Inverted Passion

Be passionate about the territory, not the map

All posts in Personal

Startups and Nihilism don’t go together

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Entrepreneurship, Personal, Philosophy10 Replies

Note: if meaning of life and startups don’t excite you, it is recommended that you skip this post. You will find it boring.

I know this is a weird title. But I have finally convinced myself that you cannot afford to be too philosophical if you are doing a startup. Doing a startup could turn out to be a terrible experience for those who especially adhere to philosophy of Nihilism. For those who aren’t aware of Nihilism, it says that life has no meaning or purpose and is in fact pointless. This philosophy was popularized by the German philosopher Nietzsche and became popular with atheists. After all, if there is no God, what’s the point of life? ...  Read the entire post →

How making money changed my perspective on startup ideas

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Entrepreneurship, Personal20 Replies

I admit it: my previous (so called) “startup” Kroomsa was a failure. Back when I was starting up, I remember how game changing I thought it was. We wanted to revolutionize Indian music scene by inserting audio advertisements into music. We also vowed to donate 20% of proceeds from advertisements to a charity organization. Do you see how cool the idea was? Though this business, we combated piracy of music, made money for independent bands and helped society by supporting charities. All at once! ...  Read the entire post →

Compilation of revenue figures for different kinds of startups

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Entrepreneurship, Personal10 Replies

Imagine for a moment that you have created a new web app and after about 3 months of launching you are doing $2000 per month of sales. Would you consider yourself as a successful startup?

Well, you are already ahead of majority of startups which never get to see any revenue. So, in that way you are doing good. Plus if $2000 covers all your human and infrastructure cost, that means you have broken even and are doing really well. Is breaking-even the measure of success for a startup?

You certainly didn’t take the risk to earn just-enough money. Why would you leave your day job if your goal was to just break-even? So, this directly takes us back to our original question – when do you say that your startup is a success? ...  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 →

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.