Aditya Kothadiya’s Blog

Their ability to listen feedback from Loving Critics

[This post is inspired by A Leader's Legacy book by Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner.]

“Pity the leader caught between unloving critics and uncritical lovers.” — John Gardner

Entrepreneurs know this quote very well. And they also know what action they should be taking when they land up in such situations. 

The other day I was discussing with few VCs and entrepreneurs in a mentoring session organized by TiE. One of the common concerns raised by two early stage entrepreneurs was getting negative feedbacks for their idea from external members like potential partners, potential investors, potential employees, etc. And they were worried about how to handle these negative feedbacks. They started questioning the promise of their idea. They were unsure if they should continue pursuing the idea or move on for the next idea.

The first thing one of the VCs said to them was,

“You guys are lucky that you are getting negative feedbacks!”

It’s very usual that we don’t like getting negative feedbacks. Instead, we like those flattery comments from our friends and family. Our problem is, we don’t believe in critics and at the same time, we don’t benefit from loving friends and family. What we really need is “loving critic” – someone who care deeply enough about us to give us honest feedback about how we’re doing. I am lucky to have such loving critics who care enough about me doing the right things. 

Successful entrepreneurs embrace this philosophy and seek for critical feedbacks from the community, from the team, from the customers, and more. They do ask feedbacks about their performance to their teammates. I still remember, my friend Vinay, President of COEP Foundation’s SV Chapter (It’s a Non-Profit Organization, not a Entrepreneurial Venture, but I believe that philosophy remains the same.) called me once and asked me if we can meet for lunch. I asked the reason for meeting, and he replied that he wants take feedback for his performance in last six months.

This is how you build the credibility. It is the foundation of any early stage venture. It is about doing things that you said you’ll be doing. Asking for feedback is the only way through which you will learn to align your words and actions over the long term. 

That is where successful entrepreneurs differentiate themselves. They listen to loving critics, and get regular feedbacks on how they’re doing. Based on received feedbacks, they align their actions. And that’s how we see successful companies doing exceptionally good.

To read more articles from this series, please visit: What Makes Them Entrepreneurial?

#1. Because they pretend to pay, I pretend to work. — Milan Bobde

#2. People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading. — Logan Pearsall Smith

#3. When I die, I want to go peacefully like my Grandfather did, in his sleep — not screaming, like the passengers in his car.

#4. When there’s a will, I want to be in it.

#5. The only reason I get lost in thought is because it’s unfamiliar territory.

Note: To read more Funny Quotes from this series, please visit: Funny Quotes

I recently wrote a post on the latest processor architecture innovation – The 64-Core Processor under Innovations category of my blog. When I wrote that post, it made enough sense to me because I am a VLSI Design Engineer and I could relate most of the concepts very easily. But for a lay man reader, it would have been a non relevant post. 

My mentor, Rajesh Setty observed this fact immediately. He suggested me that it was an article that many of my readers can’t identify with -
unless I clearly lead them to see an underlying concept (innovation)
in a lay man’s terms.  I updated that post again to explain the technical background and explain the innovative aspect. I hope that post makes sense to you guys.

What is the lesson learned?
The main focus of this blog is to share my experiences and knowledge with would be entrepreneurs,  recent graduates, students and all others who are interested in understanding day-to-day philosophies. And most of the readers of this blog are from these communities only. Few of them are from engineering background, but many are from non-engineering background as well. Even in engineering community, very few are from VLSI background.

So either I shouldn’t have written much about VLSI Innovations or should have explained it in lay man’s terms. I shouldn’t write something, which my readers aren’t interested in reading, and which they aren’t grasping very clearly if they are interested in reading.

In short, the lesson learned from my mentor is – NEVER lose focus on the blog unless you want to lose your readers.

To read more lessons from my mentors, please visit Lessons from Mentor.

The demand for more computing performance causes CPU designers to come up with innovative architectures of microprocessors. The performance of an application can be increased if we run those applications in parallel. Using multiple independent CPUs is one common method used to increase a system’s overall parallelism. But instead of using mulitple CPUs on different chips, CPU designers came up with a technology where two or more independent cores are manufactured into a single piece of silicon integrated circuit.

A dual-core device contains two independent microprocessors and a quad-core device contains four microprocessors on a single chip. Cores in a multi-core device may share a single coherent cache (temporary storage area) at the highest on-device  level or may have separate caches. The processors also share the same interconnect to the rest of the system. In order to deliver high computing general-purpose processors, manufacturers such as Intel and AMD have turned to multi-core designs.

The general trend in processor development has been from multi-core to many-core: from dual, quad, eight-core chips to ones with tens or even hundreds of cores. AMD released its dual-core server/workstation processors, the Opteron, and its dual-core desktop processors, the Athlon. Intel launched its quad core processor, and Core Duo microprocessors with dual-core technology.

Tilera Corp. has begun shipping a 64-core processor – TILE64 to customers.
It is targeting embedded applications like networking and
digital video, and is not meant to compete with multicore processors
being marketing by Intel and AMD.

The TILE64 has 64 identical processor cores or tiles — that are interconnected. Each tile is a complete full-featured processor, including integrated
L1 & L2 cache and a non-blocking switch that connects the tile into
the mesh. This means that each tile can independently run a full
operating system, or multiple tiles taken together can run a
multi-processing operating system like SMP Linux.

With a standard ANSI C programming environment, developers can leverage
their existing software investment as well as utilize the vast body of
Open Source code available. Tiles can be grouped into clusters to apply
the appropriate amount of horsepower to each application. Since
multiple operating system instances can be run on the TILE64™
simultaneously, it can replace multiple CPU subsystems for both the
data plane and control plane.


The technology was developed by MIT professor Anant Agarwal, founder of
Tilera; he continues today as the company’s chief technology officer.

Yesterday my friend, Ravish discussed very interesting thought with me – ”Whatever you do, you always end up in guilt!"

So true. Throughout my all daily activities, I feel guilty in almost all acts.

• If I wake up late, I feel guilty because I didn’t sleep early.
• If I wake up early, I feel guilty because I didn’t have enough sleep to complete my work and spoiled my life-work balance.
• If I eat pizza and drink soda, I feel guilty because I didn’t eat healthy food.
• If I eat salad as healthy food, I feel guilty because I didn’t eat what I wanted to eat — the tasty and spicy food.
• In the office, I feel guilty because sometimes I work on my part time personal activities.
• In the evening, I feel guilty because I didn’t work diligently on office tasks in the office.
• In the night, I feel guilty because I didn’t spend quality time with my wife.
• At the end of the day, I feel guilty because I didn’t complete all my to-do tasks.

I can go on and on, but you got the point. I don’t want to do any analysis or prepare any "how-to" list to avoid being in guilt. I just want to bring the point that, ending up always in guilt is a fact. Let’s live with it. We can’t avoid it. We can try to minimize it by staying more focused and more disciplined. But let’s not worry too much about removing it completely. Instead, let’s use our thinking bandwidth wisely to move on forward.

Have a very focused week ahead!

Targeted Audience: Entrepreneurs

Background: I read a lot. And I try to read as much quality stuff as possible.
Many times I stumble upon very compelling and thoughtful writings. I
learn a lot from those writings, but some of you may miss those
articles in this era of information overload. And I don’t want someone
to miss those compelling articles. 

Henceforth, whenever I stumble upon any compelling reading on
Startup or on Entrepreneurship, I will link those resources in my blog.

Today’s must read article for any would be young entrepreneur:

Dharmesh Shah (OnStartups.com) : The Dark Side of Startups: 5 Corrosive Co-Founder Conflicts

To read more articles from this series, please visit Startup and Entrepreneurship Resources.

Targeted Audience: Entrepreneurs, Students, and Recent Graduates

Ray Ozzie, Chief Software Architect at Microsoft shared this wonderful million dollar advice for someone who is either joining a startup or starting a startup at Founders at Work.

For someone who is joining a Startup:

Just learn about leadership from the people at the top of the company. Watch how they talk to people, and watch how they present to people. Companies take their shape based on the personality characteristics and human interaction characteristics of the founders. This is true in every company. Learn about the kind of culture that you want to create in your own company based on the positive and negative aspects that you witness in the people that are your leaders.

For someone who is starting a Startup:

Learn to respect and appreciate other people’s skill sets, because you are going to need other people if you do start a company and you are a technologist. Understand that it’s a rare, rare case when a tech entrepreneur is the right one to lead a startup for a long period of time. You have to feel comfortable in your own skin in terms of what you are good at and what other people are good at. Know when the shift to chief technologiest is the right thing for the company.

Of course, this advice from Ray Ozzie as well as this one from Mark Fletcher, might not be helpful if you want to develop a product or technology for your startup, but these philosophies will be very crucial aspects when we run a company.

Mark Fletcher shares very interesting phenomenon of "getting more" attitude of corporate employee vs "giving up" attitude of startup founders. Give attention to the last line.

As an employee climbing the corporate ladder at a company, it’s all
about getting more. More responsibility, more control, a larger salary,
a bigger title. However, the exact opposite is true when you start a
company. A big part of starting and building a company is about giving
up. A founder is in a weird position. When you first start a company,
everything is yours. You own all the stock, you make all the decisions.
This point of creation is the only time this will be the case, however.
Forever after, the founder must give up more and more control to other
people and more and more ownership to employees, investors, etc. The
founder must do this for the company to be successful, but at the same
time this is the opposite of what many people are used to doing.

Today morning my wife asked me that why do I like to take risks? Why do I have to be so ambitious when I am already doing so good?

I was speechless at that point of time. But after some retrospection, I understood how my philosophy works.

For me, doing only day time job because it is a norm is riskier than not taking risk at all. Of course, I do think about my responsibilities and also fear about failures I may have, but thats why I prefer taking calculated risks. But taking no risk is not an option. The 8-6 job routine in the day time and hanging out in the evening is even riskier for me. 

Instead, I prefer to take more projects, and more risks, though calculated ones. If I do happen to fall in one of the projects, I will make sure I fall forward. I don’t think about or rather, I don’t want to think about how many times I will fall as long as I fall forward. On every fall, I am sure I will learn something. By consistently taking calculated risks and falling forward, I will improve the probability of hitting it big. And thats why I think its reasonable to take more risks than not taking at all.

It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the
strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better.
The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face
is marred by the dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who
errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms,
the great devotions and spends himself in a worthy course; who at the
best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who, at
worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly; so that his
place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither
victory or defeat. –Theodore Roosevelt

Have a great day ahead!

Targeted Audience: Entrepreneurs

I read this interesting post on Too Many Companies? by Dick Costolo, Founder of FeedBurner. Dick explains a lot of people confuse fear of failure with not having enough
confidence in the ultimate success of their idea. They thus conclude
that they aren’t confident enough in their idea because it seems to have lot of challenges down the path. He insists –

The key is to just get on the bike, and the key to getting on the bike
is not the confidence in knowing you will be successful if you do
x,y,z. The key to getting on the bike is to stop thinking about "there
are a bunch of reasons i might fall off" and just hop on and peddle the
damned thing. You can pick up a map, a tire pump, and better footwear
along the way.

Enjoy the complete article here – Too Many Companies?