The reason for your zombie performance when you are jetlagged

I know a lot of folks who are sure that functioning without sleeping is just a matter of endurance.
As anyone trying to have a meaningful conversation with those folks would know, that is not the case and their mental performance is noticeably reduced (the eyes are open but the response is not there..).
I feel this way every time I am jetlagged.
A new research – http://goo.gl/tVLWH – sheds some light on the inner functions of a sleep deprived brain of rats (that is anything less than 6 hours per night for humans).
While the rats appeared to be awake by any measurable criteria (brain wave frequencies, motor skills, external appearance), certain parts of their brain selectively shut down.
Pragmatic take-aways:
1. Scheduling meetings on a different time zone – if a meeting is crucial, try to schedule it to a time that will allow you to sleep enough before(on hours that would match your night time in your time zone) and the meeting takes place in what would be a waking hour in your origin’s time zone.
2. Take into account that you will not be performing at your peak on days you haven’t slept enough – Sometimes acknowledging the problem is already 80% of the solution and letting other people know in advance puts you in a better position than appearing zoned-out in a middle of an important conversation.
3. Be all you can be – Yes you can function with little sleep, we have all done that. You might even be able to avoid people noticing those droopy eyes but at least for your own sake know that unless you sleep 6-8 hours per night, you are running at partial capacity.

How do VC firms value a start-up? – my answer to this question on Quora

http://www.quora.com/How-do-VC-firms-value-a-start-up – With all due respect to financial models, even with mature public companies the models are just a way to rationalize a reality in which you are worth as much as the last person was willing to pay for you (which is why the same company with the same financial results can change in valuation drastically between bubbles and panics). The same reality applies in early stage companies. To start the valuation discussion somewhere two things are taken into account: 1. What were recent valuations of similar start-ups (product, team, revenue) 2. How much money does the company need or what kind of sums does the investor like to invest and what kind of stake does the investor want to have by the end of the round. Often case the simplified process goes like this: 1. Does the investor want to invest in the company? 2. If so, what kind of sums the investor wants/can invest in such stage 3. What type of stake does the investor want to get (after the money and the new shares are issued) and reverse the total round size to accommodate equity needs 4. if more money is needed or more investors are interested, optimize to achieve goals of all investors and rationalize the total sum from the company perspective somehow.. This is really why most rounds for technology companies look so much alike (when looking at deals done in same period of time) even though the companies can have vast different financial needs

When is the right time for a startup to come out of stealth mode? – My answer to this question on Quora (q&a site)

http://www.quora.com/Startup-Advice-Strategy/When-is-the-right-time-for-a-startup-to-come-out-of-stealth-mode

When you need the public exposure (e.g. need more customers that you can’t get without the public exposure, Need to raise more money and the exposure might help raise awareness from VCs, you are having a hard time hiring employees because no one knows you and the market is competitive.). While The trend today is the “minimal viable product” and tell the world as early as possible what you are doing, I would argue that this advice assumes a consumer web services orientation. First you need to ask yourself what are the pros and cons of telling the world what your start-up is up to. A few cons to launching as soon as you have your first “viable product” would be:
1. You might not be able to process all the feedback you get and even those early adopters who wanted to use your products might be discouraged.
2. You need a few cycles of customer iteration to be able to explain the world what your product does in their words
3. If you do have a good product and interesting vision, by launching too early, you are might miss the opportunity to have a coordinated planned launch and these things tend to have more impact if they are covered simultaneously.
4. We are not in the business in which any coverage is good coverage and having your first coverage a negative one can be something that can take a while to recover from.
It’s not black or white and you can get feedback and customer engagement without coming out of stealth mode. For example, if what you want is to get customer exposure, you can still work with early design partners (especially if you are selling enterprise software) or selected alpha/beta testers. If need a proof that early is not always better, look at serial (successful) entrepreneurs and you will notice that as their achieve more, they become more calculated with how they time their move from stealth to public launch and time events they can control to their benefit for maximum impact

Our brains are getting smaller as we become more domesticated

A common cultural belief is that future generations will have gigantic heads to carry their ever expanding brains. The opposite seems to be true.

The brain of the future

An NPR story http://goo.gl/0l2GM covers the fact that human brains have actually been shrinking for the past 20-30 million years and our brain tod

ay is a tennis ball size smaller than the brains of cro-magnon man that lived in Europe (10% decrease).

The answer to the mystery lies in a common phenomenon in biology in which domesticated animals like pigs and dogs have all seen their brains shrink compared to their wild ancestors or contemporary wild relatives (e.g. wolves vs. dogs).
There seem to be two evolutionary factors that play here, the first is that specialization requires less total cognitive effort and so the reduced brain conserves energy (the brain accounts for about 20% of the energy we spend).
The second  relates to the fact that in civilized species, the ability to cooperate with other members is rewarded and overly-aggressive members are in disadvantage (another example cited in the story is that Bonobo monkeys, that have smaller brains than chimpanzees, are better at solving problems as a group because the chimps refuse to work together to solve the problem).

Looking at this from an entrepreneurial perspective, two things come to mind:

1.      Entrepreneurs might be the exception in the way we favor foraging in the business world instead of specializing within a lager cooperation.
Personally, in past experiences working in larger organizations I was often reprimanded for questioning rules and creating a lot of friction in the process (an analogy to tarzan jumping on ropes in the jungle as opposed to civilized driving in the highway was once used in an effort to help correct my ways..)

2.      The flip side to the foraging brain of the entrepreneur is tendency to not be very good in cooperating with others (fellow entrepreneurs particularly). The ability to look at the world in a less competitive way and instead look more at symbiotic opportunities around us is key to creating what eventually can become large companies.

Amazon taking a page out of Facebook and Google end-user privacy (or lackthereof) playbook ?

While searching for an old demo video i posted a few years ago on Google, i was surprised to find a link with my name to an Amazon profile (here is the version after I went and reconfigured it not to show everything to everyone – https://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/AKGAI3T42AEEK?ie=UTF8&responseType=info&responseCode=ups). One click is all it took to discover that Amazon has decided that my Address, Birthday, Anniversary and other private information was now on a public profile that I never even knew existed. It seems like more and more service providers feel comfortable to err on the public side of the privacy equation when it comes to end-user data. Looking further into the matter, you need to explicitly choose to opt-out of having you data public in your amazon account or else it’s all going to be out there. I personally used the wish-list function on amazon as a place to remind me of the stuff I might want to buy but not right now and so it could easily have contained stuff I did not want out there like the book I was looking to help me fix my horrible hand-writing. Seems like a periodic self-google check is in place (beyond the obvious vanity reasons..), you never know what data of yours has decided to become “social” on its own.

The “AHA! moment” myth – a great TED presentation about how innovation really happens

There is a great story in this presentation – goo.gl/iID9 on how the GPS turned to be what it is today over several years of tinkering and building a platform that later was connected to problem. The bottom line here is the following:
1. There is no such thing as the AHA! or Eureka! moment, things brew in the back of our minds for years.
2. You often have a general idea about a problem but not really how it will be used and implemented.

Declaring your goals actually decreases your chances of achieving them – new research

Comparing people who declare their goals (I am going to lose 20 pounds by the end of the year) with people who keep their goal as an open questions (will i be able to lose 20 pound this year?). The research finds that the declaration decreases the chances of accomplishment. A potential explanation might be the loss sense of autonomy and freedom of choice once the declaration occurs. From an entrepreneurship perspective i find this correlates well with difference between declaring a solution/idea as the goal of company to setting out to solve an open problem (without committing to a specific solution / technology). Setting the problem at the center gives you the freedom to learn and maneuver in search of a solution.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-willpower-paradox

Motivation – new research shows desired objects seem closer in our mind

We tend to perceive vision as the ultimate truth (“I’ll believe it when i see it..”), the reality is quite different and has tremendous impact on those trying to attain far-reaching goals.

A recent study shows that our perception of something as simple as distance to an object is affected by how desirable we find that object to be (the more desirable the object, the closer it appears to us).

Salvador Dali - The Enigma Of Desire 1929

In the entrepreneur angle or the broader goal attaining perspective it is important to note two things:

1. Our brains are not the objective data-crunching, truth-seeking machines that popular belief holds and we should be be aware of it. All data we acquire is skewed to achieve one goal or another.

2. I would bet that this mechanism works in different strengths in different people, meaning that some people would see the same object with the same level of desire in different proximity. I would further guess that those drawn to reaching goals on their own terms, tend to neglect their peers’ advice and success statistics because in their mind, the object is more desired and even closer than the to the rest of the world.

Start-ups create all the jobs in the US

In a great article on techcrunch, Vivek Wadhwa shows some recent statistics that illustrate that all jobs created between 1987 and 2005 came from companies less than 5 years old.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/14/startups-or-behemoths-which-are-we-going-to-bet-on/

Another interesting point he makes is in regards to the productivity gap of the same person in a large company and when he is set “to the wild” in a small company.

Always thought so but never had the numbers to back it up..

Presentation & demo tips – Part 3 – The Show Must Go On

Do not let technology get in the way the presentation.

In tribute to one of the most epic rock bands of all times..

For the life of me, i am continuously amazed as to how many precious minutes are wasted before and in the middle of presentations because of technical challenges. Laptop is not booting, projector is not working, projector is not syncing with laptop (extra points for Mac owners that forget the VGA converter) , the screen is not coming down, the video conferencing is not connecting, etc.