on Startup Valuations

For SaaS or PaaS startups, valuation is often considered as combination of art and science. In case of B2B SaaS companies, financial metrics make more sense since the target market and pricing strategy has to be defined, which is not always the case with B2C companies, especially social companies such as whatsapp, instagram, facebook. In such cases, valuation is often based on “eyeballs”- number of users acquired by platform.

In the event of valuation, startup can be roughly categorised in two categories. First is the seed stage, second is the growth stage. Each phase implies different ways of valuation.

Affordances in Mobile Apps

Humans are creatures of habit. Human brain learns certain patterns over time and after a while they become reflexes. User experience of mobile apps is limited by tiny screen size, touch controls, and sensors. Thus, establishing a deterministic familiar pattern is crucial for user experience.

I regularly use my iPhone and nexus tablet for reading, social networking, emails, and checking updates on the go. This mix of android and iOS gives me diverse yet somewhat unified experience for the apps I use. Even though most of my actions are mechanical by now, there are still some nuances I would like to address.

Web App Concepts

Web application frameworks are awesome. They take care of repeatitive tasks so developers don’t have to. I have worked and played with many web frameworks including ASP.Net mvc, play, express, sails, spring, django, martini and so on. Even though these frameworks vary in API offerings and environments, they are built on same fundamentals.

I think it is easy to pick up any web framework once underlying concepts are understood. From bird’s eye view, framework is just a bunch of code that developers could reuse. Consequently, it becomes easy to identify and learn structure of this code. In this post, I will try to sum up a mindset for learning any framework. Before jumping into details, let me establish ground zero.

It's the Valley

Six months have passed since I first stepped foot in valley. Yes, its called the valley not Silicon Valley and San Fransisco is called the city. Last six months have been absolutely wonderful. I got the opportunity to learn about startup culture in the valley and be a part of this dynamic ecosystem. Along the way, I noticed some unique things. In this post, I will try and provide a gist of it.

Weather is awesome
No post about valley is complete without mentioning how beautiful the weather is. There is ample sunlight, enough cold, and soothing breezes all around year. All types of different destinations are in driving distance from here; from snowy mountains to sea to desert.

Things I Wish I Knew Before I Started With Machine Learning

Looking back at my journey so far, here are few things that would have made my life easier.

It is not easy
You’re gonna spend a lot of time searching through resources. Just running an algorithm from caret library isn’t enough. You have to understand the maths behind it and it takes a lot of careful reading and mental efforts. Any resource that tells you “you don’t need to learn maths” is probably not worth the efforts.