Mind of a Young Undergrad Entrepreneur

About a week ago, I received a private invitation from Dave Howlett to attend his VIP Knocking Down Silos keynote. Only about 75 high-profile executives and managers were invited to the keynote, so I was a bit taken back when I was invited. He took a liking to my online advertising startup, Influenza Media and asked me if I needed any help with my business. Now, what a nice guy. He has no obligations to help me as a stranger but he did anyways. And so you know, I need tons of help in finding clients for my business.

So I went, and got a taste of what being rich and powerful felt like:

1) Open bar with all kinds of drinks you can think of, plus top-notch wine.

2) Free food - free ridiculously good food that I can’t even try to pronounce (except for crab salads…mmm).

3) Mingling in a sea of poker/business-faces with equally eluding laughs and chatter.

4) Forming of cliques, categorized by level of influence, fame and job position.

What a world eh?

Me and Dave Howlett at the VIP Knocking Down Silos Keynote

Visit http://www.facebook.com/n/?inbox/readmessage.php&t=1002946599799 to sign-up for the next Knocking Down Silos keynote.

Peter Kao

My economics teacher in high-school told me something that I would never forget. He said, “You haven’t seen the real world yet kids. You’ll get a closer look when you go through University, but you won’t know how the world really works until you start your career.”

Being the cocky high-school student I was, I had thought I understood what he really meant but it wasn’t until I stepped out of my bubble and started meeting with ambitious and hyper-intelligent over-achievers that I’ve noticed there are so few sincere individuals in the world.

I won’t name the specific incidences since I actually have readers of this blog (surprise!) and don’t want to create unnecessary commotion, but people always judge others based on credentials, age, sex, ethnicity and act accordingly to those judgments. That’s fine - it’s part of the evolution of the human mind, but what is not fine is when you are rude to those below you and kiss the asses of those above you. Time and time again I see this around me and even experience it myself. And starting my own online advertising company has especially put me in the lowest of the lowest position since those around me have already made a career for themselves; they are rich; they have connections; they have decades of experience. Me? I’m an undergrad who’s building a startup with no experience whatsoever. What makes me even more upset is the fact that I can already spot people around my age starting to become the kinds of people I mentioned above.

When I build a more successful startup with my own bare hands, when I become richer than they are, when I build more connections, and when I have more experience than them I will tell them from a pedestal that they should treat everyone equally and with sincerity and respect. Then they will listen.

Peter Kao

I have been putting off this blog entry for a while now (over 2 weeks…) and I was going to put it off for tomorrow…but it’ll just end up never being done.

About a month ago, I received an email asking for my appearance on a video about Velocity for UW President David Johnston’s presentation at the Canadian Telecom Summit. As the director of Velocity told me, “The Summit is the highest profile telecom conference in the
country.”

Naturally, I was pretty excited since it’s the first video interview I’ve had relating to my online advertising startup - Influenza Media.

Peter Kao

This makes me really mad. Microsoft has done it again. Over and over again they prove to be deceitful, which just shows that they are a company without any sense of moral value. I can’t believe that the world’s largest and most influential company can be so evil. Okay fine - evil might be an overstatement, but I really hate how they conduct business.

I was reading a research paper produced by the Atlas Institute from Microsoft. They are part of Atlas - the advertising section of Microsoft that produces research data to help advertisers [convert into paying-suckers for Microsoft’s overvalued products]. The purpose of the research is to show how the Atlas platform is able to more closely predict actual reach with projected reach. They even had the balls to put this up on the first page of the paper:

So what was in the research paper that made me so mad? This…

At first glance, it looks like any digestible graph, however, upon further inspection one can see that the axises (Actual Reach) and (Predicted Reach) do not start with the same distances from the origin. In fact, the bottom axis (Actual Reach) starts slightly to the right of the graph. This would be okay if you were comparing two completely different kinds of values such as time with temperature, but we are talking about the same kinds of numbers here - we’re talking about the number of audiences. To make matters worse, the scale is on a log10 scale! That means the increments in the axis increase logarithmically (with base 10)! A slight shift in the graph would mean HUGE inaccuracies in the graph.

Before I go any further, note that the closer the samples (presented as dots) are to the solid line, the more accurate the prediction reach is to the actual reach. Microsoft has skewed the solid line so that it better matches with the actual numbers!

So, I took the liberty to fix the graph a bit so that the line looks like how it’s suppose to look like:

The blue line that I have drawn is the actual line. The closer the dots are to the line, the more accurate the data is. At the bottom in green, I separated the increment of 10 million into smaller increments of 800,000 to show how off Microsoft was in their mistake.

They were approximately off by 800,000 to 1,500,000 audiences! That’s a huge difference.

Screw you Microsoft. I’m not going to use your stupid-ass Atlas product.

Note: I’m sure that this mistake has gone unnoticed for most executives/managers. Not everyone has the time to look at the graph carefully. And that’s exactly what Microsoft counts on…

- Peter Kao

Today, I went to the group meeting for New Venture Pathways. They are funded by CBET under the University of Waterloo’s Enterprise initiative. New Venture Pathways provide resources and tools for aspiring or existing entrepreneurs, such as local listings of seminars or events related to starting your own business.

The meeting went pretty well and the work involved seems interesting. I’m thinking of helping out in the technology area of the group (website, database etc…) and the financial area, so I’ll be (hopefully) gaining lots of experience in those areas. Joining NVP is also a great way to network with ‘key’ people

Cheers,

Peter Kao