Keynote by Milton Chang- Straight talk about entrepreneurship

Hello folks,

FiO has been eventful from the very first day – the highlight of the morning for me was the keynote of Milton Chang at student chapter leadership meeting and the meeting itself. The afternoon was made interesting by the ‘Hot topics in Optics’ overview. In this post, I am recounting some of the inspiring thoughts that Milton shared with us during his talk and a long Q&A session that followed.

Apart from an excellent record of successful startups, Milton is known to be a person enthusiastic about sharing his hard-earned life experiences. Today’s talk was a case in point. He used his entrepreneurial milestones of life to describe what approaches succeeded and what did not for him. His talk was followed by an intense and informative question-answer session which was followed my personal 5 minute chat with him. It seems that the video of the talk and Q&A session is not recorded. If you find out otherwise, please post a link to the video in the comment. The key points that he made about succeeding as a tech-startup were :

• Start small and develop slowly but steadily: Milton made a point that a typical VC receives 1000 applications every year, out of which 100 are funded. Out of that around 30% remain viable, which is a success ratio of dismal 0.3%! One of the reasons is that they try to become a big company and put all pieces of infrastructure together at a rapid pace. It pays to remain small until it is required to become big. So his strategy is to grow a startup as the product line and its sales volume grows. In some cases, it implies that you bootstrap the startup by using the returns earned only from that startup. The bootstrapping ensures that you do not end up spending too much if the idea does not work out. He mentioned how Newport took 17 years to become a public company since its inception.
• Focus on your core abilities and provide the best product: Unless you excel at the product and are able to distinguish it in the market from the competition with a definite advantage, it won’t sell. Therefore, his advice was to identify your core abilities and the product’s core advantages at the earliest and amplify them. It is important to have a small success early to be able to distinguish yourself from the wannabes. This small success is usually followed by more exciting and rewarding opportunities.
• Create value in an efficient way: Bootstrapping and focusing on your core abilities allow you to ‘create value efficiently,’ the key ingredient of a viable and happy business. It allows your company to become and remain excellent at what it does.
• Keep up with business literature: After his doctoral education and work in aerospace industry, Milton was called upon by his friend John Matthews to join then newly born Newport.  He was the seventh employee and had just made transition from technology to marketing.  He recounted how he understood nuances of business by reading business literature such as Wall street journal voraciously and cutting out adverts that he thought should be emulated. This allowed him to perceive the direction of the market and create some of the most captivating adverts. This marketing aspect of the business is as important as development of a great product and should receive good part of your attention.
• Have humility of learning from mistakes and asking help: He pointed out how business is benefited by developing trust and deep relationships with your colleagues. If one has humility of knowing limits of his/her abilities and asking for help when required, he/she will have more peaceful nights and better chances of success.

Of course, it is the best to hear the ideas from the source himself.

Till the next post, ciao.

An election worth voting for

Here is one election that lets you choose between good and better rather than bad and worse – as is more often the case. Google has initiated a project for finding the ideas that matter the most and ‘that help the most’. It is called

Google invited ideas from the world about the projects that would help the most number of people. Now it is seeking votes (till October 8th) to determine which five themes will be funded (with total of $10 million) and guided to reality. FAQs suggest that once the ideas are selected, applications of interest will be sought from capable organizations. Here you can vote for your favorite theme. Two themes that looked most worthwhile to me are “Enhance science and engineering education” and “Encourage positive media depictions of engineers and scientists.” But since there is only one vote to cast, I chose the one about improving media depictions of engineers and scientists. Why? Because I am involved with science and would like the world to think better of me? Partly yes.

What would you like to do when you are 93 years old?

I got to listen to an exceptional individual today. I had heard of legendary personalities but I got to see one today.

I had received an announcement of a public lecture in my mailbox relevant to the project that I am currently doing. From the lecture title, I thought I was going to attend a lecture on high-end research for doing 3D imaging of tissues. After registering for the lecture and having sat in the auditorium, I saw a senior researcher who I guessed was the speaker. I also saw an elderly man who I guessed was father of the speaker visiting Singapore with his son. There was something peculiar about elderly man – he had difficulty in standing up or sitting down on his own, but was listening to everyone around him with calm attention and replying back in measured tone. Other senior researchers entering the auditorium talked to him enthusiastically. I thought people in Singapore are so nice that they make any elderly person feel home.

And to my surprise, the researcher that I thought was speaker went up to stage and gave introduction about the elderly man. He turned out to be 93 year old researcher, inventer since the age of 10, someone who had used mechanical computers to calculate biological problems, headed a prestigious team of 100 which developed radars for US army during world war II, an olympian on the U.S. Olympic Yacht team and a person of unimaginable achievements.

His name is Britton Chance and here is the link to his biography: http://oemagazine.com/fromTheMagazine/apr01/spie_chance.html

I was really amazed to see a 93 year old man giving lucid and cogent presentation on stat-of-the-art research that he was doing. He shared many anecdotal experiences and words of wisdom. I guess the most noteworthy for me was: ” It was the rigour of olympic training that helps me stand here right now. If you want longevity, then participate in olympics.”

It was awe inspiring to see someone who has always treaded the path of hard-work, had a very fruitful life and was brimming with ideas and energy at the age of 93.

It seems that our generation (despite all the help from technology or may be due to it?) is incapable of producing humans like him.

IITs vs NUS: Who educates better?

Following are my very personal views on quality of education at IITs. So please don’t create flames.

If you feel the same or otherwise, I will be glad to hear from you and learn from your experiences. This discussion was trigerred by my friend Prajit, and I am providing the whole conversation without any edits (I have not removed typos or grammatical errors), to capture the conversation’s real tone.

Prajit Wrote:
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Dear Shalin
Yesterday I was going through the website of NUS…
I found something interesting…

University Ranking of 2005……….

In the university ranking IISC was missing.. but in the Technology Institutes category IIT’s were ranked number 3 .. ahead of NUS….
You were in IIT Mumbai… and now in NUS..

What do u feel? Where the difference? Is IIT’s superior to NUS?

Waiting for you reply..

——————————————————————————————
I wrote:

Dear Prajit,

If you consider undergraduate education, yes… IITs are much-much better than NUS. Because IITs infuse lot of rigour and basic training in their curriculum. NUS undergrads are no match to Indian brain. IIT undergrad would be very good at basics and ready to take on many branches of study, but NUS undergrad would have rather superficial knowledge but will be very well exposed to cutting-edge research areas and technologies.

But when I compare graduate research, I think IITs need to do a lot. If you create a professionalism and research activitiy continuum…. DRDO comes last, IIT ahead them, NUS ahead them, MIT/Stanford etc. first…Research here is very organized and also offers choice to students what they wish to do. It is multidisciplinary and is more oriented towards real-life problems.

Of course, there are exceptions in every system. I know a B.Tech. of IITM who did M.E. in NUS and went back to IISc for PhD. His M.E. experience was not at all good here. For two months he didn’t get anything to work. He was in chemistry deptt.

If I consider my case, I feel I am at the best place possible for me. I am supposed to do two state-of-the-art experiments in two labs in different areas over one year.. then I should select my research problem. Even in IISc, I would not get such an opportunity of really trying out two areas. So it is my scholarship and programme that are putting me in good position, but the IITM guy was just unfortunate to land up at the wrong place!!!
One of the guy has joined PhD in NUS after doing Master’s in Fraunhofer, Germany. He just hated Europe because of its weather, language problem and social culture. But he was OK with research rigour and facilities there. So he opted for Singapore.
Singapore is much close to our Indian culture and on top of that it is a developed country offering peaceful life.

So it seems that the right place for us is the place where we see opportunities for our professional and personal goal.

And rankings are biased by parameters that they use. And your parameters may not be the same as ranking parameters. Over time, I have felt that Ranking is the place to find the universities that may be of interest to you. For PhD, rankings dont matter at all… it is all about getting a good deal. In highly ranked uni.. there are higher chances of getting good deal, but that is all… there is only a chance, no surity…

Flight to Singapore

I have taken a new step in my life: of joining PhD program in bioengineering at Graduate Programme in Bioengineering (GPBE) at NUS (National University of Singapore). I flew via Singapore Airlines to Singapore. I think all airlines have something to learn from them. Even in economy class they had provided LCD screens for every passenger. That screen was multi-purpose – It displayed map of the region in which plane was flying, one could watch any movie from among 14, One could listen to many radio stations or get all information about Singapore and many other countries. Changi Airport is appropriately rated the best airport in the world. One can spend a whole day going around and appreciating the hi-tech but useful amenities at Airport. We had to check-in to our university provided accomodation, so we could not go around and have a look. Btw, here are some pics that I took while in flight.

Please look for my next post on useful tips for new comers to Singapore (especially those coming as students.)

From Bombay (Mumbai if u prefer so)

It has been exactly 20 days since I posted last blog, and 12 days since I joined IIT Bombay. Things moved really fast and luckily there were people to help me keep pace with events. Chirag and the gang of Hostel-12 B-wing landed a helping hand and made my naturalization at IITB appear very ‘natural’ to me. Hostel life at IITB is indeed different from other institutes… though not as much as I had thought before coming here.

At the same time, my project guide Prof. Preeti Rao invested a great deal of time and effort in getting me started with research. The work is indeed challenging and *REAL*.

Just to share, currently I am looking at a very low bit rate speech coding technique. The codec (coder-decoder system) can compress human speech to 1.5 kbps while maintaining good intelligibility. And this is really LOW. There is an effort in taking it even down may be by a factor of two. All these techniques rely on complex but realistic signal processing methods. It’s good to see such things implemented. Though, sometimes it is my gut feeling slightly simpler *techniques* (underlying ideas are robust- they don’t change with techniques) can be employed to achieve same results. Seems perfect material for research.

And there are so many (other) interesting things going on around me, there is definitely a lot for me to learn and explore.

Few thoughts on doctoral study

Yesterday, I shifted most of my stuff from Gandhinagar to Ahmedabad (with great help from my uncle and aunt)… in few days I will be off to bombay.

I still need to tidy up (infact write few things for the first time) my M.Tech. thesis. It is becoming slightly boring these days.

I can explain my boredome thus:
In M.Tech. we concern ourselves with a difficult but a narrow problem.
I sometimes wonder whether our higher education ( i mean graduate and doctoral level) systems miss the sight of wood for the tree. In Ph.D. one is expected to do something that no one in the world has done. But that reminds me of one of my favorit quips:
“All the intelligent ideas in this world have been thought, what is needed is to rethink them.” This means that in the quest of doing something new, a large chunk of scholars is wasting their time on useless things.

On one hand, I think Ph.D. is a way to stay in technical field for lifetime- and do what I like the most – tinker and design things and at some stage help people in their life using technology. Ph.D. can give one an opportunity to develop independent thinking and add depth & maturity to the thought process.

But on the other hand, if one gets engrossed in a narrow problem with no direct relevance to real-life, I am afraid one loses sight of real problems. By real problems, I don’t mean open problems that originate from the hunger of generating more revenue for a software/hardware giant. I mean the problems that affect our day to day life and its quality.
Ph.D. thesis titles sound so obscure and irrelavent to daily life, one feels that it will be tiring to think about them.

This brings me to the point of what I think is a good ph.d. programme.
So my dream Ph.D. programme will involve a thorough survey of basics – why things are the way they are and how to make things behave the way you want, a deep study of wide subject area and application of this knowledge to solution of a real life problem that is waiting to be solved.

One such thing that is on my mind is that of designing a system that can allow blinds to see the objects around them using auditory input. Braille system relies on tactile sense to compensate for absence of visual input. And I have read about systems in which visual information is translated in audio signals. Just as one learns new language, one can learn to understand this language of translated sounds and make out what are the objects around them. If some of the reader happens to know a place where such work is going on, please inform me.