Saket Vora

I’m happy to say that the Krispy Kreme Challenge has achieved an impressive milestone: the event was featured on CNN.com. It’s not the front page, but hey — it’s big time national news.

Check out the video coverage here:

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/offbeat/2008/01/27/rupinta.krispy.kreme.wtvd

I’m am so proud of everyone who has helped make this thing a success. As my friend Mike notes — we have reached a tipping point. There is no turning back now!

Sachi sent me my memory cards and batteries so now my camera is back in operation.

My dear readers — what do you want to see? Let me know and I’ll do my best to snap it.

This morning I met with my case study group, but we thought the case was boring so ended up talking about India’s rise on the world stage and American dominance (my three partners are all Indian). Went to Dr. Lee’s class, and had another gem today in class. He titled one section of the lecture “Stupid Amplifier Tricks”, and described ways you can trick circuits into giving you more bandwidth. Difference between a trick and a method? A trick works once, a method might work twice. Regarding the benefits that the inductive peaking technique gives you (increased bandwidth with no loss in gain), Dr. Lee said:

“It’s not a free lunch, but its a small, tasty, nutritious snack. And as engineers, we love free snacks. Now, if we put the inductor instead in series with the load resistor, I’ve got two friends: a zero, and inductive peaking. And two friends are oodles of fun.”

Yeah. I’m serious. Neuroengineering is still largely review, wish we’d move faster into actual applications.  Watched part of the State of the Union address (boring) and did some EE 314 homework. I gotta start these earlier.

Man, what a weekend. On Friday I watched as Barack Obama routed Hillary Clinton in the South Carolina primary, delivering a victory speech that at times gave me chills. This is a man that makes me want to believe again. Afterward, I went to dinner with Lei and his friend Hao, Doug and his wife Maria, Luke, and Nader. We went to Buca di Beppo in Palo Alto, and had a nice time. We went to a cafe afterward and continued our varied conversation.

I stayed up with Luke until almost 4am having a conversation with him. All that day I was fielding last minute calls about the Krispy Kreme Challenge. I went to bed and knew that by the time I woke up, the event would be over.

And what an event! I could hardly believe some of the first photos that started to appear on the web. Over 3,000  people showed up Saturday morning, raising $20,000 for the Children’s Hospital. I was absolutely thrilled to hear that after all my fretting and worrying, the event was pulled off with no major glitches. People placed into roles at the last second stepped up and made good game-time decisions, and that pulled the event through. People like Ben Gaddy (who came all the way down from Washington, D.C. for this) leading his trusted group of friends in defying all expectations of how well things at the store could go with 3x more runners than last year. Or Kent Dickens, a close friend of Thomas Finch, who offered a brilliant idea for processing finishers at the Belltower then went on to manage the donuts at the store. There are a dozen more instances of this, and I’d like to hear them all. I remember last year how thankful I was to see a friend on race day, knowing that even though they haven’t been involved until now, I could ask them to do something and it would get done. Ever since the beginning, this event has been made possible by friends believing in each other and delivering when it counts. I love it.

We had Chancellor Oblinger, official Friend of the KKC now it seems, out to greet all the participants. Did you know that Provost Larry Nielsen ran the event as a casual runner? Thomas had to do a double-take when he saw him cross the finish line. There were so many funny shirts, costumes, and stunts that morning. A whole group of runners with the letters for ‘NCSU Krispy Kreme Challenge 2008″  emerged, with an amazing photo taken of them spelling it out in front of the Belltower. 37 NCSU ROTC members ran the race in perfect formation, chanting the whole way. Elvis was there. Some people setup a drum kit out by the St. Mary intersection and cheered on the runners with music. I’m proud of the diversity of this event. Kids, students, alums, adults, seniors, everyone was there. Strollers, pets, rollerblades, we invite and encourage them all. And you know, a UNC student won it this year. We’ll have to fix that next year. :)

On Saturday night I was chatting with Jordan Price, a good friend of mine who is out here at Apple doing an internship, and later he came and picked me up and we hit up a cafe in Menlo Park with Nader. Just hung out, had some great conservations. Swung by the new (and really nice) Safeway and got some drinks and snacks, and watched Pirates of Silicon Valley back the apartment. I’ve got a lot of respect for Jordan.

Woke up late Sunday and took care of some reading and MarkStrat work mostly. My team is doing very poorly in the simulation, but we’re feeling confident that our turnaround is about to come. I also had a phone conference with Joel and and his friend Matt Ungar, about the finances for the WaterPLUS project. After talking with him, I’m grateful that he’s advising us — I can learn a lot from him.

This upcoming week looks  busy, as usual. Procrastinated on my EE 314, so need to hit that hard tomorrow. Boston Consulting Group is giving a case study workshop tomorrow. I want to try to submit an idea for the ASES Venture Capital Speed Dating event. On Friday I’m meeting Dr. Kenneth Arrow to talk to him about a movement regarding Access to Essential Medicines in the Developing World. Dr. Arrow is an economics professor here at Stanford involved with health issues and I will try to get his signature to a statement supporting a policy shift towards this movement. Coincidentally enough (and not known to me until later), Ben Gaddy referenced Dr. Arrow’s work in his fellowship application.  Mom is returning back home pretty soon too, I got to talk to her today.

Tonight I attended an event called GREENtrepreneurs at the Graduate School of Business. I hadn’t realized what kind of event it was until getting there (the couple next to me forked over $80 to get in, whereas I showed my Stanford ID and got in free). The finger food before the panel talk cost $15 so I skipped that. The panel included three entrepreneurs and two venture capitalists.

The first company that spoke was Recyclebank. This was founded by Ron Gonen in New York. The idea is that people take part in city recycling programs but practically all of them never see any money come back to them for their effort. Thing is, the city saves a bunch of money by reducing their landfill diversion fee. So Recyclebank does is that they give people a large container outfitted with a chip, and add some sensor hardware to a truck that goes and collects the container. The chip tells the truck how much the container weighs, and the household is credited with Recyclebank dollars for their recycling effort. These Recyclebank dollars can be redeemed online or in person at a very large number of popular retailers. Recyclebank rolls out their service for free, but it signs 5 year agreements with cities in which they get 50% of whatever the city saves in landfill diversion fees. So far they have implemented this on the northern East coast.

Gonen is a lively and engaging speaker. He started by asking those that recycled in the past month to raise their hands. It was practically unanimous (450 people in the room). He said that’s why he loves California. “If it were New York, this tiny corner would raise their hands.” He then asked “how much of you got paid for your recycling effort?” And only 2 people raised their hands. “Exactly.” After he showed us the website and told us about, he took several ‘VC-like’ questions from the audience. Many of them quite good, about his business model, about how he wards against competitors, etc (”This is why I’m scared of speaking at Stanford. I see you all out there taking notes!”) Then someone asks “what about quality control? What’s stopping someone from putting a bowling ball in the container?” And he laughed. “See, that’s the first question I get when talking to people in New York! But in California, it takes a while before someone brings it up.” Overall, I think the audience was pretty responsive to Gonen’s idea.

The second company was Lucid Design Group, with CEO Michael Murray. I was very interested in hearing about this company, as many readers of the blog will understand immediately. Though not as dynamic of a speaker as Gonen, the demostration he did of their web dashboard for energy usage in a Emory dormitory was extremely impressive. NC State needs to get on board with this. (UNC has a dashboard in their Morrison Hall).

And finally we heard from the CEO of GreenPlug, with founder Frank P. Paniagua. Paniagua was the founder of the Video Electronics Standards Board, which got different vendors to talk to other and communicate their designs so video quality would improve in early computers. He and his wife was going to a wedding and he realized he was lugging around eight or nine AC/DC power converters. This is ridiculous he thought. Paniagua is much older than Gonen or Murray, and he had an easy way of talking to the group like a veteran. He gave some shoutouts to familiar faces in the crowd, and spoke overall in a matter-of-fact way. GreenPlug aims for companies to create a universal DC charging solution. His company has created a chip that lets electronics talk to each other securely about their power needs. So he envisions DC power hubs. “What’s the most coveted spot at the Starbucks or at an airport? The one by the power outlet! It doesn’t have to be like that!”. You plug into a hub with any electronic device, and your device will tell the hub how much power it needs and what voltage and current, and the hub supplies it. Simple. It’s an interesting take on the cleantech that can have a lot of promise — but relies on getting companies to start shaking hands. We’ll see.

Overall pretty interesting panel. I didn’t get to hear John Denniston of Kleiner Perkins talk. I remember seeing him at the social innovation talk last quarter when they had the founder of Ashoka speak. I sat next to a 1st year GSB student from Bulgaria and 2nd year enviro/energy graduate student.

I had a mixup with the Stanford Career Development Center that I spent a good part of the day sorting out. See, there is a special level of access tier called ‘Cardinal Recruiting’ . On top of opening a general account with the website (allows you to search for jobs/internships, apply for them, etc), Cardinal Recruiting is an additional thing you have to apply for. Some more exclusive firms only select from that tier. Having come from NC State, where everyone is treated the same, I wasn’t aware of this distinction. As a result, I missed some deadlines to submit via the CDC website. Argh. I wish I had gotten a better clarification of this earlier.

Anyway, tonight I attended a screening of King Korn, a documentary about what I call the corn conspiracy. Ok maybe that’s fair. The film follows two young guys with no farming experience as they go to Iowa to grow an acre of corn and see where it goes. Learning about corn leads them to explore where corn goes and the role it plays in our lifestyle. Having just read Michael Pollan’s excellent book The Omnivore’s Dilemma (and no, for the record it doesn’t espouse a vegetarian diet, learn more about the book) over winter break, I was very interested to see it. They overall do a good job. They don’t proscribe a diet or anything. It is a film geared towards audiences, not like a History Channel documentary. Afterward, the producer and one of the two main characters came on stage and answered some questions. I asked them a question about the ammonia fertilizer and how it is made with copious amounts of petroleum. The producer answered it pretty well I think.

Michael Pollan (professor at Berkeley) is coming to campus later this quarter. Will definitely go hear him speak.

Finally, a summer frisbee friend Derek Lundberg at UNC has gotten in contact with a distinguished professor of economics here at Stanford. Derek is leading a project to collect signatures about an agreement regarding access and delivery of essential medicines to people in need all over the world. The movement has an impressive list of signatories so far, and I volunteered to help get Dr. Arrow’s. I give him most of the credit as being the driving force behind this. I’m playing just a bit part. I meet with Dr. Arrow next Friday.

We submitted our first round decisions and this evening I got back the results. Not good at all. In our group of 5 industries, we were the only ones to go down in stock price index. All others increased. We also fell from 4th in market share/capitalization to 5th. Even worse, all of our similar teams in the other groups are doing better than us. Our work is cut out for us.

The next decision is due Friday by 5pm.

So there is no class tomorrow, but it hardly crossed my mind until now. Honestly, I’d just rather have class.

Read outside for a few hours, catching up on case study and neural science reading. I want to enjoy it — i’ve been hearing the weather is terrible everywhere else. On Saturday afternoon went over to Staples (luke got a new chair) and the new Safeway on El Camino. The new Safeway is a lot better than the old one (which they are demolishing next door). After getting back we went with Nader to Nick Steinmetz apartment in Rains, where he was hosting a MIT Mystery Hunt party. MIT puts on this three day hunt where teams must find a coin hidden on campus, and there are around 100 to 120 extremely difficult puzzles or questions you must solve to know where it is.  Nick’s friend at MIT formed a group and he volunteered to work remotely, and recruited a bunch of fellow Stanford grad students to help out.

So the scene: about a dozen people seated around Nick’s living room, with count’em ten laptops open with a whiteboard and papers everywhere.  A sofa table stood off the side, rather lonely (until the pizza came). This is serious business — Nick’s team had created an entire wiki to help the collaborative effort. In addition to the 50 or so MIT students working in the team, people were filing in results from Kansas, Illinois, Boulder, LA, and Stanford. The questions are incredibly tough, with the answers being a short word or phrase. Nader, myself, and another guy worked on one for about 2 hours and got nowhere. Nick and Luke had better luck, successfully solving one. Their question featured about 8 different pictures of a person standing somewhere (usually on a street sidewalk) in Boston. Being from Boston, Luke helped out. A T-stop (public transportation) sign could be seen in the background of two photos, so perhaps all of them were near T-stops. Using Luke’s knowledge and Google Street View, they tracked down the location where all the photos were taken. I saw some of the photos — some of them were entirely nondescript. They then noticed that all the t-shirts being worn were from Threadless.com. Each of these t-shirts has a name. So they found the name of each t-shirt. Nick suggested that they then order the T-stops pictures from the center of Boston going out, then they took the first letter of each of the corresponding T-shirt names and found the right word — they had solved it.

Mine wasn’t so lucky.  I’ll post a bit of the question after the Hunt is over.

We went from around 6pm to 11:30pm before people were mentally worn-out. It was fun though, nice crowd.

Today I worked on the MarkStrat strategy decision, took care of the laundry, and helped Luke make some banana bread from some going-bad bananas. Watched the Chargers-Patriots game too; oh well. The Patriots are going to streamroll over the NY Giants.

In Krispy Kreme Challenge news, they have reached 1414 registrants as of this writing. A huge milestone to be sure!

The more I see/read about the Democratic primary, the higher my blood pressure goes. I have a dreadful feeling that the Democrats are going to @#%#@ themselves over again due their own stupidity.

Switching gears finally to EE 314 homework (been procrastinating that all weekend).

Couldn’t find a good way to make a coherent title from those three things. Just some general news.

Krispy Kreme Challenge 2008 is rolling along. It reached 1239 registrants to do, a 3x increase compared to this time last year. Still one more week to go. No one knows when this thing will saturate. I’m keeping a comparison graph here.  I hope the new crew is ready for what is to come. It’s the little things and attention-to-detail that matter.

My repaired camera made it back to me. The sensor died and it was beyond warranty. It appears however that I left my memory cards and rechargeable batteries back in Cary. Will have to get my sister to mail them to me.

This strategy class is getting interesting. Discussed a Wal*Mart case study on Thursday, and Apple Computer on Tuesday. Today I met with my strategy simulation group. One component of the strategy class is a simulation using a program called MarkStrat. This program has been developed over the past 20 years by two French strategic marketing professors. You control one firm in a fictional world with two fictional kinds of widgets, and you compete with four other firms. We simulate two years each week, and we are graded on our stock price. My team’s firm is 4th in market share and capitalization — have some work cut out for us.

This past week I also attended information sessions for Boston Consulting Group, Bain and Company, and McKinsey. These are the top 3 firms for strategic consulting. I’d love to do something like that this summer, will be applying for their summer associate positions.