Inverted Passion

Be passionate about the territory, not the map

All posts in Personal

Startup Lunch Delhi 2: How was the experience?

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Entrepreneurship, Personal3 Replies

I attended Startup Lunch Delhi 2 today as a candidate, not as a startup. The event is mainly about connecting startups and people who want to work for startups.

In a word, the experience there was simply wow. I met numerous startups and their founders who shared information about what their company is really about and what kind of candidates they were looking for. Following are some of the points I noted:

  • 95% if the startups were technology startups, with exceptions being Zice and iDiscovery. Is it because of a bias that only technology companies are aware of this event or is it because there aren’t really many non-tech startups in the first place?
  • More than 5 startups talked about changing the world, which of course is good.
  • Interacting with so many startups, a candidate can really get spoilt for choice. Any thumb rule on what to do when one gets so many options to choose from?
  • One more thing I noticed is that interacting with startups increases the fire in your belly. I really began to think: if they can, why can’t I. Next time, I promise that I will be there as a startup, not as a candidate.
  • There is such a thing as free lunch after all!

An idea of an event struck me there. If startups can meet potential candidates in an event, why can’t people find co-founders for their startups in a similar event. In this event, people would exhibit their ideas and find the right people and mentors to kick-start their startup. Avinash expressed his concern that people might not be willing to reveal their ideas at the concept stage. But I think such an event would be a tremendous opportunity to get feedback, find co-founders, mentors and heck (who knows) even customers. How do you find the idea of this event? Any takers? ...  Read the entire post →

30 by 30

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Personal8 Replies

Update: 5th September 2025. Striking off a few more items (only 8 years beyond 30!)

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) (2012; Wrote a 100+ page unpublished book that successfully wooed by wife into marrying me)
  • Start a startup incubator (Ycombinator style) (2024; started Lossfunk, flirted with the idea of incubating companies)
  • 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!) – (2025;  went waaay past it! Sold Wingify to private equity firm)
  • 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 (2025; passing the Turing test is trivial now, can train an LLM trivially)
  • 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 (2025; did both by now!)
  • 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 (2025; stopped tracking)
  • Being featured in a good business magazine (Featured in a few already)
  • Being admired by businessmen, scientists and students (cough cough)
  • Learn to draw better cartoons
  • Read and understand the history of philosophy (Read Sophie’s world. History of Philosophy is next)
  • Read and learn about world’s religions and mythology (not interested anymore. Cosmology and mysteries of universe is way more interesting)
  • Make a 40 by 40 list

Hopefully, some of the things will come alive for me. So, life, here I come! ...  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 →