akrish

It’s high time that I wrote something about Ultimate; I’ve been playing for this entire school year and I’d say I’ve become kind of obsessed. So obsessed, that I just spent the last minutes (between writing the previous sentence and this one) watching videos of ultimate on youtube. Ultimate has essentially replaced soccer for me. In high school, I was obsessed with soccer, I would watch games whenever they were on (and often record them), I would run and lift weights to improve my fitness for soccer, and of course I played competitively for a club team and for my high school. This year, I’ve been watching ultimate videos whenever I get free time, I train for ultimate and I played for Thugmo (our Men’s B team).

I have a decent amount to write about with regards to ultimate (of course keep in mind that I’ve been playing for less than a year) and I’m sure there will be many more posts to come about the sport. For this post, I wanted to write about throwing. During the year, I usually spent a couple of hours a week outside of practice just throwing a disc around with a couple of my teammates. I attribute a lot of my improvement over the past year to those sessions outside of practice, as I’ve noticed that my throws are significantly better than they were at the beginning of the year. My coach also repeatedly told us this: throwing is the best way for a new ultimate player to get better.

One thing that I really like about throwing sessions is that you get to goof around. At practices, I spend most of my time working on my real throws, the ones I’d use in games. When I go out and throw with my teammates, yeah we work on real throws, but we also work on stupid throws. Like today, we started out normally, throwing standard flicks and backhands, then started mixing things up with high release throws and upside down throws. Finally, we played a 4v4 scrimmage with only left handed throws. It was really fun, but I’d argue that the scrimmage wasn’t all that beneficial.

There is some benefit to the goofing around though. Some of those throws are really useful (especially hammers and high release backhands), but practice and tournaments aren’t the place to perfect them. That’s where throwing sessions come in. You get to work on the throws that you don’t have, and get them to the point where you feel comfortable throwing them in games. I’ve been working on my high release flick and my left-handed backhanded, both of which I feel can be useful short-distance throws, and I’m almost at the point that I’m willing to throw them in games. The same can be said with my hammer. Throwing sessions have really increased the types of throws that I am comfortable with.

From another perspective, as a overworked student, throwing is a great break. When I was a freshman we used to play soccer as a break, but for soccer you need at least 6 people. With ultimate, you can have a pretty good time with just one other person, and I can almost always find someone on my team who is willing to throw with me for an hour. It’s really easy to organize a throwing session, and I derive a lot of enjoyment from it.

I guess I’m just really excited to be playing a competitive sport again. After a couple of years without it, I realized how much I missed it. Last year, I tried filling the gap with running, but the lack of a close team didn’t cut it for me (although I do still enjoy running). It’s been really amazing to be back on a competitive team.

I’ll leave you with a video I watched while writing this. Enjoy.

If you’ve been reading my old blog posts, the ones from way back, you may have noticed that I have quite a few posts about entrepreneurship. I used to be really excited about starting my own company straight out of college. In my free time I’d read stuff by Paul Graham, Marc Andreessen, and tons of blogs by founders and VCs. I’ve tried to start a couple of serious side projects with some of my friends, and we hoped to turn these into startups when we graduated. And most importantly, one of my dreams was to start my own company. 

Over the last year though, I’ve become really involved in a couple of research projects and my excitement about them has got me thinking about my life direction. Nowadays, when people ask me what I want to do after I graduate (which scarily isn’t that far away), I tell them that I want to go to grad school, get a doctorate degree, and possibly go into academia. If you asked me that question a year ago, I would have said that I wanted to start my own tech company. So why this sudden change?

Well first of all,  I actually don’t think that the two paths are all that different. I’m excited by working on really innovative, leading software/technology, and this property is essential in any research project as well as in any startup (at least to have some core competency). I love the challenge that comes with working on something that’s never been done before, and I definitely want that challenge in any thing I devote myself to. There are tons of other similarities, to name a few: 

• Both research and entrepreneurship have some component of selling your idea to others. With research, you need to get grant money, you need to present your work in a way that will get you published. With entrepreneurship, you need to pitch your startup to VCs, and VCs have to like what you’re doing.
• Both have quite close-knit communities. In research, you largely see the same people at conferences in your area; the grad students and professors that I’ve talked to know a lot of other researchers in their field just by attending conferences. You know who the top researchers are. It’s the same way with entrepreneurs, they have events like startup school as ways to meet fellow entrepreneurs. And of course, you know who the successful people are.
• Both typically involve some small group effort for awhile. With research, you often work in a small group, maybe of 2-4 people. Similarly, when you start a company, you may have 1 or 2 other co-founders and the founders are ultimately responsible for the success of the company. On a similar note, your effort can noticeably impact the success of the company or the research project, largely because there are so few people involved. This is really important to me, it’s one of the things that turns me off to large companies.

So these similarities are all awesome, and the fact that these are also around in the research world made it much easier to change my direction. Of course there are several differences. In a start-up, you have to do a lot more than just build your product; you have to hire employees, interact with VCs and customers, and a lot of the business/managerial stuff. In research (at least as a grad student), you do have to do some of the managerial stuff, writing papers and grant proposals, giving talks about your work (to gain credibility and support in the community), and as a professor the analogue to hiring employees is admitting and advising grad students. So yeah even here there are similarities, but I think this is a fundamental difference between entrepreneurship and research. As a young company, without some of these business skills, it will be very difficult to succeed. In research, your success is much more related to the quality of your work, and doesn’t depend so much on these auxiliary things.

Startups also need to build products, whereas in research, you can often get away with a good prototype. There’s a huge difference here and personally, I hate doing the work to turn a prototype into a product. In research, you just need your project to prove your point effectively, you don’t need your project to be visually appealing and entirely bug free. As an entrepreneur, you do need to spend a lot of time on this, potentially taking away from the core functionality and the level of innovation at your company. I really like this about research; you can focus entirely on the novel aspects of your project, you don’t have to waste time with the stuff you’d need to attract customers.

Now, I think the whole customer thing attracts people to entrepreneurship. They like to measure how successful they are by how many users they have, and yeah it feels great to have people using things that you built (or reading things that you wrote…). But I think there are ways to get this feeling in research too, one way to measure a researchers success is to look at their publications. Even better is to count citations. Citations tell you how many other researchers are looking at and using your work, and it’s pretty much the same measurement of success as the users one.

So research and entrepreneurship have some similarities, but they also have some fundamental differences. I think I transitioned from the latter to the former because I found that I didn’t want to get caught up in all the other stuff that comes with being a founder, I wanted to focus on the new technology. In my research I’m totally able to do that.

Another thing I love about research is that you’re always learning, and you’re always learning really cool things. Honestly, I wish I had the time to read a paper every day. I have a huge list of random papers that I want to read but there’s just too much stuff to do. As a researcher, it’s kind of your job to read random papers to see what other people are doing and to learn about new techniques. I don’t really know if this is around for entrepreneurs. You have to watch your competition but I don’t think you’ll learn much about their core technology. I’m not sure about this (and feedback would be awesome) but my impression is that you won’t experience the same state of perpetually learning in a startup.

Actually, I want to emphasize that last point. The constant learning really keeps me going. I don’t choose my classes because their easy, I choose them because I’ll learn a lot and because they sound interesting. I get really bored by easy classes because I don’t learn anything. I’m taking one of the hardest classes offered at my school this semester, and although it’s a ton of work, I love it because I’m learning so much.

So yeah, over this past year, the classes I’ve taken have pushed me in the direction of research. I’ve become involved in a couple of projects and I’ll be spending my summer exclusively doing research. Not that the dream of success as an entrepreneur has completely faded, but it’s definitely been put on the back-burner while I try to become a successful researcher.

Last Wednesday, my dad approached me with an interesting proposition: he thought that we should take advantage of the weekend to hit the ski slopes. I had nothing better to do and I love skiing so I agreed with him and just like that, we went to the ski rental shop, got our blades and embarked on our long drive. The three of us (my friend Vivek came along too) left on Friday and headed to Sacramento where we stayed at our family friends house.

Saturday morning, we all woke up at 6am (earlier than I’ve woken up in a long time) and headed up to the mountains. As Vivek slept in the back of the car, my dad and I were eager to get to Northstar (our intended destination), but ran into a serious snow storm before the Donnor Pass. The weather worsened as we made our way up the mountain and we didn’t have snow chains, so we decided to stop at Boreal. We spent the day there, skiing and enjoying the seriously bi-polar weather (snowy and cold one minuted, and then bright and sunny the next), but the resort was pretty small and we ended up hitting almost all the runs that were our level.

Sunday, the weather was much better so we drove the extra couple of miles to Northstar and skied there for the day. It was a beautiful day, and so Northstar was ridiculously crowded, but we found one lift that oddly stayed empty throughout the day. We got some nice runs in and around 2:30 we shed our ski clothes and made the 4 hour journey back to the Bay.

I haven’t been skiing in a really long time (the lift ticket on my ski pants told me that the last time was February 12, 2006) and I’d forgotten how fun it was. Actually, I’ve started ski-blading (really short ski’s but I still consider it skiing) and I’m really excited to head back which is why I named this article “Tahoe Trip #1″; I hope there will be another one soon. Anyway, I wanted to put up some pictures from the trip, most were taken by my dad but he did a pretty good job.

chairlifts in the snow at Boreal (Day 1)

the sun and the terrain park at Boreal

beautiful weather at northstar looking at East Ridge Run