Trailer: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7388450n

Unrelated one, but interesting: ; This is not the one playing in the theaters: http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/11/17/the-lost-interview-steve-jobs-tells-us-what-really-matters/

"The thing about Microsoft is that, these guys are opportunists, and I mean that in a good way. When they first entered the application space, lotus and others had the market. They launched office and it wasn't all that good, but they kept going at it, like the japanese soldiers, they never stop. And they finally won." [after this is the quote about taste]

Jobs: Microsoft has no taste. The trouble is that, the people who buy products, don't have a great taste either. But you know, we as humans, need to take the best that we find, and give it to the whole species.

Interviewer: What are you going to do about that?

Jobs: I'm not doing anything about that. We're too small for that. I can't do anything about that.

Note that this was the time when he was working on NeXT, and they launched the computer, and the product failed. He was pivoting into a pure-software business, and was melancholic about the whole thing.

We were on a mission from god to save apple. It was a deeply emotional product. When have you heard about people, falling in love with a product? It doesn't happen that often. You don't love your telephone. People who worked on it, say it was the most intense work they have ever done their whole life. I think everyone of them would cherish it.

"There would be tears in his eyes, when he spoke about beautiful works of man."

My dad was one of those reverse wired people. Never for the past 20 years, have I seen him want a material object. For the most part of his adult life, he never wore slippers, and his foot looks harder than a typical villager, because he walked on cities (and hence roads). He practiced the self-restraint of a saint. One can't do that, unless you genuinely transformed to enjoy it. He was thirsty for success, and worked very hard most of the early twenties. Back then you needed a (much more) diverse set of skills to succeed, and hence sheer force of will was required to learn every one of them. The toolkits he built were no minor either. Wake up without alarms or when someone just pronounces your name. Remember the phone numbers and addresses without ever noting down. Why? He really found the process exciting, I suppose.

My case was a hybrid, and I doubt someone could have seen this transformation as closely as I had experienced. He was trying to teach me how to practice some of the toolkits (tons of practice), and I rebelled. I did not see the point of doing it, and since it was expected of me, I sure did not enjoy it. But as I grew up, I understood how powerful some of those values were. It was a shocking observation, that I was just much better at handling pain than my peers. The desire to prove my superiority, kept polishing the practice of self-denial.

They say, great things don't come without pain. I think, great things don't come with pain, either. The trick is, for the performer to be able to stand it for a while, he shouldn't think it's pain. In fact, if it's quite a while, he should believe it is not. If it might take forever, it needs to feel like play. Ambition probably is born when he respects what he likes to play.

Most of the greats, were just naturally good at it. Bill Gates, dated Melinda long distance for a long time before they eventually decided to marry. Carnegie and Warren Buffet, were adamant advocates of cheap lifestyle even without a necessity for it. I think a good proportion of folks who were extremely competitive learnt to not like "stuff"; After a point it becomes not a question of whether this is required to get something done. Self-sacrifices start to fall in line with pride. A symbol of expression, to tell the world that something is burning inside of you.

As they start testing the limits of delaying gratification, they begin to build belief systems, and their own view of the world (much the way, crazy people, live in their own world). I think a fairly common trait I've seen, is people run the strong emotions of, how amazing (long term) wins, might look. Movies are shot, scripts are written, and it is replayed fairly often in their heads, to taste a part of the gratification. As the mirage gets stronger and stronger, their ability to get others on that world rises. A cult is born.

Startups are described as a bunch of founders who have a deep desire for getting some sleep. "There's a lot to do", is an understatement. Human time is the most valuable asset. Code stability, Site up-time are less important than moving fast and getting more users. Any given line of code has 90% chance that it will be removed after 3 months.

Startups define and influence the work culture for the next big wave of companies. Ours was largely defined by facebook - break but move fast. Everyday we hope to be more agile (and fragile) than they have been when they started. Being a startup founder you get a close look at most of the emerging trends that others who work at big companies don't realize. After all that's what you are paid to do. I think there's a big shift in engineering going on, and somethings are going to change forever.

Big design takes time, that startups can't afford. Having the whole system in mind is expensive wrt human resources. We program in a very reactive environment, mostly write everything up and test them all in one shot. We write scripts that evolve into a big product, the same way as startups evolve into big companies. We move forward with a mind-set that everything is fine and when it breaks - we aggressively fix it. Taking the metaphor one level further, even compiling is a hindrance. It by definition adds redundancy. 

I believe strongly that 10 years from now: C++ and other compiled languages that are used in most big companies right now, will see a 90% reduction in people who code directly in that language. Most of them will be working on interpreted languages with which you can get any feature's v1 up fast. Anything that gets in the way of producing a product - even a single line of code, a single configuration option that requires planning will disappear. For example, here's the biggest one that I'm fairly confident of: Private class variables will be dead. Everything will be public.

For a programming language to win in this environment, it must be able to provide a pattern. Patterns reduce the amount of thought a programmer has to put in. But no patterns are perfect, and in the cases when the thing you want to do, doesn't fit in quite nicely, you must able to easily break the pattern and go your way. The emphasis is on the amount of thought programmer has to put designing things. (Take rails for example, you can technically beat the MVC by not using models and putting all your code in the views like a traditional php page. You take the MVC route because of ease of use, not because of constraints. There is zero cost to breaking that pattern.)

Welcome to the new world. It's where products get much cheaper to make, grow much faster and the winner takes almost the whole pot, than it was ever possible before. Competition is intense. Are you game? Because if you finish second, you go home with next to nothing.

Letter to my ex-Manager at Microsoft. A real nice guy.

---

How are you doing these days? We've just launched an iPad app called Apollo, and it's been awesome so far. We have tons using it everyday, and we are actively iterating in a highly competitive market. I came across these and thought this might interest you. A couple of articles about the culture change that's going on in the fast moving mobile and internet space.

It's interesting to see, how far beyond startups it can permeate.

-Prasanna

PS: I mean in the worst-case what's going to happen right. Big example of twitter screwing up:

They repeat the tweets, twice or thrice :) World din't end.

Also found it interesting to compare with gate's early days.

I recently saw this movie Glengarry Glen Ross. It's one of the best movies I've ever seen, and it definitely is the best one I've seen this year. (Even guy kawasaki thinks so). It's like those movies where, best people of the profession get together and talk, things that are visionary to us, as if they are just old-day rules of the game, a trick in the book, you know.

For most of us, I think it's eye opening. Introducing a new class of people called 'sales people', in a way that atleast I've never realised. These people are whom I've met everyday. Yet I dint know, their moves were taught. I used to think spontaenity had a role. Or atleast, human relations prompted them to make the connections. I'd never buy that again. Oh my!

All right so I'm a fan of this movie, and I'd like to narrate some events I have experienced, that I can link to, or recollect.

ByteCode

A college junior of mine wrote: (removed name of companyX)
[...] We had contacted (companyX) in August and the talks went on for 3 months and then everything got stalled. We have started the talks again and the campus representative has forwarded us to Ms. (some rep) who is in Mumbai office. We have submitted them a proposal and they have told us that they will get back to us in 2 days. Is there any way in which you can help us out? Because Bytecode without any sponsor may not look good. [...]

I had once helped raise money for ByteCode, and this was what I had felt like writing back:
[...] 2. Ask Amazon, HP, Dell, etc etc; Move things fast -- This can get terribly slow with HRs in between. But with a tone that dictates ready acceptance or denial from your side, things can move fast on the other side as well. For instance, the person who contacts the HR must be able to (and be ready to) say Yes/No during the call. Or give conditions for Yes/No with the flexibility also detailed. Things delay if the contact person at your end, says "ok, sounds fine, I'll contact my team and get back to you." [...]

Seems like the first thing they teach you about selling. Most of us, including me dint quite get this right first time. ABC - Always Be Closing. (from the movie).

BankBazaar

I once asked a friend of mine, how their startup managed to strike partnerships.
Theyagarajan: dai essentialy u take one bank in. Then write a smnall mail to the product head of bank and schedule a meeting. Pick ur team. Talk well with them (give impressive intros) and then tell them we will revolutionize ur online presence and a demo of ur product. Product if good usualy impresses them and dont push. Just keep sending updates once in a while when u get new bank or mentioned in press. They will come in because at the end of the day, banks want to make more money open up more channels of revenue.

On a larger note, they say, when you are selling something to someone, everything has to be about him. Highlight what he gains. And never sound desperate for what you gain (dont push).

How to Win Friends and Influence People

Paul Graham quotes this as a great book. To quote some: (that resonate right now)

1. Arouse in the other person an eager want.
2. Talk in the terms of the other man's interest.
3. Try honestly to see things from the other person's point of view.
4. Start with questions the other person will answer yes to.
All the above, the movie just nails. Fourth point is so un-expected. If I went back and watched it again, it seems to be obeyed. Psychological aspects.
Making contact

I used to say things like "Let's just checkout this shop, see the models and go."; How much I dint know, the price of making contact. We all find it so hard to say no, to a great sales pitch. Because they do you a favour and dont ask for anything. They always do. It might not be right to correlate (this inability to say no) with status symbol, maybe. I din't even tip waiters when I was at college. A few ones, are so hard to not tip.

The best example I can think of now, are the street performers. When I was new to this place I watched the street magician perform round after round, and I hence realised all his (supposedly) spontaneous jokes are all pre-planned. To pin people into paying him, he says all sorts of things like, "come closer, cars are passing by."; Better yet, they tell you how much exactly you've got to pay. It goes like, "If you watch a magic show on the decks, it'd cost you $20 per person. Well, I'm not asking you $20. How about 19?" (people laugh) "When someone gives me something, all I say is, ask yourself, can I buy anything with it? Well if you can't, nor can I." (people laugh) (in context about don't pay me pennies). "If you give me $10 a person it's great. If it's $20 I'd be very happy. If you give me $100, I'd come home with you" (people laugh) "You know when I first told my dad, I know what I was going to be ... I'm going to be a street comedian -they laughed!" (crowd laughs) "Now ..." "They stopped laughing" (claps from the crowd). They have a set of things that goes deep inside. Great pitches include a personal component, that makes you feel connected to a stranger. The right set of switches arouse the "sense of giving", in this case. The last $100 joke ofcourse meant, that's too much of money to give me, but the gap between 20 and 100 is large, much larger than 10 and 20. When you give in the ballpark of the amount that's last put in your head, it feels as if you obeyed. Now only your sub-conscience is hinted to obey. You feel as if you decisively gifted. (Btw, he earns 10 times as much as I do.)

This guy is atleast several metres far from you, and you can't just walk away. And I'm not talking about the Jo on the street. Even my dad, paid up. I remember once, when we had to get a very important train, we went asking people in the ticket reservation queue weather they can get two more tickets for us, with our money. When three of them shouted at us, the fouth guy we asked agreed. That sort of a guy, my dad, who has self-trained himself, to be able to not take things inside, paid up for this performance. Sure, he could have avoided if he wished, but the fact that he impulsively paid, suggests there's a cost to not paying. In other words, hearing out a salesman isn't cost free.

Oh now I get it. The relocation specialist who found me a rental apartment, who made us assured (in one day), if we wanted anything in vancouver she'd show us around, who introduced herself to the home owners confidently and eagerly as "Rindy Hartner, Partner at Oriental Housing.", who spoke to us highlighting why each house is a great one to see, when we asked her to compare homes, gave us differrent advantages, added the disadvantages and spoke why it dint matter as much to us in particular, who spoke to the land lord saying we are immediately ready to close the deal, who spoke to us before hand saying most land lords ask for a 1 year lease, and when we agreed, said to the land lords when we met, we were willing to sign a 1 year lease, who spoke to us a bit about her personal life, her kids, who got the deal done that single day, who mailed one other day giving dental directions, and whom we never contacted or got contacted by till date. Now I get it, she was a salesman. I wouldnt have even used the same above words to describe her before. (Mostly I would have expanded what I knew about her personal life.) Btw, oh yes, when our flat owner said to us, the next person is coming to see this in 20 mins, (when we said we'd take it today evening, after we saw a couple of more homes), it probably did more good than bad to her. She can always call us back if we moved on to the next home, even if there was no client actually visiting in 20 mins.

Self promotion and status

So is the guy from college, who one night he even almost convinced me, that I got to do a startup with him. He was a salesman. I remember several situations where it's so hard to say a no to him. This guy has now dropped out from college, and is running his own business. Here's my conversation with him a while ago: (removed some contents off it)
me: oh, so what business are you in? In trichy only?
him: simulation... oil rigs...
me: computer simulation?
him: i have it in trichy only.. 3d
me: oh
him: i know trichy well and cost effective
me: sure to start something, but clients are in trichy only? bhel?
him: clients do come to trichy... our first client is (companyX) singapore.
me: oh!
him: he came down to trichy...
me: our? how many ppl? :)
him: i can make ppl come da...
me: lol :)
him: its what u say that counts, abt yourself and place
me: haha
him: trichy is not bad. i gave them a decent 3 star accom - royal suthern
me: wow! and what did they want in return
him: they want to build a platform to make their design workflow simple and effecient, and also remotely accesible
me: marine design?
him: they do it but we jus support exactly that, they have interconvertability problems as well .. they use solidworks. wait.. also many tom dick and harry softwares seriously never heard of them also
me: ok, what did u provide? .. how many are you working with?
him: wait i have a candidate to interview now... will call u.. tell me ur number.. sorry bye :) tc
me: ok. ttyl

When I had this chat with him, I thought it was good for him. I knew he puts things in a way that beats it up - a good sell. And giving a 3 star accomodation, for someone, is no small expense for students like us. So maintaining a status, is one of the important things sales people worry about. Movie even puts it more clearly. Great it worked for him, and he somehow seemed to know already.

If I read this conversation again now, I'd see more in it, and the way I look at it changes, given that I'm beginning to understand how they think. Now, was it true that he was able to convert a singapore client? Maybe. People don't lie unless necessary. And it doesnt work in the longer term, for my image on him. So yes, likely, he did have a singapore client. He met them in trichy, sure. Did they send a representative to meet him, from singapore, after his email and phone contacts? Really? Did he fly to trichy, just to meet him and no other business stuff on his agenda? Or did my friend get introduced by someone to the client, when he was on some business trip? Or did the client company already have a branch in India or trichy in specific? Some other friend of mine told me, he has heard this story a long time ago, which implies either this was the best client he could highlight to me, or it was special because it was first.

On a differrent dimension, what did he work for the client? From whatever I know about this guy, I had an opinion, he's not exactly the deadly programmer, he can write code, as much as real world applications need. Which is why I asked that question. The answer contained so many buzzwords (interconvertability; solidworks) which I'm sure he dint want me to exactly comprehend, (which is OK). "build a platform to make their design workflow simple and effecient" - "they do it but we jus support exactly that" - so he's providing support. I dont think marine software is exactly his area of expertise yet, and 3D is not yet. So it can't be the form of technical consulting, rather likely to be help in development. In other words, he's writing some software for them, as a non-hired programmer. How many are working with him? He dint answer that as well. Which probably means, -not many-. So is he really going to interview someone? Maybe, he's planning to talk with someone and get him develop a part of his work for a pay. Does he have to go at that time? Is it a prescheduled appointment for that time, IMO very unlikely.

OK, about the hotel, did he really take the expenses for the room? Or did he show them to it. Now, I dont know. Maybe, Maybe not. If he did the latter, I probably believed before that he did pay. (From his tone, I still think he paid). So he did a great job. He probably dint lie, but built up a great image, which is so vital for selling.

Animals

Paul Graham writes: What do I mean by good people? One of the best tricks I learned during our startup was a rule for deciding who to hire. Could you describe the person as an animal? It might be hard to translate that into another language, but I think everyone in the US knows what it means. It means someone who takes their work a little too seriously; someone who does what they do so well that they pass right through professional and cross over into obsessive. What it means specifically depends on the job: a salesperson who just won't take no for an answer; a hacker who will stay up till 4:00 AM rather than go to bed leaving code with a bug in it; a PR person who will cold-call New York Times reporters on their cell phones; a graphic designer who feels physical pain when something is two millimeters out of place.

Finally go ahead and see the movie, if you haven't already. :-)

OK, so in short, Interview Street connects the interviewer and the interviewee for a virtual interview. Interview Street targets the Indian university students, as interviewees. Eligible seniors with less than 2 years of experience are targeted as interviewers.

Interview Street (IS) will hope to partner with institutions on a grass-root level. The approach here is to partner batch by batch, at least in the initial stages.

Filtering the list, by removing those who put Google Ads on their page, that leaves to about 10 players. [R3] There is no body who attract high quality crowds -- For instance, there's no one whom Microsoft or Google places an Ad on. [R4] Further the number of sites that specifically attract freshers, is less than 5. Even the moderate ones, seem to have a high number of audience, which shows the need for better solutions in this space.

It's time to go

1. Don't be shabby:

There are basics in web-site design optimization, that are not met in the the big player's websites. For example, Naukri clutters it's home page with all job listings. A great page, is simple and the parts that take the click are highlighted. Filled with carefully photo-shopped media, it briefs the same content redundantly, at differrent levels of shortness. This is no small deal. Monster does a better job, in their UI, than most people. The content clutter they dont seem to be able to avoid it as well.

2. Match - Dont Search:

Everyone either shamelessly classify and list all their openings for click navigation, or spend a decent effort to provide a search option. The list is either too large or too small. It's either too unclear or not so useful. It's ok if the list is too large, but the top results have to solve your problem. Again relevance is so poor, since it expects users to type everything down in a search box.

There's is nothing to search about jobs. Most options used for search are static, and must belong to a person's profile. Also job searching has very little choices to make. In most cases there exists a well defined ordering of job preference that holds good across a critical mass.

InterviewStreet will build custom web-apps, that are: [R5]
A. Recommendation engines that match user profiles to jobs, with high clarity of their initial report. Better targeting will improve precision, and form the theme of the game.
B. You apply to about 5 jobs and track, their status -- not a blank [applied] sign, something more user involving than that. He makes job specific notes, and book-marks, with tracking web-apps specifically designed for this purpose. This can be extended socially, with he being able to share it to people who study in the same college, class, etc.
C. Job targeted training or training recommendations will be offerred -- More on this later.

3. User generated content:

The web is about a constant user presence. Stickiness is important. People spend time in two ways on your page.

Firstly, and most commonly, they are in between something and open your site, just the way they open e-mail. To engage them, a good update rate on your quality content is necessary. User engagement rate is measured in number of articles published per week. Necessarily, the older ones get read lesser and lesser. [R6]

Secondly, people come when they are in need. They have an interview tomorrow, and want to look for historically relevant content. A well linked web of pages will do a great deal here. There are certain articles that cover the "head" of the domain specific problems. They will get heavily linked into. Content will be reached by links and equally often by classified navigations. The actual collection that the user first reaches will essentially be user generated. The tail is so large, and scaling will happen with user generated content.

There are no websites that do both of this. People who work like publishers today, have unworthy content with low update rates. [R7] Those who generate content from users, have an incredible lack of "structure". Everything is plain text, posted on forums.

There is need for structure and better apps. Eventually specific algorithms will 1. cluster, 2. classify and 3. and search this data pool. For a concrete example, when a user posts a new interview question that he came accross, it'd get matched with the existing pool, and the relevant questions will appear. He then can edit, with a simple interface and see if he can merge the two to mean, a complete question, adding value to the problem. No history is ever lost. In addition rich linkage structures across question papers are set, on top of which user generated apps can mine this data. For instance, it's now simple to determine, how many questions overlap across time in CTS interviews.

The vision is to make it so simple that, a student who just got an interview done, will be sent requests for a paper by his class mates, and instead of explaining it to all of them, he hosts it on your page (or) his own page, as add-on widgets. The motivation to host it online, is he get's to see some cool stats, as to how long people (a lot of people), took to solve the problem he solved. Added ease of distribution, with a feel of content ownership.

In the early days, for the first type of content, the founders can post upto one article a week, and get quality posters to write once a month. The second type of content needs a lot of importing todo. Semi-automated scripts, will import rich content by crawling other sites, and impose structure. Quality here is more important than quantity, since this sets the best case examples for later content added.

4. Scaling:

Any one who chooses the domain of a jobs and a training site, makes a trade-off between how much 1:1 human engagement you can commit, and how large a rate you want to grow at. There's nothing new in understanding that, human engagement doesnt scale. People like NIIT represent the left end and others like, Monster India chose the no-training path. But training and jobs go together. They cant be seperated. Either of them nurture the other. It's like making buyers and sellers meet, with online shopping. [R8]

The challenge is in providing scalable training. I was recently impressed by AppJet's efforts to create engaging tutorials. Web-seminars and recorded content goes a great way as well. Apps built around a rich repository of questions, that can auto recommend puzzles each time a user logs in, is a great way to engage. Auto evaluation systems that can score user generated problem-sets will emerge. A domain specific example, for most programming problems you can write engines to evaluate by running the program. The ease and simplicity with which ordinary users can create evaluators will determine how many sets are scorable.

The online interview meetings that they host, can be recorded and archived. The context information about the interview can be built around user profiles - again something recommendation engines can leverage.

Institute specific work shops will serve as starting points. (ofcourse that doesn't scale.) Facebook grew by dominating specific universites and opened up gradually.

5. Marketing:

Marketing trends in the web are changing and most players havent adopted yet. They still do news paper advertising as thier main reach. For web-sites, apart from the biggest form of advertesting, which is creating sticky users, social networks are big tools for growth. A new web-app model is necessary which can easily build apps into facebook, orkut, nokia, and run on web-sites as add-on widgets. Youtube and Slide grew immensely with that.

Google contact list is a great place to viral. Lets say, A new user who wants to register, if he lets your app to mail all his gmail contacts, and has greater than 20 contacts, gets a 10% off. [R9]

Opportunity

This space is fast growing and more players will eventually jump in. More mature and clean sites will have an edge, long term.

Most university placements happen through dedicated departments, that puts restriction on the number of firms that a student can apply for. That will eventually dis-appear, and a lot more companies will have visibility to better students at the expense of a low joining rate.

InterviewStreet, with about 5% odds [R10], can shake up the way recruitment happens in India, and forge a fortune, and the change may well be, irreversible.

Footnotes

- R1: The closest analogy is Topcoder, who is a premium programmer attractor.
They don't teach the masses how to program. There are 3K+ reasonably
active low quality Indian participants, while the quality participants
are close to 20.

- R2 Thirdly, the original structure of interviewing etc, will still remain.
This will serve as a source of marketing, in two ways. Firstly premium
institutes will be engaged more than, the rest, since that's the
interviewer's choice skew. This engagement will create a constant
presence, in places with highly employable mass, which in turn are
extremely monetize-able. Secondly, The more important implication is,
It will create a brand for the firm, as others like to look up to it.

- R3 Wait a minute -- Even naukri does google ads!

- R4 There's no specific quality barrier. We know the numbers are larger towards lower quality candidates than at the top, and as any site expands to capture crowd, it would continually lose its bar. Rating users will go a big way. Branding that the earlier growth creates, if it's oriented towards quality, growth rate will be directly meaningful. Audience are more valuable.

- R5 I don't want to say, a "new player will build" instead of saying "interview street will build", as it gets too verbose and distracting.

- R6 As a direct result, unfortunately for both the users and the publisher, the same thing get's re-written. For example, Paul Graham's essays, talk repeatedly about a surprisingly small number of his strong views. There are a set of common principles that the author beleives in, that arenot very obvious and can create a spark to the first time a reader comes accross it. (Example, Creation of Weath, Market Value). The genius of republishing content is essentially telling the same thing at differrent angles and at differrent depths. TechCrunch has another work around for this problem. They just link to their old content, in the newer ones.

- R7 Quoting "Interviewers have short memories. A thank you note is your final chance
to stand apart from all of the others who want the same position."

- R8 One could say that buyer and sellers are here, trainers and trainees. Scalable training is a blue market, and arguably a hard problem. It might make sense to leave it alone and focus on one of the two domains. The truth is, they are heavily co-related and it can be a product differentiator.

- R9 RemindMeSam does that. It uses google contact list when you say Invite Friends on it's home page. He doesnt have to give you his password. He just has to say Grant Access, when google asks for permission.

- R10 5% are impressive odds for growing at this scale. The odds go much higher, if prominent (Sridhar Vembu; Rajesh Jain.) angels who sit for ideas but don't push you in directions are on your board. Google started off that way. The less obvious purpose of a board is that you report status to someone and forces you to think on a longer term. Also, saying what you did this week and what you plan to do next week, is a useful data to track - and pushes harder. Men like Rajesh Jain circumvented it, by blogging regularly.