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The Central Japan Railway company reports that its magnetic levitation bullet train topped 366 miles per hour on Thursday during a test run along a lengt

Also, expected to cross 600kmph in another run scheduled next week. At this speed, the Delhi-Bombay 1384km long journey would take about 2 hours and 18 minutes. 

Hmm.

[prateeks]

One cab ride and two startup stories

So I've convinced Parul that we are not going to buy a second car. With our offices being in different parts of town, we do need to figure out the commute. And our solution is the car-in-the-cloud. I've moved almost completely to Ola-Uber-TFS for most of my commute, with a little bit of driving thrown in.

The story, though, is about something else. On my rides, I like talking to the drivers. It's a short ride for me, 15-20 min. So its great to make small talk, without the fear the getting stuck with an over-enthusiastic talker ;)

On one of these rides, on my way home, the driver picked me up. It was on Ola. A few minutes into the ride, and he was furiously trying to do something on his phone, while also trying to drive.

Me: Bhaiya, please pull over. Do whatever you want to do on the phone and then drive. You'll run into something

Driver: Ok sir. Just 1 min only.

Then after waiting for 5 min, we start the ride again. Standard IST to Real time expansion applied :)

Me: Bhaiya, what were you trying to do on the phone?

Driver: Sir, recharging my phone. I have this app, been using it for 2 years. Super app. You can recharge anytime. I keep a balance of some 1000 rupees on the app. Whenever I need to recharge my phone, or some friend's phone, I do it on the app. Immediately it happens.

Me: Which app is this? Sounds very good.

Driver: Mobikwik (!)

Me: (Grinning. Same app I use to recharge phones for my parents. Created & run by this super couple, Bipin & Upasana)

Me: So bhaiya, how long have you been driving Ola?

Driver: Close to 2 years, sir.

Me: Thats a long time!

Driver: Yes sir. I live in Koramangala, and their office is also in Koramangala. So I knew when they started. I know their MD also. Bhavish Agarwal. Very good man.

Me: You know Bhavish? We both went to the same college in Bombay.

Driver: Oh, is it? Same college? Ok, I'll tell you the story of how I met him. One night, when I had just started driving Ola, I had logged off from the service and was about to go home. I get a call from a customer. He says he is waiting for me. I tell him that I didn’t get any message from the company and I am going home. He gets angry. He says that he will complain to Ola if I don’t come. So I also get angry. I tell him that I’ve got no message. Do whatever you like. So now he tells me, he is Bhavish Agarwal and he is MD of the company. He tells me if I don’t come right away, my cab will not be allowed tomorrow onwards on Ola. Now I am really worried. I tell him I am sorry and I am coming immediately. I get there and I am really worried if this guy is going to be upset with me. When I see him, I tell him about the problem. He asks me to log out and login. No message. We try one more time, still no message. Now he says I am sorry, but looks like it’s our problem. I take him to JP Nagar. As he gets off, he gives me Rs 500. I tell him sorry about the whole episode and also that I don’t have change. He tells me, keep the change. And then he says, I am the one who should be saying sorry, it was our problem. Such a big man saying sorry, was such a nice thing sir. He is a very good man. Because of him thousands of drivers are employed in Bangalore. Very good man. 

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Such fantastic stories these 2.

One about mobile technology making life easy for the person who lives on the move.

Fantastic job, Bipin & Upasana!

The other about personal open-mindedness, humility and just the huge amount of job creation that new startups are doing in India.

Hats off, Bhavish!

[prateeks]

A trip to the PMO

The funny thing about the PMO is that even though everyone knows it exists, it’s very hard to find. I was headed to meet Vivek Kumar, a friend from IITB, who is rocking the world of the administrative services. Vivek told me that I need to come to the South Block. I think you can measure the power associated with an address by how short it is. Google maps is not particularly helpful either. I knew it had to close to the heart of Lutyen’s Delhi, to I headed to India gate and then called Vivek for directions. He said, I need to come up the Rajpath. Rajpath is a straight road, about 2.3kms, from India gate to the Rashtrapati Bhavan. This is a road which weighs on you. As a child, almost all my Republic Day mornings were spent glued to the TV watching our military might and our cultural diversity on display on this very road. In the pre-internet days, it was quite a sight! Now here I was, riding through this piece of history. It felt like a trip through time. India has transformed through the last 100 years and yet I could feel that this road, and the space round has withstood the tide of time. With the Rashtrapati Bhavan peeking out the of haze and mist of Delhi, it was an awe-inspiring sight. So we rode, with a little bit of apprehension. You just feel a little out of place in the middle of all this grandeur and all the security. We felt that at any moment we would be stopped by the police, saying we couldn’t go any further. But no one did. So we kept going, all the way to the Rashtrapati Bhavan gates. And right besides the gates, was a nondescript entry to the South Block. Special security arrangements. The guards were exactly like the suited Special Agents you see in hollywood movies, complete with partially hidden ear pieces. Just that they spoke hindi. Surreal. So I went through several gates, each a little more secure than the previous. Left my bag at the last one, only phones & wallets allowed after that. An escort, in white pants and white shoes, led the way to Vivek’s office. There is something about school/college camaraderie. It’s like even after you meet people after years, you start off like you are in the middle of a conversation. The room was massive, as are a lot of sarkari offices. Being a railways kid, I was spoilt for space till I came to IIT. Where I was successfully transformed from human to chicken, space-wise. So anyways, always fun to see the sarkari space. Also interesting were some artifacts. So there was a computer on the table but there was a separate area, in the corner with another computer attached to a printer, scanner etc. There was a wooden, standalone coat-hanger. Which was again something that reminded me of dad’s offices on the railway stations. And there was a window that opened into the garden. We talked about a lot of stuff. I mostly about tech & startups. He mostly about governments. But we also converged about some issues like how some furniture e-commerce guy gouged him with a bad deal. Wasn’t Urban Ladder ;) We drank great back coffee. Which was a first for me in any sarkari office in India. PMO nails black coffee. There were a few things that made me comeback with more hope for India. First was Vivek himself. He is one of those who I respect tremendously. He is one of the few who have jumped into our broken governance systems and fixing things from the inside. Kudos. The other learning about how the government is working now. The fact that the offices are now working 9am - 9pm signals that the times they are a changing. Just hope the change sticks. Here is to Vivek and a very successful term at the PMO. I am sure you will make us all proud!

[prateeks]

Foosball ≠ Culture

"Culture" is a word that gets thrown around a lot in the startup world. It's kind of like a secret weapon that every startup professes to have. Even big companies try to get a little halo effect going by saying that even though they're big, they have a startup culture!

This is something close to my heart. Building a company for 5 years makes you think pretty deeply about a lot of this stuff. So couple of days back I got a few tweets out about culture. Thought I'd expand on those a little here.

Culture in a startup is quite like parenting. You might say all the right things but It’s what you do that matters 10X more.

As a founder, you speak to your team a lot. You have one-on-ones, you do all-hands meetings, you participate in the daily scrum, you might even hang out at the water cooler. But that is still a small percentage of what you DO in office. Your team hears you but they observe you a lot more. Got to walk the talk. Your team is super smart. That's why you recruited them in the first place, remember?

All contradictions are revealed & magnified in your team. Need to be hyper-aware and open to personal change, to lead the team in same.

You say that customers matter but haven't talked to the single customer. They're watching. You say you are a data-driven company but then overrule a team mate who makes a data based point. They will realize that its status that drives the org and they will fight for status instead of whats right. As a founder, you live in the limelight. Kind of like Jay-Z except you're not that cool. Fix internal conflicts that you're aware of. Yet, know that there are new conflicts you'll discover along the path. Be open to change.

Culture is not a foosball table, or 30 of them. It’s a shared world view, shared value system, shared decision-making process.

A while back, I came across this fantastic word - umwelt. It's actually a biological term, around the idea that different animals in the same ecosystem pick up on different elements of their environment and thus live in different micro-realities based on the subset of the world they’re able to detect. This is very true of humans as well and so also with your team. Culture is an exercise in merging the individual umwelts of your team, at least the parts that relate to work.

A founder might feel that the big decisions you make drive success. Instead it’s the thousand micro-decisions your team makes every day.

Sure the big decisions matter. As a founder you choose whether you're in the taxi market or the real time logistics market. But the thousands of decisions that your team makes in pursuit of their goals are the ones that have huge impact. You can't and should not be micro-managing each of these small decisions, makes for a super-slow org. Slow = dead in startup world. Realise that small decisions matter and empower teams to make the right ones.

Posted originally on linkedin. 

[prateeks]

What can I say, I am a sucker for street art. I think a city's status elevates a few notches if it has a resident masked street artist. All hail, the great Banksy!

Since 2001, artist and illustrator David Zinn has stalked the streets of Ann Arbor, Michigan, creating temporary illustrations with chalk and charcoal. Zinn improvises each piece on the spot and makes use of found objects, street fixtures, and stairsteps to create trompe l’oeil illusions. These

[prateeks]

I am amazed by how artists continue to find new, exciting subjects for art. Especially in stuff that has been around for ages. 

Bangkok-based photographer Visarute Angkatavanich (previously) continues to capture some of the most elegant portraits of fish we've seen. His intimate, crystal-clear photos of Siamese fighting fish (betta) make it seem as though they are suspended in air instead of water. Angka

[prateeks]

Pain and Adrenaline

A few days back, I was trying barefoot sprinting. Barefoot means no vibrams, no other funky foot aid. Foot-meet-ground barefoot. It was a fun experience, surprisingly so for a first-timer like me.

Interestingly, somewhere during that sprint, I cut my foot on something. I say interestingly, and not painfully because I did not realize this till I stopped. That's when the pain hit me. 

In the rush, my body did not feel the pain cause the mind was overrun by adrenaline. Pain was not important at that point of time. It became valuable only later, when it reminded me that I need to fix something in my body. What a fantastic system! Our emotions are so tied into our bodies that we often forget that our even our bodies are systems, perfected over millennia. 

Now, can we extend this system to more of our emotions? Can we teach ourselves to add a suitable delay to all our emotions & use them as flags to fix something in our emotional systems? That would be an interesting enhancement to evolution. 

[prateeks]

“You might as well be dead. Seriously, if you always put limits on what you can do, physically or anything else, it’ll spread over into the rest of your life. It’ll spread into your work, into your morality, into your entire being. There are no limits. There are plateaus, but you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. If it kills you, it kills you. A man must constantly exceed his level.”

 - Bruce Lee

Mr Bruce Lee. Nuff said.

[prateeks]

From the Kickstarter - Wish I was here (I'm a backer). Here is what the backers put together as their favorite music. Great list of fresh music, if any out there. 

[prateeks]

Some flora around the house. Still trying to figure out names. Any help? 

[prateeks]

Who does 12min, riffing guitar driven songs on an album anymore? Well, Boris does. No, the're not scandinavian. Japanese. Classic hard rock style. Just the kind of stuff to pump up the morning. 

Also on grooveshark - Naki Kyoku

[prateeks]

A beautiful, and insightful, photo project, where photographer Gabriele Galimberti traveled the world to make pictures of children with their favorite toys. Here is a small excerpt.

At their age, they are pretty all much the same...they just want to play.

But how they play can reveal a lot. The richest children were more possessive. At the beginning, they wouldn’t want me to touch their toys, and I would need more time before they would let me play with them. In poor countries, it was much easier. Even if they only had two or three toys, they didn’t really care. In Africa, the kids would mostly play with their friends outside.

Yet even children worlds apart share similarities when it comes to the function their toys serve. Galimberti talks about meeting a six-year-old boy in Texas and a four-year-old girl in Malawi who both maintained their plastic dinosaurs would protect them from the dangers they believed waited for them at night.

The complete project here - Toy Stories.

[prateeks]

Canon recently released this incredible interview with photographer Canon Antonin Kratochvil on his imaging style. An excerpt:

You should never use camera to make your pictures. You use yourself, your experience, to make the pictures with the camera. Not the other way around.

Photographer Antonin Kratochvil on his Style of Photography

via A Photo Editor

[prateeks]

I am sure Mordor looked like this...

The Eternal Lightning Field in Venezuela. 10 hours of lightning per day and up to 280 times per hour. Electrifying enough?

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Love the groove on this one. Classic rock sound from a 2000s australian band. 

[prateeks]

An amazing photoset from The Atlantic, celebrating 100 years of the Grand Central Terminal. The complete post here. 

[prateeks]

Design < Price (In India)

Just spotted on a jewelry hoarding- 

Designs you like Prices you love

Makes you realize where junta is at and hence what businesses would have to align to.