A Pensieve… digitally saved, digitally shared
April 17, 2010
Akhirnya pertanyaan ku kejawab. Apakah kucing bisa melihat display LCD dengan benar?
Jawabnya “YA.” Tadinya sy ragu, karena visible spectrum yang bisa dilihat mata kucing tentunya berbeda dengan mata manusia. Lucunya, kucing ini bermain2 dengan touch screen iPad.
March 19, 2010
An insightful article for those who want to become an enterpreneur. I copied the article from Washington Post to secure it, just in case it’s removed someday.
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Vivek Wadhwa
TechCrunch.com
Saturday, February 27, 2010; 5:00 AM
Silicon Valley investors often have a picture in their heads of the type of person who is worthy of funding: young, brash, stubborn, and arrogant. They believe that successful entrepreneurs come from entrepreneurial families and that they start their entrepreneurial journey by selling lemonade while in grade school. Angel investor and entrepreneur, Jason Calacanis said as much in his recent talk to Penn State students. And after meeting Wharton students, VC Fred Wilson expressed shock when a professor told him that you could teach people to be entrepreneurs. Wilson wrote, “I’ve been working with entrepreneurs for almost 25 years now and it is ingrained in my mind that someone is either born an entrepreneur or is not.” Jason, Fred, and Silicon Valley VCs, I’ve got news for you: you’ve got it all wrong. Entrepreneurs aren’t born, they’re made. And they aren’t anything like you think they are.
My team surveyed 549 successful entrepreneurs. We found that the majority didn’t have entrepreneurial parents. They didn’t even have entrepreneurial aspirations while going to school. They simply got tired of working for others, had a great idea they wanted to commercialize, or woke up one day with an urgent desire to build wealth before they retired. So they took the big leap.We found that 52% of the successful entrepreneurs were the first in their immediate families to start a business, just like Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sergei Brin, and Russell Simmons ( Def Jam founder).
Their parents were academics, lawyers, factory workers, priests, bureaucrats, etc. About 39% had an entrepreneurial father, and 7% had an entrepreneurial mother. (Some had both.) Only a quarter caught the entrepreneurial bug when in college. Half didn’t even think about entrepreneurship, and they had little interest in it when in school. There was no significant difference between the success factors or hurdles faced by entrepreneurs who were extremely interested in entrepreneurship in school (and who likely set up the lemonade stands) and the ones who lacked interest. But entrepreneurs with extreme interest started more companies and did it sooner. Of the 24.5% who indicated that they were “extremely interested” in becoming entrepreneurs during college, 47.1% went on to start more than two companies (as compared with 32.9% of the overall sample). Sixty-nine percent started their companies within 10 years of working for someone else (as compared to 46.8% of the rest of the sample population).
What did affect their successes? Education–but not the college they graduate from. In a different study of the 652 CEOs and CTOs of 502 tech companies, we researched the correlation between education and the sales and headcount of companies founded. We learned that the there was a significant difference between companies started by founders with just high-school diplomas and the rest. Education provided a huge advantage. But there wasn’t a big difference between firms founded by Ivy-league graduates and the graduates of other universities.
The education and training of entrepreneurs is something that the Kauffman Foundation has been researching extensively. Over the last six years, it has invested around $50 million on academic research to understand what makes entrepreneurs tick and what policies are most conducive to entrepreneurship and to construct data bases to permit analyses of these subjects. (Kauffman has also funded some of my research at Duke, UC-Berkeley, and Harvard.) Its VP of Research, Bob Litan, says that Kauffman has learnt conclusively that entrepreneurship can be taught. The key is to provide education at “teachable moments” when the entrepreneur is thinking about starting a venture or ready to scale it. What entrepreneurs need isn’t the type of abstract course they teach in business schools, but practical, relevant knowledge. That’s why Kauffman created a program called Fast Trac, which has trained 300,000 entrepreneurs so far.One of the findings of Kauffman research is that of the appx. 600,000 businesses that are started every year, less than a fraction of 1% become high-growth “scale” businesses. These new firms, especially the “scale” firms, have added all of the net incremental jobs to U.S. economy since 1980 (about 40 million), and probably account for about 1/3 of GDP growth since then. So the key to boosting economic growth is to increase the number of successful high-growth startups. After all, the growth rate of our economy is nothing more than the aggregation of the growth of our firms.
That is why Kauffman (which has a $2 billion endowment) is investing heavily in an ambitious new program called Kauffman Labs. This aims to dramatically increase the ability of small businesses to become big businesses. The Labs program is built around a novel idea: that highly motivated individuals with “scalable ideas” can be recruited to be entrepreneurs and to be made successful, by surrounding them with a network of other experienced entrepreneurs; sources of money; and mentors. The goal is to educate entrepreneurs and surround them with a powerful network. This is like a Y Combinator on steroids.Anecdotal evidence also shows that there are many more factors at play than that of genes. Note this BusinessWeek article about waves of spinoffs from Google. I doubt that all of these Google employees who are starting successful businesses were born with entrepreneurial genes. VC and former entrepreneur Brad Feld also blogged about how many of his frat buddies at MIT had become successful entrepreneurs. Were all of these people born to be entrepreneurs as well? I don’t think so. It is probably education, exposure to entrepreneurship, and networks that led these people to pursue the entrepreneurial path–which means that Kauffman Foundation may have hit on the right idea with Kauffman Labs.
The reason this topic is really important is that, as Wilson writes, “Venture Capital is a lot about pattern recognition.” The reality is that VCs like him make quick judgments about people based on the stereotypes in their minds. So, like the women that I wrote about in my previous posts, we may be disadvantaging another important segment of our population–a segment that is older, more humble, more sensible, and more realistic than the population that is getting all the attention (and the money).
Editor’s note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa.
March 12, 2010
1. Sashimi ikan paus
Whale Sashimi
Patut di coba! Yg mengejutkan: harganya!!! Normal price…
Harganya tipikal sashimi biasa (sekitar 500 Yen – 8 slices), cuma sedikit lebih mahal dibanding salmon sashimi. Soal rasa, personally, lebih amis daripada ikan salmon.
~Jepang tempat yg cocok buat melahap makhluk gigantic macam paus atau gurita.
2. Sashimi kuda
Horse Sashimi
Harganya juga standard seperti sashimi biasa. Soal rasa, pengalaman sy sendiri sih… so-so.. Tp kalau penasaran mesti dicobain langsung.
p.s.: Tulisan ttg makanan ‘aneh’ akan diteruskan seiring dg pengalaman penulis
March 6, 2010
I got this “Fish Story” from Zen Presentation (written by Garr Reynolds), a book talking about presentation design & delivery. This story appears in a chapter about simplicity.
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When you talked about reducing the text on the slides, I was reminded of a story from my childhood in India.
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When Vijay opened his store he put up a sign that said “We Sell Fresh Fish Here.”
His father stopped by and said that the word “We” suggests an emphasis on the seller rather than the customer, and is really not needed. So the sign was changed to “Fresh Fish Sold Here.”
His brother came by and suggested that the word “here” could be done away with — it was superfluous. Vijay agreed and changed the sign to “Fresh Fish Sold.”
Next, his sister came along and said the sign should just say “Fresh Fish.” Clearly, it is being sold; what else could you be doing?
Later, his neighbor stopped by to congratulate him. Then he mentioned that all passers-by could easily tell that the fish was really fresh. Mentioning the word fresh actually made it sound defensive as though there was room for doubt about the freshness. Now the sign just read: “FISH.”
As Vijay was walking back to his shop after a break he noticed that one could identify the fish from its smell from very far, at a distance from which one could barely read the sign. He knew there was no need for the word “FISH.”
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February 26, 2010
Masih tentang Handphone… ups. Cell phone!!! (buat yg ga ngerti, lihat postingan sebelumnya 
)
Tadi siang (sekitar jam 1), banyak orang Jepang pada duduk di kursi-kursi nganggur. Mereka nonton acara televisi di HP masing2 (padahal siaran yg mereka tonton sama loh!!!).
Mereka nonton cabang olahraga Figure skating di Vancouver Olympic 2010. Rupanya jagoan figure skating dari Jepang berpeluang jadi juara pertama, makanya dibela2in nonton.
Ternyata akhirnya yg juara dari Korea. Jepang jadi runner up. Mereka pun bubar, membuat kursi2 itu kembali menganggur, dengan wajah yang jutek & kembali ke kesibukannya masing2…
February 26, 2010
Kemarin ga sengaja keceplosan ngucapin kata “handphone” pas lagi ngobrol-ngobrol dengan beberapa international students. Beberapa di antara mereka menunjukkan “blank face” tanda kurang mengerti.
Biasanya (dan mestinya) saya bilang “cell phone” atau “mobile phone”. Sebetulnya pengucapan kata “handphone” secara literal ga salah. Bahkan jelas2 di Wiki tertulis mobile phone (also called cellphone and handphone). Tapi ternyata pemakaian kata handphone pada akhirnya kurang populer tampaknya.
Sewaktu di googling (pakai google.co.jp) keyword “handphone”, mayoritas hasil pencarian om Google adalah situs berbahasa Indonesia. Ternyata handphone lebih populer daripada cellphone di Indonesia
Ini ada diskusi konyol tentang ini.
February 24, 2010
“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few” -Shunryu Suzuki
As I read a book entitled “Presentation Zen” (this book talks a lot about delivering & designing presentation), I found an interesting thought in a subsection of the book.
It said “Start with the beginner’s mind.”
The presentation Zen approach encourages us to think differently and leave conventional way of making PowerPoint presentation behind. Just remember three keywords in mind: (1) simplicity, (2) clarity, and (3) brevity.
With the beginner’s mind, we are more likely to say “Let’s try it” or “why not.” Such kind of nothing-to-lose mentality is necessary to start something.
Avoid thinking “hey!! it is never been done, forget it!” or “oh, but that is not common.”
I recommend student or anyone else to read this book, especially for those who give presentation frequently. I borrowed this book from Tokyo Tech’s library.
This quote below from Curious Case of Benjamin Button will energize one who is seeking a way to start something…
“For what it’s worth: it’s never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be. There’s no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of. If you find that you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again. “
February 14, 2010
bikin rugi restoran tabehodai Dim Sum (pesan >30 menu), mengalahkan semua orang di sekeliling. Menurut perhitungan salah seorang, biaya makannya sudah melebihi 15.000 Yen… Padahal kita bayarnya ga segitu…. Jauh lah..Ada 3 cara:
a. Copy paste simbol di atas
b. Tahan Alt, tekan 3. Terus lepas. Buat laptop, pastikan NumLock nya aktif
c. <3
February 13, 2010
14 Februari besok, Imlek & Valentine’s day jatuh pada hari yang sama. Buat cowok yg belum nikah & merayakan Imlek, harusnya ada multiple income (terjemahan: angpao) & coklat dari si ‘dia’ atau teman pada hari yang sama.
Tentunya si cowok bakalan sibuk dg manajemen waktunya. Ngejadwal kegiatannya disana-sini. Dari pagi dia entah akan didatangi atau mendatangi keluarga dan saudara-saudaranya untuk menjalin hubungan kembali & menerima angpao. Biasanya bisa memakan waktu cukup lama, pindah2 dari rumah saudara A ke rumah saudara B + ngobrol2, bisa sampai sore menjelang malam baru selesai.
Kapan Imlek & Valentine bisa jatuh pada hari yg sama lagi? Kapan momen ini bisa terulang lagi?
Saya iseng2 googling, akhirnya nemu referensi di wiki. Ternyata tanggal 14 February sbg Imlek cuma terjadi di tahun:
February 13, 2010
Seminggu menjelang Valentine ada 2 tanda hati bertebaran di sekitar saya. Karena sifatnya personal & agak2 kebetulan, jadi lucu ngelihatnya, makanya saya potret buat kenang-kenangan.
Tanda hati ke-1: karet gelang berbentuk hati (paling ga penting!!!!)
Waktu balik ke dorm tanggal 8 Feb, tiba2 ada karet gelang berbentuk hati di meja makan,
Oke lah, karena ini karet gelang, mungkin aja teman asrama saya yg main2 & ngebentuk simbol hati. Jadi kita abaikan…
Tanda hati ke-2: 3 hari menjelang Valentine, pas lagi potong bawang bombay… What???
Ternyata tengahnya berbentuk hati. Karena unik (Saya sendiri sebetulnya jarang potong bawang, apa tanda hati ini emang sering ada di tengahnya bawang?? Soalnya dr pengalaman2 sebelumnya, saya belum pernah nemu bentuk hati)
Karena pengalaman pertama & menjelang valentine, tengahnya saya keluarin lalu saya foto lagi. Ini dia fotonya
Fiuhhh… Ga terasa, besok ud Valentine… udah 5 bulan di negeri orang.
