Finally peace.... the sound of it ... ... ...
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Well, i give up. It is pretty dumb. Holidays are boring. Period.
This article's pretty late, damn late. Much has happened in between yawns: stanford trip, exams, nite outs, cup with interns, then some intern, giving up, taking up, a new team and so on..
Let me try and summarize all of that for the legions of my followers (under construction that) :P
1)ASES stanford summit: defintely the biggest surprise for me last semester. the surprise came in several parts. the first one was in me getting selected, the second one was when i got funded, third one was when i actually landed in san fransisco, next one was when i landed in the campus and the final one was the summit itself :D
for those who dont know about it, ASES is a stanford based student organization, which is acting as an evangelist of the "silicon valley way" in Asian economies, or let's just call it entrepreneurship. They are trying to spread it as a way of life in Asian countries by opening their chapters in places where they will have the most impact: universities and schools. Annually they organize several events and lectures in these countries through their sub chapters + 2 annual summits. The main summit is the one which happens in Stanford University during April. It's a week long summit, and they invite delegates from all their sub chapters for this. Needless to say i got lucky this time (otherwise u would be reading a bored report of IPL instead of this..)
Neways, now they dont fund these trips, and so all the delegates are left to fend for themselves.. :( All of us, once we came to know about our selection (6 of us from IIT M) starting attacking companies, PE/VC firms, philanthropic orgs, HNWI's, ur neighbourhood Joe and anybody we could lay our hands on.. And needless to say, everybody dissapointed us. It was indeed very hard for us to make them realize that parting with a couple of lakhs for students is a GOOD thing indeed. So, please try and understand my surprise when finally somebody did step forward to bail out us guys. An IIT B alum helping IIT M guys!! Let's call him the 11th hour samaritan.
So, we were on our way to California, courtesy him. Then we landed in SFO. And here was our next surprise. There were no caucasians, anywhere.
California has to have atleast 50% asians, and i havent even started talking about latinos, for such a view. It's all Indians, Chinese, Japanese and so on everywhere. Who took away the white-man? Apparently, he left on his own accord, so that the American economy could have a massive Asian pillar. California has to be also the richest state in USA. Every damn IT company, and every start-up worth his/her salt are there. They ARE running the show for the states as it tries to pull itself out of the depression caused by the financial giants in New York and the hawks in Washington.
The summit team was there to recieve us on the airport, and guided us on the bus for Stanford. After a couple of mishaps, and a lot of mess we finally landed in Stanford. And here was another surprise.
We thought our campus at 650 acres was massive. Well, then gigantic is not the correct word even as you start describing the 100 year old Stanford campus. At 8,000 acres (yes, 8,000) it's world's second largest campus, and one of the oldest in the states. It's spread out (obba), confusing, and is a self-reliant town in itself. Infact, once the campus came up, a small town sprung up nearby, to support the campus. Called, Palo Alto, it is now the third most expensive place in the world, and home to every IT company in the world.
And that leads me precisely to what the summit was all about. It wasn't about attending lectures, or panel discussions, or even the much publicized company visits. and nor am i gonna delve into them. check the summit website for all of that. i would rather prefer to talk about the reason for the summit.
It was about the feel of the valley. Through their honest attempts, the summit team tried to convey us just that. In stanford, entrepreneurship is indeed a way of life, what with every second or third guy starting up on his own. Also, they have all the supporting system required for taking such risks. Profs are multi-millionaires there and have become part time investors because of all the money they have earned. Students with good ideas simply need to talk to a nice prof, he will take care of the rest. Connecting to a good investor, scheduling their studies, all that a good prof will help in. And, they have a pedigree to look upto. Google, Adobe, Apple, Dell, Orkut, Intel, Nvidia, SUN, Cisco, Intuit, Facebook etc etc all started up in Stanford, and are now happily settled in Palo Alto. We here don't have such great examples to look upto..
Anyways, all in all the summit was a great experience for me. It did change me in very subtle ways, and taught me something which I always knew: Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish ;)
This was a long post (by my standards), will try and hammer down something about the rest of April, some time soon..
