angel investing: top 5 reasons why indie films are like startups

When I tell people that I’ve been an angel investor for five years, they naturally assume I mean investing in tech startups. I do live in Silicon Valley after all, and it is true that since 2007, I have invested in a number of successful (and some not-very-successful) startups. 

But that same year, I also did my very first investment in an independent film, and I’ve learned a lot about that industry in the past five years. I think it’s a good time to reflect back.

Incredibly, the number one question I get asked by people who have no problem with the idea of investing in the latest unproven iPhone app or social gaming company is:  Aren’t independent films really, really risky??

You bet they are. But then again, so are tech startups.  

It’s rumored that 90% of startups and 90% of indie films don’t make any money for their investors.   I don’t know for certain, but my guess is that the failure rate of startups may actually be higher than independent films. 

The main difference is that when a startup fails (and they do, often, trust me – in the press we usually only hear about the successful ones), as an investor you usually end up with nothing less than the clichéd worthless stock certificates that you can use as wallpaper in your bathroom!

At least with a film, even if it’s not a financial success, you have a finished product that you can watch and recommend and enjoy.  And when a film is both an artistic and financial success, it can be rewarding in ways that most tech startups never approach.

In fact, I got involved in film investing for the same reason that I got involved in startup investing – as a way to help entrepreneurs who had an idea that they wanted to bring to the world.  Since then I’ve invested in and become an executive producer of quite a few indie films (see my imdb page for some of them) – starting with smaller budget films like Turqouise Rose and Raspberry Magic, and more recently higher visibility projects like the visually stunning and insightful documentary Thrive: What on Earth Will It Take? and the upcoming horror/fantasy flick Knights of Badassdom.

Unlike startups though, there isn’t really a good eco-system for angel investing in films, and young film-makers usually struggle to get their first film made. Similarly most angel investors are at a loss when navigating the treacherous waters of Hollywood.

That’s how I got involved in my first film, shot on the Navajo reservation in the Four Corners region of Arizona.  Travis Hamilton, a young film-maker fresh out of film school, had a vision for a film about a Navajo girl.  Not only did he not have a track record, but he was in a very un-commercial genre, and most seasoned investors weren’t going to give money to him, (you can read a little bit about this investment in an article in the wall street journal blog which mentioned my first investment, and a group called Film Angels that I’m a part of in Silicon Valley,  here ).

But like startups, when they go right, indie films can be quite lucrative (think My Big Fat Greek Wedding).   So in support of independent film-makers everywhere, and to encourage my fellow Silicon Valley angel investors (of which there are lots) to support film entrepreneurs (of which there are also lots), here are my top 5 reasons why investing in independent films is like investing in tech startups:

1.  It all begins with an entrepreneur and an idea, usually one that nobody will fund because “it’s too risky”.  OK, so not exactly.  In film it usually starts with a script or a book.  In many smaller budget indie films, the scriptwriter is often the director and main producer, meaning that they’re basically a one-man show.  Usually filmmakers who think of themselves as entrepreneurs and not “creative types” are more likely to get their project off the ground.
   
   
2.      You have to pitch to “the big boys”, but usually it’s usually small money that gets a project off the ground. Just like entrepreneurs here in Silicon Valley, who pitch too early and too often to “the big boys”, the venture capital firms on Sand Hill Road, so filmmakers end up pitching to studios.  Like studios, VC firms will turn down most of the pitches they hear and invest in only a few per year.  Like entrepreneurs, filmmakers who have been turned down have to find angels to invest in their projects.  Many big budget films start off as options on literary properties.   A few years ago I met one of the guys who bought the movie rights to Batman in 1980, and it took almost a whole decade before it became a big budget production.   Of course, like entrepreneurs who take too much VC money and lose control of their company, this can happen if you go the standard Hollywood route.   In this case, the original Batman rights holders lost control of the project creatively and financially.   The alternative to studio money is to go the independent route, where filmmakers can keep more creative control and influence their productions.
   
   
3.      Later stage investments are less risky than earlier stage investments.  While most of us in Silicon Valley know about startup investments – seed round, series A, series B, late stage, etc., I didn’t really understand that the same is true for film.  The stages are a bit different – usually the development stage can begin even before the script has been written, then there’s pre-production, production, post-production, and then distribution – which involves p&a funds (print and advertising) for a theatrical release.  It turns out that just like investing in a late stage company is usually less risky than investing in two guys and a business plan, so the later stage investments tend to be less risk - i.e. think DST’s investment in Facebook after it was already successful.  In fact, there are entire funds dedicated to providing finishing funds for a film and p&a monies to films.
4.      It’s all about distribution.  While a few startups succeed because they have a great product, most succeed because of their distribution channels – getting a good product to the target market.  The same is true of indie films – the films which are successful financially are usually the ones who understand the distribution side of the business and have a core audience that they are able to reach.  Not all films gets theatrical distribution – this is a fact of the film industry, but film-makers who understand this are the ones who are prepared for it.  Most profits from most films actually come from DVD releases, not the box office numbers that the press focuses on.  Of course the more anticipated a film is, the easier it is to get the right distribution channels in place.
   
   
5.      Stars are helpful, but not necessary. In the startup world, VC’s love to invest in entrepreneurs who’ve “been there and done that”.  In films, it’s even more pronounced – even a smaller budget indie film can benefit from having a star  - think Bill Murray in Lost in Translation.  But television stars can be a great boon to an indie film too - in my upcoming film Knights of Badassdom, we are lucky enough to have Peter Dinklage, who won an emmy for Game of Thrones, along with Summer Glau, who made fan-boy fame in the Firefly and The Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles and Ryan Kwanten, of True Blood fame.
   The most innovative filmmakers are able to get B or C-list stars to make brief appearances in their films, and that’s enough to get the film going.  But it’s also possible to have a breakout hit with no well known stars – think of Bend It Like Beckham, which launched the careers of Keira Kneightly and Parminder Nagra.   The same is true of startups – while it would be nice to invest in Mark Zuckerburg’s new company (if he ever leaves Facebook), it’s probably more profitable (and likely) to invest in the next Mark Zuckerburg who’s starting the next big thing.
   

Well that’s a very quick overview on what is a pretty complex topic. Of course there are also many reasons why film investing is DIFFERENT like startup investing, and maybe I’ll list those in another post.

In the meantime, if you are thinking about investing in a startup to support a tech entrepreneur, why not think about also investing in an indie film to support a film entrepreneur?

Zen and the Entrepreneur: The Startup Files

I just celebrated my birthday last weekend and as always, I found it a good time to reflect on the past year and the upcoming year. (Perhaps this is a good idea for all of us, since December 17 was also the day the war in Iraq was finally, finally over, and also the same day that Kim Jong Il, the leader of North Korea, keeled over).

A birthday seems to me like a more natural time to make resolutions for the next year, so that's what I did. One of mine was to write more. Which brings me here.

When I started this blog years ago, my plan was to write mostly about startups, along with some occasional tidbits about zen, meditation, science fiction, or anything else which popped into my head since the last entry, as long as I could somehow relate it back to the experience of starting and growing a company.

Like most things in life, it’s pretty easy to get dragged off track!

Two obvious examples: when I spent at year at Stanford Business School, this blog became about what life was like at the GSB (which led my classmates to have a running joke - whenever anyone said anything really funny or controversial, they’d to turn to me and blurt out: “Don’t put that in the blog!!”).

And, just last week, when I’d restarted the blog after a 1.5 year hiatus, I felt compelled to write about the Daily Show’s (wildly inaccurate) portrayal of my interview with them (See The Top 10 Things that the Daily Show with John Stewart Got Wrong About Tap Fish).

Of course, I'm sure there will be plenty of controversial and off-topic posts in the year to come (I promise!), but for now I want to shift the blog back to where I started. In this spirit, I thought I’d re-link to some of my favorite posts about… you guessed it… entrepreneurship (this is, after all, called the Zen Entrepreneur blog).

I’d like to dedicate these posts to those fearless individuals who, in the past year or in the upcoming year, despite the terrible economy, are willing to leave their well paying jobs, work long hard hours for little (if any) immediate reward, to take a risk and start a new company. In the process you will literally be creating something out of nothing, hopefully creating lots of jobs in the process.

I won't deny it can be stressful (if you've never had employees depending on you for their paychecks, month after month, or a mortgage of your own to pay without any paycheck coming in, or had investors and/or customers literally yelling at you ... well, welcome to the everyday world of a startup founder). But it can also be very rewarding on the days when things go right. And there are definitely some of those days too!

Here's to you:

• The Curious Case of Steve Jobs: Intuition and the Entrepreneur

  one-liner: “Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. ”

• Social Entrepreneur: From a Wacky Idea to the Nobel Prize

  one-liner : “Even the wackiest idea can make a huge difference. This happened when most of us had no idea what micro-loans were.”

• The Bootstrapper’s Dilemma

  One-liner: “When you got no cash, the real question is: To Focus or Not To Focus??"

• Build it Fast, But Make it Last

  0ne-liner: “Is your Agile really better than his Waterfall for a new software product? Is there really any good methodology for building software in a startup?”

• Poetry for Entrepreneurs: Love My Startup More Than You.

  one-liner: "Silly poem I wrote to the tune of an old jimmy when I was kicking around unemployed in Silicon Valley."

Here's to an interesting year ahead for all of you who are already on, or about to jump onto, your own entrepreneurial journey!

Top 10 Things the Daily Show with Jon Stewart Got Wrong about Tap Fish!

Some of you may have seen the segment last night on the Jon Stewart show called “Video Game Dealers” where correspondent Aasif Mandvi interviewed me and a family/parent in New England whose kids had used their parents iTunes account to spend more on our game, Tap Fish, than they should have or were authorized to by their parents (NOTE: the parent got a refund from Apple long before this interview, and had given the kids his iTunes password, things that would have been obvious if they had shown the whole or even parts of conversation; more on what they DIDN'T show you below).

Now I enjoy Jon Stewart’s comedy as much as the next guy, and generally find it funny and outrageous, which was the reason I decided to do the interview in the first place (more on that later too!).

I think most people who watch it realize that the Daily Show is a “fake news show” and will take this all in good humor – CEO gets ripped by Fake News show which edited the footage to make him look bad.

But for the few who think this was a “serious journalistic piece” (and you’d be surprised at how many people are tweeting or blogging that this was a serious expose – probably people that don’t watch the Daily Show much) rather than a "fake news" piece that was staged to leave viewers with a certain impression.

So, taking a cue from two other late night comedy shows (David Letterman’s Top 10 Lists, and Saturday Night Live’s Seth Meyers Really!?! segment), I’d like to present my own top 10 list of things that the Daily show segment “conveniently” forgot to mention or edited out or otherwise just got wrong from my interview with them. Trust me, I was there and saw the whole thing, unlike the few minutes shown on TV.

1.) The Setup – Saving the Economy. Really?!? They did almost 4 hours of interviewing/filming in our offices. The producer Brennan told me that the story was about how bad the economy is and how this one sector (virtual goods based mobile and social games) were doing well and creating jobs, and being a fan of the show, I was up for some lighthearted comedy. They actually filmed a bunch of stupid stuff (but funny, more on this later) that they didn’t show to convince me this was a light-hearted piece about the virtual economy. Turns out that wasn’t the focus of the story at all – the story was “Silicon Valley Company exploits little kids!” Now why would a reputable journalistic institution like the Daily Show lie to the people they were interviewing? LOL – don’t answer that I think I already know the answer.

2.) Reviving The Dead Fish costs $99. Really?!? The worst part of the clip was that they made it seem that it costs $99 to revive dead fish in Tap Fish! That’s ridiculous. It costs 1 Fishbuck = 4 cents to revive ALL of your dead fish. And you start with some free fishbucks and you also get free fishbucks on certain level ups. You can also have your friends revive your dead fish for you so it doesn’t cost you anything! I’ve actually seen some people, after watching this segment, suggesting online that Tap Fish charges hundreds of dollars when your fish die or for a single fish! Ridiculous! Most virtual items are less than a dollar and most users (millions of them) never pay a dime and play for free!

And how much does it cost to feed your virtual fish with virtual fish food to keep them alive? (hint: it's completely free!). But, you say, that's not what Aasif led us to believe on TV! Really?!?

3.) Was the Game Designed/Targeted Primarily For Young children?. One of the takeaways for most viewers from this clip was that this was a game originally designed for young children who can’t even read! Really??
Totally not true. When we designed the game, we were looking at Facebook where aquarium games were very popular – and the average player, according to various blogs was a 43 year old woman! We figured that many of those people who liked to play these kinds of free to play games online would want to play them on their iPhones too.

Do adults in their 30’s and 40’s play Tap Fish? Yes there are LOTS of them. Do college students play Tap Fish? Yes LOTS of them. How do we know? Many of our users are on the Facebook Tap Fish page and fans of the game, and many more email us every day, and you’re not allowed to have a Facebook account if you’re under 13.
Do children play Tap Fish? Of course they do – and when parents (and even Daily Show personnel) download it, they see a big warning “Tap Fish is a free game but some items can be purchased for real money. If you don’t want this you can turn off in app purchases.”

But why didn’t I make this point to Aasif during the interview that this isn’t only a game for kids? Of course I did repeatedly, but like just about 99% of what I told them about the game it WAS NOT SHOWN!! Why not? I think it’s pretty obvious why not – it didn’t fit the script (more on the script below).

4.) One click to charge $99! Really?? Even worse, they made it seem like the only way to spend money on the game was to click on the $99 option in iTunes (the only price point shown) and poof you get charged! Just like that!

Why did they then skip the part where iTunes pops up a password dialog dialog that comes up every time you want to make a purchase? Also, they didn’t show the part where I said that most purchases were for 99 cents or $1.99 - why would they edit that relevant information out? Again I think I know the answer.

Now, back in 2010 here was an actual issue with Apples’ in app purchasing where iTunes didn’t ask you your password for 15 minutes after you installed the app. Apple fixed it in early 2011, and this got a lot of press in our eco-system and in the mainstream press.

Aasif and Brennan (the producer at the Daily Show) also didn’t mention that unlike other games (Tap Zoo, Smurf Village, etc.), we (Tap Fish) were one of the only games that actually disabled in-app purchases the first time users played the game so that this 15 minute window wouldn’t come into play, back in 2010, when this was a real issue for us and Apple wasn’t asking for passwords all the time.

5.) The Phone Call with the Parent. Is That What Really Happened?? A big hoopla was made about my hemming and hawing about speaking to a parent whose kids had charged too much on their iTunes account. But they didn’t show the actual phone call! Why not?? Here’s why:

a. During the call, the parent admits that he gave his kids his iTunes password that allowed them to make charges, which he shouldn’t have done.

b. I told the parent we’d be happy to work with him to get his money back from Apple – then the parent admitted that Apple refunded the charges a few days after “the incident” happened so this wasn’t a financial issue.

c.I actually took the time to speak to the parent, address his concerns, and explain to him how in app purchasing works, how to turn it off, and why it was bad for us when this kind of thing happens – where it counts – financially! The parent got his money back, and Apple got their "profit" from us even though this wasn't a real sale for us nor did we make any money from it. I’m not saying this was a good situation but making it seem like we were profiting from the situation was completely ridiculous, since we’re the only ones who lose money in these situations!

d. The parent actually thanked me by the end of the call and thought I was being reasonable.

e. The Daily Show producer, Brennan, told me that they probably wouldn’t show the actual phone conversation because if they did, I would come across as an “honest CEO who cares about his customer” and that we weren’t “outrageous enough”! They actually told me this – but decided to show the setup of the call and then skip the whole call and not show our actual conversation!!

f. At one point, I can’t remember if it was Aasif or Brennan, but they told me I should have called the parent a “f****ing idiot” for giving his kids his iTunes password. Maybe that’s how the TV guys in New York think about these kids and parents, but it’s certainly not how we approach this issue, and not how I dealt with it personally.

g. They edited in lots of “hemming and hawing” when I said that we prefer to deal with customers via email. After 4 hours of sitting in a conference room answering stupid questions from Aasif like “Isn’t playing Tap Fish really like being with a hooker??”, I was pretty exhausted, then they sprung this phone call on me, Jerry Springer style. Yes, like every other mobile game company on the planet, we prefer to deal with customers via email! We have millions of monthly users and there’s no way we could deal with them all on the phone. At least we have people answering email, which is more than I can say for a lot of mobile game companies. Could the Daily Show, which has millions of monthly viewers, take phone calls from viewers? Hell, even I can’t get the CEO of the Daily Show, Jon Stewart, on the phone, and I was actually on the show!

6.) Do you have to pay to play the game? Really? A funny quote was “Unless you spend money, the game sucks”. But, as Aasif mentioned 20 million people have downloaded Tap Fish and many more have downloaded other games. What he didn’t say (and I did say during the interview) was that most users play the game for free!

On any given day, less than 1% of users actually pay, the other 99% play free. This is how the freemium game model works – which companies like Zynga, Pocket Gems, Capcom, and even EA are now adapting. But millions of Tap Fish players have never spent a dime, but played the game for weeks or months! Why would our trustworthy fake news correspondent not mention that? And why would our trustworthy comedy show editors not show me saying that - which I said like 5 or 10 times during the interview! Really?!? (Again, I think you can figure out why).

7.) Are Inapp purchases evil?? Really? If you watch the segment where they’re showing Tap Fish in the app store closely, you’ll see the description starts with: “Please Note: Tap Fish is completely free to play, but it allows purchasing of items with real money using in-app purchases. If you don’t want this, please turn off inapp purchases”. Yeah, if you look closely it's there in the video clip but was cut away from quickly so u couldn't really see it. Of course, In app purchases are new, so people can get confused about how they work or how to turn them off. We do our best to explain this to players, and those who download apps even after reading the warning still download.

Do unauthorized purchases still happen? Yes sometimes they do. But on any given day, only 1% of players actually pay. And only 1% of those (yes that’s .01% have this scale of issue). Saying that inapp purchases are evil are like saying that because credit card numbers can get stolen and lots of unauthorized charges can happen, credit cards are evil!
I actually agree that as an industry we need to make people more aware of how inapp purchases work, because as a game developer unauthorized charges actually cost us money, a point I made several times during the interview but again was ignored because the script said to make it look like we "profited" from unauthorized charges made by kids!

8.) How much money do apps really make? Several people online expressed outrage that Aasif mentioned that we were making “$1 million per month” on this game. What I actually said was that I couldn’t share our current financials (because we're owned by a public company), but the most successful games on the iPhone, including games like Dragonvale, Smurfs Village, Angry Birds, and Tap Zoo were making significantly more than $1 million per month in sales. Those are of course only the top few apps out of over 500,000 apps. Most apps make very little - not even enough to support a single full time employee. We weren't making anywhere near this much on Tap Fish via iTunes at the time of the interview - and Apple just released a list of the top grossing apps this year and we weren't even in the top 25.

Keep in mind, Zynga alone does $1 billion a year (yes with a B) from free games like Farmville and Cityville, where a small percentage of people pay for virtual goods, and they’re going public next week!

I also explained (another clip that wasn't shown!) that to be a real player in the mobile gaming space you must also spend something like $1 million per month - in salaries (yes I know most viewers won’t want to believe we, unlike the media, are actually creating jobs both in the US and abroad), in advertising and marketing expenses - so profit is pretty hard to come by in a cut-throat industry like the iPhone gaming world where we’re all trying to grow a business. Really?!?

9). Splicing and Dicing Can Make You Look Bad. Really? With 4 hours of footage, you can splice in any stupid expression or thing from anywhere in the footage to wherever you think it’ll make the person look the worst. There were a number of times when they took a facial expression or answer from a different part of the interview. At the end of the interview Aasif sat there and actually put on a bunch of different “stupid expressions” so they could edit them in – and they certainly took some of what I’d said from the 4 hours of interviews and edited them in at inopportune times! (Notably where they made me look squirmy and uncomfortable for a long time).

10) Funny or Manipulative or True or Scripted? Coming under the guise of “we think it’s funny that you sell virtual fish and that you’re the only part of the economy doing well,” they shot hours of gags about the game itself and how it worked: at one point Aasif even poured actual fishfood on top of an iPhone in an attempt to poke fun at the game (leaving our conference room carpet full of fishfood which we had to call in a cleaning crew to clean up, mind you).

At one point, Aasif put on a hardhat to walk around our office where “virtual goods were being constructed”. Where did these gags end up? Nowhere – they didn’t show up online or in the segment.

Instead, during a break I peaked at Aasif’s notes, which he had been studying religiously when not interviewing me, and they were a collection of: ”Make him say XXXXXX. Here are 5 or 10 different ways to ask questions so that you can get him to say XXXXXX. We really need to get him to say XXXXXX on tape.”.

An interview where the questions and the answers are in a script?? Really?!?

So, there you have it. The Top 10 ways in which the Daily Show Got It Wrong (and that’s only the top 10 - I could go on and on).

Despite being almost entirely inaccurate, editing out the most relevant information about my conversation with the parent (and making me look squirmy when they sprung it on me), believe it or not, there were still a few things about the segment that I found funny, so I guess I have to just laugh at it.

But I didn’t find the implication that we’re consciously out to exploit kids funny at all (nor should Jon Stewart or Aasif Mandvi or the Daily Show Producers), and they could’ve shown this wasn't the case, if they'd wanted to, by simply showing my actual conversation with the parent on the phone! But the parent and I were "too reasonable" and weren’t swearing at each other enough!! To say that is our primary business purpose is insulting to the millions of players who have played for free, it’s insulting to (the very few) entrepreneurs who are building the new economy and creating jobs here in the US.

Why if this wasn’t shown a “fake news show" meant to make people laugh, I might actually think they were being dishonest journalism and be upset with them!

Still, their conclusion about what Tap Fish “teaches” kids – that if something dies you can throw money at it to make it live again. That is pretty silly (and ok, kinda funny).

The real lesson for me from being on the Daily Show? Welcome to show business – where nothing is quite what it seems, and heroes and villans are made in the script and the editing room, and have very little to do with real life.

The Curious Case of Steve Jobs: Intuition and the Entrepreneur

“Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

- Steve Jobs, Stanford Commencement, 2005

Wow it’s been a long time since I’ve written an entry (the last once was written just before I sold my iPhone gaming company, Gameview Studios, to DeNA) in 2010. I’d like to re-start my blog with two topics that are dear and near to my heart: following your intuition and the death of Steve jobs.

Steve’s death on October 5, 2011 caused a literal outflowing of emotion, analysis and opining: hundreds, perhaps thousands of pages have been written in the last month alone since his death. And that’s not counting Walter Isaacson’s 600 plus page biography.

Some of these focused on his achievements at Apple and Pixar, some on his tumultuous personality, some on his “insanely great” products like the Mac and the iPhone, some on how he ran Apple after his comeback, some on the impact he’s had on (count them) at least five different industries, some comparing him to Walt Disney and Henry Ford combined.

So...what’s left to say?

For me one of the most inspiring (and overlooked) aspects of Jobs’ career and philosophy was his reliance on his own intuition even in the face of the “noise of others’ opinions”. I haven’t seen much written on it, so using his own words as much as possible, here goes:

Most writers about successful business persons like to try to reduce what they did to a set of pithy “principles” you can follow to be just “like Mike”. With Jobs, I think that’s pretty much impossible. It’s like asking for the “step-by-step formula” for how to “think different”! If it could be reduced to a formula…well you get the point.

Intuition vs. Analysis

Jobs attributed much of his success to his ability to follow his own “inner knowing”, even when analysts and the “experts” disagreed. He was quoted as saying he hated focus groups because consumers “don’t know what they want until we show it to them”. Instead, he insisted on having an “intuitive” feel for when a product was “just right” and when it felt “wrong”.

This is pretty much the opposite of what you will learn from business schools (even more progressive west coast ones like Stanford) about building products and companies. It’s even different from what most venture capitalists and startup gurus here in the valley will tell you - which is to analyze a market, make sure the analysis confirms that the market is “big enough”, then interview the people in that market to find out their needs. It’s kind of ironic that one of the biggest icons of Silicon Valley would disagree with the way business is being done here.

Tim Cook, who replaced Jobs as the CEO at Apple, talks about following his own intuition when he decided to join Apple after meeting with Jobs. “Engineers are taught to make a decision analytically but there are times when relying on gut or intuition are indispensable.”

Where did Jobs get this mindset from? A big part of his reliance on intuition vs. analysis came as a result of his own search for truth. When he was young, he dropped out of Reed College (again the opposite of what logic would tell you to do if you want to be a successful entrepreneur) and followed his own intuition down several notable paths.

The first path, his quest for enlightenment, led him first on a trip to India chasing some guru, and later transformed into his study of Zen meditation here in the Bay area. “The people in the Indian countryside don’t use their intellect like we do, “ said Jobs. “They use their intuition instead, and their intuition is far more developed than in the rest of the world.”

He concluded with: “Intuition is a very powerful thing.” (src: Isaacson's biography).

Continuing his search for enlightenment when he came back to the US in the 1970’s he experimented with Zen meditation (an interest he kept up for the rest of his life) and mind-altering drugs (which as far as I know, he did not keep up for the rest of his life). Now I can’t speak for LSD (since I’ve never taken it), but I can vouch that meditation can be indispensible for learning about different states of mind and teaching you how to follow your own intuition.

Steve Jobs said: “If you just sit and observe, you will see how restless your mind is. If you try to calm it, it only makes it worse, but over time, it does calm, and when it does, there’s room to hear more subtle things- that’s when your intuition starts to blossom and you start to see things more clearly and be in the present more. Your mind just slows down, and you see a tremendous expanse in the moment.”

According to his longtime friend, Daniel Kottke, who’d known him since his college days: “Steve is very much Zen. It was a deep influence. You see it in his whole approach of stark, minimalist aesthetics, intense focus.”

Zen influenced Steve Jobs in other ways too – including his appreciation of a minimalist ethic that rubbed off on his insistence that user interfaces and products be as simple as possible. When creating great products like the Macintosh and the original iPod, Jobs talked about having this intuitive knowing when something had met this ethic of simplicity and when it could be improved. Although he wasn't always right, he was right way more often than he was wrong.

Connecting the Dots: One thing leads to another

Of course, it’s not always easy to follow your intuition when it’s telling you something that’s different from what others tell you should “logically” be done. Jobs own life is a good example – ranging from his decision to drop out of Reed to what looked like a very poor investment decision to fund Pixar, a money-losing operation that he bought from George Lucas for $10 million in the eighties, and then continued to fund for years (to the tune of $50 million of his own personal money), until they came out with Toy Story in the nineties and became the landmark success story we know about today.

I think it only happens if you can have confidence in yourself and your own ability to find what’s right for you. Following your intuition often means follow your own path, even if you can’t see exactly where it’s taking you.

Jobs often gave an example from the time when he dropped out of college. He said that once he’d officially dropped out, he could take the classes that he “wanted to take” rather than the ones that “they were requiring him to take”, showing a streak of his habitual disrespect for authority.

He saw a flyers on campus for a calligraphy class, and decided to follow his intuition and take this class, where he learned about proportional fonts, serif vs. non-serif fonts. Jobs would say about this time: “It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating. None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life.”

Later, when it came time to design the Mac, he insisted that there be “fonts” of different types, rather than the usual stale green fonts that were popular at the time. Again in his own words:

“And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.”

This was perhaps the most important example of what Jobs referred to as “connecting the dots” – when something in your life unexpectedly connects to something at a far later date, but you are completely unaware of the influence it’ll have at the time.

I think that most successful entrepreneurs benefit from “connecting the dots” – bringing together seemingly unconnected experiences into a single whole that somehow is more than the sum of the parts. How do you know? You don’t – you have to have the courage though to follow your intuition.

I’ll end, as I began, with Steve Jobs in his own words from the now famous Stanford speech:

“Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

Aliens, Radio Signals, Warp Drive, and Dead Heads: SETI con asks "Are we alone?"

Anyone who’s been reading my blog will know that I’m a big fan of science fiction, and maybe even that I’m a big fan of scientific discovery, which is why I was excited to attend the first ever SETIcon in Santa Clara last weekend.

Although I had read a lot about SETI in the past, my main knowledge of the guys running SETI came from watching the movie Contact, starring Jodie Foster and based on the novel by astronomer Carl Sagan (of “billions and billions” fame).

Those of you who’ve seen the movie will recall Jodie Foster’s radio astronomer character (“Ellie Arroway”) being very upset when the funding for her search for extraterrestrial signals was cut off. In a last ditch effort, after being turned down for funding from everywhere including Hollywood (“Those guys have been making money from aliens forever!”), she ended up getting funding from an eccentric billionaire.

Whether art was imitating life or the other way around, SETI itself used to receive funding from NASA, but this was cut off in the 1990’s. Since then, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen (yes, whom some would call an eccentric billionaire) donated quite a bit of money to set up the Allen Radio Telescope array so that the search for ET could go on utilizing private funding.

For those of you who don’t know, SETI basically studies radio (and now light) signals from various stars in the night sky, looking for evidence of an “intelligent” signal that could only come from an “intelligent” species that at the very least has mastered radio technology. SETI stands for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and has been going on in some form or another for almost 50 years.

To date, no confirmed signal has been found, though there have been several “candidate” signals that could never be re-acquired for further study.

The SETI institute is located in Mountain View, CA, which is just down the road from where I live (another benefit of being in Silicon Valley), and I was glad to be able to attend this conference so easily (it was held in Santa Clara). There were attendees from as far away as India and Kuwait, and as close as well, Santa Clara.

A Blending of Science, Science Fiction, and the Grateful Dead??

Since science fiction (in all of its forms) has always been a great way to get the public excited about science (everything from the Alien Attack movies in the 50's to Star Trek in the 60's forward), I was glad to see that this conference was not just about Radio astronomy (which I'm sure is a fascinating subject in and of itself), but included an intelligent blending of scientists and sci-fictionists (for lack of a better term). In my opinion not only did this make the conference more fun, but it also helped to open up our imaginations a bit, something that is necessary because the whole idea of extra-terrestrial intelligence is still speculation.

Despite being the first year of SETIcon, and a relatively small number of attendees, there were some great speakers – all of whom were pretty easy to approach and get to know. Here's a small sampling of SETIcon:

• Mickey Hart - On Friday night, we were treated to seeing a preview of work from Mickey Hart – yes, that Mickey Hart, the drummer of the Grateful Dead , about the “rhythms of the universe”. It turns out he’s been collaborating with the scientists at the SETI institute working on a “sounds of the universe” DVD/CD. Mickey said he loves “timelines” and he always begins his books with a timeline that starts with “The Big Bang” from 13 billion years ago.
  For years, he’s wondered what this most primordial event of the universe (the Big Bang) might sound like. This DVD showed his on-going attempt to capture the sounds of the universe ("Everything is vibrating, so everything has a sound" - Mickey), and mix them with incredible visual images to make "art". Mickey pointed out that the Hindus and others speak of an original sound and the Greeks refer to the music of the spheres, so this isn't a new undertaking.
  Listening to this was almost like having a mystical experience, and added a bit of needed "right brain" creativity to what has been mostly a "left-brained" search for ET, and as a fan of the mystical, I enjoyed Mickey's presentation quite a bit. There were some deadheads in the audience, and you can bet they were more than a little excited to meet Mickey!
  
  
• Dr. Frank Drake – anyone whose investigated the scientific possibility of for Extra Terrestrial intelligence will know of Frank Drake, who started investigating whether radio signals could be coming from intelligent alien signals some 50 years ago, dubbed Project Ozma. Frank Drake is considered the Father of modern day SETI, and he is the creator the of the well known Drake Equation, which is an equation that tries to estimate the number of intelligent civilizations there may be in our galaxy. Anyone who’s looked up at the night sky, marveling at the number of stars and wondering how there couldn’t be any life out there amongst the billions of points of lights will intuitively understand the Drake equation. Wikipedia even has a section on it: click here .
  Basically if you plug in some assumptions about the number of earth like planets orbiting earth like stars, and how many of these might have life on them, and how many of those are intelligent, and how long those intelligent civilizations might last, you end up wtih an estimate of how many intelligent civilizations we might communicate with our galaxy.
  
  Of course the big thing that's open about the Drake Equation are the actual factors - which make the resulting number vary widely. Carl Sagan estimated the number to close to 1 million, while Frank Drake himself estimates closer to 10,000. No matter how you slice it though, it's very difficult to make the number come out to "1", which makes it unlikely we are alone! On Saturday night at the conference, we had a banquet honoring Frank’s 80th birthday and 50th anniversary of Project Ozma, which was a fitting way to start the first SETIcon.
  
  
• Dr. Jill Tartar. Jill is the director of SETI research at the SETI institute, and has a host of honors and recognition as a scientist and educator. Many say she was the inspiration for Jodie Foster’s character in the movie Contact, including being the point person for “pitching” for SETI funding after NASA discontinued it’s funding.
  
  
• Tim Russ and John Billingsley Star Trek fans will recognize these names. Tim Russ played the Vulcan Tuvok on the Star Trek: Voyager series, and John played Dr. Flox in Star Trek: Enterprise series. Tim is an amateur astronomer and really committed to both astronomy and the SETI cause, and it was great to hear him on several panels. Although I couldn’t go to all the sessions, I think that he played out one of the most thought-provoking scenarios about interstellar travel (More on this later).
  

Of course there were many other speakers, including Robert J. Sawyer, an award winning science fiction author (who was the author of the novel that the TV series Flash Forward was based on), Andre Bormanis (who was the science advisor for several Star Trek series), Seth Shostak, SETI’s senior astronomer, who also does their podcast “Are we alone?” each week, Kevin Grazier (science adviser for Battlestar Galactica, who finally answered the question, How does Galactica’s FTL engines work?), Robyn Asmiov (Isaac Asimov’s daughter), and many real scientists - astronomers, astrophysicists and astro-biologists.

The speakers included, on a more personal note, an old mentor of mine from MIT, Greg Papodopolous, who left MIT many years ago to become the Chief Techonology Officer at Sun Microsystems. I did a research project with Greg on parallel computing during my undergrad days at MIT, and it was great fun to see him again and learn that he'd been involved with SETI also.

So, Did we Answer the Question? Are We Alone?

OK , so by now you’ve probably guessed that attending this conference was fun (it definitely was!), and from the speaker list, you probably guessed that I got to mix with a lot of interesting personalities (I did, and am still in touch with some of them!).

But, did I learn anything? More importantly, did it answer the burning question: Are we alone?

Yes and No.

Yes I did learn something, and no it didn’t answer the question of whether we are alone or not (you’d probably have heard about it on CNN if the conference had gone that far!)

But the conference raised a number of related questions which are equally as interesting, and easier to discuss, which the panelists did enthusiastically. On this front, I think mixing science fiction authors and actors with professors and PhD’s was a very smart move, since these questions have no simple answers, and are still to a large part, a matter of speculation.

Here they are, in my humble opinion, five of the most interesting questions raised at SETICON 2010 (other than “Are we alone”, of course), in no particular order:

1. Should we be sending out signals to extra terrestrial societies? If so, what should we send? And Who speaks for the Earth?
   
   • This question came up again and again. Of course, SETI’s official charter is to look for signals, not to broadcast them. But there have been many broadcasts from Earth (including our TV signals starting from the 1940’s and 1950’s, as well as broadcast by Frank Drake from Arecibo, the big radio telescope in Peurto Rico).
     
     As eminent a scientist as Stephen Hawking has suggested that if we broadcast a signal, it could be picked up by a much more advanced civilization than ourselves, and …well you might see something like Independence Day (remember that movie with Will Smith)?
     Actually, joking aside, this a pretty serious concern, as many speakers pointed out that a less technologically advanced civilization has rarely withstood contact with a more technologically advanced civilization (case in point: the Native American population after contact with Europeans). Given my interest in both science fiction and native american history, I find this topic more than a little fascinating … I actually started writing a novel once about what might happen if a more technologically advanced alien civilization arrived here on Earth -it's called Synchronized - and this conference has led me to believe it's worth completing.
     
   
   


2. Will we ever develop warp drive and be able to travel to the stars?
   
   • The scientists discussed this at length along with the science fiction authors and consultants to TV shows like Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek. From the point of view of the scientists, this would require traveling faster than the speed of light, something that is not permitted by Einstein’s theories of relatively. Lots of interesting ideas were discussed for “folding space” which wouldn’t violate Einstein's general theory of relativity, but the answer was that it would take so much energy to do this as to be practically impossible. When many members of the audience objected, the scientist pointed out that they weren't saying this to be negative. In fact, most scientists would love to figure out a way to get around Einstein's laws (they'd land a nobel prize if they could), but as far as we know, travelling to the stars at faster than light speeds would violate the known laws of physics.
     
     I actually thought the best answer to this question came from Tim Russ, of Star Trek: Voyager fame, and the only member of the panel who had actually flown faster than light (at least in a TV series). He said to imagine that we were sitting at a similar symposium at the time of Columbus, and the question we were being asked wasn’t about traveling over the water to the other side of the earth, but of traveling to the moon. Using the technology of the time, wind power and sails, it would seem “impossible” to ever get to the moon, even if all of the wind power on earth was utilized in the effort. So Tim was suggesting that there may be some kind of breakthrough that we don’t know about yet, which will let us travel to the stars – his bet was that it might have something to do with quantum mechanics and parllel realities. The scientists bet was that it wouldn't happen.
     
     I agree whole-headertedly with Tim that most scientists of today, just like the scientists of every other era, are a bit short-sighted and only looking at a limited perception of reality - that which has been proven in the past. I'm reminded of the head of the US patent office who resigned in the early 1900's because "everything that could ever be invented had already been invented"! Boy, was he wrong! Someday, there will probably be some unexpected new discovery or breakthrough that may make it possible to travel to the stars.
   
   


3. If Aliens exist, where are they, why aren’t they here?
   
   • On an not-unrelated note, there was the more serious issue that if travel across stars will ever be possible, then we should assume some technologically advanced races (say a million years more advanced than we are) would have mastered that technology already. So, why haven't they visited us?
     
     This is a pretty controversial topic, because it relates to UFO theories and sightings, which pretty much every speaker on the panel dismissed as "lacking credibility".
     
     The only answer that made sense to me was that Earth is in a relatively uninteresting corner of the galaxy, and given the millions of likely planets out there, it’s unlikely that an intelligent species would visit here without some concrete reason to (other than to abduct us and do experiments on us). Since we've only mastered radio signals in the last 100 years, this means that any star that is more than 100 light years away wouldn’t have received any transmission from us, making Earth an unlikely place that someone from another part of the galaxy would want to visit. This seemed logical answer.
   
   


4. Is Radio Astronomy the right way to look for Alien civilizations? How will we communicate with an alien civilization?
   
   
   • We are taking our current technology (radio signals) and using that as the basis under which a more advanced civilization might be broadcasting to us. This of course, gets at two core questions – will aliens communicate like we do, and is SETI looking in the right place?
     
     In my personal opinion, this is an interesting question and there’s no good way to answer it, and it probably deserves a much more investigation than was done at the conference. The best answer, given by senior Astronomer Seth Shostak, was that this is the best we can do right now, and any advanced civilization might realize that less advanced civilizations “come of age” when they master radio technology or wireless communication. Just as columbus didn't wait for better ships to be built, we can't wait for better radio telescopes to start our quest.
     
     
   
   


5. Is SETI a worthwhile endeavor, should we continue to fund it?
   
   • Underlying many of the other questions, this was the pink elephant in the room. If it's such a difficult task to scan the whole night sky, and aliens might not even be communicating in ways we understand, is SETI worthwhile to do? Well, actually, as I mentioned, the government is no longer funding SETI proper (i.e. the search for radio signals, though NASA does fund astrobiology research at the SETI institute).
     
     100% of funding for SETI proper comes from private donations and tickets for events like SETI con. Personally, I think SETI has the ability to light up the imagination of the young, to make them more interested in math and science in a way that few other “official activities of our day” do. Whether an alien signal is found or not, it makes sense to have a program like SETI. Of course, if an alien signal IS FOUND, then this would probably be the biggest discovery in the history of the human race ... so I think i can speak for everyone at the conference who thought that we should all help fund SETI to a certain extent, since it concerns us all - not a single state or profession or nation. So, let's all chip in - at the very least if you're interested in the answer to these questions, be sure to attend SETICON 2011!
     
   
   

As you can see, answering each of these questions is not simple; I think I could easily write a separate blog post (or even a chapter in a book) on each of these questions. The panelists (and attendees!) brought up many thought-provoking points and counter-points on each of these and many other topics. (see www.seticon.com ) to see the full program.

In short, I think the conference was not only fun, it was also worthwhile. These kinds of questions force us to think of ourselves as a common species on a common planet, and not as individual fiefdoms known as countries or religions, which is why it’s very important to have something like SETI.

In the meantime, while SETI continues to search the heavens, it was pointed out again and again at the conference that that our TV broadcasts have been in space for more than 50 years already, which means that someone out there (within 50 light years) may have detected our presence already.

Which means that even if there were no signals directed at us in the past, there may very well be something – a signal or who knows what - coming our way in the future… all we have to do is keep our eyes (and ears and telescopes) aimed at the sky!

Mobile App Development: iPhone vs. Android: Books, Blackjack, and Tap Fish!

It’s been a while since I last posted. So what have I been up to?

Mobile, Mobile, Mobile

I've been doing mobile game development using our offshore team for both Apple and Google platforms (iPhone / iPod vs. Android) – and this entry is about what I’ve learned during that process.

Android vs. iPhone Gaming, Round 1: Quality and User Experience

In general, game developers have flocked to the iPhone/iPod in big numbers (there are 140K apps in the appstore and my guesis is that 70% of those are games), but not as many to the Android platform. Why not?

My own informal opinion is that to date, games on android have been less polished in all respects – the graphics and animation and gameplay. Historically, part of the reason for this was the horsepower of the phones themselves, though with Motorola’s Droid phone and Google's Nexus One, the physical hardware and OS has started to catch up to the iPhone. But it takes time to develop software, so it may be a while before a large number of android games “catch up" in quality and user experience to the iPhone.

We released two android games, Bay Blackjack, and Bay Connect 3-4-5, earlier this year (they’re live on the android market now - download them if you have an android phone!).

Our goal with these two games was to try to make android games that “looked” as good and played as well as iPhone games. Did we succeed? I think so. On the Motorola Droid phone, which I have in addition to my iPhone, these two games play as well as any iPhone versions.

So on Quality and User Experience, who wins? The iphone still provides a better game play environment, and with the upcoming iPad this gap may widen. However, as software developers eventually upgrade their android games, it’s possible in a year or more that the average android game will be as “good as” the average iPhone game.

Google vs. Apple, Round 2: Monetization and User Acquisition?

How about on the monetization and user acquisition front?

These are pretty important to developers; that's how we decide where to spend our time and money, which is what results in quality games in the end.

On android, these are still big issues: How do you advertise your apps, and how do you make money from your apps? Right now, it’s still just a paid/free application model – but the pre-requisite to making money (whether that money is from paid apps or advertising or virtual good sales) is to get LOTS of users.

Our Blackjack game has gotten more than 10K users in its first month. While that’s not bad, those are very small numbers when it comes to the iphone.

We released Tap Fish on the iphone in March. It has been a big success – one of the top games in March - within a week of launch, we were the #2 free app in the entire iTunes app store (that's right, #2 most downloaded out of 140,000 apps).

In contrast with android, though, you need something like 10K+ downloads per day to reach the top 25 list in the appstore.

Like other developers, since there is no built in monetization for our android games, we have been unwilling to spend a lot of money on distribution. For Tap Fish, we use Tapjoy (a company that I invested in) for both distribution and monetization, and use apple’s paid models to augment this revenue stream. Tapjoy is just releasing their SDK for android so this may spicen things up a bit.

Who wins Round 2? The iPhone eco-system for making money is much further along than android, by a long shot.

Round 3, Android Market vs. Apple iTunes App Store: Development and Deployment

You would think that this is easy win for apple – the iTunes app store has more than a hundred thousand apps already, with billions of downloads.

Not so fast, though. It turns out that development for Android is a lot easier than development for the iphone. With Android you usually write code in java, and there are millions of java developers who can be trained to write android apps pretty quickly.

Apple, on the other hand, uses Objective C, which was a very progressive language when it came out in the 1990’s – Steve Jobs and his buddies at NeXT computer laid the foundations for it long ago. I remember seeing demos of this in 1992 when I was still at MIT.

Back then, Steve Jobs' development language was cool and hip and new. Today it’s pretty arcane – you still have to do lots of memory management, syntax is unlike most other languages, and what goes for visual programming (again it was cool in 1992) seems kind of ancient now. Ever heard of Visual Basic?

Plus, there are only about 20 developers in the whole world who have more than 1 year experience with Objective C (LOL – just kidding about that number – actually we probably have 20 developers in our Pakistan operation alone who now have very good iPhone experience). Still, good C programmers (which Objective C is kinda sorta based on) are hard to find and the number of C/C++ developers has been in decline since about 1997. Since most universities (including MIT) switched to using java almost 10 years ago, good java programmers are not hard to find (though of course, good programmers can be, no matter what language you're using).

Round 3, part-1 for development, the winner is... Android, by a long shot!

How about Deployment and testing?

Android apps are very easy to deploy – you just get apk file and put it onto your device. That’s it. After struggling with apple’s very confusing and dare I say it, BrainDead approach to distribution of apps during development (using things called provisioning profiles and entitlements that even MIT engineers have a really hard time figuring out).

And that’s just for deploying to development/test devices. Don’t get me started on deploying to the App store which requires that Apple go through a review process. I know people whose applications were delayed by a month waiting for apple to review their apps and addressing apple’s multiple rejections.

That said, Apple has come a long way since the bad old days of waiting weeks for your app to be approved. For example, we came out with a new version of our Book Bazaar app - which now includes support for searching for books at local libraries (thanks OCLC) as well as local bookstores. It only took us 1 day (less than 24 hours) to get this update through apple’s review process – thank you Apple!

New apps can take up to 7 days - still a pain, but they're often approved in less than that, so good work apple! Nevertheless, the fact that i'm saying Apple has improved means that Round 3 still squarely goes to: Android!

Of course, if you are a mobile developer and you have any significant amount of sales, the lion’s share of it probably comes from the iPhone, so Google’s advantage in development and deployment may not mean much in terms of the market. The rule of thumb, as always, is: follow the money.

What about other platforms?

We have done a little bit on other mobile platforms - blackberry, palm, nokia, but not much compared to the "big two" mobile platforms.

Last week I attended the GDC (Game Developers Conference) in San Francisco, where the two hottest platforms to develop for were... Facebook and the iPhone.

Of course, Facebook still has many more users today than the iPhone, but it's so ... 2007 (ok, i know i'm going to get into trouble for calling Facebook a "legacy" platform" LOL!!). But that's kind of like saying that AOL had more users than the Internet in 1995. Of course it did, but not for long. When you count the growth in the number of smartphones out there, facebook on mobile may end up being more used than facebook on PC's and Macs soon enough.

It's very rare when you see computing shifting to a completely new hardware platform - it only happens once every 10 or 20 (or maybe even only every 30) years. The last time such a major shift happened was the introduction of PC's and Macs in the eighties. Even the arrival of the Web in the nineties (which was BIG with a capital B) didn't prompt a wholesale shift in physical hardware - it just prompted people to buy more PC's and Macs.

And that's why i'm all about: Mobile, Mobile, Mobile!

Filming, Blogging, Novel-ing, and Ranjan has Died

Many of you have written me about not keeping my blog up to date since graduation from Stanford Business School back in June.

Thanks for your gentle nudges – I’m taking your advice and resuming my blog postings, starting with a very long one about what I’ve been up to since business school, and some very sad news I received today about an old friend and one of the biggest movers and shakers in the Indian software industry, Ranjan Das.

But first, what have I been up to?Read More Here...

Turquoise Makes the Wall Street Journal

As many of you know, I have a pretty strong interest in films and film-making (the two don’t always go together).

A few years ago I was an investor and Executive Producer of my first feature film, called Turquoise Rose, shot on the Navajo reservation in Arizona. For me, as usual, I stumbled into this role by helping an aspiring young, determined and talented film-maker, Travis Hamilton, create his first feature film.

Turquoise, shot on an ultra low budget (even by startup or indie movie standards) never made it onto the national circuit, so you probably didn’t see it. But, through the determination of the film-makers it was shown in limited theatrical release across the southwest.

It was a resounding success with its intended audience, Native Americans. It may have been the first feature film whose world premiere was on the Navajo reservation. Sometimes whole families would go to see it, multiple times. Of course, Hollywood rarely sees the merits of a little film like this, so we had to distribute it ourselves.

I also inadvertently found myself as one of very few investors in independent film who made a profit on my very first film investment. I know, Films are Risky Shmisky. So are startups.

So I’m now a member of a group of angel investors, called Film Angels, which invests in independent feature films and is located in the Bay Area. The idea is to use a Silicon Valley style of investing and bootstrapping to put out quality films at low budgets.

The Wall Street Journal wrote about Film Angels recently, and it turns out that Turquoise and my own investments were mentioned very prominently. Here’s a link:
http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2009/10/12/angel-group-likes-lights-camera-and-action-of-indie-films/

The full version of the article (on WSJ.com) which has to be accessed through Google News also mentions two upcoming films I’m involved with: Raspberry Magic, a small low-budget film about an Indian-American family (www.raspberrymagic.com) [look for it in 2010] and a big budget film series based on the Gap Series, a best-selling science fiction series from author Stephen Donaldson [look for it – well, I’m not really sure when yet].

Sid Searches for Enlightenment

One reason I haven’t blogged much this summer is that most of my writing energy has been directed to finishing a novel I’ve been working on - tentatively titled: “The Enlightenment of Sid: A Modern Quest For the Cure to Sickness, Old Age, and Death”.

It’s nominally about Spiritual Seeking, Buddhism, and Sufism, the mystical branch of Islam.

It follows the adventures of the main character, whose full name is Mohammad Siddhartha O’Leary (and who likes to be called, in fact insists on being called, simply Sid), whose parents were Pakistani and Irish, and who met at a Buddhist meditation seminar. Sid is going through a bit of a mid-life crisis, and finds himself compelled to go on a Quest.

The novel is inspired a bit by the famous novel Siddhartha, by Herman Hesse, about spiritual seeking, and a bit by the novel “The Lost Horizon” by James Hilton, which is about finding a Shangri La and was inspired by the Hunza region of Kashmir in Pakistan.

Sid takes place in the modern world and asks the question, is there really a literal answer to the questions that Buddha went to seek – i.e. is there a literal answer to the problems of Sickness, Old Age, and Death? If so, how would we find it today?

It also poses an important question: Do we need to turn to teachers to find our spiritual path – or is it something we can find on our own?

In the novel, Sid, while learning about the life of the Buddha and the Prophet Mohammad during his own search for enlightenment ends up in the mountains of Kashmir with a surprising dilemma.

There aren’t many books that are about both Buddhism and Islam – for good reason: at a simple glance the religions seem very far apart. But if you look closer, particularly in Pakistan, where tombs of Sufi saints are commonplace, you start to see similarities in mystical/experiential traditions.

Sufism, though not an organized sect of Islam, refers to many sects of Islamists which emphasize personal experience over simple ritual. Sufi sects were led by iconoclasts like Jalaladin Rumi (who is well known in the west for his poetry), Ibn El Arabi (who is not so well known in the west), and Lal Shabhaz Qalander (who is virtually unknown outside of Pakistan), among others.

Anyways, that’s what the novel is about. I felt compelled to start writing it last year when I took a walking tour in Ireland (what a beautiful country) and when I visited Pakistan during December of last year, the novel took an important turn. [Yes, both countries play a big role in the novel].

Now that it’s “done”, when should you expect to be able to read it?

Well, if there’s one industry that recognizes small, quality projects even less than the traditional film industry, and is even slower, it would be the traditional publishing industry...so keep your fingers crossed - i'm sure it'll happen within this lifetime.

Ranjan Is Dead … Long Live Ranjan!

Speaking of religion and Death, I received some news that struck me very hard today. I guess Facebook is good for something other than making money for app developers, since several of my old college friends sent me messages on Facebook.

One of my closest friends from my years at MIT, Ranjan Das, passed away suddenly today in Mumbai, India. I won’t say much about his career in my blog, though he had a very successful one, as outline by this article: http://business.rediff.com/report/2009/oct/22/tech-sap-india-president-das-passes-away.htm

I don’t know the exact situation, other than it had to do with a heart attack. In fact, I haven’t seen Ranjan in quite a few years, and didn't even know that he'd moved back to India.

Nevertheless, I still found the news devastating.

Why?

Not only because Ranjan was such a talented, smart, witty guy ( think about this: in 1992, only two students from the entire country of India, which had a population of some 800 million at the time, were admitted to MIT, and Ranjan was one of them).

Not only because he was a great friend during my college years. During those years, Ranjan was the informal anchor for a rag-tag social group of misfits that included, at different times during our four years at MIT, a Sri Lankan, a White Guy from Jersey, One or more Bangladeshis, Indians, Pakistanis, a Nigerian, a German, a Nepali, and even one ABCD (that would be me as the resident American Born Confused Desi of the group, even though technically I wasn’t born in America and never considered myself confused!).

And it hit me hard not only because I felt guilty that I hadn’t seen my old friend in years. When I moved to the Bay Are a few years ago, I had always planned to get in touch with Ranjan and spend some social time together – rather than only talking about work and software and startups. There were still so many things to discuss and laugh about.

How many other close friends from those years haven’t I seen in ages? How easy it is as we get caught up in our own lives, our careers, that we don’t make time for those who have added something to our lives.

Not only because he was in the same age and to use a cliché (something Ranjan, a creative writer in those days, would never want me to do), it makes us face our own mortality. All of us, my old classmates and I, are approaching that mid-life age of forty. Hearing about Ranjan has really made me pause and think about things.

If death can strike like a lightening bolt so quickly, so unexpectedly, then shouldn’t we make sure we’re spending our lives doing the things we really enjoy, the things we would regret doing if it were to happen to us?

Mainly, though, I was devastated because, though I hadn’t seen him in years, I can still see him so clearly in my mind’s eye that it doesn't seem real. Even though he was nearly forty when he died, I can still still see him so clearly as he was 20 years ago, when we were twenty.

Whether we were having late night conversations about Xeno’s paradox (umm, it’s a physics thing), working on problem sets late at night for differential equations (Ranjan made up his nickname for me when he discovered that while I was pretty good at taking tests, I was never very good at completing problem sets on time. “Hey scholar!” he called me for the rest of our years at MIT, “you can copy my answers for the problem set,” while we called 783-BIRD or Domino’s to order late night food), or taking the bus to Wellesley to try to meet some girls (umm, don’t think we ever really did meet many girls from Wellesley though) or when we were carrying our little brown suitcases filled with home-made computers for our Computer Engineering Class at MIT (6.004) to computer lab in the middle of a snow-filled night in Boston.

The suitcases housed makeshift computers that we built up during the semester – they were called “Maybe” machines. To this day, I can still hear Ranjan singing his rendition of some old song, as we trudged through the snow, hoping our “Maybe” computers would work when we got the lab, “Come on Baby…. Don’t say Maybe…”

At that time, I didn’t realize that Ranjan was a trailblazer who was inspiring me in way inspiring me in many ways.

Amidst a sea of engineers, he was the rare creative, wrote short stories in both his native tongue and in English. When I visited him in the Bay Area a few years after college, he told me about a writing group he was in. A few years later, when I was writing more seriously, Ranjan inspired me to start my own writing group.

Among a wave of scientists who didn’t believe much in religion, he investigated them using logic and clarity of mind, and even got me interested in Buddhism well before I did any exploration of it on my own and (even though he wasn’t a Buddhist).

In a time when I was appreciating only Hollywood blockbusters, Ranjan taught me to appreciate off-beat indie films and quality filmmakers (Barton Fink and Fellini, anyone?).

Of course most of these memories are from long ago and they go on and on. This makes me realize the biggest shame of all, is that though I knew Ranjan quite well as a young man, I didn’t know him in his thirties, a successful business executive.

Even so, I can see him more clearly than ever, in whatever dimension of reality he’s moved on to, amused that all of his old friends have suddenly come out of the woodwork to appreciate him on the news of his death. He would be standing there, making up nicknames for all of us and for all of his recent colleagues, as he sings some rendition of some old song, changing he words to amuse himself, and to comfort his wife and family to not be sad, that he’s OK…he’s just moved on to the next thing…

Ranjan has died, but Ranjan lives on!