Story one: fixmymovie.com. I know nesha half of my life. He is one of guys that can speak to every possible personality. I dont know anyone who can chat with random girls as gracefully and relaxed as him. Great character and equally good volleyball player. Well, you might believe that this story is about nesha, and in that case you would be wrong. This story is about his brother, nikola. I dont know a whole lot about nikola's personality, how successful was he with the girls, neither how well he played volleyball (btw. from what I heard he appears to be really good tennis player, but this needs to be checked ;-)). However, I will not talk about his personality, so this might not be a problem ;-)
So, nesha was this weekend in SF, and I met him and nikola. I had a really great time. Both of them look really great, and hanging out with them was real fun. While nesha was playing with little son of nikola, nikola spend couple of minutes explaining me what is his job. Well, he finished his phd 3 years ago, then moved to a small company and spend several months there before moving to his current job. Today, he is the CTO of a small starup, living with and solving real world problems in digital signal processing. Check out their site. Anyhow, he is one of those smart guys who has a very special skill: he can talk to people for hours without passing the line of becoming uninteresting. But what is amazing about him is his ability to step up and do what regular guys (like me) are afraid to do. One of the examples of this I can remember was him leading the student protests against Milosevic's faked results of the 1996 elections in serbia. At the time, it was a really big deal and nikola (21 at the time) did all the right things.
Today I was chating with steve, and at some point he said something like "in our business, everything is about DBLP... you search someone's name, you get his DBLP page and you judge him by counting the number of papers at DBLP...". Well, right point, assuming that you are in academic business its all about DBLP. However, Nikola got his hands out of DBLP business. Its not easy to run your own business but the potential personal accomplishment can be huge. Having met hundreds of phd students, i can say its very seldom to see such a spirit of a fighter, and thats why I need to give credit to Nikola and guys like him. Being in Silicon Valley doesn't guaranties the success, but definitely helps building that I-can attitude.
(I put up the pics online. This pic is taken with nikola's super cool camera)
My second story is about life and work in big corporations. Yesterday, I was doing regular stuff, unsuccessfully trying to come up with something smart ;-) Then Anand, guy from my group, came to me and asked me if I would like to see a NBA game... there was a free ticket and the guy who was supposed to go canceled and there was an extra ticket. Well, I said why not. The history behind the tickets is lengthy, but on a high level, a big corporation called TI has its own box at Oracle Arena, and they use these seats to befriend the potential business partners.
The box means that you have your own room with a dozens seats, infinite amount of food, beverages, and deserts, and great view of the game. However, compared to the court seats, the deficiency of box-seats is in fact that you cannot fully appreciate all the elements of the cheerleaders. The game was great, the box services were great and if I was someone important I would definitely try to develop business with TI people. I have never heard of people using sport shows to build up their business, but cmon, this is the Valley... Everything is possible ;-)
2 comments:
you know why nobody has commented here? Because we don't want to know about those better off than ourselves. Tell me about someones misery and misfortune so I can make my mediocre life and lack of motivation seem not so bad.
i wanted to fix my movie, but the website is not operating yet. so, mosha, until they make it work. idea and demos look nice though.
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