Being an entrant to the MIT 50k competition, I was invited to the semi-final awards last night. Unfortunately, our team didn’t make it to the semi-final. Perhaps, in hindsight it isn't difficult to understand why our team didn’t win. As you can see, the more technical the idea, the more the judges (or venture capitalists) want to see a proof-of-concept of the idea. A proof-of-concept has to be defensible and most of offer competitive advantage. In other words there better be a patent or a patent-pending associated with the idea. We have a great idea but it was a little premature to ask for funding to start making products when we don’t even have any solid evidence if the idea even works. The purpose of the 50k competition is to build a company to sell products not asking for research grant.

In hindsight it is always easy to reflect on our failure. Nevertheless, I have learned so much from the experience. More than that, it is a calling for me. The 50k competition has uncovered the entrepreneurial spirit within me to get involved in building a successful enterprise. The keynote speaker for the 50k event last night, Rizwan Virk, expressed my thoughts most eloquently. Rizwan is a successful entrepreneur who had start 3 different companies to date and written a book on entrepreneurship. While most books on entrepreneurship focus on the mechanics, his book titled Zen Entrepreneurship look at entrepreneurship from a spiritual perspective. Rizwan provided insights how entrepreneurship is like embarking on a Hero's journey, in which the hero (which is you) grows to become more matured person at the end of the journey. The example that he used to illustrate his point was Frodo in the Lord of the Ring. Overall, his speech last night can be summarized in the following:

Why is entrepreneurship like the Hero's journey?

• You can win a lot of treasure.
• You will be up against impossible odds.
• To be successful, you will have to recruit allies. For you Lord of Rings fans, this means that you should go look for your Strider and Gollum.
• You never know what is going to happen next.
• You'll end up a different person than when you started.

There's a happy ending to my 50k endeavors after all as I was invited to join another semi-finalist team yesterday. I went for our first team meeting today. Like my PDD team, this new 50k team made up of a diverse group of highly talented and motivated individuals. I am really excited to embark on this new journey of entrepreneurial learning experience. Wish us luck.

3/11/2005 11:43:24 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)

Comments [15]

Entrepreneurship

I have not been writing with a lot of thought and content on my blog lately. So for those of you who have been reading my blog the past week, sorry. Life has been so hectic, it has been difficult keeping up.

3/10/2005 12:22:04 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)

Comments [14]

Blog

After a week of inactivity in the first Sloan Trading Competition, I finally made my first trade on Monday. So far, I am not doing too badly. With $1 million virtual money available, I made over $20k in 3 days. Of course, this is fantasy money, right. However, the number 1 ranked team in the competition has made a whopping $750k in less than 2 weeks. Wow!!!

On other fantasy news, Yoav just invited me to play in the NCAA tournament pool with other classmates. Oh yeah, I will be trash talking all the way to championship.

3/10/2005 12:21:05 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)

Comments [17]

Social

Wow, I spent the past 2 nights working on the ERBA assignment in the LFM-SDM office. Once again, the usual suspects were there working on the problem set in groups. Teamwork is critical to one's success and sanity in the SDM program. But one particular person stands out from the crowd. Spiros the Greek was long done with his homework assignment and has no incentive of being there but he didn't seem to mind as helped others with their ERBA homework. For this, I applaud Spiros for his generous assistance to his fellow students. And Spiros, I owe you a beer for helping me with question 2c.

3/9/2005 1:54:00 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)

Comments [12]

School

The weekend has been relatively uneventful. I spent most of time working on administrivia stuff like designing business cards, writing emails, etc. Fortunately, John and Jake (aka Kodak) were willing to hang out with me at Toad for some live music. Besides its excellent beer selection, you never have to play cover at Toad despite its outstanding lineup. Last night band was good and their music style is akin to that of the Ramones.

Speaking of music, I have been listening to early 90's music reminiscent of happier times of my undergrad years. My favorite music genre back then was Hair Metal and Alternative Rock. Looking back, it was a pity that Alternative Rock killed Hair Metal. Anyway, here are some of the albums I have been listening to in the past week.

• Surfer Rosa by the Pixies
• Doolittle by the Pixies
• Dirt by Alice in Chains
• Siamese Dreams by the Smashing Pumpkins
• Appetite for Destruction by Guns & Roses
• Incesticide by Nirvana
• Favorites by Enuff Z'nuff
• For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge by Van Halen (Note that the initials of the album title has a smirking message)
• Ten by Pearl Jam
• Long Cold Winter by Cinderella

3/6/2005 10:05:13 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)

Comments [25]

Music

For every Friday in the last month, I have raved about how great 15.840 - Innovation in the Marketplace (Seminar in Marketing) is. Today's marketing class was both long and boring. I thought the 3-hour theme of the class can be summed up in one sentence: provide your users (customers) with a toolkit so that you can outsource your company's R&D and market research to them. Come to think about it, isn't this what open-source is about? That is innovation through the sharing of intellectual property. Hmmm... Interesting.

The debate on ERBA rages on again today. A survey was constructed to get feedback from students on how they feel about ERBA. But here's the question, is a survey a meaningful survey (as some has claimed) if its questions are biased against the class? Well, probably not, but it ultimately ignited a flame war in cyberspace. I personally think that the use of the survey was really a bad idea. But since I am part of the ERBA agnostic minority, I am staying away from further revolt and discussions on the issue. My advice is work smart as opposed to working hard, make studying ERBA a team effort, get on with it, and be glad you get slaughtered by ERBA (or math) while you at MIT.

3/4/2005 9:45:22 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)

Comments [13]

School

The word "networking" often has a negative connotation to many people. Many feel that network is about smoozing and impersonal communication. Since coming to MIT Sloan, I have recognized the value of networking as a powerful career and professional development tool.

I am currently using LinkedIn to build a network of professional contacts to help each other with introductions, job search, and business opportunities. So what is LinkedIn? It is basically a social networking site like Friendster where you network with other people through a common contact. While you put social interests and favorite movies on Friendster, LinkedIn is a site geared to professionals. You see resumes, business interests, and organization affiliations on LinkedIn. If you are job seeker you can either scan for job openings or find out who's hiring from your network. You can also search for business opportunities from your network. Say for instance you want to set an import/export business in Germany but don't know anyone there; you can look up on your network for someone who can help. In fact, one of my classmates got 2 job offers by the 3rd week after joining LinkedIn while a friend of a friend was contacted by someone from his LinkedIn network with business opportunity in his home country.

The membership is free and so far I have not received any spam of any sort from the network. Unfortunately, for some of my friends, I have become somewhat of a spammer. I have been a little insistent on asking my friends to join LinkedIn. So for those of you would have been getting emails from me asking you to join LinkedIn, I apologize for the spam. Nonetheless, I highly recommend LinkedIn and it is a great tool to have if you want to network professionally.

3/3/2005 1:25:27 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)

Comments [14]

Internet

I paid the price of "goofing-off" last weekend as I started working on the assignment from hell - Engineering Risk-Benefit Analysis (ERBA) assignment #4. With 8 hours spent sketching the product concepts for Product Design & Development the prior night, I was further delayed in working my ERBA homework. Furthermore, when the best of minds in class were publicly confessing that they were having difficulty in doing the homework, I became even more worried. But being indoctrinated in the values of teamwork during our SDM orientation, a few of us got together 12 hours prior to the submission of assignment and put our minds in solving the problem set. Thanks largely to Matt and Dave, the collective efforts was a huge success. We completed the entire assignment, including heinous problem #4, in 9 hours. So far, much of my experience in team-based exercises at MIT SDM program has been positive. I am definitely an advocate of team collaboration.

Now, let's talk ERBA. It's not surprising that the last assignment had generated a lot of impromptu discussion among my fellow SDM students about the class. Many voiced that there is little practicality of the topics being taught so far and a few insisted that the class content was poorly delivered to the students. My argument for ERBA has always been that the concepts taught in ERBA help engineers/managers to make better decisions in systems applications through the use of probability and statistics. Moreover, how can we leave MIT without getting slaughtered by Math? But I do agree with John who argued that the delivery of lecture and recitation has room for improvement.

I am loving the music from Crowded House and the Finn Brothers even more now that I have been listening to their music since last weekend. Also, with ERBA assignment out of the way, I can finally watch the Daily Show tonight.

3/2/2005 5:32:29 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)

Comments [9]

School

Give 1 million virtual dollars to a Sloan student and see how much he/she can gain in 10 weeks by trading in a virtual stock market. And that was what I signed up for the 1st Sloan Trading Competition. The competition starts today but so far, I have not made any trade yet. I have been a little out of touch with stock trading and with a short time horizon, none of the "buy-n-hold" strategy works. I think I'll check with Sloan IS department tomorrow to see if there's any technical stock analysis tool that is available to students for free.

3/1/2005 12:53:15 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)

Comments [15]

School

On the school front, things are getting more exciting in Product Design & Development (PDD) as we get into the product concepts phase of our team's semester-long project.

On other news, I have been long-time musical fan of the Finn brothers who are better known as the founding members of the music groups, Split Enz and Crowded House. So I was delighted when I learned that they will be playing in the Somerville Theater on March 2. Unfortunately, as hard as I tried, the tickets to the gig were completely sold out by Saturday. I am very disappointed and so far my luck in procuring tickets to the shows that I wanted to see this year has been dismal. Anyway, here is the playlist of my top 10 favorite songs by the Finn brothers.

1. Better be Home Soon by Crowded House (Temple of Low Men)
2. I Got You by Split Enz (True Colours)
3. Private Universe by Crowded House (Afterglow)
4. Dont' Dream it's Over by Crowded House (Crowded House)
5. Only Talking Sense by Finn Brothers (Finn)
6. Distant Sun by Crowded House (Together Alone)
7. Recurring Dreams by Crowded House (Afterglow)
8. World Where You Live by Crowded House (Crowded House)
9. Where is my Soul by Finn Brothers (Finn)
10. Last to Know by Neil Finn (One Nil)

2/28/2005 11:57:00 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)

Comments [12]

Music

In my quest to create what I would call the ultimate personal blog site that I can live with for a long time, has made me jump from one blog solution to another in the past month. In order to blog, you either need to have blog software running on your web host or utilize some of the commercially available web hosts available on the Internet. I was using a .NET open-source blog solution called BlogX from 2003-2004 on my website but it wasn’t as stable as some of the more popular blog software like MovableType. My laziness aside, the lack of good editing tools on BlogX was one reason why I didn't update my blog for almost over a year prior to 2005. It was only coming to MIT that Matti and especially Yoav profoundly influenced my decision to share my thoughts and life with other people online.

To save time, I decided to use a blog host for my blogging needs a month ago. My first free blog host is Blogger, which I still high recommend to people who wish to start blogging online. It was free, easy-to-use, and fast, but I wanted more features, in particular, category. So I went to Modblog, which has more features but a lot slower and restrictive on how you can customize your blog. Along the way, I tried other free blog hosts like My blogsite and Typepad but none met my needs. My blogsite impose an online ad on every client's blog, it's ugly but the blog hosting is free (well, sort of). Typepad is cool but it's not free and it's really not as good as Blogger IMHO. I don't know why I was so insistent on the feature of using icons along side with blog categories (like slashdot). Despite the shortcomings of BlogX, I was able to modify BlogX source code and implemented what I the icon-category feature quite easily. Fed up with the inadequacies of these free blog hosts, I decided to download the latest version of BlogX and create a completely revamped blog site on my own website.

When I downloaded BlogX, I was quite surprised to find that BlogX is now under new management by Newtelligence who has done a good job in maintaining the software and the software has now been renamed to dasBlog. Anyway, I hacked the source code to implement what I want and completely redesigned my website to come out with what you currently see the past weekend. There are still bugs and as usual, this project is still a work-in-progress but I am mighty proud of it. I have managed to transfer my previous blog entries but the timestamp for each blog entry was lost during transfer. So without further ado, may I present to you Cybersam's blog version 4.0. Suggestions are most welcome.

2/27/2005 9:11:28 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)

Comments [13]

Blog