BlogSat

As I was waiting for the bus coming back home today, I started thinking about LinkedIn , which is admittedly a strange thing to start thinking about, but I can be weird that way. One of the site's visions is to be a "Resume 2.0": not just can you post your entire background and accomplishments, but have (trusted) people comment on it, give you recommendations, testify to your experiences etc. etc. It's a great idea, especially if you consider all the applications: for example, for business schools recommendations, for renter's background checks etc. etc. It's sort of already in place on a very one-dimensional basis on sites like eBay through user feedback mechanisms. I love the way the founder, Reid Hoffman described it: "removes the inefficiencies of the resume process", i.e. so much harder to lie, exaggerate and hide information about your experiences. But here's why I think it won't work: more people lose from the inefficiency going awa...

So, I couldn't helping noticing that the activity on LinkedIn amongst GSB students was getting pretty high off late. Now LinkedIn has been steadily increasing in popularity, so maybe that's just part of it, but I couldn't help wondering if another part of that was as second-years see their MBA experience coming to an end, they're looking for a tangible way to "build their network", as they were told they were supposed to do. In an interesting co-incidence, I ended up catching Reid Hoffman 's podcast on the Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders seminar . His track record of investments/involvements with consumer Internet startups is pretty impressive:LinkedIn, Paypal, Facebook, Six Apart, Kiva, Mozilla, Flickr, Friendster....yikes! Fun podcast, too. Interesting tit-bit: They have a 2-person team working on ensuring a person's LinkedIn profile shows up on the first page of a Google search for that person. Works for me , here's mine . Best/worst l...

Mark Cuban's blog is a surprisingly good read. Now, my first introduction to Mark Cuban was seeing him randomly shout at an NBA referee; and not normal crazed-fan shouting; this was more like criminally insane, violent shouting. This has been a fairly common sighting at most Dallas Maverick's games over the last few years. It's really easy to not believe he actually founded and sold Broadcast.com (to Yahoo for something like a billion), which is how we bought the Dallas Mavericks in the first place. Oh, I really like the Mavs, but I don't think they'll ever win the NBA championship. I'll take that back; "ever" is too strong. This bunch of players, as brilliant as they are, are not destined to go all they way. I can't explain it; I just feel it. Leave it at that. Anyway, back to Mr. Cuban. I've been following his blog for the past couple of months and he's surprisingly articulate and insightful sometimes. This post is not his most insigh...

I have many excuses for not blogging much over the last week. Some of them are actually legitimate reasons: midterms, class projects etc. But one of the more interesting reasons I haven't been getting the recommended amount of sleep (I don't know what that is, but I'm not getting anywhere close to it, dammit!): VCIC. The creatively named Venture Capital Investment Competition was a blast. The rules are available on the website, but in short: teams read 3 business plans, grill the entrepreneurs the next day and present their decisions to a panel of VCs. I was lucky I had a great team; we worked hard but were pretty laid-back about the whole competition. Sample e-mail exchange, the day the competition applications were due: Me: "Hey, do you want to do the VCIC?" Team member: "Sure...what is it?" Seventeen teams applied, seven teams were selected for the round based on our resumes/application and we were one of them. (Team member's comment after look...

Sigh...I've crossed over. I recently accepted this position and I'll start work in August. It took me a while to make my decision and one of the reasons I chose to accept the offer was that I used so many of their products. At the moment I finally decided, I realized I had 5 Google properties open at that time. However, I've avoided using Google Calendar , Docs and Spreadsheets for a while now. I've had a number of good reasons to do so, but for some reason a flip switched when I signed that offer letter and I'm eating the dog food (interesting Wikipedia entry by the way.) I'm trying to use both for 2 class projects this quarter. And yes, everyone to whom I've complained endlessly about Gmail : that's my primary non-school email id now, and I really like it; no seriously, really! I also find that I have a very, very different perspective when I read articles like this one .:)

The post below just turned out to be a bit of rant on jargon, but originally it was this post on the Long Tail blog that caught my attention. This line is a trend that I see more and more in others as well as in my own behavior of late:"The future of media is to stop boring us with news that doesn't relate to our lives." Yikes, me no likey this idea of the future. Increasingly I choose the news and the entertainment I consume; to be more specific I can choose to a much higher level of granularity what to use and what to reject. I don't watch TV or flip the newspaper pages cover to cover, I select shows to watch on my PC and just click on those links (or sections) that I know I'm already interested in. While most of us agree this is generally a good thing, it does end up meaning there is a higher probability of being too narrow in focus, or if you're a believer user-ranked content (e.g. Digg ), what you believe a particular crowd thinks is generally important...