Inverted Passion

Be passionate about the territory, not the map

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30 by 30

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Personal8 Replies

Update: 23rd November 2014. Struck a few more items (Only 2.5 years remaining to complete the rest. So. much. pressure.)

Update: 6th November 2011. Yay, striking off a few items of the list

The aim of this post is to list 30 things which I would want to do before I turn 30 (I turned 21 yesterday). Got inspired by this and this. So, here goes my list (in no particular order):

Learn to play Electric Guitar and start my own Rock band Write a novel on my philosophy of life (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance style) (Wrote a 100+ page book on ramblings on Philosophy, titled ‘Mind, will you shut the fuck up?’) Start a startup incubator (Ycombinator style) Start my own (successful) startup (see Wingify) Go to the moon (I know it sounds crazy!) Earn Rs 100 crore (I know this sounds naive!) Read thoroughly The Road to Reality Publish a paper in Science or Nature Reduce India’s poverty by at least 10% Produce something creatively viral (I guess some posts that I wrote will qualify for that?) Travel backpacking across Western Europe (Partially done. Did a road trip in Montenegro in Oct 2011; Netherlands, France, Switzerland, Italy in 2012) Make a truly creative Artificial Intelligence program that can learn and perhaps pass the Turing Test Make a short-and-slick movie that earns more than what it takes to produce it Sponsor my parents’ world trip (I really really would want to do this) (yay! they’ve been to many, many places now) Learn a foreign language (preferably Spanish) Live for a year or so in Silicon Valley (doing an MBA/MS at Stanford perhaps?) (was there for a couple of months; realized the oppurtunity is here back in India) Read entire Calvin and Hobbess collection (Bought the collection and started reading it) Do Skydiving and Bungee Jumping Spend a year or so at MIT AI Lab Buy a (small) country (it is not impossible) Read all the popular books on Philosophy, Psychology, AI, Sociology, and Cosmology (Ongoing effort…) (My secret wish) Spend sometime somewhere without spending a penny from my own pocket Produce a truly breath taking theory (in the leagues of Theory of Evolution, Relativity and Gravity Travel to at least 30 different countries Being featured in a good business magazine (Featured in a few already) Being admired by businessmen, scientists and students (

cough ...  Read the entire post →

Why (Most) Internet Startups Suck?

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Entrepreneurship, Personal9 Replies

Inspired by WhyDoesEverythingSuck.com and learning from Kroomsa.com, following is why I think most internet startups suck:

  • They Give Away Things for Free
    When the business model depends on free, only a very few lucky companies can survive. Advertising, at best, should be a secondary source of income for a startup. How would startups keep on innovating their services when they are giving away stuff for free. Where is the motivation, dude? On the other hand, when you charge for what you are offering, there is a direct incentive to improve your services in order to attract higher prices or more customers, which directly translates into better earnings. Thus, charging for something you offer kick-starts a positive feedback loop which reinforces itself. And, that is good for a startup.
  • They are VERY easy to start
    This directly translates into absence of vision and low barriers to entry. When you don’t have to invest time thinking about why you are doing something, you end up doing a quick but messy thing. This is especially true for startups. Today, starting an internet startup is so easy that anybody, really anybody, with a basic knowledge of web can start a so-called internet company. People find it cool to have a company these days. And, successful startups are seldom cool. So, in a nutshell, either try to do something not-so-cool and/or try to do something hard, which will force you to think about the reasons for your motivation.
  • There are Gazzilions of Internet Startups
    While for the industry and consumers, it is good to have so much of choice, for entrepreneurs it not so good to have an idea and then discover that there are already tens of internet startups offering *exactly* the same service or product (and, chances are, for free). How is your new internet startup going to make money when some freaks are offering the same thing in a better package, at a better price and with a better marketing budget. So, get a little away from Internet and think if you can do something useful in traditional fields where there is a moderate amount of competition and where barriers to entry are higher.
    •  ...  Read the entire post →

    Beautiful Design by Jay

    Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Entrepreneurship, Personal

    If you notice, I have recently (yesterday, to be precise) released my first ebook: How to Start an Online Business: 11,520 Free Resources for the Internet Entrepreneur.

    Now, as I have finished writing and publishing the ebook, it is time to promote it. I am looking at ways to advertise it on various blogs relating to this subject. However, with so many ebooks on the same subject (of making money online), how do I make sure that my ebook stands out from the crowd?

    The answer is design. I want the advertisement banner for the ebook to look killer, professional and cool. While researching on the internet about how to create such an advertisement banner, I stumbled across ScribblesAndWords.com, a design firm by Jay. In an instant, I was mesmerized by the banners he has created. They look so beautiful. In addition to banners, he also does Copywriting, Blog Header Design and Blog Consultation for a very reasonable fee. ...  Read the entire post →

    Finding My Passion

    Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Entrepreneurship, Personal, Philosophy2 Replies

    Here I found an excellent post on how to find your passion. The article presents you a list of questions which you must answer. Let’s see what is my passion:

    1) If money was not a worry, what could you see yourself doing? What would you do for free?

    Well, I guess, I would work on interesting ideas for free. I wish I could generate ideas day in and day out and make a quick prototype of those ideas. That would be awesome.