Niraj Rajmohan

The notes are very insightful. I had read all of them last year. I should have put these up earlier. Do yourself a favor and read them.

http://blakemasters.com/peter-thiels-cs183-startup

The links to the notes on Blake Masters site for each of the lectures:

Class 1: The Challenge of the Future

Class 2: Party Like it’s 1999?

Class 3: Value Systems

Class 4: The Last Mover Advantage

Class 5: The Mechanics of Mafia

Class 6: Thiel’s Law

Class 7: Follow The Money

Class 8: The Pitch

Class 9: If You Build It, Will They Come?

Class 10: After Web 2.0

Class 11: Secrets

Class 12: War and Peace

Class 13: You Are Not A Lottery Ticket

Class 14: Seeing Green

Class 15: Back to the Future

Class 16: Decoding Ourselves

Class 17: Deep Thought

Class 18: Founder as Victim, Founder as God

Class 19: Stagnation or Singularity?

Source: http://sub.garrytan.com/the-three-kinds-of-laziness

We speak of three kinds of laziness. The first is simply to spend all your time eating and sleeping. The second is to tell yourself, "Someone like me will never manage to perfect themselves." In the Buddhist context, such laziness makes you feel that it's pointless even trying, you'll never attain any spiritual realization. Discouragement makes you prefer not even to begin making any effort. And the third kind... is to waste your life on tasks of secondary importance, without ever getting down to what's most essential. You spend all your time trying to resolve minor problems, one after another in an endless sequence, like ripples on the surface of a lake. You tell yourself that once you've finished this or that project you'll start giving some meaning to your life.

...

The antidote to the first kind of laziness— only wanting to eat and sleep— is to reflect on death and the impermanent nature of everything. We never know when we're going to die or what circumstances are going to lead to our death. So there isn't a moment to lose in getting down to what's really essential. The antidote to the second kind of laziness — feeling too discouraged to commit ourselves to spiritual practice—is to reflect on the benefits that such inner transformation will bring. The antidote to the third kind—attending to details rather than to the essentials—is to realize that the only way to get to the end of our endless projects is to drop them, and then turn to what gives life its meaning without waiting any longer. Life is short, and if we want to develop our inner qualities it's never too soon to start getting down to it.

Update: I'm also waiting to experiment with Enigma.io, the data startup that was the winner of TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013. I spent the day checking out RecordedFuture, a startup that provides tools for web intelligence, forecasting and predictive analytics. Founded in 2008, their investors include the CIA (In-Q-Tel Ventures) and Google Ventures. How does it work ? Unstructured data on the web --------> RecordedFuture performs linguistic analysis, entity and event extraction, identification of business or product relationships --------> Allows you to filter based on context (organization, technology, person, event, time), momentum(measure of related online activity), sentiment (positive,negative) --------> visualization in clusters, timelines, network graphs --------> derive your insights The idea is to complement keyword-based Google searches with search and analysis based on the context of information. Extraction of Temporal data -

Inside RecordedFuture -