Ajay Ohri

Eleven lessons for Startup teams from Ocean’s Eleven

Creating a startup is like giving birth to a baby. Sustaining the baby you need a team of concerned protective disciplined and skilled people. Skillset and mindset are the operating words. The skills and the minds of the diversity in the team must gel.

Danny Ocean had an excellent idea to repay his debt to society. He set up a team of skilled hackers and scientists to achieve a common goal. No birds were hurt in Danny’s startup. Even the bad guy won his money in insurance and the French guy lost his money in the sequel. But this not about Ocean’s Twelfth where clearly Danny and his merry men went overboard and hired a bridge too far. This is about the original play on the original startup. So here are the eleven lessons.

Skillsets should be complementary- The grease monkey and the smooth talker are different skill sets.
Team members should have cross-functional skills. In a crisis you need backups. In terms of volatility you need options. Suppose your Hadoop guy called in sick. Cross train your tech team into different technologies and cross train your business team into different skills like leads. deal origination,
The big guy who lends his name to the team needs to have Charisma to do the recruitment for first few chaps
You need a smart guy to handle the Operations like Rusty and you need a guy with a lot of money with nothing to lose like Ruben. Ops and Finance are the first few hires you will make Danny Boy.
Leader needs to have integrity. If that is questioned Leader needs to be flexible. If Leader has a secret personal reason to do the op in a startup, it goes better if that is known to the top guys in the startup team, but not all the members in the startup team have the same need to know.
You need young men who are hungry and eager to prove their mark in the world like Matt Damon. Young men who are skilled but not known well enough are easier to recruit to your startup team . With a limited budget you need a few good young men in your team.
Diversity happens by karma not by design. Choose people based on skills and mindsets. Ethnic orientations should not paly any role in positive or negative decisions in the recruitment. If the startup idea is good, the black guy and the chinese guy and the jewish guy and old man and the young man will play fine. If the idea is bad, not all the liberal books you read can set it right.
Be ruthless when dealing with ruthless situations but be classy always. Class shall always count. You may think of your startup idea all the time but it is most probably not your first and not your last job. Most of us dont get the luxury od dining on the Job like Steve Jobs did. your classy behvaiour will help you in your career beyiind your startp team and even in your personal life.
Dont forget the little guys. The little guys help with blueprints, intel, product design and product delivery. Dont forget them.
Be open to hire more.
Be loyal to the team, and dont fire your people when you are down. Dont crap on your team when the shit hits the fan. Take the shit and swallow it and smile back. that’s what a fearless leader does.

You be good to your team, and your team will rob the casinos and get you girl. BE nice and BE Kind to your team. In case of doubt, watch the DVD again. It’s excellent motivation.

Fashion Models, Role Models and Regression Models

During my stay in Hauz Khas Village I used to come into contact almost on a daily basis with fashion models. I had friends in the business both on the designer and on the modeling side. Ok my friends were not so big, and I never got no party tickets. Who has time to party when one is writing a blog? Work-life balance for a blogger is just sleep-shit-eat-write-read-think-procrastinate-sleep.

Fashion models have a tough profession. They are expected to be nice else they are a bitch or a brat. There are more catty bitches and more bratty snitches in the fashion business than in a movie on Whitey Bulger. Fashion models are expected to be thin. Smoking cigarettes and drugs helps them stay that way. But in the public they will say they were born to be thin. They attend amazing parties with amazing free food but are not expected to eat or swallow more than a morsel or two. Fashion models have a short shelf life and get not much respect in the unfair game of life.

Role models used to be sportsmen like Joe Dimaggio, Jackie Robinson , Kapil Dev and Tendulkar. Tendulkar who? Don’t do that Russian roulette? it will give you tennis elbow in the chin. Ok, ok. Tendulkar just is the man who made the largest number of runs in cricket. Think Babe Ruth multiplied by 20 in statistics and divided by 5 in terms of appearance and size. Role models used to be businessmen who gave jobs. Role models used to politicians who actually wrote the speeches they were going to say and actually kicked bureaucrats to do the work the politicians promised in their speech. Remember Kennedy and the moon shot speech. Now thats a role model for me and Happy Birthday to you Mr President. My role models were Charles Dickens who wrote himself to death and Churchill who won the Nobel Prize for Literature after winning the World War and turning down the Dukedom of London. Churchill before Sartre turned down the Nobel, when Brando still accepted Oscars, when Ike was still building and not talking about the mil-ind complex and Churchill a few years away from the crazy last years and the truth on how we overlooked a few things like genocide, famine, holocausts in his quests for Anglo Saxon supremacy. Churchill was my role model because he could write his own speeches and get his team deliver on those speeches.

My role models got obsolete. My role models got old and died. My role models sold out for cash from the advertisements on Television.

Role models for the next generation are who made the quickest billion in technology, who dated the most in the least time in acting and no politician makes the role model list unless you wanted to be a politician yourself. Paris Hilton gave us a night in Paris, Kim Kardashian who gets invited to the Presidents dinner with journalists, Olympic medallists and hacker snitches like BradleyManning,Snowden and the rappers dating J Lo are the role models of the next generation.

The nerds, the geeks, the quants, the scientists rebelled against this and made their own models. Their regression models helped the money bags sell the right kind of ad on the best kind of content so the middle of the intelligence curve sheep can keep spending money in debt in debt in debt.

Fashion models look good but are broke. Regression models make you rich but can get ugly. Role models are the ones that help you balance your needs with your greeds, with your hunger and ambition to look good and look glorious and your enduring need to balance your energy with long term non-burnout success.

Marilyn Monroe, Churchill, Einstein were the old models. Kim Kardashian Jenner West, Barack Obama, Zuckerberg are the new models. Choose your models wisely. Or enjoy the hetero scedasticity that follows.

Post Script-

(image from

http://rarehistoricalphotos.com/ticket-to-armistice-japanese-leaflet-dropped-on-allied-troops-1942/

Lieutenant Colonel Mahmood Kan Durrani who was an Australian prisoner of the Japanese quotes a lecture given by a Japanese officer on how leaflets should be prepared. One of his six recommendations was:

“The leaflet should have, if possible, the picture of a beautiful woman, after the method used by the Germans in the First World War. This device would insure that the soldier would be attracted and would be unable to resist looking at the picture over and over again. This would rouse his passion, and his heart would be inclined for love and to hate fighting.”
– Sex and Psychological Operations by Herbert A. Friedman

Dawood Ibrahim found in youtube video

If you look closely at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2K_2MQij9Q at this point India can finally catch Dawood Ibrahim

Nobody sees the invisible data scientist

You are a data scientist if you help turn data into decisions. This may be a non-glamorous excel sheet, Python or R, or writing one more query to your RDBMS. Data to Decisions is the key. Don’t turn data into just one more Powerpoint or one more spreadsheet for management to say hmm, interesting and then ignore. Be a data scientist for the next epoch not just for surviving the next meeting.

Don’t believe what they told you in Harvard Business Review on competing on analytics. I am trying to talk you into competing within analytics.

Learn one new thing a day. This may be trick in coding, a function in R or a library in Python. Read a lot of technical blogs. Write one blog post a week. Clarity of thought is only proved when you can write clear words. Blogging is a great way to build your personal brand.

You are not a data scientist if you are in the middle of Drew Conway’s Venn Diagram, that lovely impossible sweet zone of being balanced in business, coding, and math. You are a data scientist if the world acknowledges you as one.

So do those free courses or MOOCs, and do those hackathon contests, but write one blog post a week and learn seven new things in data science in a week. Learning one thing every day. That’s just it. Look at babies. They learn so many things rapidly.

Suspend your cynicsm and your greed for a year or two. Focus on the knowledge. Knowledge shall set you free, but getting paid is what makes you rich. People pay data scientists for their skills, but also their branding. No one wants to lose their job because they hired a sexy data scientist. Help your client or your boss look good in front of their bosses and clients. The one way you can do that is excellence.

Like Bill and Ted, focus on your excellent adventure in data science. Tools- check. Techniques -check. Business reading- check. Blogging-double check. Make a checklist of things you need to learn every day, every week, every month, every year.

Go to meetups, you putz. Dont just sit home on the weekend. Go shake hands with your fellow data scientists. Only way you can beat them is learning more things faster, being branded as a better data scientist by your writing and social media, and finally by being known in the data science fraternity as the person to go to when stuck.

Data scientists are fire fighters with code. Fight the fire in the business and a day will come when they celebrate you as a hero. Put in 10,000 hours of practise in data science. Start from giving half an hour to blogging every week, and half an hour to reading about code and techniques every day.

You give nine hours to the job, two hours to your commute, three hours to the family. You even give six hours of sleep as your brain reboots. Give yourself half an hour.

No one sees the invisible fire fighter. No one sees the man who knows a lot but is too shy to explain , share or give away a part of his code, his knowledge and his wisdom.

Code well. Dig Data Hard. In the future everything related to a decision will have a data scientist lurking somewhere. Be the guy they trust for decision making assistance.

Dont try to maximize your brilliance in your go to visible efforts, instead focus on minimizing your incompetence. Curious people often find solutions wise men overlook . What made DJ Patil, Hillary Mason, Hadley Wickham celebrated data scientists. Not just Their ability to learn and create, but also their ability to expand and share their learning. Surely you can share some stuff and improve your visibility.

Sartre Satire

If Nietzche was on Twitter, what would he tweet? If Shakespeare was on the internet would he prefer Medium writing or Kindle Publishing. If Satre was a blogger would he still be offered the Nobel Prize. If Sartre was a blogger would he still have refused Alfred Nobel’s nobel honor. Or would he have said, dang it, the number of views will only go up.

What would Charles Dickens do to stand out on Facebook from Brad Takei and Dwayne the Rock Johnson. Would the Tale of Two cities be serialized in blog posts. How much would Dickens earn from Adsense anyway. Would you ask Beethoven to stream on spotify or Apple Music. Would Mozart master Youtube the way Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga did.

How about a reality show on “Keeping up with the Shakespeares ” . Will it get enough ratings and Emmies. Will it be able to compete and beat ” The Game of Thrones”. Why does the Pope not use LinkedIn? The Pope doesn’t network? The Vatican bureaucracy won’t use wikis to catalogue research on what really really happened.

Heisenberg would be uncertain if he could use social media. I mean the Breaking Atoms Heisenberg not the chemist. The funny cat of Heisenberg on the internet would be a meme. or not a meme. or you know you don’t know.

The intellectual dumbing down of the population continues. It started with student debt as a way to discourage the lower middle class from aspiring to intellectual pretensions. Educated populations are rarely persuaded to go to war based on jingoism. The Cold War demanded obedience from populations from both sides of the iron Curtain. The Digital Iron Curtain exists and it is helped by technology that is closed to the outside world . Izronically much of it was developed on tax payer money.

Today the Internet has an Iron Curtain in China, but the politicians are too busy facilitating the corporations to import microwaves and refrigerators. There is no God. God deleted his Gmail account.

What would Jesus do on social media? Would he get 13 followers?

we sell nouns but we call it text mining

In cryptography, a nonce is an arbitrary number that may only be used once. A noun is a part of speech that denotes a person, animal, place, thing, or idea. The English word noun has its roots in the Latin word nomen, which means “name.” Every language has words that are nouns. Fuck you is a verb but you is a pronoun. Shit is a noun.

Take the nouns, leave the adjectives.

We sell nouns on the internet. Everything we sell is a noun. You can sell verbs as well but they are not very respectable.We use too many adjectives to do the selling. Adjectives Adwords and Adsense all add up to a long tail of Ads.

After everything is sold and bought, we analyze. We pretend we are analyzing because we are smart monkeys trying to evolve to smarter humans. We pretend we analyze because we are God’s creation designed more intelligently than an iPhone made in China. Choose your theory on why you were created to analyze the text that surrounds you.

Actually we try to analyze to deal with buyer’s remorse and seller’s remorse. Quantifying our risk helps us sleep better. If you could analyze the thoughts of humans using the brain waves they generate they would build a temple for you on Mt Olympus. Instead you make do with analyzing who sold which noun where and when.

Why did anyone sell and not just swap? Because swapping is less mathematical though sometimes more fun than the precision of converting X apples into Y money to buy Z oranges. The Alphabet can help us make a beautiful soup but it won’t tell us the psychology of causality.

Human behaviour is predictable in short bursts of time and irrational over longer periods of time. Microscopic predictability of human behaviour is now possible thanks to open source free software, pay on demand cloud hardware, free tutorials on blogs and MOOCs. But comfort zone demands that we predict aggregated and macro human behaviour.

The same mathematics that is used to predict terrorism can be used to predict fraud, paedophilia and virtually every crime. Yet capitalism demands we spend a trillion dollars to find a tall terrorist but don’t spend a billion dollars to find the short tail of crime. Crime is the ultimate weapon the lower classes have in capitalism and yet it diminishes them more than the ones watching from the balcony of the sky tower. If predicting crime was as profitable as predicting terrorism the masses would vote the right kind of politicians into the right kinds of seats.

Instead we have compromises. The machine algorithms that could be used to improve educational learning and deliver customized education to every kid’s device, is diverted to the flood gates of Advertising Heaven where a digital Mad Son Avenue dictates , nudges, cajoles, triggers , prods and converts your propensity to spend money to increase the velocity of money in the economy.

Nouns are what we sell, but bullshit is what we buy. If you dont’ believe me, trust me on the Dont Be Evil It is Just An AD company that just turned into a General Eclectic of the Internet behemoth .

Trust me on this, I wont ever sell your data to your government funded by your money on your time captured by my machines and my code monkeys. Just click my ads and buy my nouns.

Irishman grows potatoes on Mars

Matt Damon grows potatoes in his shit on Mars to stay alive in the movie Martian. I hope I didn’t ruin anything for you. Spoiler Alert.

The luck of the Irish keeps Matt Damon’s career alive and his astronaut alive in the Martian. Heck Affleck actually had to struggle for his stardom. All Matt does is smile at us, and we smile back. Personally, I am more a fan of Tarantino Hollywood than Spielberg Hollywood anyway.

The Martian was an interesting movie for me to watch since I have seen Matt in Interstellar ( where he lost the fistfight again. Why does Matt get into fist fights when Krav Maga is clearly his style). Interesting to see how teams play and interact and politic and still come up trumps. In space travel, socialism wins and Team trumps individual. Not to be confused by Team Trump’s Individual.

On this planet, called Earth, Capitalism wins. Corporations trump individuals. Nations trump other-other nations. Humans trump rest of nature team. We eat lamb chops, pork ribs and beef burgers and wonder why the global warming brigade is just tin hat battalion. How many battalions do the scientists have anyway? Environmentalism is for sissies who play chicken- chicken!

Meanwhile in other non-significant news, the polar ice keeps melting, scientists keep crying, and all your duly elected democratic government can think of is how can I milk the oil under the ice to feed the corporation whose lobbyists can fund my election. Cause and effect, brothers and sisters, cause and effect.

Give me the shit science that an Irishman does to grow potatoes on Mars, and I would any day prefer it to the crap news that you feed me on how climate change is just a joke for a George Carlin to joke on. Carlin is dead! Who will save us from the ice and water that floods or the droughts. Not your buddy, Jeez.

So you can send the Irish to grow potatoes on Mars but you can’t send the Scots to force people to grow olive and coconut trees on Earth. Insa, that is too bad, is it not.