Business - RicoJia/notes GitHub Wiki

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Business Case Studies

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  1. Convenience store:

    • Some ppl may bring food to work, which makes the enterprise fail
    • People may make homogeneous choices.
    • Take outs: Made website for a nearby company. But old employee left, while new guy didn't learn how to make it profitable

  2. Success you see may not stay:

    • socks are seasonal. you need home clothing
    • Good thing: provide socks for magazines.

  3. Find good business partners

    • location. Coffee shop right beside Starbucks, unique!
    • Nobody knows about these.
    • Found good beans in Ethiopia, took 2 years to come back into it.

  4. Start up ideas

    1. Conventional industries. Hotels, restaurants, social media marketing, event planning lol.
    2. Web development is conventional.
      • Strength? Side cash and test the waters
    3. Maybe not a good idea to create a pure web project. Lots of Competition, and large companies can easily eat you up
    4. New tech: AI-related. Largest potential markets?
    5. Robotics: Sim2Real farm? Large language model? Developer tools, or interfacing with customers? Hotel robots? Elevator panel detection?
    6. A good business model should be simple and clear. a. Tons of good engineers, but not entrepreneurs

  5. Some Concepts:

    • MRR: amount we bill clients monthly. ARR: MRR * 12
    • GROSS margin: (revenue - cost)/revenue
    • Start up: Enterprise Application

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Product Ideas

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  • aesthetic usability effect: if your product is beautiful, they trust it's better quality

  • Mom's test: bring a prototype to companies

  • You and your research

    • Very clearly they are not because people are often most productive when working conditions are bad.
    • What appears to be a fault, often, by a change of viewpoint, turns out to be one of the greatest assets you can have.
      • Programming
    • turning the problem around a bit, changed a defect to an asset.
    • many scientists when they found they couldn't do a problem finally began to study why not.
    • Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest.
    • Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former.
    • The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity
    • I don't like to say it in front of my wife, but I did sort of neglect her sometimes
      • I needed to study. You have to neglect things if you intend to get what you want done

  • What to Work ON

    • You should do your job in such a fashion that others can build on top of it
      • Instead of attacking isolated problems, I made the resolution that I would never again solve an isolated problem except as characteristic of a class.
    • I've often wondered why so many of my good friends at Bell Labs who worked as hard or harder than I did, didn't have so much to show for it.
      • The misapplication of effort is a very serious matter.
    • For those who don't get committed to their current problem, the subconscious goofs off on other things and doesn't produce the big result.
    • What are the important problems of your field? And after a week or so, What important problems are you working on?
    • You can't always know exactly where to be, but you can keep active in places where something might happen.
    • the average scientist does routine safe work almost all the time and so he (or she) doesn't produce much.
    • I came up with the observation at that time that nine out of ten experiments were done in the lab and one in ten on the computer.
      • I made a remark to the vice presidents one time, that it would be reversed,
    • I thought hard about where was my field going, where were the opportunities, and what were the important things to do.
    • when a great scientist sees a new idea come up, one hears them say Well that bears on this problem. They drop all the other things and get after it.
    • They get rid of other things and they get after an idea because they had already thought the thing through. Their minds are prepared;
    • Now of course lots of times it doesn't work out, but you don't have to hit many of them to do some great science. It's kind of easy. One of the chief tricks is to live a long time!
    • I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. - So, go to the office!

  • You have to sell: The world is supposed to be waiting, and when you do something great, they should rush out and welcome it. But the fact is everyone is busy with their own work. You must present it so well that they will set aside what they are doing, look at what you've done, read it, and come back and say, Yes, that was good.

    • You have to learn to write clearly and well so that people will read it
    • you must learn to give reasonably formal talks
    • you also must learn to give informal talks.

  • We had a lot of so-called back room scientists. - They give feedback when it was too late.

  • Friday afternoons for years - great thoughts only - means that I committed 10% of my time trying to understand the bigger problems in the field,

  • I found in the early days I had believed this' and yet had spent all week marching in that' direction.

  • Presentation

    • You should paint a general picture to say why it's important, and then slowly give a sketch of what was done. Then a larger number of people will understand
    • The people who do great work with less ability but are committed get more done than those who have great skill but work only during the day.

  • Work with the system, instead of fighting it

    • He had his personality defect of wanting total control and was not willing to recognize that you need the support of the system.
    • If you want to do something, don't ask, do it. Present him with an accomplished fact. That's what I did with 2d global localizer
    • Tuck your ego in, or you way pay a small amount of price I am going to do it my way,
    • I was friendly to secretaries and I could get things done
    • Do not get into fights. They are not necessary
    • Know your strengths, and your bad faults. Turn your bad faults into an asset: Before I left, I told all my friends that when I come back, that book was going to be done! (So tell people what you want to do)
    • Why didn't you do it right? Don't try an alibi.
    • Why some smart ppl didn't make the impact that they should have: didn't work on important problems; didn't become emotionally involved, and try changing a difficult situation into an asset. And also, they don't have the guts to work on important problems

  • Brainstorming is not that useful

    • Pick capable people: the critical mass. Then, get rid of the sound absorbers who always says yes. I picked my people carefully with whom I did or whom I didn't brainstorm
    • I think people with closed doors fail to do this so they fail to get their ideas sharpened, Did you ever notice something over here? We need to go ahead and find such a group of ppl!!
    • Presentation is key. TODO: Go refine your resume

  • If you read too much, you just think the way ppl think about it. Once you have a clear idea of the problem, try think about it thoroughly first without looking at others' answers

  • But reading to get the solutions does not seem to be the way to do great research. -- Our way of getting code done: hold off on getting to the answer directly. Instead, think about how the problem came thru.

  • It's not the amount of stuff that you've done, it's the way you do it, and think about it that counts.

  • Fields with new tools will stop growing, that's why we don't have 1 million fields now. Read books, they should leave out bad info

  • Somewhere around every seven years make a significant, if not complete, shift in your field. Because you will use up your ideas. Elsewhere, you can start off as a baby

  • I think it's very valuable to have first-class people around. When the best ppl at the chemistry table left, I left too.

  • luck favors a prepared person

Christopher Olah

- Doing an internship, residency, or startup can be easier -- at least in some regards -- than working independently. There’s more structure (especially in the first two) and a clearer path to supporting yourself.
-  Do you feel like you’ll learn? Does it feel like a good community? Does it feel important? If it feels urgent, is the urgency for good reasons? 
- While it won’t solve the fundamental issues, it can be extremely emotionally helpful to have an aligned support network. Having people who were proud of me for good reasons and could recognize my successes and failures was deeply affirming and motivating for me.
- TODO: Hackerspaces - **Hackerspaces are community technology spaces, and can be a great way to meet people who are really excited about technology. They are quite common in large cities.**
- It's often the case that, while getting a paper in the main conference is quite competitive, getting a paper into one of the workshops isn't. 
- Twitter can be surprisingly great if you carefully curate the people you follow. A few of my favorite ML-focused accounts include David Ha, Miles Brundage, Janelle Shane, Alex Mordvintsev, Maithra Raghu, Jeff Dean, Catherine Olsson, and Tim Hwang. Some other accounts I find delightful are Devon Zuegel, Alexander Berger, Emma Pierson, Michael Nielsen, and Julia Galef. This is only a small slice optimized partly for variety -- there's lots of people I think are fantastic. You can also follow me, but obviously I'm biased on that.
- One of the most important emails I've written was a cold email to Yoshua Bengio in 2013. **I spent more than a week writing it**. This included reading many of his recent papers and thinking a lot about where our interests overlapped. The final email was only a few paragraphs.

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Team Management

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  • What makes the best team by google: teams feel psychologically safe to contribute, without worrying about ideas being shot down

  • patent filing: keep the lawyer updated with release dates. everycall is $1500. Up to us. Email it instead of meeting. provisional change, non-provisional (not really enforceable.)

  • What's your motivation? money, prestige?

    • Player Coach is someone who still writes code. There are pure managers
    • PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY
      • Your peer pool shrinks the higher you go. IC work and Leader Work (tough)
      • Come back as an IC
      • Don't make your managers say things twice. Be active; Take over a team that used to be your peers.
        • Respect is earned, not given, sure.
        • Marie made mistakes for being an asswhole to VP
      • Dog ppl: they understand the society has a hierarchy. Do not undermine the person publicly. Depending on the organization,
    • TODO: where is a copy?

  • How many core robotics engineers at polymath? (2021)

  • What are their backgrounds?

    • Leveraged deep learning architectures for point cloud pose estimation using PointNet and KITTI LiDAR datasetLeveraged deep learning architectures for point cloud pose estimation using PointNet and KITTI LiDAR dataset
    • Naveen: Machine Vision / Robotics Systems Engineer. Some small AIs, northeastern
    • Troy Gibb: BA in Philosophy. First job in 2017, Tesla; React, etc. Cruise, staff software engineer, started jan 2024
    • Zeerek Ahmad: 2 years of college, drop out? Controls, developed 3D scanning, fpga
    • Zhuo Linwei: 2D Slam, point cloud segmenetation
    • Ilia baranov: CTO: Worked on development of the Aeryon Scout, and object avoidance research with the University of Waterloo. Clearpath, as an engineering mgmr, Jun 2018. Managed team of engineers and applied scientists, focused on perception, behavior control, motion and docking. Worked closely with the SLAM and path planning teams. Owned PR2 repo
    • Alexander Yuen: staff controls engineer
    • By the end of 2021, we were already running unmanned tests with no person on site.

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Management Ideas

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  • Karl Runge

  • Shakespear

  • Machiavili

  • Keller You have to become "the loud and best" engineer. Worst is you lead 20 guys from the previous company and try to replicate what you did in the last company. Trust is most import. It's more efficient than contracts, negotiations. If you see someone trying to manipulate the env for their own benefit, that person must leave. They will make everybody stressed. He doesn't think he's the smartest, because they don't need to work too hard. For him, the best is consistency. Because in chip design, there are lots of details to adjust. Do things that excite you, and help others get excited. Because that way, you will become better, too.

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