Priv Bradoo

Priv Bradoo

• PhD on a gene discovery
• "Business was for losers"
• Am I empowered?
• Old business school 301
• PGSA 3rd board meeting
• 3 to 13
• Ironed out in retrospect
• New set of challenges
• Ecosystem has to be so entrenched
• Infused into individuals
• Could've been a scientist and could've been entrepreneurial.
• If you don't ask then you'll die not knowing.
• Opportunities exists but you have to put in the effort.
• Hold onto your core.
• Going to clean tech.
• Success is your ability is have a fully rational understanding of the challenges but an irrational understanding if how to overcome it.
• US didn't make sense for Lanzatech. China didn't work out.
• Changed to water clean tech.
• Singularity University
• Entrepreneurship is a mindset not a job
• Goal is to look inside; that there's more than one way.
• Dream big then dream bigger.
• Fail is subliminal. Ask how many times they have failed. If they haven't failed, then don't hire them.
• Learn.
• Let 1000 flowers bloom.

• Branding
• Non-for-profit seed fund for businesses.
• Spark counted as work experience.

Derek Handley

Hyperfactory:

• 2001
• Mobile advertising communications.
• Agencies didn't know how big or how fast the mobile advertising would get.
• Realized that the agencies would start to competing against each other so decided to go straight to the client.
• Connect brands with their consumers using mobile SMS.
• Business plan becomes a bog scribble.
• Believed in the vision.
• Checking-in to make site you're going towards the goal.
• Using New Zealand as a test bed doesn't really work.
• Get a foot in with Saachi & Saachi through a friend.
• Dad had to mortgage his house for a quarter of a million dollars.
• Prepared to take the risk to see the rewards?
• Trouble: you have money. Tend to spend it too fast. Lose focus. Went to raise money from the market too late because of the global financial crisis.
• Trim down the business.
• When looking for capital, they got an offer to sell the business to a media company.
• Took one year to wind back and correct the misalignment and different visions and bad hires.
• Unwritten values hampered the hiring process.
• Global benchmarking.
• Time. Start early. The later you start, the more barriers that will come up.
• If the customer wants customized products then you end up being a customized services business.

Concurrent Python using transactional memory

Speaker: Fuad Tabba

"Parallelism is hard"

• Figure out the parallelism in the application.
• Figure out the required synchronisation. How do you protect the critical sections? Race conditions, deadlocks, livelocks. Locks take away the parallelism you had hoped to achieve.
• Locks have inherent overhead.

Python uses one "Global Interpreter Lock" to protect shared resources.

Transactional memory: Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability.

The use of transactional memory is to abstract away critical sections so that parallel programs can become easier to write.

In the Sun Rock Processor (which has limited hardware support for transactional memory), there are two caches:

• L1 Cache tracks memory locations that have been read and written to.
• Write buffer stores tentative writes (uncommitted transactions).

Cache coherence protocol is used to detect transaction conflicts. The physical size of the caches limit the size of the transactions. When a transaction is committed, the new values have to be propagated to each processor. Transactions can abort/fail for unspecified reasons.

SGI

• Simulation examples (Hardship)
• Bandwidth of copper wire doesn't keep up with bandwidth of processors.
• Latency of conducts not improving.
• Fibre optics not very fast. Only air core; but increases available bandwidth.
• mpi_reduce >> mpi_waitall, mpi_reduce, mpi_barrier, mpi_recv.
• Ethernet chip to offload communication.
• Memory chip speeds have not increased.
• Bandwidth/Latency.
• Linux -> Computer frontend -> Matrix of computing resources.
  

Experience with and potential of hardware transactional memory

• Rock processor
• Everyone needs to do concurrent programming. Not just OS or VM developers.
• Essence of TM: ability to access multiple memory locations in an atomic transaction, without specifying how atomicity is achieved.
  
• Using one lock: not scalable but mimicks transactions. Parallel critical sections.
• Finer grained locking.
• Best effort hardware transactional memory - Hardware can abort. Problems raised to the software level.
• Abort feedback important.
• Speculative haredware features gave subtle bugs.
• Lock elision.
• Doubled ended queues.

Bill Payne

Friends, Family and Fools (3x investment levels)

• Unsophisticated
• 1 -2 times a lifetime
• Passive
• Gift?

Angels (1x investment levels)

• Time and money
• Active
• Investing in entrepreneur
• Accredited
• Savvy

Venture Capitalist (1x investment levels)

• Institutional money
• Large portfolios
• Invest in company
• Limited partnership

Capital lifecycle













The funding gap

• Between Angel and VC.
• $1 US <--> $4 million US.
• Entrepreneurs: Go where investors are.

NDA

• Not motivated to steal technology.
• Most Angels and VC will nto sign.
• Write non-confidential business plans.

Friends, Family & Fools

• Debt, equity or gift?

Angels

• Accredited investors
• Exited entrepreneurs
• "Mad Money": Money set aside to lose
• Range of roles
• Lead investor
• Investor/advisor
• Passive investor
  

Motivation

• Venture capitalists make money
• Return on Investment
• Staying involved

Business plans

• Elevator pitch: Verbal. Attract interest. Don't close.
• PowerPoint: Verbal. 10 pages, 20 min, > 30pt font.
• Executive summary: Written. Attract interest. Don't close.
• Full Business Plan: Written. Validation score card. Write full plan first.

Evaluating deals

• Management team > Opportunity > IP > Funding
• Investing in the business, investing in you.

Fundable management teams

• Vertical experience
• Balanced / Complete team
• Coachable
• Leadership
• CEO experience

Size of opportunity

• High gross margin
• Scalability
• Large niche market
• Unfair competitive advantage
• Ready for customers

Angel investing process

• Pre-screening
• Screening
• Due Diligence: Also check investors
• Investment presentation
• Follow up
• Closing
• 1 in 72 who apply receive investment

Five mistakes to avoid

1. Don't take dumb money. Someone who is passive or does not help you.
2. Don't elaborate in describing your product / technology.
3. Don't overestimate market size.
4. Don't ball park addressable market size as a percentage.
5. Don't press the first mover advantage.

Finding money is time consuming.

Prefer to see a company with entrepreneurs with majority control of the company. not interested in taking control of the company. Prefer to keep entrepreneurs motivated.

Lack of execution on the part of the entrepreneurs.

If the total investment is more than $10 million US then company would probably not succeed.

Self-Sabotage

Patterns of behaviour

• Overcommitting
• Never saying no
• Getting distracted
• Perfectionism (measuring against)

Impostures syndrome

• One step away from being found out as a fraud
• Keep being an impostor
• Others are also impostors

Saying no

• Automatic Negative Thoughts (ANTs)
• More Accurate Thoughts (MATHs)
• ANTs ... and so ... MATHs

It's the thought that counts

• Depends what you do with the thoughts.
• Event -> Beliefs (intervening probabilities) -> Feelings

Twisted thinking (wrong conclusions -> wrong actions)

• All or nothing
• Over generalisation
• Mental filter
• Discounting the positives
• Jumping to conclusions
• Magnification
• Emotional reasoning (feelings as facts)
• Shoulds (assuming how things should be)
• Labelling
• Personalisation and blame

Procrastination

• Avoidance strategies
• Action -> Motivation -> Action -> More action
• Break into smaller pieces
• Procrastinators: Leaders of Tomorrow

Time management

• Velcro fingers
• The three D's
• Do it
• Diarise
• Ditch it
• Pareto principle (80/20)
• 20% of the work leads to 80% of the output

Circles of influence

• Core: Can control
• Inner circle: Can influence
• Outer circle: Can't control

Writing is not recording, it is thinking