Inverted Passion

Be passionate about the territory, not the map

All posts by Paras Chopra

Single biggest problem with entrepreneurs

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Entrepreneurship3 Replies

The single biggest problem with entrepreneurs is that they have a very tightly knitted community. Yes, you read that right: being part of a tight community around entrepreneurship (especially Internet and technology startups) could be a barrier to moving ahead towards success. This might sound bit controversial but allow me to explain.

Most likely, entrepreneurs visit discussion forums dedicated to entrepreneurship. They have entrepreneurial friends. They consume entrepreneurship gyan day and night on how to succeed, what to do and what not to do. When they have difficulty, they take advice from like minded entrepreneurs who understand them. In short, lives of entrepreneurs revolve around experiences of other entrepreneurs only. ...  Read the entire post →

The only alternative is to work harder

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Entrepreneurship, Personal, Philosophy18 Replies

What do you do if you feel you are born unlucky? What do you do if you feel that the whole world is conspiring against you to make you not succeed? And, what do you do if you feel you have less intellect, less resources and less everything to succeed?

The short and sweet answer is to work harder. You cannot control luck. You cannot control amount of financial resources you have. But what you can definitely control is the amount of effort. Your competitior or neighbour might be advantaged in all respects but you can compensate all that just by working harder. ...  Read the entire post →

ContextSense on ReadWriteWeb

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Entrepreneurship, Personal, Technology2 Replies

ReadWriteWeb had a nice, long article written on Wingify’s ContextSense. Read the article titled Identify Any Website’s Sentiment with ContextSense.

To quote:

To test out ContextSense’s accuracy, we put in the URL for ReadWriteWeb.com (but of course). The end result was mostly on target, identifying our main concepts as a top ten list including things like software, Google, iPhone, news and media, commenting, semantic web, and more. The last three items in the list – AJAX, class libraries, and JavaScript – were off base. Perhaps that’s why they were greyed out while the rest of the list was in black, though. There isn’t any explanation as to what the shading means, but that’s a logical leap. ...  Read the entire post →

Wingify in HT Mint

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Entrepreneurship, Technology3 Replies

HT Mint ran an article on Pluggd.in and Wingify was featured as one of the few startups that the blog helped (which was very true). To quote:

Meanwhile, some very young firms have gained from Pluggd.In’s coverage. For six-month-old Wingify, a New Delhi-based firm that offers website optimization software, the biggest challenge was in getting early adopters. The firm is yet to launch its product, but was pleasantly surprised when, within three weeks of being featured on Pluggd.In, it got 10 early users and possibly its first customer. Pluggd.In had profiled the firm in July, says Paras Chopra, chief executive, Wingify. The start-up had approached Sinha for using its optimization software on his website. ...  Read the entire post →

Digital Evolution Basics

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Biology, Personal, Technology

For those who are not aware of digital evolution, I am writing a quick short summary. Digital evolution means evolution of computer programs who compete for limited resources such as CPU and memory. In short, it goes something like this:

– You define a universe, which is virtual memory (space) and CPU (time)
– You create energy (CPU cycles)
– You define an extremely limited instruction set for Virtual Machine (Physics). Instruction set being limited is important because you want to mimic physics, not chemistry or biology
– You seed randomly generated programs of varying length
– You start parallel execution the random programs
– Each instruction eats up energy and at random times you feed energy into universe
– At random times mis-execute program instructions
– Run it for a long time and Voila! finally self replication gets evolved from very simple instructions
– Then arms race gets started between programs and things get interesting ...  Read the entire post →

Are soft lies in sales okay?

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Entrepreneurship, Personal10 Replies

Really, does it matter at all if you make up small lies while doing sales? If you convince yourself that it is sort of true but deep inside you know it is fundamentally a lie, are you okay with that?

I’ve known sales people going to extremes: promising benefits which never were, projecting products with made up facts and use other tricks of the trade just to get that sale. They are desperate to make a sale. This is quite common in finance industry. But, in this post, I am not concerned about blatant lies made up to trick innocent people. ...  Read the entire post →

The mystery of number 23

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Personal, Philosophy14 Replies

I’ve been literally forced to write this post. My hands have been dragged to the keyboard and my mind has been controlled. Never would a person who claims to be rational, scientific and no-nonsense would write on something as unscientific as why number 23 is special. For the uninformed, there is something deeply mysterious, extremely special and wonderfully interesting about 23. The phenomenon is called as 23 Enigma.

When I first heard about it, it was yet another overhyped meme for me. But slowly, and definitely steadily, I started identifying 23 in everyday phenomenon around me. Now, not a day passes without me seeing 23 somewhere around me. And it is not just me, by showing examples, I have convinced several of my friends about this odd belief of mine.  ...  Read the entire post →

April Fools Pranks on the Internet

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Personal, Technology2 Replies

I randomly stumbled across many interesting April Fools pranks on the Internet today. So, I thought of sharing them here:

Enjoy! I will try to add more as I come across them. Do let me know if you any interesting pranks.

So, you have a million dollars. Now what?

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Entrepreneurship, Personal, Philosophy13 Replies

Suppose you win a lottery or get a successful exit for your startup. You suddenly find yourself with a million dollars to play with. It is like what you always dreamt for has become a reality. At this point, what would you do? What would your future look like?

It is hard to imagine not having fun with a million dollars in bank. But that is precisely what I (sadly) concluded after thinking deeply over this issue. There are multiple reasons why I think a million dollars won’t bring me the freedom, happiness and euphoria that I had thought were main motivators for me.  ...  Read the entire post →