Talk by Dan Warmenhoven….

 Many of you might be wondering ( i wonder many ) that what the hell is this post …

well , this post is about the talk given by this dude , dan , and i am writing this because kansal asked to note down minutes of the discussion ( he did not attend it ) and it is a weekend so quite free and i really felt like blogging today ….

so this guy dan ( who is this ?) is an engineer enterprenaur who is now the CEO of Net Apps. (have ever heard of it ?) who is responsible for turning this small company in 1993  with only 40 employees to now a huge company , worth 3 billion dollars and employing more than 7000 people now … and if you need any evidence whether  net apps is a huge company  , then find it on google …( he showed that virtually netapps is related to  virtually every electronic product and big electronic companies…)  it is in fortune list of 500 best companies and forbes list of 100 best companies to work …  After this introduction , he asked us that do not you think you now feel  ashamed that you have never heard of net apps ??:-)..

S o the talk was basically aimed at transition of this guy , dan , from an engineer to a CEO … , his ups and downs , his priorities and his ‘funde ’ to young enterprenaurs …

let me first come to his personal life … His father was an imp. employee of General Foods , a company in US , and had an huge impact on his mind as far as management abilities are related . They always had to keep shifting from one place to another . The other thing which had an imp. influence on him was  his great love for mathematics( he put that in exactly these words !!) . At age of 16 , he had decided that he would become the CEO of a company that would crack into fortune 500 best companies (wow!! what an aim !!) so he decided to analyze the various options . Since he had strong mathematics , so he applied to MIT and was selected there but when he went there he found that there is too much of theory in MIT , so he applied for Princeton and joined the mathematics department there , but soon he found that you can study in princeton mathematics department for 4 years without even coming across a number even once ( very much similiar to MAL 124) so soon he left that also ( there he also came across fermat’s last theorem and was fascinated by it ( i think he was only fascinated !!), he knew that some other guy from princeton solved it , to which i ( was sitting in front row , not very common) said that it was andrew wiles , and then he with a sign of disgust he said ” ah ! andrew got all the credit !! ) , and joined the computer department , from which he completed his engineering , basically he was into hardware components more… Then after that he got a job offer from IBM , but after 5 months he left that company too , as he was not thrilled by the kind of work he was doing , so he came back into academics and studied for some more time and then after many companies ( during which he told that he got deviated from his idea of breaking into top 500)… he finally came into Net Apps . it was a company in shackles so he went to their directors and ‘twisted ‘ their arm , to which they made him CEO and since then it has been an ever increasing curve for them….

Let me now  write down his funde( these are for those who want to become a CEO)…

1.  Whatever aim you have , write it down on a piece of paper and think why i want this , in short write your goals and motives ( He said that if you want to be a very good CEO then money, fame  should not be the motives .. instead seeing a group of people under your leadership doing something creative ( This was not his motive actually ) is the best motive )

2. Now once you have chosen your goals , see what are the resources and options available to you and plan your future events according to it ….

The first two steps are not self evaluation , these are actually the things you want to do .. and not any kind of evaluation of yourself…

3. This is the tricky one …. Have good mentors , who can evaluate you ( he said self evaluation is actually not the best judge) … this was tricky in sense that when one of the listener asked him that what if he did not get such good mentors . then what ?? to which he replied that he was lucky enough to get them ….

4. The million dollar ‘funda’ which he gave was that one has to make a balance when to take your ego out of pocket and when to keep it in inside ( if you have your ego always in front of you , then you cannot gain enough faith of your employees and if you do not take it out at any instant , then you are not going to survive….)

5. There  was another thing he told that as CEO one needs a very broad opinion , so during our undergraduate studies , we really have to broaden our horizon by choosing various other streams like economics, psychology, other  languages and all those things…

I hope i have jotted down most of things and kansal must be satisfied now and as for others sorry for boring them …

Butcher at its best…

My latest found love got the first taste of reality( no confidence , then no respect)…

ruthless !!! No mercy!! kara totally demolished shiva in parliamentary debate …

but the imp. point to note is shiva lost , not because they were short of points , but because they were weighed down by the sheer strength of the opposition , two of the best speakers in iit…

quite similiar to australia Vs bangladesh …..

Diff. fields but Same result!!

Ah !!! changed the fields from parliamentary debate to group debate , but the end results remain the same ….

once again i fucked up my speech , actually it is diff. to say i fucked up my sppech , actually i did not spoke at all .. ( the topic was once again whether sydney test was a landmark in cricket or not..) actually in a group you have to think of lot more options then have to say anything , i remained silent thinking that if i spoke , i would turn the group into a fish market , but after the debate i got the comment from the judge that i did not have the confidence to say my word in the group ( i agree i was little short of confidence, as it was my first official GD ) but saying it quite plainly was a big let down…

anyway we friends have decided to now give it a try a lot more often now…