I’m Sumant and this is my place on the internet. Check it out!
Innovating from the perspective of monetization
Life update I have gone from developing software as an engineer to someone who develops software and talks to customers as a Product Lead. Currently, I’m working on building the Gordian Network. The product places ads on travel websites. These ads are contextualized with your travel metadata. As part of building this, I’m having more conversations with publishers (airlines, OTAs, etc.) and advertisers (a variety of travel companies). A framework that has become useful to me, suggested by a colleague at Gordian, is designing the product around price (see Monetizing Innovation)....
Those little actions add up
We make choices all the time. Some choices are important – where you choose to live, work, etc. Other choices are extremely unimportant—what color of shirt to wear, your lunch, etc. Everything else is in between. I’m going to focus on the unimportant choices, where any level of thought beyond 5 minutes is just a time sink. I noticed last year that I overthink about meaningless things. I’m going to use email as my example—I’m sure many of you relate....
Expected Value Calculations Can Guide Decisions
In most aspects of the world, we are trying to improve our expected value (E.V) of love, happiness, money, time, and etcetera. Companies operate on this principle. They always try to increase expected value of their business, customers, or employees. Yet, we don’t frame our personal lives or careers as maximization of E.V. I recently have reframed my decision making to include a sort of E.V analysis, and it’s a helpful heuristic....
Upfront vs Gradual Costs
Often, I found myself deciding between taking an act that has relatively high upfront cost or something with gradual cost over time. I agonize over the pros and cons because of the upfront cost, even if gradual cumulative cost is cumulatively more. For example, currently, I am deciding if I should remove my wisdom teeth. The upfront cost is high, but the gradual cost is higher. It is literally shifting my teeth, causing more problems in the future with higher cost....
Startups Vs Academia
When I was a scientist, the process of innovation was throwing ideas on the wall and seeing what stuck. That felt good—think of an idea, test it, and share it to the world. I thought I was innovating. I had three whole papers to show for it! Was I though? Well, I certainly was adding to the body of knowledge, creating something that didn’t exist before. However, I did not solve any problem of significance....