Author: Vivek Srinivasan

  • How do you say it?

    Adam is a smart and intelligent boy. He has a great amount of interest in most things and wants to constantly learn. He is also known to be quite stubborn and at times, very envious. What do you think about Adam? Do you think he is likeable? Do you think you might want to spend…

  • Vision and Security

    A lot of great ideas have been dreamed up during vacations. It was a late night in Paris, and the challenge to find a taxi that caused Travis to dream up of Uber. There are countless stories students sitting in their dorm room who came up with the next big thing – Bill Gates and…

  • Trial and Error

    There is a reason that the Pyramids were built much before the Pythagoras Theorem was committed to paper or papyrus.  The modern education system makes you learn the theory first and then think of its application. In most cases, we even ignore the application completely. Those of you who learnt trigonometry in high school math,…

  • Genius

    The Mayans invented the wheel but they never used it. They used to make toys with wheels on them but their own construction projects which were quite immense were undertaken by moving stones on wooden logs. They just could not make the leap of imagination. We call it the Morse Code because of Samuel Morse, who…

  • Learning

    There was a time (however brief) when Mozart did not know how to play the Piano (he started playing it at the ripe age of TWO!). There was a time before Picasso knew how to paint. There was a time before Einstein knew how to calculate. They learnt. I often come across Entrepreneurs who will…

  • Signal to Noise Ratio

    In a world where data is the new gold, it is not abnormal to go chasing data and seek to make every decision based on the data at hand. And to have it updated each second. Data is a useful and wonderful guide provided you have enough of it and over a long enough duration.…

  • Building businesses around Habits

    If you are building a consumer business think habits. Every successful consumer business uses a fundamental insight into consumer behaviour to exploit the same and profit from it. Even if you ask a tea vendor by the roadside, he operates on great insight. He knows people have lunch between 1 PM and 2 PM. As…

  • Why we are wrong about AI

    Steve Jobs very famously said that computer will be the bicycle for the mind, or so he had hoped. Somewhere along the way, we moved away from using computers to support us. Today, we are moving towards making them do the entire thing. I often think about this bit from Dan Norman. People are flexible,…

  • Push

    We all need ‘Push’ to get things done. If you have managed projects, you know what I am talking about. You could have managed just yourself or a team. There are many ways in which the push can arrive. You can have deadlines that make the push come through; you can create a fear of…

  • UberPool and Incentives

    If you were seeking to find a lot of people headed in similar directions, I would suppose ports of arrival would be the best place to find a lot of them. In an airport where thousands of people arrive the odds of finding 3 people who might be headed in the same direction would be…