How are you? I send these letters every year. This is a way for me to send thanks to all the mentors and friends who’ve been part of my journey so far. And I wanted to drop by and say Happy Diwali :) What is up with you? Is there something I can do for you? For what is up with me? Health & Wealth Health Since the beginning of this year, I have tried ‘building better healthy habits’.

Why we need to do a reference check on startup teams we work with? Great Startups always ask someone who is joining for a reference check. They speak to your previous managers and colleagues. There is no reason why candidates should not do the same. Many startup employees have more opportunity costs than the founders themselves. I’m surprised by the lack of due diligence which candidates do when interviewing with us.

In the first few pages of the book Born Standing Up, Steve says something poignant: One can have, it turns out, an affection for the war years. He was someone chasing something external: fame, glory, money or a version of these. Yet, in his dusk years — once he had achieved some of those, he valued his struggle more than his fame and glory. For Steve, it was not about achieving these, it was, as I have come to call it: a good fight.

There is a invisible binding thread among most BITSian’s - optimistic, easy going, but somewhat pragmatic. The sky is the limit, but most of them realize flying in hot air pockets is easy - it’s the takeoff that hurts. I guess there is a flavour of cheerful pragmatism that is uniquely BITSian. You can get ice cream and ice cream shakes anywhere - but Sharma’s MNB is uniquely BITSian.

A Getting Started Guide Let us get our facts straight, shall we? I am writing from my non-existent but probably relevant experience. I worked in a Machine Learning role at Samsung Research, Bengaluru. It is only 1 of the 4 research enterprises which hire Machine Learning researchers from Indian colleges — the other being Microsoft, Xerox, and IBM Watson. I am now in a even more Computer Vision focused role for a small enterprise tech company.

Note from Nirant: This is an archived blog post from here by Syam Sankar. I am not the author of this post. I’m keeping it here since the original source is no longer available. I’ve taken the liberty to copy paste the raw text: Given my journey, you can imagine my first reaction to questions of work-life balance is fairly unsympathetic. I want to protest that, by legitimizing such a false dichotomy, you’re pre-empting a much more meaningful conversation.