Long time...

It has been an incredibly long time since I posted. I need to get back to this before I make it a habit of neglecting my blog. So while I am out here, let me post an update.

Work is progressing at a fast clip and I am feeling more and more certain of my products now. It is amazing how something which is such a small piece in terms of the overall scheme of things, needs so much work and coordination to get done. My products are small, probably will not be noticed much in the first couple of years of their existence as they evolve and gather critical mass, however they require an enormous amount of time, resources, money to put together.

This whole experience has been very humbling. We spend so much time using Internet based services, and it is so easy to be critical of a product experience, or worse, just take it for granted. However, the truth is that a lot of thought and work goes into building a usable, intuitive and smart product. I have been a part of technical teams building up ideas, invested in companies, built one before myself, and still I am constantly overawed by the creativity and vision required to take the seed of an idea and make it into something that impacts people's lives.

So yes, I am having an incredible amount of fun trying to build this up. My life is chaos currently, work-life balance has gone for a toss. And I am just loving it!

PS: Will write more about the key issues one should worry about when putting together a consumer facing product. Right now, this is just to signal that I am alive!

Stay Cool

The atmosphere in the room was tense to say the least. I was in a meeting discussing certain decisions that we had to take recently in the product. One person in my team were not happy with the way things were going. I knew that we were doing the right thing in the long term for the product, and was attempting to reach out to him and explain the reasoning behind the way we were approaching the problem. But he was just ranting at this point, lacing his responses with heavy sarcasm. Now Google is an intense environment but rarely have I seen folks lose their cool. There is a lot of discussion, and hashing out of solutions through arguments and discussions, but never this way. At that point, the one thing that was going on in my mind was "Stay Cool".

It is how we react under intense situations that defines us. We can all be genial, happy, smart and cool when the going is good. It is way harder to do that when your decision making skills are under question, and you feel as if you are in the middle of an inquisition.

As the discussion moved on, I kept my head up and kept answering his questions. You could cut the tension in the air with a knife, and I knew I was getting angrier at every step as the discussion dragged on. Thankfully the meeting ended. I got up and went for a long long walk, cleared up head, calmed down and headed back to work.
Soon I found out that the person had gone through a very tough time lately. A few days later, I approached him and we sat down and sorted out the issue.

In work, board meetings, team meetings, negotiations, and in many other situations, there are constantly conflict points in a discussion. One could get defensive and lose one's composure, or one could take it lying down and suck it up. But there may be a third way. Be firm, be logical about your opinion, respectful and lastly, dignified. In all, just stay cool.
You will not only be respected a lot more, you will also sound consistent and more credible.

PS: Don't try this in personal situations. Logic does not work there!

Warren Buffet on life and work (and the economy)

I would be foolish not to post this. This guy is amazing and yet all that he says is plain old commonsense. Just goes to prove how amazing plain ol' common sense is.
Do yourselves a favor, read these notes from a recent reception hosted by Warren Buffet for some MBA folks.

Notes from Buffet Meeting

Love him, hate him, but you can't doubt the wisdom of his words.