2 Tips on developing the mindset of an Entrepreneur

Get Bored Easily
As a management consultant, I have found that my most entrepreneurial clients get bored quickly, and seek to continually reinvent themselves. They test out new products / services, and drop old ones when they get bored.

Turn Problems into Opportunities
The best example of this tip is the famous 1930's jazz pianist Art Tatum. When he would travel for performances, he would often find that the piano at the night club or venue would have broken keys, or be out of tune. Rather than get upset however, Tatum would get excited! He would spend the day incorporating the flaws into his music, and would end up giving an improvised, one of a kind performance. This is a must-have skill for entrepreneurs! Problems are always occurring. Intead of simply fixing them, and getting back to the status quo, the best entrepreneurs recognize an opportunity for innovation, and improve the product or service beyond the old normal.

Is AI 'really really stupid?

As a consultant who advises companies on strategy—including technology and AI startups, I can tell you that AI is very good at mining data for insights, but it is "dumb" by human standards because it's incapable of making intuitive leaps or insights.

For example, there was a case where a technology company used an AI tool to sort through resumes.  Most of the resumes were from men.  A human leader would see this, and think "how can we attract more women into technology?".  The AI, instead, started automatically rejecting resumes from women.  When the company found out, they had to stop using the AI.

Lessons for Recent College Grads

Two things I did right:

1. In my senior year, I chose to work on a project for Engineering Open House. This one extracurricular activity was critical, because it attracted the attention of a very small, very technical start-up company with only 6 employees. After college, they hired me as employee 7.

2. Choosing to work for this very small company rather than a Fortune 500 company. At very small companies (less than 20 employees), new graduates get exposed to much more responsibility, and a breadth of functions, than at a large company.

Pros and Cons of a multi-cloud strategy

Instead of sticking to one cloud vendor (such as microsoft or amazon), there is now the option for multi-cloud. 

These are layers of software, such as containers and micro-services, which can sit on top of different cloud provider's APIs, so that developers can write their applications once, with a uniform interface, and deploy them on multiple clouds without having to make and support vendor-dependent modifications.  

The advantage is flexibility—you aren't tied to one cloud vendor. A major con is that, since multi-cloud tech is evolving so fast, you can be left with a skills gap if you can't retain talent.

Don't Let Your Business Become a Victim of it's Own Success

Here is the link to my article:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/dont-let-your-business-become-victim-its-own-success-praveen-puri/

Is freeium technology a good business model for tech companies?

I am a strategy consultant who has worked with technology companies considering the freemium model.

While there have been some notable successes with the freemium model, most companies that implement it do not succeed because only a very small percentage of users ever become paid customers, and the gap between free and paid customers become too great.  When this gap occurs, the company can't recoup its recurring expenses.

There are 3 better alternatives:

1. The best is the free trial model, where the company offers a free trial of their complete version and, after a certain amount of time, the user must leave or convert to a paid customer.  

2. The application is free, but there are one-time purchases.  This model works very well for mobile games.  This model is different than freemium because it does not depend on a small subset of users becoming ongoing subscribers.  Instead, because purchases are one-off, a higher percentage of customers will buy on occasion.

3. The application is free, but consulting / services are offered for a fee.  In this case, since consulting / services command a higher fee than subscription charges, companies that elect this model have a much better chance to cover expenses, and generate a profit.

Results over flash: How Chicago-based startups lead the nation in VC returns

My latest Chicago Business Journal column is out:


https://www.bizjournals.com/chicago/news/2019/03/03/how-chicago-startups-lead-nation-in-vc-retruns.html