Tuesday, October 09, 2012

Internet Drives

The advantage of thinking and behaving like a start up is that you start doing things you wouldn't normally do in your "big company" job.

For example, my "start up" sales team and I recently started using Google Docs to share information and have a single point of reference about the opportunities we are working on. Something I would never do in my older role in a larger company, because you have other more expensive and complicated solutions to work with.

What's amazing about Google Docs is how easy it is to keep data in sync - everyone, on every device, is accessing the same file and there is no need to send them back and forth. There is only one version of the truth.

But the pain is there too! Even with a super fast Internet connection in office, the updates are sometimes very slow to propagate, and the lack of immediate feedback/change makes you feel sluggish and irritated all the time. You keep losing connection to Google, and even though the connection is restored automatically after a few seconds, it is disturbing. I guess it's a small price to pay... but on slower connections, this can be a big deterrent.

Overall, cloud drives are here to stay, and like it or not, your data is going to end up there very soon!

2 comments:

Yogesh said...

No. Thinking and behaving like a start up doesn't have the same pressures as actually being an entrepreneur. Being creative is one thing. Taking the plunge without a big-company benefit package is a whole different story. Entrepreneurs....They are a class apart. Brave enough to take the risk inspite of not having a big boss to save them, since they themselves are the big boss.

Siddhesh said...

Yogesh, the post was not at all about start ups and enterpreneurs and having a job cover. It was about Internet drives.

That said, to respond to your point briefly, yes, many of us do have the safety net of a larger company behind us, which reduces our risk to some extent. Not that working for a large IT company guarantees your job - it's not so any more! People like us who have jobs, and try to innovate within that safety net have different challenges that sometimes true blood entrepreneurs do not face. You have to face very different pressures, right from day one. You cannot do what you want, and you have some very smart guys questioning your every decision.

But that's another topic, another blog post maybe - so I will desist from further discussion at this point.

And yes, we all aspire to be our own bosses one day - some succeed, some attempt and fail miserably, some never get the opportunity. But I guess the dream is a given!