Category: Entrepreneurship (Page 6 of 12)

3 Things To Look for in a Co-founder

May 12, 2014 / Sri Srikrishna / 0 Comments

Almost soon as I made the case why you need a co-founder, a friend responded with the question “What should I look for in a co-founder?” While we’ve asked this question of both entrepreneurs and angels, here’s my take on what you need to look for in a co-founder.

Vision Match Building a business is often a long hard journey, and you want to make your that your partner or co-founder shares your vision. As setbacks occur (which they will) or when money seems hard to come by, customers leave, milestones slip or worse yet when things work, and especially when you seem to be making more money than you can keep track of, having a shared vision will ensure that things stay on even keel. If there isn’t a shared vision of why you are running your business and what it is you seek, as a company and as individuals, it will be difficult to survive every fork in the road that you’ll encounter. And you will encounter far more than you can imagine. So make sure your visions match.

Complementary Skills All too often we end up hiring or connecting with people who are just like us. While that’s nice, its far more important to find someone who has complementary skills – someone who’s comfortable talking to prospective customers or selling, if you are building a product. Someone who can manage projects or money, if you are out there focused on selling; someone who’s comfortable writing or documenting while you are out there hustling or building. Usually startups require everyone to be as hands on as they can, especially co-founders and it can really help, if they can do things you can’t or do them better than you can. So make sure that they not only have shared vision but can do things you can’t!

Honest & Open Communication The nature of startups is such that you will screw up. Heck so will your co-founder and more than once. So it’s important that your co-founder and you share a healthy interpersonal relationship – one not just based on mutual trust and but on honest and open communication. If you walk around each other, either too polite to raise uncomfortable topics or avoid conflict or confrontation at all costs, lots of important issues will not get sorted out in a timely manner and that’s something no startup can afford. So it’s really important that you feel comfortable around you co-founder that either one of you can raise issues that bother you and can be talked through to resolution. Only with honest and open communication can you keep one another honest, not to mention your business out of trouble.

Here is Sanjay Anandram’s take on what to look for in a co-founder

Meanwhile to make sure that your prospective co-founder & you are aligned on

a shared vision of the company and its raison d’etre
what complementary value each of you bring to the table
talking openly and resolving matters through timely and effective communication

So go out there and find that co-founder. Good luck!

Keep your needs simple – Lessons from my dad

March 25, 2014 / Sri Srikrishna / 0 Comments

Photo Credit: visualpanic via Compfight

“Why do you take the bus? Couldn’t you at least take an auto (3-wheeler cab)?”

My father never stopped asking his friend, a Gujarati Jain gentleman, this question each time he visited. Even the times he did come to our doorstep in an auto, my father whispered to me conspiratorially, “He probably took the bus to Adyar and took the auto for the last kilometer.“

The said gentleman, had like my dad, landed in Chennai as a teen with less than Rs. 10 in his pocket. He’d then gone on to amass a considerable fortune in the plastics business. Yet, he maintained a disarmingly simple, nearly spartan, lifestyle. While my father pulled his friend’s leg about his frugality, his own actions were not all that different.

As kids we were always embarrassed, when my father would order idli–sambar – steamed rice cakes with spicy lentil – at even the fanciest of restaurants. Likewise we were flummoxed that he’d check in at the 5-Star Taj hotel with his boss, but choose to spend the night at his sister’s duplex in Karol Bagh. It took us more than twenty years to try and get him to wear anything other than the white shirt and pant that he wore every day to work – even then we only managed to get him try solid pastel color shirts!

My dad lived and breathed his belief to keeping his needs simple. Without my realizing it he’d trained me from day one to be an entrepreneur. Not that I was a good student. In my first foray at being an entrepreneur, I blew nearly $250 (yep, dollars) on business cards. Let’s just say I was a slow learner. But luckily I returned to my roots – when we bootstrapped our first startup. We didn’t buy a computer, we didn’t hire a coder – we began pitching customers. We kept it simple – emails and presentations. We operated out of my co-founder’s apartment and held day jobs while we tried to land our first paying customer.

The lesson I learned was not just frugality but to keep every element of life (and business) simple.

Keep your

business simple, so others understand it. Stay focused
offerings simple, so customers just get it
pricing simple so buying what you sell is easy
cash tracking simple – know where it goes, what you need and have
organization simple – so your team is clear about their roles & what’s expected of them
life simple – early to bed, early to rise, love, affection & exercise

Thanks dad!

Simple Sales Tracker for Startups

March 14, 2014 / Sri Srikrishna / 16 Comments

This last quarter, I met several interesting startups, that had a clutch of good customers. When I asked them “How can I help you?” at least three of them asked for help with sales. Not what you’d think, as in find me customers or introduce me to prospects but how do I manage my sales pipeline. In fact two of them specifically had the question “How do I track my sales pipeline?”

Over the last several years, while I’ve used a variety of tools from mere contact managers through sophisticated deal trackers to full-fledged CRM suites, I’ve found myself returning each time to a simple spreadsheet-based sales tracker, at least in the early days. The tracker has not only evolved as I’ve learned but stayed surprisingly simple and has worked just as well in a fund-raising function at non-profits as it has in a for-profit startup.

As I promised these founders, I’m open sourcing the sample tracker as an Microsoft Excel spreadsheet as well as Google docs template. The tracker can be used for selling products or services or combinations thereof. You can download it here.

The tracker has three parts.

1. Setup – your business basics

Based on the nature of your business (product or service), actual sales offerings and the sales process your business may have to follow, you can tweak the setup. All this is done in a single worksheet (the last one, titled “Stages, Categories, etc.” of the online sales tracker). This one time set up of your product or service offerings, your sales persons (or deal owners), and stages of your selling process, makes maintaining your sales tracker easy and minimizes human or data entry errors.

Figure 1 – Typical Sales Stages

Sales stage this is simply the series of steps you have to go through from start to finish to close a sale. It begins with you first identifying a potential target customer for your product or service and runs all the way through receiving payment from the customer (never forget collecting the money is a critical part of making a sale). Figure 1 shows one such typical sales cycle.

Figure 2 – Sales stages for a demo-based sale

Sales stages obviously can vary for your particular business – one common variant that I encounter is when a demo installation or trial period needs to be offered to a customer (something you ideally want to get away from, but unavoidable particularly at tech startups in the B2B space). In this case there may be more interim steps (or stages) in your sales tracker.

Similarly you can set up your product or service offerings, as in actual names or code names that tell you what product or service you are talking about.

Tip: Typically I’ve found it useful to precede the offering name with a numeral such as 1-Bluetooth Stack or 2-SEO Consulting, as this makes sorting and other types of numeral based operations easier. For instance variants could all be numbered within say 100-200 so reports can be easily generated.

2. Sales Tracker
The sales tracker is a straightforward spreadsheet, with each prospective sale or deal on a separate row. For each deal, the row (or record) spells out, who the customer is, what is it that’s being sold (opportunity or offering), what revenue (or selling price) you expect, what sales stage is the specific deal at, who owns the deal and what the target close date is. You can of course have additional fields such as comments, or next steps, key customer contact. Figure 3 below shows a sample tracker for product sales.

Figure 3 Sales Tracker

The tracker also has variants of the sales tracker, if you need to track number of units (N) and have a unit price (P) and therefore compute deal size based on NxP (tab, Sales_Tracker_B_Units). Similarly there’s a tracker variant for service or project selling, (tab, Sales_Tracker_C_Project) where you can add descriptors for a project in addition to any opportunity or offering name you provide. Of course your business may require yet another variant, but you can simply by adding columns make the tracker your own.

By using the Filter function in Excel, you can look up deals

of a particular size or greater
expect to close prior to a specific date
belonging to a particular sales owner or product (or both)
at or before a certain sales stage
that have closed but you’ve not gotten payment

In other words, an individual sales guy (that’s you) can see which of his deals he should focus on this week to close, what is the value of deals you intend to close this month (or week or quarter), which deals have NOT moved for more than a month – you get the idea, you can pretty much filter it any way you need.

3. Summary Report

Figure 4 Report Master

The first tab Report_Master, is a quick overview report of your sales pipeline. It presently has both #deals and deal value by sales stage. I’ve set these up as formulas – these could just as easily be set up as pivot tables if you so desire. You could do without this master report sheet, by merely filtering the sales tracker sheet itself. Alternately if you find that you are running some searches often, you can just have them set up as reports. Its also useful to have a report if you multiple folks are using the tracker and you want a big picture view.

Good luck with your sales – as and when you make improvements do share and spread the love and knowledge. If you have any questions please feel free to ask questions in the comments below. Spread the word. Happy selling!

2 Ways Growth Can Kill Your Startup

March 3, 2014 / Sri Srikrishna / 2 Comments

Photo jurvetson via Compfight

A popular Frank Sinatra song speaks of love and marriage going together like horse and carriage. The words startups and growth seem to be used much the same way. Recently I moderated a panel on “Why some startups grow and others don’t” at the TATA First Dot powered by NEN student startup showcase.

One of the questions that came up during the discussion was

“Is growth always good? Are there instances when growth can be bad?”

The panelists all agreed that NOT all growth is good growth. Specifically,

Non-focused growth Naga Prakasam, angel investor and mentor, brought up the point, that growth unless directed and focused can easily derail a startup. So growth in revenue, even when profitable, could turn out to be bad in some situations.

One of two things most commonly happen

Revenue consideration – as a cash-strapped entity many startups chase any and all revenue – so you have product companies taking on services or service firms taking on non-core functions – pretty soon the organization is pulled in many directions with people stretched either too thin or into areas that are not their strengths

Customer retention – you have a major or important customer for whom you provide specific products or services. They want you to support them doing something that another vendor is doing – for instance in my first startup we did only Bluetooth software. However our customer, one of the largest accessory makers in the world, wanted us to help them with IT support too. Luckily we turned them down even though the risk of losing our core business to their IT vendor loomed. (Of course their IT vendor claimed that they could do Bluetooth software as well – but that’s a whole another story 🙂 Such growth, unless planned as part of a larger strategy, will eventually end up hurting the customer and your business, as you take on things for which you either don’t have competence or distracts you from your core business.

Non-profitable growth In the semiconductor business, we’d always joke about “making it up in volume!” As airlines, magazines and mobile phone companies learned the hard way, growing non-profitably, especially when you lose money on each sale is not a good thing. In fact, the more growth you have the more money you’ll lose (or burn through) and rarely is the outcome pretty. Sure, there are times you have to get your foot in the door, enter a new market, test a new product when you will lose money – but hopefully that’s well planned and the downside is contained. Either it allows more profitable products to be sold or customers to be acquired and cross over from loss to profit making, when some volumes are attained (or fixed costs or amortized).

Growth, when focused and profitable is good. But when neither can easily hurt your startup and possibly kill it too!

How much money should you raise?

December 23, 2013 / Sri Srikrishna / 2 Comments

The best answer to this question, as you’d probably guess is “Depends!”

The most common answer I hear is, “As much as you can” – which I’m not sure is the right answer, for at least two reasons. If you raise far more than you actually require,

you’ll be diluting more of your company at a price lower than you need to
you run the risk of developing a wide range of bad habits starting with mistaking raising money with running a successful business

Entrepreneurship literature suggests too much money can be as much (or greater) a cause for business failure as not enough money. Of course the same literature suggests that under-capitalization is the primary cause of slow to no growth of startups.

Better minds than mine have grappled with this issue, in a variety of manners. However most of them are set in the context of the US of A. I provide links to several at the end of this post.

Whether you raise money, in what manner and how much will depend on

Nature of business – is it a service business, that is better boot-strapped? Web design, IT services, most consulting businesses all fall into this category. Does it require significant capital expenditure or up front investment – multi-location courier service or restaurant, manufacturing or high tech businesses fall into this latter category. Of course a slew of businesses fall in between these two – which would put them in the sweet spot for formal fund raising.

Nature of capital – are only friends, family or fools going to fund your business – most businesses would fall into this category – particularly service businesses that are going to stay small or local. If you are already profitable or revenue making and are looking for capital to grow, you’re likely better off with debt. Of course in the Indian context debt may be non-trivial to access, despite a pile of money being available. Or do you need equity capital – as offered by angels or venture capitalists?

Assuming that you are a fundable business, I’d suggest asking the following three questions to determine how much money you should raise in your seed, angel or a series A round.

How much are you likely to spend over the next 18 months for your business plan?
Do you intend to raise another round and If so how many rounds do you anticipate?
How much of your business will you be diluting in both the first round and subsequent rounds?

Fred Wilson’s advice to US startupsis largely applicable in the Indian context too with a couple of caveats. He advises

raise enough for 12-18 months of business – in India I’d recommend at least 18 months
try not to dilute more than 10-20% – in India this might have to be as high as 25% percent

Can you raise too little money? Absolutely. Two things to keep in mind are

Things take much longer than you anticipate – the product ship, the first customer, incoming payments In India a rule of thumb would be
It easily could take six months from the time you start your fundraising to when the money hits your bank

Good hunting!

What is the right amount of money to raise at a startup – Mark Suster
How much money to raise? – Fred Wilson
How much money should you raise from an early stage investor? – Seedcamp
How much should we raise? – Venturehacks

Valuation 101 – for startups looking to raise their first round

December 12, 2013 / Sri Srikrishna / 8 Comments

A recurring topic in conversations with young entrepreneurs and journalists across India has been that of startup valuations. Despite all the writing that’s out there, innumerable forums and meet ups, some questions – often very basic ones – persist. The questions themselves vary in actual phrasing from

How do VCs or angels value startups?
How much should I raise?
How much should I dilute?

And each time as I’ve attempted to answer the questions raised, I’ve found us going back to the basics of What does valuation entail – what are its components and the math behind it.

Note: In India, when people talk of valuation, they are usually talking of post-money valuation and the dilution refers to the percentage the investor owns, after their money is invested.

At the risk of oversimplification, all fund raising and valuation – regardless of fundraising round (angel, seed, Series A) – breaks down to three variables, which from the entrepreneurs’ perspective looks like:

I believe my company is worth so much today (pre-money) pV
I intend to raise so much money- A
You sir investor will now own D% of my company

The reality though is more like this

Amount (how much money you absolutely need to raise?) A
Dilution (% you’re prepared to give & investor’s ready to accept for A) D%
Valuation (what the company’s worth post the investment (post-money)) V

Math dictates that the post-money valuation is

(for the curious, pre-money valuation is obviously pV = V-A)

In this scenario, the valuation (V) is an artifact of how much money you absolutely need to raise (A) and how much ownership (D) you are prepared to give up (or how little the investor is prepared to accept). Once you fix any of these two variables the third is automatically fixed. So it’s important to understand which of the variables are really in your control and what degree of flexibility you have in them.

Amount So how much should you raise? Any kind of serious fund raising can easily take you six months between first discussion and the money hitting your bank. So it’s a good rule of thumb to raise money for 18 months of operation, so that you can focus on running your business for at least a year without having to worry about raising money. You’d need this money to cover the operational expense of running your business over the 18 months and any capital expense or investment that you’d make in the business. For a startup that’s not raised any outside (of friends & family) money, based on your business plan this amount may vary from as little as Rs. 45-50 lakhs ($65K) to say 1.5-2 Crores ($250K). So this fixes one variable (A) in the valuation triangle. Of course if you plan to start an airline (Indigo) or overnight delivery (FedEx) or semiconductor firm, you’ll need a lot more money to start with, but most of us can start with $60-100K.

Dilution Particularly for any first round (seed or angels) the investor likely would expect to get 20-25% of the equity. Depending on where your business is at – concept, prototype, early customer traction, they may go as low as 15% or want as high as 30%. This is largely a matter of the maturity or stage of your business, the perceived de-risking done and the line of business you are in.

Comparables (what other companies in your line of business, in your geography got valued at) are relevant as is your revenue, margins, free cash flow but treat them as rough guidelines rather than definitive stakes in the ground. Sure, your market size and share, your business plan, your product or service state all matters – but usually, in the Indian context valuation is not absolute but a direct output of answering the two questions.

How much money do I need to raise in this round?
How much ownership am I prepared to dilute

So for instance, if you seek to raise Rs. 60 Lakhs (Rs 6 million) and desire to dilute no more than 25%, then your post-money valuation is

Just as easily for the same money, if you have dilute more – your valuation could change without any real material change in your business. Depends how desperate you are and how greedy or generous the investor is. The table below shows the effect of A and D on valuations.

Reality rarely is this clean. Happy hunting.

Why I Tell Indian Entrepreneurs “Stop reading TechCrunch!”

December 9, 2013 / Sri Srikrishna / 12 Comments

Every time I hear an entrepreneur in India tell me “It’s Angel List meets GitHub” I try not to grimace. Given the ardor of youth and the desire to get their elevator pitches easily understood, I can certainly understand young entrepreneurs pitching in such a manner.

TechCrunch (Alexa score 369) is more popular than livemint.com, India’s #2 biz paper (837) or nextbigwhat.com (640) and yourstory.in (802) – two popular Indian startup destinations. At one level just as the BBC (112), Huffington Post (264) and New York Times (305) are popular in India, it’s not a big surprise that TechCrunch given its brand and Silicon Valley pedigree is followed closely and devoured by the tech startup community in India. However the fact that something is understandable doesn’t make it healthy (as with my Doritos-eating habit).

Silicon Valley, even within the context of the United State is in many ways unique – and unlike anything in India. From the time Fredrick Terman first began molding young minds at Stanford, more than three-quarters of a century has passed before Instagram, Twitter and Facebook appeared on the scene. And before them came the first generation Internet folks – the networking and computing folks before them and the granddaddy semiconductor firms before them, who were themselves preceded by the likes of Hewlett-Packard and Litton. So nearly five distinct generations of companies and innovation preceded this current crop.

Alas, young Indian founders approach TechCrunch without any of this context. For most of them, 2005 when I sold my first tech startup, is practically the dark ages and 1999 another geological era altogether.

As an angel and mentor when I encounter entrepreneurs, I find that TechCrunch plays an inordinate role today in their thought process. This is true particularly with startups dealing with bits rather than atoms.

Many of their assumptions are not grounded in the reality of today’s India – may not even in today’s America.

All they see is that a startup to sell tampons online raised $250K with just an idea on a napkin. Or Pinterest raised whatever astronomical amount of money without any real monetization strategy and Fred Wilson invested in Zemanta (who’d by then acquired a million downloads) even whilst acknowledging that none of them were clear how they’d make money.

The reality of the Indian entrepreneurial ecosystem is that we are yet to see more than one turn or “generation” of tech entrepreneurs. A large amount of money is following very few quality deals. The VCs are acting as PE players would elsewhere. Angel groups are acting like VCs would. Everyone’s looking for revenue, customers, and traction (all of which are good), but not quite the high risk/high reward perspective of early stage funders. To be fair to the funding community in India, the supply side problem of deal quality is compounded by the fact that there have been very few exits, and their LPs may be looking for medium risk/medium returns.

The needs of the Indian market and Indian consumers are quite distinct. Enterprises in India do have needs similar to those of companies elsewhere – databases, analytical tools, HR software, CRM systems – but their behavior and culture often are different. Consumers, on the other hand, can and do have very different needs. So when we talk about “building the Amazon or Zappos of India,” and unimaginatively try reproducing something done elsewhere, it serves no one well.

The good news is that oodles of young entrepreneurs are starting companies each day in India. Now if only they paid a whole lot more attention to what their customers are saying and what problems those customers face than what TechCrunch is reporting from the Valley, I’d like to think, we’d see a whole lot more innovation and business building amongst Indian entrepreneurs.

notebook — Photo by Suzy Hazelwood on Pexels.com

“This week” – the secret to managing your time well

November 3, 2013 / Sri Srikrishna / 3 Comments

“Honey, can you make the insurance payment? ” my wife would ask me.

“Sure dear, I’ll take care of it,” I’d respond.

Early in our marriage there were often fireworks due to such seemingly innocuous conversations between my wife and I. It took me a while to figure that my wife meant, “Can you get the insurance paid NOW!” And it galled her no end, that my response meant, that I’d get it done one of these days.

Fortunately for us, we arrived at a compromise that all such conversations, especially ones where I needed to get something done, meant I’ll get it done that WEEK! Twenty years on, we are still on talking terms largely due to this one agreement.

Each year, as I work on new projects and often with new team members, I learn a thing or two about managing my time better – even if it’s only what not to do. From my early Franklin planning days of the early ‘80s through the 7 Habits of Highly Successful People all the way through Getting Things Done and Wunderlist, I’ve tried my share of tools and methods to be more productive and get more of the right stuff done in less time. Truth is that it’s still a work in progress and I continue to struggle with procrastination.

As the parent of two teen girls, child of an aging, recently widowed parent, as a slightly overweight middle-aged man trying to get in shape, the operational head of a non-profit and spouse of a professional musician, my to-do list is overflowing. Even when it’s incomplete.

If you are like me, your to-do lists are ambitious – maybe more hopeful than practical. The very act of opening them is daunting. But we still put too much for a day on ‘em. It finally dawned on me to apply the lesson I’ve learned in making commitments to my wife. Seek balance over a week – and not try the impossible of trying to achieve it each day.

Plan your to-do list for a week. Yep – not just for the day. The reality is some days you’re going to get only one thing done, if that. On other days you’re going to be on fire. By keeping your to-do horizon to be a week, rather than the day—things will be a whole lot less stressful. Sure the first week you’ll over commit, but very soon you’ll get the knack of it.

Now say after me, “I’ll get it done sometime this week!”

3 Things That Great Speeches Can Teach You

July 21, 2013 / Sri Srikrishna / 0 Comments

“Bear with me;
My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,
And I must pause till it come back to me.”

As I read Julius Caesar with my fifteen-year-old, I wonder what it is about Mark Anthony’s speech that’s made it a keeper. Sure the Bard had a way of words and it is him speaking rather than Mark Anthony. Yet the words alone, however powerful, fail to explain their hold over us.

Each of us across nations and times, have our own favorite speeches — often cutting across generations — Winston Churchill’s “We Shall Fight on the Beaches” June 1940 speech, Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” August 1963 speech, Steve Jobs commencement speech in May 2005 at Stanford, Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture in September 2008 and Barack Obama’s “Tuscon Memorial” speech in 2011.

Oratory seems to be a skill that politicians and lawyers (many of whom end up as politicians) have cornered the market on. Starting from Cicero, a lawyer turned politician from Julius Caesar’s time to Barack Obama, yet another lawyer-politician in our own, the power of a well-rendered speech have moved nations. Actors and clergymen, who’ve relied on the gift of their gabs to succeed have just as assiduously cultivated their oratory. In trying to understand what it is that makes their speeches memorable, worth transcribing, passing on through word of mouth from the dawn of time through the age of YouTube, three things stand out.

Content, Context, and Cadence.

Content What is said in a speech is clearly the biggest contributor to its success. No amount of skill or theatrics can salvage an empty speech. The content needs to be clear, concise and compelling. Like poetry it needs to be able to stand alone — complete in itself. Try reading the transcript of any speech you feel is well done and you’ll see why it works. Mark Antony’s speech is an excellent example as is any good tale, be it To Kill a Mockingbird or Cannery Row, content still trumps all. But you knew this.

Context When your spouse (or in my case my teen) wakes you up and say’s “I had a dream,” or when an interview candidate tells you “I have a dream” it doesn’t evoke the same sense of Dr. King’s words at the Lincoln Memorial. Context is important. When four men carrying a funeral bier in India, utter “Ram, Ram” or as Gandhi calls out “Hey Ram” when he was shot or in the epic Ramayana, when Rama’s father calls out after his exiled son “Rama, Rama, Rama” — the same words mean very different things. So context is what makes what’s ordinary and makes it extraordinary. The words “a more perfect union” when used by Barack Obama yesterday in the context of the Trayvon Martin case takes on a whole new level of poignancy than in his original speech titled “A More Perfect Union” in 2008.

For Brutus is an honorable man;
So are they all, all honorable men

Mark Antony’s words taken out of context lose their power.

Cadence makes the difference between a good speech and a great speech. The pauses and silences of a speech often can and do say more than the words themselves.

When English teacher Taylor Mali narrates his poem, “What teachers make?”

“I decide to bite my tongue……..instead of his” his pause adds emphasis.

When Jesse Jackson in his speech at the Democratic convention in Atlanta in 1988, says “With so many guided missiles ……… and so much misguided leadership, the stakes are exceedingly high” his pause serves to highlight the irony not unlike Mark Antony’s literal “And I must pause till it come back to me.”

Repetition is the other not-so-secret weapon of powerful orators.

Here’s Dr. Martin Luther King speaking at the Lincoln Memorial:

But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land.

Later in the same speech, the phrase I have a dream is used ten, yep ten times in consecutive sentences as is Let freedom ring nine times in his closing words. Cadence.

Content, Context, and Cadence.

Make sure your next speech covers the 3 Cs.

Occam’s Razor – Keeping it handy

June 18, 2013 / Sri Srikrishna / 0 Comments

“The VCR is not turning on!” says my wife over the phone. We often have short phone calls along these lines. At other times it’s the laser printer or the washing machine not working or turning on. My first question usually is “Honey, is it plugged in the wall?” followed by “Is the switch on the wall socket turned on?” Sometimes we find that the kids have used the electrical socket for something else and just unplugged our device. At other times they left the outlet turned off or forgotten to turn the UPS back on, after switching it off when it last squealed.

While I’m sure your spouse (or room mate or sibling) and you never have such conversations, we certainly have to thank William of Occam (also Ockham) who lived eight hundred years ago. His eponymous maxim (aka Occam’s razor) states “in explaining a thing no more assumptions should be made than are necessary.”

In other words the simplest explanation for any observed phenomenon is likely the right one. This is the reason when we show up with chest pains, they check for heartburn or gas first rather than rush you into surgery. As entrepreneurs, managers and leaders, we are often faced with issues that seem to baffle us.

Why can’t I seem to hire anyone?
Why didn’t that VC call us back – the meeting went so well, we thought?
Why is the customer not prepared to commit?
Why is the network slow?
Why does our product crash often?

For most of theses instances, Occam’s razor is worth keeping in mind. Before you explore more complex reasons, look for the simplest ones first and those are the most likely ones.

Of course it’s worth keeping Einstein’s caveat in mind

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”

If you’ve come this far, you might as well read what physicists have to say about Occam’s razor here.