mind × the + gap ™

NVIDIA had their earnings call yesterday for the quarter ending Dec'23. Markets were muted in anticipation. As expected, the S&P 500 rose by 2.5% on the back of a strong performance and pipeline. The day after, NVIDIA stock rallied to all time high of $800. This gave the company a market cap of USD 2 Tn, surpassing Alphabet, Inc., and becoming the fourth largest listed company in the world by market value.  For perspective consider this - the single day gain of USD 277Bn was bigger than the largest listed company in India - the world's 4th biggest equity market, and by an estimate its market cap was now larger than the entire SENSEX of India. Who knew? Perhaps not even Berkshire Hathaway. (See share holding pattern in the links below). One of the simplest reasons for the meteoric rise of NVIDIA is, as Warren Buffet once famously said about resilient businesses, that NVIDIA provides a moat to the the software firms for their business of developing and productising AI and, sp...

Sam Altman was the CEO and  Greg Brockman  was the chairman of the board  at OpenAI.org, the parent company that is listed as a not-for-profit organization in the US u/s 501(C)(3).   On 17 Nov 2023 both of them were fired by the Independent Directors of the board. This post talks about the 4-day drama that ensued at the back of these events, focusing on the role of Independent Directors. (Try here for a related earlier post.) One year ago the company launched the ChatGPT, the Large Language Model, that rose to prominence with its Generative AI capabilities (“GPT” or Generative Pre-trained Transformer) and human-like response and interactive interface (“Chat”). At launch ChatGPT was based on based on GPT-3.5 series. The launch took the internet by storm as Microsoft unveiled its commercial partnership with the firm, and its global marketing machine geared into action.  To accommodate for this new profit-making "partnership" endeavor, the firm came up with anothe...

The Election season is upon us again, and it is only fitting that The Supreme Court of India has taken up a clutch of petitions challenging the constitutionality of Electoral Bonds that were introduced in 2017 as a means of donations to political parties.  The capital involved is expectedly huge. After all, India is the world’s fifth largest economy and the most populous nation that goes through a 5-year election cycle with an overlap between 28 state elections and the national one. Electoral Bonds, as a fund-raising instrument, are primarily targeted towards corporates – including public limited companies except for those run by the government. And while the constitutional bench of Supreme Court headed by the Chief Justice would evaluate it for constitutionality, it is important to conduct an analysis from the perspective of Companies Act 2013 as well as from the purview of good Corporate governance. This article offers an in-depth analysis of these implications.  Historica...

A tribute to Clayton Christensen, the Harvard professor who  introduced "disruption" in his 1997 book  The Innovator's Dilemma , which, in turn, led  The Economist  to term him "the most influential management thinker of his time."  Even more influential  for some would be his 2012 co-authored book How Will You Measure Your Life? . [try here ]. Christensen  passed away in Boston on Jan 23, 2020.

If you haven't taken the Stanford's Machine Learning MOOC by Prof Andrew Ng on Coursera, you are less likely to be taken seriously in the AI community. Or so they say. Somewhere in 2008 Andrew Ng started the Stanford Engineering Everywhere (SEE) program that placed a number of Stanford courses online, for free. Andrew himself was responsible for teaching one of these courses, Machine Learning, which consisted of video lectures by him, along with the student materials used in the Stanford CS229 class. The "applied" version of the Stanford class (CS229a) was hosted on ml-class.org and started in October 2011, with over 100,000 students registered for its first iteration; and became one of the first successful MOOCs made by Stanford professors. Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller left Stanford to co-found Coursera in 2012. The Machine Learning course was one of the key offerings on the platform. And it continues to be #1 (check  here ,  here , or comprehensively here...

JEFF BEZOS SPENT AN EVENTFUL TIME with his larger Amazon.com engineering team in India recently. The "events", so to speak, involved no less than a typical decorated delivery truck on one hand (The event where, apparently, his amazon.in CEO called out Jeff as his 'Baap' [try here ] ). And, on the other hand, there was him meeting with the Indian Prime Minister in Delhi and talking about things (in e-retail in the most promising e-global economy with the world's 3rd largest open internet userbase, of course). In between these two was a private dinner organised with a dozen or so CEO's in Bangalore. This paraphrased post is thanks to one of them [try here ] "minuting" the following five points that Jeff talked about among other things. #1: What was the hardest moment of your life? Jeff: My experience of raising the first million dollars to start Amazon. Nothing over the following two decades of founding Amazon compared to that. I reached out t...

Cheers to Life!

There are two kinds of self-fulfilling prophecies. They are broadly defined by wiki as follows: The Pygmalion effect , or Rosenthal effect, is the phenomenon in which the greater the expectation placed upon people, the better they perform. On the other hand is the Golem effect , in which low expectations lead to a decrease in performance. In ancient Greek mythology, Pygmalion fell in love with one of his sculptures, which then came to life. The theme was in the main stray of many English literary works during the victorian era. One of which is George Bernard Shaw's play titled "Pygmalion" from which Rosenthal effect gets its name. In Shaw's play, the protagonist, a professor of phonetics Henry Higgins makes a bet that he can train a bedraggled Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, to pass for a duchess at an ambassador's garden party by teaching her to assume a veneer of gentility, the most important element of which, he believes, is impeccable speech. (The pl...

YOU CAN CONSIDER GOOGLE your friend only if the two of you play games with each other -- especially with Google the search box. I call our little game Bubble-game. The rule is simple. You need to come up with a vaguely familiar term that you know from somewhere -- desirably from within the Google Apps ecosystem that you personally use on various gadgets. Again, the only rule is that the term should be only vaguely familiar, if at all. It is not necessary to know the precise spelling. So then, you turn to Google.com and ask. From within the context of your 'relationship' with Google, the algorithm would suggest to you the possible answers in the form of search results. And depending on how extensively you use Google --or, to put it more socially-- depending on how well Google 'knows' you, you should find traces in the search results that may indicate where you might have encountered the term for the first time and the subsequent info-branches it created thereafter: ...

IN THE INTRODUCTORY paragraph of this legendary paper for Harvard Business Review, Peter Drucker writes: We live in an age of unprecedented opportunity: If you've got ambition and smarts, you can rise to the top of your chosen profession, regardless of where you started out.  But with opportunity comes responsibility. Companies today aren't managing their employees' careers; knowledge workers must, effectively, be their own chief executive officers. It's up to you to carve out your place, to know when to change the course, and to keep yourself engaged and productive during a work life that may span some 50 years. To do those things well, you will need to cultivate a deep understanding of yourself - not only what your strengths and weaknesses are but also how you learn, how you work with others, what your values are, and where you can make the greatest contribution. Because only when you operate from strengths can you achieve true excellence. Marking a small foot...