Quarter 11 - Week 5

You know you're getting old when you think that updating posts can happen even two-three days after you're actually supposed to. Talk about a 50% delay in timelines! This would NEVER happen in the IT industry.. or atleast it wouldn't be estimated for, despite what reality keeps suggesting. The good news is that the stats engine suggests that people actually read the blog in these last two days - there are people looking at the interview process from waaay back in the day, one of my first few posts in fact. That's the zero-th year students, or should I say potential candidates.. then there's another set of people looking at what's happening in Quarter 3, apparently a bunch of first-years who just can't stand the suspense of the weeks to come. Still, oldies always feel good that atleast someone wants to hear their war stories... so no complaints from my side.

New Enterprise Financing

The prof takes his time... we're supposed to be doing two cases this week, but the prof intends to ensure that we get the fundas right. He takes us through examples of how different rounds of financing happens, taking the example of Cartographics Online. He goes on to explain the meaning of the terms pre-money and post-money valuation. Apparently, early stage investors are this full-on secretive types. They don't like that free-market, efficient-market theory in all its finery, but prefer to keep information close to their chests... just like entrepreneurs. Sure, the entrepreneur runs around saying 'I do this, I do that, my idea is this and that' but try asking him 'HOW' he does it. VCs apparently do a similar thing. They don't want to talk about how much money they spent to get what share of the company, so if a company is valued at 1,000,000 dollars, and a VC is willing to invest only a 100,000, then he gets 10% of the company. Imagine him going out and saying that to other VCs, the replies can vary... the worst case scenarios are 'Chee, you put only 100,000?' or 'Chee, you got only 10%?' or 'Chee, the company's only 1,000,000 dollars?'. To save everyone any downside, they say 'ok, you know what, if I don't give you my 100,000 then technically you'll hold a value of 900,000 dollars'. So we'll all go and say that we invested in a company with a pre-money valuation of 900,000. For some reason, hiding the exact info seems to work for this industry, so I'll leave it at that. The kicker comes when the prof tries to show us how the company in question, Cartographics Online, should worry about its assumptions when predicting the future to VCs. He says that it's important to do a sensitivity analysis to find out that even if you were to go a little wrong, how much will it actually impact your final share of the pie. There's also a little talk of how the pie shares get diluted when newer rounds of investment happens, and some magic formulae that explain this. The way the prof puts it, you're surprised that this is post-grad level stuff. Then again, he's keeping the problem simple (which still in any case can't hide the simplicity of the funda here).

Reinvention through Entrepreneurial and Intrapreneurial Learning

Right, so you remember the rant from last week? The way the prof went all ballistic when we didn't read? This week we were supposed to watch some videos, and everybody thought the videos would be shown in class. The prof comes in, asks did you watch the videos, hears about what happened... just shrugs his shoulders and tells us 'Even after knowing everything I do, I still lost my temper the other day. I went back and asked why that happened? I was obivously angry, and one thing you should know is that anger is what you feel when you dont accept that things happen that you cannot control, and therefore you should have no expectations in such scenarios. And I realized that you people reading is beyond my control, and therefore I should set no expectations. This course is for you guys to understand the important facets of life, and if you want to treat it lightly, feel free... I don't gain anything anyway.'

After some time, he does point out with a gleam in his eye that this doesn't mean we get to shirk off readings through the rest of the course. He does have some control over us, our grades and all, so that still allows him to exercise some expectation. Anyway, nice guy that he is, he sent out some links for us to check out later. With a firm announcement that we should watch it, as they were videos that would be of great meaning to us - videos on Happiness, hardship, self-esteem, love, anger etc.

The next session had us discussing three specific Jataka tales, stories of leadership and the prof gets us to discuss what we thought were the salient points that we could take from each of the stories. The whole point was not to treat the stories like gospel, but just to absorb what lessons we could take from it. The stories were the 'Apannaka Jataka', 'Makhadeva Jataka' and the 'Mahakapi Jataka'. Good stuff, nice takeaways, and definitely a reminder to re-read the Jataka and Panchatantra tales. God knows what I missed as a kid, which I might realize as an adult.

Takes a while before I realize that five weeks are up... and there are only another five to go.