Aditya Chadha

via: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=625644

Stick it out, yes… that’s the most important part. That’s the hardest part. I think most people who have a startup want to quit at some point. It has to hurt. You have to move through the hurt, because everytime you keep going when you want to give up, someone else out there with the same idea who got to the same point where you want to give up… well, they actually gave up. They gave up which means more customers for you…
I was at a library once and this was a very popular library. There was a whole crowd of people waiting outside before the library opened all wanting to rush inside and find a desk where they could sit and read the books. The security guard had to yell at the people twice DON’T RUN! It was insane.
So what I found was, the people who went the farthest into the library were most likely to find a spot. Some people went in say, half way and instead of simply going farther in, they stopped and turned around and went back and hunted through the desks they’d already passed hoping to find a desk everyone else had passed up.
But on the next floor or closer to the corner, there were still open spots! Those readers simply didn’t go far enough. They gave up too soon and so someone who went farther got an open spot those who gave up could have gotten.
It was a metaphor for startups… “Keep walking!” that’s my motto. If a customer says no, keep walking, find another customer. If you find a bug, keep walking and fix it. Just keep walking. Don’t stop. Don’t turn around. You’ll stumble, but pick yourself up.
Damn, it’s hard sometimes… it’s really hard sometimes. You’ll want to cry (you’ll notice those go from tears of sadness to tears of joy as you walk), you’ll want to smash your computer. You’ll get depressed. You’ll get hungry and have no food. You’ll sleep on the floor. Everyone will think you are crazy. You are crazy. Crazy is good.
Just keep walking.

Maybe I should be using twitter for this, but these need some explanation and are things I don’t want to forget…

• Using the humans on twitter as a mechanism for large scale data computation – How would this work? Reminds me of the group mind of the Drummers from the Diamond Age. A knowledge engine seems closer to what twitter can do for you, but distributed computation?
• Writing a Facebook application that asks your friends questions about you and calculates a trust metric – How would this work? How do you convert raw data into a consistent metric that you can use across people?

That is all. Remind me to work on these, please.

So, the talk went OK. Here’s the slides in case you need them:

If you have questions or are interested in talking about this more, feel free to drop me a note

So, yesterday, a new social search engine called topsy launched. This is probably not a big deal to most people, even given the glowing TechCrunch review, what with all the search engine hype of late having being stolen by WolframAlpha.

However, topsy is going to be amazing. And here’s why. Topsy is the first real implementation of a large scale reputation network for the general public. When google invented pagerank, they used the inherent value of backlinks to assign authority to webpages. Topsy is taking this one step further, and assigning authority (or, in their words, influence) to people. There’s an abundance of social metrics (who is linking to you, who is friending you, who is following you, who is retweeting you, who is commenting on your blog post, etc.) out there which can be used to compute influence for a particular person and I believe when topsy is done, it will get very close to assigning reputation to people.

But, why is this important? Obviously, you can’t eat reputation (yet!). Nor can you use it as currency. No, of course not. We’re not living in some magical world where Whuffie has replaced money and can actually make things happen for you. But we’re getting close. In an attention economy, what reputation does get you is attention. And, attention is valuable because it is scarce.

You could theoretically use Topsy reputation to figure out who to pay attention to, and who to ignore, based on a single metric computed from a massively aggregated set of social interactions. You could use it to calculate trust in a particular reviewers rating for a particular object. You could take it with you to your next outing and use it to figure out if a restaurant is REALLY going to be as good as they say it is.

And, this, ladies and gentleman is why topsy is going to kick ass, not because it is computing your search queries, but because it is computing your reputation.

Full Disclosure: I’ve been friends with the topsy co-founders for a long time so I know where they are coming from, however I have no details about what they’re planning on doing so all of this could be hogwash

So, I’ve been quiet here for quite a while and that’s mostly been because of all the craziness going on with my life. I think I’m finally at a spot where things have slowed down enough that I can take a step back and coherently think and talk about them, and more importantly where I think they are going to be… This is going to be another long post, so sit back and enjoy

First up, I’m no longer with outside.in — that gig’s been over since February of this year, and has definitely helped put things in perspective for me. I don’t think my creative urges were really being satisfied and that was just leading to unhappiness and discontent, which consequently played out in the oddest of ways. Overall, I’m fairly happy with the way things have turned out and looking forward to where the rabbit hole will lead.

Since my departure from OI, I’ve helped co-found my dream company, subLucid Inc and I think from my perspective subLucid is really the culmination of a two-year long effort to see what lay beyond the big giant mess that is Corporate America and the Consulting industry in general. I’ve learned a lot, most importantly the fact that I’m not cut out to be an employee at this point in my life and probably need to do this on my own (and possibly fail) to figure out what the right answer is. If there is a right answer, that is?

We’re currently running subLucid as a Rails consulting company, so if you’ve got consulting work that you’re considering farming off, get in touch! The larger goal with subLucid is the same as my larger goal in life, which is to make beautiful and functional products. Very similar to what 37signals, balsamiq, CrowdVine and others are doing.

I’ve also moved out of Manhattan for the first time since graduating from graduate school, and seem to miss it quite a bit, but I’m living with some wonderful people and burning a lot less cash in rent so the jury on whether I’m moving back is still out. I do miss walking out and being in the center of it all, though, and taking the train just doens’t cut it so almost all signs point to a return to the island at some point.

That brings me to what I’m doing along with writing ruby code pretty much 24/7 at this point. My primary focus at this point is Groupped. I’ve talked about this on the subLucid blog and the groupped blog a bit so I’m not going to belabor the point other than to say that Groupped is going to kick all sorts of ass. Hopefully I’m going to be able to launch something (not too pretty) along the lines of “if you’re not embarassed by your first alpha, you’ve waited too long to launch.” — so stay tuned! Also, I’m working with Karen, who is an awesome designer, so if you’re every looking for one, hit her up.

Along with Groupped, I’ve also started working on an idea that I’ve been interested in for quite some time, connecting the dots between humor, memes and network virality. The goal is to throw a bunch of ideas against the wall and see if something sticks, and to have fun doing it. The project is tentatively titled QuitBlowingMyMind and will hopefully turn into something more interesting than a splash page soon. Once again, I’m working with some very awesome people, so I’m sure it’s going to turn out well.

The one other project, and perhaps the grandest of them all, that I’m involved with is John Geraci’s DIYCity, and its first spin-off, SickCity. DIYCity basically aims to harness technology and publicly available data (eg. Twitter in SickCity’s case)

to reinvent their cities as places that are more efficient, more cost-effective, more sustainable, and simply more livable places to be.

I’m super-excited about DIYCity since it brings together a number of things that I’m passionate about including extracting signal from large data sets, spreading automatic social and civic software, and building for the future. Very, very cool.

On the open source side of things, I did publish the Rails caching guide (and I think it’s going to become official Real Soon NowTM) and think I want to write more Rails documentation (especially since I _really_ miss the old wiki). Along with that I did start hacking on boomer, which is meant to be a rails plugin to enable usage of the Tokyo Cabinet key-value store, just like a regular CacheStore. That has languished for a while, and so should be updated soon!

And, that’s all the craziness that I’ve been upto in all the time that I haven’t written anything here, but the one thing I do want to add to all that craziness is a regular writing schedule, since I do enjoy it quite a bit (even though it is very stream of conciousness, I have all these posts that I just HAVE to get out!). Other than that it seems, that the larger picture is to help start or be involved with executing on as many creative ideas in parallel as possible. Remember, time is short!

The problem right now is that between my Rails blog, my two business blogs, and this blog, and my twitter feed, I’m not totally sure where everything goes. Ideas?

Yep, published the rails caching guide, finally! Most of the tech/rails related stuff is going to now appear on http://ferric.net/.

I’m going to start writing more about my entrepreneurial life on this blog, and look for an update coming on that Real Soon NowTM!

Wow.  The more I read about Honda, the more impressed I am. This is exactly how you should run a company, find the smartest people you can find and then let them figure out what needs to be done. A sample from the second article above:

A funny thing happened on the way to the solution. Try and picture this. On my first day of work, no one told me what to do. On the second day, the same thing happened, and on the third. That’s as much as I could take. I decided to meet with everyone I was coming in contact with to find out more about their individual talents and personalities, and to find out what was going on. Before I knew it, I was developing a picture of how things really were, and who needed what, and I became creatively involved in defining my own participation in relation to the skills I could bring to the table. In the process of doing this, I had complete access to everyone in the company, from other newlings to the President. Nothing but open cubicles no higher than 3 1/2 feet. I was allowed to learn, interact, and find solutions to every problem and need I recognized. I always found something important to do, and it became natural to provide effective solutions as needed. I am not a very unique individual, but I am effective because I am allowed to be. I also know it may be different for some people, experiencing this kind of freedom. I know that some people are petrified by this kind of freedom, and equate it to abandonment, and it drives them crazy not knowing what to do. I also know that even under the best of circumstances, people become sedate sometimes and settle in to patterns of repetition for false comfort. The answer, then, is to have them all switch places every few years, no matter how well they may be doing their job, because it is just as important to let everyone see their own position from someone else’s position. It also allows for the surprise of finding how much fun change can be when your creativity meets a new challenge. See what you end up with. It’s either this, or that.

That’s all there is to it.  Maybe you need more self-directed individuals than your average college grad but I think its worth it spending the time to find such people, and then helping them flourish both professionally and creatively. Don’t you?

Yeah, like Eminem said… ‘back again’, I’m back from my whirlwind tour of the homeland and have a ton of things to say about Delhi and what’s going on. 

First, the flight. Don’t fly Air India if you can avoid it — I got totally screwed on my way in and was very uncomfortable on my way back. Now, this may have possible been because of the fact that it was Diwali which is pretty much India’s biggest holiday season so maybe every airline was going to be overloaded but Air India actually ended up losing a flight in Mumbai so heed these words: STAY AWAY.

The only good thing that came out of my delay at Mumbai airport was a chance to kill a few (12!) hours just watching life go by. All of India is in a constant state of building and there’s a lot of activity going on even more than you’d usually expect from a nation of over a billion people. (I’ve heard China is similar). Look for a post from Mumbai airport soon!

Diwali and the wedding were amazing. It is always fun going back home and catching up with friends and relatives and the innate warmth is quite a change from the usually frigid North American social relationships. Not that I don’t have some amazing friends here but people in India are just indescribably warm, which is tough to replicate here. Or, perhaps (more likely) it is because my trips are so short that I only get to see the good part of what social life in India is like. 

That’s pretty much it, most of my time was spent with my parents and catching up with other friends and relatives and it was great. 

Interestingly, this is the first time I’ve actually been excited to be back in the US. I had a billion ideas about things I need to do in the last few days before leaving India and on the flight back and hopefully I’ll be able to write more regularly here about what I’m upto! 

Watch this space!

Yeah! The thing I’ve been working for the past few weeks is finally live. This is a place map from my posterous blog which allows me to take the stories I’ve written and put them on a map.

If you haven’t seen this post from Chris yet, you have to check it out. Awesomely inspiring!