Manager, not an Entrepreneur?

noreply@blogger.com (jbx) — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 21:06:00 +0000

My results from the "entrepreneurship aptitude" question from Bo Peabody's Lucky or Smart...

Peabody's Question: When you look up at a cloud, which of the following best describes your thoughts?
My answer (option E): "Gee, I wonder exactly how a cloud is formed"

By the way, I laughed out loud when I saw option E. I was NOT expecting that to be one of the options. My immediate response was "Holy s*** this book knows me."

Anyway, on to Bo Peabody assessment of my answer: "You may not be an entrepreneur, or even entrepreneurial, but you most likely have a knack for managing a business... Chances are you are a manager, not an entrepreneur."

Harsh but insightful nonetheless. I don't ascribe to his claim that "entrepreneurs are born, not made," so I am certainly taking this with a grain of salt, but I've actually been wrestling with this general topic of being an entrepreneur vs. biz dev guru for a while. Either way, there's plenty of time to figure that out. One step at a time :)

Although... it did please me to see that I'm apparently doing something right: "If you answered E... you should go to a training program at an investment bank like Morgan Stanley, or to a management-consulting firm like Bain."

Hi-tech immersion course

noreply@blogger.com (jbx) — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 07:22:00 +0000

I've always been a bit of a tech nerd (understatement), but it wasn't until half a year ago that I decided to make a career of it and dove in headfirst. Since then, I've made goals to learn as much as I can about the topics that interest me and to get to know the New York tech/startup scene.
The journey has not been an easy one, thanks to my liberal arts pedigree and highly time-consuming management consulting career, neither of which are redeemable for tech street cred. Today, I'd like to share the tools that I've used to immerse myself in this space, so that others who share my interests can take advantage of these great resources too.
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The first thing I do in the morning is refresh Pulse to download my RSS feeds onto my iPod Touch for the subway ride. Before I got an iPod Touch, I read the New York Times on the subway through the blackberry app - another great app.
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I use my 30-minute subway commute catch up on my favorite news blogs on Pulse (in this order, which means that I don't always get to the bottom blogs)

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When I have spare time at work or at home, I have a few Chrome customizations to help me keep up on the news:

Bookmarked for daily use: Techmeme & Hacker News (browsed with help of Chrome Extension Hacker News OnePage)
Bookmarked for daily use: Read It Later bookmarklets to build and check off my web must-read list
Rapportive, to get sender contact profiles embedded into gmail (very useful for large tech list-serves to know who's who)
Polaris Insights, to view Crunchbase, Quora, and LinkedIn info for any site (great tool for basic company diligence)
Chromed Bird to send and receive tweets realtime - this extension has donewonders for me in keeping up with all sorts of news, tech and other
By the way, all of these are synced across my three computers using Chrome's built-in sync capabilities.

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In addition to keeping up with the news, I also enjoy programming for fun, so I have the open source Eclipse IDE on my personal computer, which I occasionally use to tackle online programming challenges or learn new languages.
Online programming challenge sites I'm working through:

Hack This Site (have done 23 levels)
Python Challenge (just started - have only done 3 levels)

Fun language tutorials I'm also working through (slowly but surely):

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When I just want to sit an absorb information, I turn to a few reliable sources of educational videos sure to cure boredom

Startup School videos for perspectives on VC/startups
TED talks, responsible for my academic crush on Amy Smith
New York Tech Meetup videos, because I don't want to deal with getting RSVPs to the huge monthly meetup
Harvard CS50 Seminars on programming topics (because it was my favorite class in college and I wish I could have done a few more final projects for it)

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Finally, I can't stress how much I love Meetup. It makes me giddy to plan my week of Meetups every Sunday evening, going through my week and deciding which meetup to prioritize over others, because I'm often interested in multiple meetups for a given weekday evening.
Well, that seems like a decent roundup for my inaugural (real) blog post. G'day, mates.

Musings of a Hacker Wannabe

Manager, not an Entrepreneur?

Hi-tech immersion course