Ten Talks and Lots of Learning

I don’t think I have done this much of talking, in a while. It was great and I loved every bit of it. I gave ten Talks in about twelve days (weekends included) in three different states. It is kind of cool. In the end, I learned a lot and had many great interactions. I think it is a great way to meet people and start conversations. Some of these conversations continue  – some on Twitter and others in email.

Here are a few observations:

  1. Surprising to see the level of interest in entrepreneurship among students. Wish we can figure out an efficient way to help them do simple micro-startups.
  2. An unassuming kid (almost a kid) is working on a framework for modeling brain. Whoa! Had a nice lunch talk and plan to follow up.
  3. After every talk, there is small cluster of people who come up and continue the conversation. This is the best part of giving a talk.
  4. Interaction in smaller crowds always seems to be better than larger crowds.
  5. Interaction is better when the crowd is a bit homogeneous (barcampers, CS students, management students). If you mix them up, it is more difficult to find a common theme.
  6. I always prefer the audience to talk way more than I do. But that does not happen most of the time. They seem to spend a lot of time absorbing the information and lot less time challenging.
  7. I finally found some really, really cool people – a girl with interest in game development, a boy with an interest  AI and machine learning, a small club of semantic web enthusiasts, a very vocal group of Tweeters.
  8. Give the same talk to two different audience and surprisingly, you get entirely different discussions.
  9. The best people to talk to (at least for me) are geeks. Eternally curious, amazingly insightful and entertainingly opinionated.
  10. Better then geeks are the small subset of geeks who are aspiring entrepreneurs. I can spend hours with them and not even notice the time passing.

I know what I am going to do for the rest of my life. Just find lots of opportunities to have conversations. They are way more fun than anything else I have done in my life so far. I just need to constantly reinvent myself to stay entertaining, informative and interesting.

2 thoughts on “Ten Talks and Lots of Learning

  1. As a reminder to your point#6, (I always prefer the audience to talk way more than I do. But that does not happen most of the time. They seem to spend a lot of time absorbing the information and lot less time challenging.)

    Having heard you speak, you are far ahead than us in tracking this geeky thing called Technology and that makes our mouth agape forgetting to speak.

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