Future of books

"How we will read" interview series published in the findings blog is interesting. Found it enlightening.

I also need to go through the main site of findings. After I check it out and use it for some time, I ll blog about it.

Talk in Entrepreneurship

Yesterday I attended a talk in series conducted in IIT Madras called "Leadership lecture series: Alumni speak!". The talk was given by Sandy Chandra (1973 B.Tech Chemical engineering batch) titled "Confessions of a serial dreamer: A broader conception of entrepreneurship".

The talk was delivered in an excellent fashion. He started the talk with his personal connection with  IIT Madras and went on to define what it means to be entrepreneur. It was very interesting to hear him walk as through his life journey as an entrepreneur.

The part of the talk which I feel is important is about his view on cash. According to him, success of business comes down to cash flow it generates - not very successful if it got high valuation and little cash flow. And he also mentions his other golden rules on cash:

1. More cash is better than less cash
2. Cash at present is better than cash in future

The rules might seem obvious, but he explains why many forget and also how he himself found sometimes hard to follow those rules.

The talk duration including Q&A was 1 hour.

I forgot to take my Sony voice recorder with me and sadly couldn't record it.

Below is his profile (which was sent in the mail) - 

Sandy Chandra is a graduate of Indian Institute of Technology and MBA from Rutgers University. Sandy is a serial entrepreneur, focusing on building world class technology businesses. He is currently recreating a global technology consulting firm with deep domain focus on a number of areas such as Financial services, Health Care, Life Sciences, Manufacturing and Technology, security and defence. The underlying core competence is each of the areas is built around managing big data in the context real time. Before this Sandy spent 10 years as a turnaround specialist focused on the acquisition and turnaround of seven distressed companies in India, Europe and USA. In this role, he has had significant exposure to India’s agriculture, manufacturing and engineering consulting sectors. Sandy has worked in villages of India as well as dealing with labor realtions and has deep understanding of needs of the Indian societySandy started his career at Lummus Crest (then part of Asea Brown Boveri) and was with them for over 18 years. Sandy was involved as a conceptual thinker and designer of some world’s largest and most complex petroleum, petrochemical and oil and gas facilities, and was responsible for building Reliance Industries’ major petrochemical assets in India. At the end of his tenure at Lummus Crest, he was the Managing Director for the Indian operations and was responsible for building the largest offshore engineering centers in India. Sandy and wife Lakshmi have created a Foundation active in promoting classical Indian performing arts in India and the USA. Additionally, they are very active with respect to a number of charitable institutions serving the underprivileged. Sandy is a student of foreign policy and matters concerning human development and rights, and is currently focused on seeding a think tank focused on human rights in India.

Quotes...

I have always liked reading quotes and at the same time I feel that it is intellectually harmful or at most useless in most cases. In very few occasions, it is actually helpful in making me be aware consciously or give me ability to express what my unconscious mind already knows.

For past few months, I have been passionately reading rationality quotes (especially one from lesswrong). Ironically, I still haven't found out a rational reason for reading rationality quotes. If anybody does have one, please be kind enough to share it.

Reading non-fiction books

I like non-fiction books. I gain information, knowledge and insight on variety of subjects and they are easy to consume. It is also very useful and easy to spread and discuss about ideas written in it. But I feel that I don't read it enough despite its usefulness. I just read 27 books in 2011. In the start of this year, I decided that I would read at least 52 books (a book per week on average). But, till now I have read just one book. I hope that I would be able to read 51 books in next 9 months.