Vivek Kumar

(Originally posted on Medium) Evaluating consumer hardware startups 3 Things hardware startups should focus on As Marc Andreessen famously said; software is eating the world [1]. VCs consider hardware startups riskier than software startups. Hardware startups involve higher costs and have lower margins. The availability of programming tools and internet based services make it easy for software startups to build and validate potential solutions with customers, making them a lower cost, lower risk investment. ...

(Originally posted on Medium) Also posted on Quora as an answer to How do I learn deep learning in 2 months?) 4 Steps for Learning Deep Learning A handy list of resources to help you become a deep learning expert Firstly, if you need some basic information or convincing on why Deep Learning is having a significant impact, check out the following video by Andrew Ng Step 0: Learn Machine Learning Basics (Optional but recommended) ...

(Originally posted on Medium) Social network is not the most interesting part. The keynotes and highlights of the conferences were other parts — Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus. Facebook, like Apple is doing a great job of disrupting itself, mainly through acquisitions. Yes even Messenger was an acquisition Facebook’s 10-year road map “Facebook’s 10-year roadmap is basically lasers, bots and VR” — Napier Lopez The Bots are Coming Facebook released Chatbot API’s making it easy to create Bots without native Apps. Additionally the Wit.ai’s Bot Engine enables natural language communication in both text and speech. By feeding the engine new information, new tasks, and new data, it will understand more situations and will become smarter over time. Facebook already uses state-of-the-art AI in moments and in curation of News Feed. ...

(Originally posted on Medium) Based on photo from https://www.flickr.com/photos/jdlasica/12338690004 Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers Ben Horowitz is the cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz (A16Z) and one of Silicon Valley’s most respected and experienced entrepreneurs. In ‘The Hard Thing about Hard Things’ he shares his experience of being a founder-CEO and the hard decisions he has had to make — offering advice on managing tough problems as a leader, which business schools do not cover. While most management books focus on doing things correctly, Ben offers insights into what you must do after you have screwed up. ...

(Originally posted on Medium) Top 5 Videos from Extract Conference 2015 Extract conference, 2015 was a day jam-packed with data stories meant to entertain, educate and inspire. The stories were a combination of data analytics and growth hacking told by the people who know it the best. They are all interesting and here are my favorite top 5 videos for Data Stories Worth Sharing. Deep Learning — Andrew Ng Andrew Ng, Chief Scientist at Baidu, talks about recent developments in Deep Learning and the work being done by Baidu. This session explores what deep learning is all about and why it matters in 20 minutes — liquid gold. If you had to see just one presentation from the conference this would be it. The slides are posted here: http://www.slideshare.net/ExtractConf ...

(Originally posted on Medium) Design Thinking and the Art of Innovation I have always believed that everybody can increase their creativity if they put their mind to it, and the recent course at Stanford University on Design Thinking and the Art of Innovation (XDES400–019) provided the essential tools to do just that. I was inspired to take this course after watching David Kelley’s TED talk on How to build your creative confidence. The class was led by Bill Burnett, the executive director of d.school who has worked in both start-ups and Fortune 100 companies, including seven years at Apple. Here are my key takeaways from the course. ...