What makes for a successful networking event?

So the second edition of the NED Talks took place last night. And no, this is not a “match report”. So the purpose of the NED Talks is to put together a bunch of interesting people who are interesting in different ways, and get them to talk. There are approximately ten talks (the first edition had thirteen, the second eight) followed by interaction, and a round of interaction before the event. So in certain ways, NED Talks are networking events.

So the question is what the ideal “network structure” of the networkers is in order to ensure a successful networking session. The idea is that the network at the beginning of the session needs to be only slightly dense – if there are too many people who know each other at the beginning of the session, there is not much of a point in the event as a networking event, for the value add in a networking event is to bring together people who hitherto didn’t know each other, and to strengthen existing weak ties.

The network being not dense enough also is also a problem, for that means that people might be lost. So if you have a lot of people who have never known each other earlier, and if some of them are introverted (as is likely to happen when you put together intelligent people), the conversation can be a bit of a non-starter. So low density is also not a good thing.

Then there is the issue of cliques – if you have a bunch of people who all know each other from earlier, then the others might feel “left out”, and not be able to get into the conversation. There are likely to be “in-jokes” and “in-stories” which everyone else finds irrelevant. I remember being  at one such gathering where I was the only person who was not thus “in”, and so I got up and announced that I was getting bored and walked out.

Anyway, so let us represent all attendees to a party or event in the form of a graph (undirected). Each vertex represents an attendee and two attendees are connected by an edge if they know each other from before. Given such a graph, can we construct an algorithm to “verify” if it is a good set of people to have for the party? Oh, and this is one of the insights from yesterday’s NED talks – computational complexity can be measured in terms of how “easy” it is to verify a given solution, rather than generate a new solution.

The first thing you can do is to find the size of the largest clique – if it exceeds a certain proportion (a third maybe? a fourth?) of the total number of attendees, it is a bad idea, for that means that this clique might dominate the conversation.

Then you can calculate the “edge density” of the graph – the total number of edges on the graph to the number of “possible edges” (given by NC2 where N is the number of attendees). For example, the edge density of the first NED Talks was 3/26 (largely due to 5 attendees who were not connected to any other nodes) . The edge density of the second NED Talks was 1/3 (might have been higher but a not-so-well-connected attendee backed out at the last moment). What range of edge density makes sense? Or should we use the variance in edge density also?

Then there is the number of “components” in the graph – if the graph is mostly disconnected, the group might split up into small cliques which might defeat the purpose of the networking event itself and lead to disconnected conversation. Note that nodes of zero degree don’t matter here – it’s components wiht at least two people.

And so forth. So can anyone help me build an algo to “verify” if a party / networking event is going to be good given a graph of who knows who from before?

Matching problem in the Indian Dating Market

And no, this has nothing to do with Hall’s Marriage Problem.

As the more perceptive of you might have noticed, about a year and a bit back the wife started this initiative called “Marriage Broker Auntie”. Basically she thinks she is a good judge of people and a good judge of “matches” between people. As a consequence of this, there were many friends and relatives who would approach her to “set them up”. Having (successfully or unsuccessfully) made a few matches among such applicants, she decided to institutionalise it, and thus Marriage Broker Auntie was born.

The explicit objective of the initiative was to broker marriages (as the name clearly suggests. The wife was the “auntie”. The plural in the title was because briefly there was one more (mad) auntie involved but she’s since moved on). The methodology was to “know the customers” and then use an intelligent human process in order to find pairs who might be interested in each other and then set them up for a date. As simple and basic as it gets. The quant in me had already started dreaming up of an expanded business where I could use “big data” and “analytics” and whatnot to “understand” large sets of people and match them up.

But there was a small problem – ok the fundamental problem was that the number of people who had signed up was not very large, but let’s assume that can be solved through marketing – the problem was that the sex ratio on the website was skewed. Heavily. At one point in time I remember there being 20 girls and 5 boys being registered on the website (all heterosexual, perhaps a consequence of “marriage” in the title)! The ratio remained thus as long as the initiative was in existence.

Now this contrasts heavily with other “dating” sites that are operational in India, primarily global sites such as OkCupid and Tinder. The gender ratio on these sites is heavily skewed, too, except that it is heavily skewed in the opposite direction (too many boys, hardly any girls). For example, check out this piece in Man’s World on Tinder, which talks about users who think there is a “permanent bug” in the site that doesn’t allow matches, and of “all girls on the site being bots”.

The problem with most dating sites in India is that there are way too many boys and way too few girls (I should add Orkut also to this list, and should mention that I met my wife through a combination of Orkut and LiveJournal). This leads to girls on the site feeling like they’re “being stalked”, and getting freaked out and getting out of the site. A girl I know signed up on OkCupid India, just on a whim, only to find a hundred “interests” from boys within a few minutes of logging on.

Reading stories like this, you might be bound to imagine that there are no girls in India interested in dating, or getting married. But if you were to look at sites like Marriage Broker Auntie (small sample, I know, but significant gender bias) you know that this is simply untrue. There are girls out there who are looking for flings and relationships, to date and to get married. And they are short of ideas on how to meet such men. “Traditional” dating sites such as OkCupid or Tinder intimidate them, and shaadi.com and bharatmatrimony.com are in a completely different business altogether – they make matches on a different set of variables such as caste and gotra and stars and so forth.

So what we have here is classic market failure – of the Indian dating market (this, however, is NOT a call for government regulation! 😛 ). The market is surely fertile (no pun intended), and there is plenty of opportunity to make fat profits if someone can get the matching right. There are a number of players looking to enter the market as I write this (I’ve spoken to some of them), but none look particularly promising.

Oh, and you might want to know why Marriage Broker Aunties gets all the chicks – it’s because of a complicated sign up process (a five page google docs form if i remember right) which puts off any non-serious players. Also there is the promise that until matched, potential counterparties cannot see your profile, and there is a “trusted third party” (in the MBA case, my wife, but an algorithm should do reasonably well to scale) who does the matchings.

The most important bit here is the anonymity – the ground reality in India is that online dating is still seen as a “last resort” – to be resorted to only if you can’t find a match through your network. With Tinder and OkCupid being exclusively dating sites (unlike Orkut which was fundamentally a social network), signing up on one of these two sites is an admission of a degree of desperation (in the eyes of most people), and there is a chance people might see you differently after they know that you’re a member on such sites.

While this explains reasonably well why chicks flock to Marriage Broker Auntie, why is there a shortage of guys on the site? It can’t be that there are no serious guys around for whom the 5-page form is a massive transaction cost. The wife’s (and my) perception is that fundamentally guys want to “check out a girl” (i.e. know well what she looks like, etc.) before agreeing to meet her on a date (I remember scouring Orkut and Facebook for all possible pictures of my then-future-wife and “checking her out” before meeting for the first time). And in an anonymised matching site, this experience is not there. So men don’t like this!

It’s a hard problem but not intractable. There are many companies that are coming into this space now. Hopefully someone will get it right!

Apartments and mixed zoning

So, as Udupa put it, I went to Barcelona “on a study trip like a corporator”, came back and wrote one piece on urban planning in Barcelona and what India can learn about it. The piece is in Pragati. An excerpt:

That said, there are important lessons to be learnt for India from E’ixample. Most current models for urban development take after the sprawl-heavy automobile-intensive US model. What is important to make the new “smart cities” effective is to move away from this model to a more dense public transport focussed “European model”. And from this perspective, the new cities could do worse than looking to Barcelona’s E’ixample for inspiration.

Read the whole thing. Anyway, so I talk about two features of E’ixample (the district in Barcelona where the wife lives, and hence where I spent most time during my trip last October) in the Pragati piece, and mention that they’re useful concepts that India should adapt for its “smart cities” program – mixed zoning and apartments.

The former, I argue, ensures that there are “eyes on the street” at different points in time. This helps keep the crime rate low (deserted streets and lack of pedestrian movement usually make it more conducive for criminals), and provides a safe atmosphere. The latter ensures good efficient land use and allows for provision for large roads and open spaces without compromising on total density. And as I realised this evening, the two concepts (apartments and mixed zoning) are not independent.

One of the reasons that people offer for strict zoning (keeping residential and business areas disjoint) is that they don’t want random people hanging out in front of their residences. Random people hanging out in front of your house makes you feel unsafe, and a bit weird, and if there is a shop or a restaurant next door, the chances of this happening are rather high. For example, recently the Bangalore Mirror wrote about a “controversy” regarding the opening of a cafe in a residential area in Koramangala. Neighbours don’t like such cafes as it will lead to people hanging out in front of their homes, and that gives a sense of violation of space.

So what makes apartments and mixed zoning go together? When you live “high up” in a mid or high-rise building which you share with many other people, your sense of ownership of the space in front of your house is lower. If someone is “loitering” in front of your house, you are less concerned because 1. you are farther away from the “action” and 2. you don’t feel a sense of violation of your space. Thus, being in an apartment makes it more palatable for you that there are shops and restaurants and offices close to your house.

Now, everyone likes shops and restaurants close to home, but in case of single-unit homes, people are likely to adopt a “NIMFY” (not in my front yard) attitude towards these – for they might violate your space. Apartments help address this conflict!

Hence apartments and mixed zoning go hand in hand, and both need to be encouraged. Note, however, that I’m not proposing Brigade Gateway as the ideal model for urban development!

Finance is boring, once again

So IIMB goes to placements this week. Two months back, though, in the first class I taught there, in an attempt to “understand the class”, I asked my students to tell me their “most preferred employer”. The intention was to tailor the course in a way that would be more suitable for their prospective careers.

Thinking back at that class, there is one thing that hits me – very few want to do finance (again that’s no indication of how many of them will end up in finance jobs this week). I initially thought it was a biased sample – there was a course of the same name offered to the same batch in an earlier term, and those that had taken the course then were not eligible to take the course now. Given the primacy of spreadsheets in finance, I thought students more inclined towards finance would have taken the course in the earlier offering. But then thinking about it (without data to back me), that so few want to do finance doesn’t surprise me at all.

When I tried putting myself in the shoes of my students and thought of what jobs I wanted to take, I realised that there weren’t any finance jobs that I could think of. With the derivatives world having undergone several downturns in the last decade, no one recruits for derivative sales and trading from IIMs any more (if my information sources are right – they could be wrong). And if you were to take out derivatives sales and trading, there is very little that excites about the other finance jobs that recruit MBAs.

There is investment banking (M&A, Equity/Debt Capital Markets) of course, but the job is insanely fighter, and while it is ultimately a finance job, finance forms a small portion of your day-to-day activities there (secondhand information again). Venture capital and private equity are again ostensibly finance but again there is very little finance you use in decision-making there – other “softer” stuff (such as evaluating “quality of founding team”, etc.) dominate.

Then there is commercial banking, which is finance only in name, for most jobs for which they recruit MBAs (data from a decade back) are in the realm of sales or business development. There is the odd treasury or risk management job, but those jobs are small in number compared to the others. And corporate finance jobs see excitement very rarely (when there is M&A or related activity). You have asset management and research roles, but they are again not the kind that you would call as “exciting”.

In short, finance has become boring, again. Most jobs on offer to fresh MBAs nowadays are for roles that are fairly routine and “boring” for the most part, and while finance still pays well, there are no adrenaline-pumping jobs on offer there as there used to be a decade ago. And from the macro point of view, that is a good thing.

Because finance is fundamentally a boring job, and is supposed to be a boring job. If finance had become “exciting”, it was because finance people were doing stuff that they were not supposed to be doing! Like taking highly levered bets for example, or concocting derivatives so complicated that nobody – not even most traders – would be able to understand it.

I had written recently that people have stopped considering coding “cool”, and that we should do something about it. A similar thing is happening to finance, where MBA students are not finding it “cool” any more (but people will take up the profession since it pays well). However, this is not a problem, and nothing needs to be done about it. This is how things ought to be. Finance is supposed to be boring!

Anyway, this might be biased opinion since if I could roll back nine years and were asked to pick a job, I couldn’t see myself working at ANY of the companies that had come to recruit from IIMB back when I graduated! So perhaps my hypothesis about finance jobs being boring now is a result of all typical post-MBA jobs being boring! Perhaps that explains why I’m doing what I’m doing now – a “job” so atypical it takes a lot of effort to explain to people what I’m doing.

Oh, and coming back to finance, I’m four weeks though with my Asset Pricing MOOC, and have been totally enjoying it so far!

How much surge is too much surge?

I had gone for a wedding in far-off Yelahanka and hailed an Uber on the way back. The driver was bragging about how it’s easy to find an Uber at any time anywhere in Bangalore, when I pointed out to him that earlier in the evening when I was on my way to the wedding I’d failed to find one, and had taken an Ola instead.

He was surprised that an Uber wasn’t available in Jayanagar when I told him that there were cars available but at a 1.7X surge, and given the distance I was to travel I found it more economical to take an Ola which was offering a ride at a flat Rs. 50 premium. To this, the driver said that he had also noticed that demand sharply dropped off once the level of surge went beyond 1.5X, and at such surges supply would easily outstrip demand.

Now I’m no fan of Ola’s pricing – I think the flat Rs. 50 premium during peak hours is unscientific, but I wonder if the level of Uber’s surges makes sense. From a pure microeconomic standpoint, it is easy to see where Uber is coming from – raise price until quantity demanded matches quantity supplied and let the market clear. The question, however, is if this kind of a surge makes sense from a behavioural standpoint.

The point is that the “base fare” (“1X”) is “anchored” in the customer’s mind, and thus any decision he takes in terms of willingness to pay is made keeping this “anchor” in mind. And when the quoted price moves too far from the anchor (beyond 1.5X, say), the customer deems that it is “too expensive”, and decides that waiting for a few minutes for fares to drop (or using a competing app) is superior to paying the massive premium.

I suppose that Uber would have noticed this. That there is a “cliff” surge price beyond which there is a massive drop off in volume of matchings. The problem is that if they restrict their surges to this “cliff value” they might be leaving money on the table by not being able to match the market. On the other side, though, if the surge is so high that the volume of transactions drops sharply, it results in much lower commissions for Uber! I’m assuming that a solution to this problem is on the way!

And I’ve found that it’s always harder to find a taxi on a Sunday. The problem is that because demand is lower, supply is also lower (this is a unique characteristic of “two-sided markets”) because of which the chances of finding a match are harder, and transaction costs are higher. I wonder if it makes sense for taxi aggregators to levy a “Sunday premium” (perhaps with Uber holding a day-long minimum of 1.2X surge or something) to compensate for this lack of liquidity!

Making coding cool again

I learnt to code back in 1998. My aunt taught me the basics of C++, and I was fascinated by all that I could make my bad old x386 computer to do. Soon enough I was solving complex math problems, and using special ASCII characters to create interesting pattens on screen. It wasn’t long before I wrote the code for two players sitting on the same machine to play Pong. And that made me a star.

I was in a rather stud class back then (the school I went to in class XI had a reputation for attracting toppers), and after a while I think I had used my coding skills to build a reasonable reputation. In other words, coding was cool. And all the other kids also looked up to coding as a special skill.

Somewhere down the line, though I don’t remember when it was, coding became uncool. Despite graduating with a degree in Computer Science from IIT Madras, I didn’t want a “coding job”. I ended up with one, but didn’t want to take it, and so I wrote some MBA entrance exams, and made my escape that way.

By the time I graduated from my MBA, coding had become even more uncool. If you were in a job that required you to code, it was an indication that you were in the lowest rung, and thus not in a “management job”. Perhaps even worse, if your job required you to code, you were probably in an “IT job”, something that was back then considered as being a “dead end” and thus not a very preferred job. Thus, even if you coded in your job, you tended to downplay it. You didn’t want your peers to think you were either in a “bottom rung” job or in an “IT job”. So I wrote fairly studmax code (mostly using VB on Excel) but didn’t particularly talk about it when I met my MBA friends. As I moved jobs (they became progressively studder) my coding actually increased, but I continued to downplay the coding bit.

And I don’t think it’s just me. Thanks to the reasons explained above, coding is considered uncool among most MBA graduates. Even most engineering graduates from good colleges don’t find coding cool, for that is the job that their peers in big-name big-size dead-end-job software services companies do. And if people consider coding uncool, it has a dampening impact on the quality of talent that goes into jobs that involves coding. And that means code becomes less smart. And so forth.

So the question is how we can make coding cool again. I’m not saying it’s totally uncool. There are plenty of talented people who want to code, and who think it’s cool. The problem though is that the marginal potential coder is not taking to coding because he thinks that coding is not cool enough. And making coding cool will make more people want to take it up, which will lead to greater number of people take up this vocation!

Any ideas?

The NFL Documentary

As you might have figured out from my earlier post, I’m no great fan of American Football. I find it too “discontinuous”, I find that the play has too many breaks, and the game is a lot less “elegant” than rugby. However, there is one thing that the National Football League excels at – to make great videos.

Somehow I’m unable to embed the video here so you’ll have to go to the NFL website to watch it. It’s easily the best sports highlights package I’ve ever seen. Extremely well produced and put together, and puts any other highlights package to shame.

The key is that it’s been set out as a kind of documentary – there isn’t much from the commentators, most of the voice is that captured from the bench, from the players and the coaches. And you can see the levels of motivation in either team through the game. You see the players talking to each other, the interactions between opponents, and the chatter from the benches. It shows the game in a whole new perspective!

That however doesn’t mean that I’m a fan of the game now. The forward pass rule makes it extremely inelegant and clunky. I’m reminded of the “football” we would play with a tennis ball back in school – there was no off-side rule, a bunch of us would go stand in front of the opponent’s goal and our goalie would throw the ball to us. And one of us would try and “head it in” (as much as you can head a tennis ball). Then the ball would turn over and action would shift to the same, but at the other end.

Watching a couple of “touchdowns” made me lose whatever little enthusiasm I had for the game. There was none of the elegance that is there in rugby. The ball would move forward great distances in short amounts of time. There was no passing and moving – in fact, I didn’t see a single back pass in the entire highlights package. The moves were really short. I can go on.

Yet, despite the game itself being atrocious, that doesn’t take away from the totally awesome highlights package. Watch it, even if you (like me) hate American football.

Related: Why American sports are hard to watch. TL;DR – their ad breaks are unpredictable

 

Why AAP should win Delhi

Though I frequently write analytical pieces about elections, this is NOT one of them. It’s pure unbridled opinion.

I had mentioned this a couple of years back before the elections in 2013, and I mention it again now. The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) should win Delhi. To rephrase, Delhi should be “sacrificed” to them. If only to illustrate how ridiculous some of their policy ideas are, and why them having a larger role in Indian politics is a terrible idea.

Now, from my timelines on twitter and facebook, I see that a lot of people I know are big fans of AAP. What attracts them to the party is their image of being “clean” and “beyond corruption”. There is also the TINA factor – the Congress has proved time and again that it is incapable of governance and the BJP has this looney fringe with ridiculous social ideas which they actually pay attention to. Given such worthy alternatives, people are plumping for AAP as a party that can provide superior governance.

Except that they seem incredibly commie, except perhaps in name. Look at some of their policy prescriptions (free power, free water, etc.) and you can imagine one of the communist parties coming up with the same. They want to bring back big government in areas where government interference has been cut down after significant effort. They believe that the solution to corruption is more layers of bureaucracy (Jan Lok Pal, etc.). And as the Somnath Bharti incident showed, they are not paragons of virtue when it comes to social freedom, either.

The problem with the AAP is that they haven’t got enough opportunity to show their incompetence, which is why people worship them. They got an opportunity last year, when the Congress supported their minority government in Delhi, but they perhaps wisely saw that their incompetence was being shown up, and Kejriwal resigned in a hurry. And from what opinion polls show, this gambit seems to be working for them. The problem with gambits is that they are tactical weapons, and usually don’t work over a long-drawn period.

So it is time to give the AAP another opportunity to show off their incompetence and bad ideas. Delhi is in that unique position where there is the central government and the municipal government that tread on over one foot of the state government, so the state government can’t do too much damage. And Delhi is also a small state, so any damage will have limited scope.

From this perspective, it is a great idea to “sacrifice” Delhi to the Aam Aadmi Party. I hereby call upon voters in Delhi to vote for the muffler broom.

The Ramayana and the Mahabharata principles

An army of monkeys can’t win you a complex war like the Mahabharata. For that you need a clever charioteer.

A business development meeting didn’t go well. The potential client indicated his preference for a different kind of organisation to solve his problem. I was about to say “why would you go for an army of monkeys to solve this problem when you can.. ” but I couldn’t think of a clever end to the sentence. So I ended up not saying it.

Later on I was thinking of the line and good ways to end it. The mind went back to Hindu mythology. The Ramayana war was won with an army of monkeys, of course. The Mahabharata war was won with the support of a clever and skilled consultant (Krishna didn’t actually fight the war, did he?). “Why would you go for an army of monkeys to solve this problem when you can hire a studmax charioteer”, I phrased. Still doesn’t have that ring. But it’s a useful concept anyway.

Extending the analogy, the Ramayana was was different from the Mahabharata war. In the former, the enemy was a ten-headed demon who had abducted the hero’s wife. Despite what alternate retellings say, it was all mostly black and white. A simple war made complex with the special prowess of the enemy (ten heads, special weaponry, etc.). The army of monkeys proved decisive, and the war was won.

The Mahabharata war was, on the other hand, much more complex. Even mainstream retellings talk about the “shades of grey” in the war, and both sides had their share of pluses and minuses. The enemy here was a bunch of cousins, who had snatched away the protagonists’ kingdom. Special weaponry existed on both sides. Sheer brute force, however, wouldn’t do. The Mahabharata war couldn’t be won with an army of monkeys. Its complexity meant it needed was skilled strategic guidance, and a bit of cunning, which is what Krishna provided when he was hired by Arjuna ostensibly as a charioteer. Krishna’s entire army (highly trained and skilled, but footsoldiers mostly) fought on opposite side, but couldn’t influence the outcome.

So when the problem at hand is simple, and the only complexity is in size or volume or complexity of the enemy, you will do well to hire an army of monkeys. They’ll work best for you there. But when faced with a complex situation and complexity that goes well beyond the enemy’s prowess, you need a charioteer. So make the choice based on the kind of problem you are facing.

 

The deflation controversy

This is my first ever blog post on hand-egg, or the sport that the Americans call as “football” despite you being allowed to run with the ball. I’m writing this as I try to watch the SuperbOwl and try to understand the rules while I’m doing so. So far it looks like a heavily discretised form of rugby, but with none of the elegant pass-and-move routines. People like to fall too much it seems.

Anyway, this post is not about this game. This is about the semi-finals, where the New England Patriots were accused of “deflating” the ball. Over the last week my twitter and facebook timelines have been filled with this controversy. People have mostly been outraging about it one way or the other. I’ve had to mute a lot of people on Twitter for this reason.

As far as I can see it this controversy is similar to the reverse-swing controversy that dogged cricket in the 1990s. The question is if you are allowed to change the ball to suit your conditions as the game goes on. In cricket, people spit on one side of the ball and shine it and try to wear down the other side (sometimes using illegal means such as lozenges and bottle tops respectively). The convention in cricket, however, is that as long as such illegal materials aren’t used to change the ball, there is no problem with maintaining the ball in the way it suits you best. And the opponent (the batting side) can ask for a change of ball if they think it’s been changed too much.

Drawing an analogy from there the rule in hand-egg should be simple. Players should be allowed to do what they can to change the condition of the ball to suit them (inflation/deflation/whatever) as long as they don’t use “illegal materials” for the purpose. So if they use a pin to let out air from the ball, it’s possibly illegal. But if they just use their hands? Possibly not. And so forth.

The only problem is that unlike cricket, hand-egg is a simultaneous game (both teams have opportunity to attack at any point in time), so you might have the two teams wokring the ball at cross purposes. Then again, as long as you have the rule that the opponent can ask for a change of ball in case they think it’s been changed irretrievably, it’s fine!

So coming back to the semifinal controversy, I think the fault lay with the quarterback of whoever the Patriots beat. That guy, if he were clever, should have figured out the “tampered” ball when he got it, and asked for a change. It appears that he was either not clever enough to figure that out or that the Patriots had so much possession that he didn’t have a chance to even touch the ball!

No point crying after the game was up!