Recruiting at Startups (follow-up)

In a previous post we discussed the challenges of hiring at Startups. Recently we interviewed a candidate who is an exemplar for all that is not to be expected from a candidate applying for a job with a startup. This experience has led us to re-evaluate some of the criteria we applied earlier and add news ones. We share our insights here in the hope that it helps some fellow entrepreneurs in similar situations.

We received the resume of a candidate, who on paper, appeared to have some decent qualifications. But in the very first interview serious doubts were raised about this candidate's abilities, despite several attempts to smile and hand-wave through. So we asked this person to take a simple computing challenges test, loosely modeled along the challenges we had encountered.

Our doubts were more than confirmed - this candidate's responses were along the lines of "company so-and-so has done it ...", "so-and-so is researching it"; and we kid you not, even a response to the tune of "this is a well known problem and no need to explain".... yadda....yadda....Imagine taking an test and responding "... this is already solved, hence no need to answer it here". What grade would you have received in such a test? :-)

Not one of the responses were anything even close to being acceptable. When the obvious was pointed out in no uncertain terms, the applicant threw a hissy-fit: the details are unimportant but needless to say the applicant knew "game over!" .

This example brought up a number of questions in how we evaluate candidates, so we added the following points to evaluate applicants:

1. Originality Very Welcome: Most startups are looking for some innovative and original thinking and not copy-paste warriors. To be clear, we are not looking for theories of relativity to be developed, however we are looking for the beginnings of some out-of-the-box thinking. The proposed approach might not be workable at all, but it must demonstrate creativity and innovation. Startups need that kind of thinking to develop a competitive advantage wherever and whenever they can.

2. Prima Donnas Unwelcome: A startup is a very, very rough and tumble game. if one cannot handle being tackled and tackled hard, they are best advised staying away from the field. A fellow entrepreneur pointed out being in a startup is like being a quarterback without a defensive formation, and that is not far from the truth. Any employee with a chip on their shoulder is likely unsuited to work in entrepreneurial organizations.

Working for a startup requires more often than not, the ability to take some hard hits and remain standing. If that doesn't sit well with some.....oh well! Sorry!

Is consciousness an emergent phenomenon?

This is a fascinating Scientific American article on emergence as the root of consciousness. It asks the interesting question if a bee hive is conscious because of the emergent behavior of individual bees. Similar questions could be asked if shoals of fish, or flocks of birds display some measure of consciousness in a manner similar to how a collection of human cells perform microscopic tasks and yet collectively display sentience.

Is Search the Future? (Part-1)

This is the first in a multi-part series on Cognika’s vision of information access in the next generation of the web. In subsequent posts we will provide specifics on how this would work in practice.

A hotly debated topic is the so-called “future of search” or "the next Google". Opinions have ranged from Google’s Marissa Mayer's “search is 90% solved” to Bill Gates’ opinion that search has barely scratched the surface. However, search is increasingly more of a problem than a solution.

Undoubtedly, companies like Google, Yahoo etc. efforts in search have made information accessible to anyone with an internet connection - which is a very laudable achievement - but it has made the challenge of information overload worse than anyone could have imagined. Search, has made information available, but it has not yet begun to make it usable, and there is a night/day difference between information availability and usability. To make information usable, it needs to be coalesced from multiple-sources in a context-specific manner and presented intelligently to achieve a task. (look for specifics in later posts)

Search today is - pardon the expression - a** backwards. Imagine a child asking a parent questions that typically puzzle the infant mind, about “why it rains”, “why birds fly” or “why are leaves green” etc. and now picture the parent handing out a collection of encyclopedias, books, papers, articles etc. in response, and saying “go figure it out”. In many ways, the current paradigm is just as inane. It is left up to the user to make sense of the information from across multiple-sources (and most information does indeed span multiple sources).

A school of thought believes that the holy grail of search is a crisp, succinct response to queries. While this approach might work for questions such as “What is the capital of Peru?” or “Who is the current president of Ukraine?”, this approach would fail for the vast majority of queries – the ones for which there is no ready-made response. Since this involves aggregating information from multiple-sources, reasoning therewith, providing a response that is relevant and contextual, and yet provide a user-definable level of detail.

For example, could such a system answer a subjective question such as “What are the greatest movies of all time?” A response would typically involve user iterations: as ranked by AFI or IMDB or MPAA? Hollywood or International? Specific genre? And so on…

Some might argue the faceted browsing approach would work since a result set could be filtered by selecting/deselecting facets for the above etc. However, that is not quite the end of it. While the content might include Movie Title, Synopsis, Cast and some associated information. This does not allow inclusion of user-definable data points: such as reviews from select critics, availability in local stores, movies with similar plot lines, other movies by the same director, or other movies in the same genre etc.

This information would usually span multiple data-sources, documents, domains and would require repeated searches and manual collation. Now extrapolate this to highly complex domains (such as scientific research, business analysis etc.) and the challenge is multiplied manifold.

At Cognika we believe that a new paradigm needs to be developed for information processing and that search as-is today is a stepping-stone towards this vision. This quote best summarizes Cognika’s vision for the future: “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” – Winston Churchill.

"Biomimetics"? - why not just mimetics?

The field of Biomimetics or Biomimicry applies generated by nature through evolution, to solve scientific challenges. While inventions such as Velcro, Swarm algorithms etc. are some famous examples of technology inspired by nature, why not extend the idea to be inspired from multiple domains.

An example is the idea of TRIZ developed by a scientist in the former Soviet Union Genrich Altschuller. Altschuller postulated that solutions that exist in one domain (example: automobiles) could help solve a challenge in a very different domain (example: medicine). He found such cross-domain solutions using the patent corpus as a source. So biomimetics seems to be a specialized case of TRIZ that uses biological organisms an information source.

AskNature is a website that seems to be a great start at collecting such data and making biomimetics usable. It would be a good next step to release the data into public domain or expose as an API, so it can be integrated into other applications.

Overall we feel that the concept of mimetics should be extended across corpora - biological, patents, journals etc. Only then will the true power of this approach be realized.

Coding errors get 'dangerous'

A fascinating list of top 25 coding errors and the potential dangers posed have been unveiled by the SANS institute with a host of organizations such as the NSA, DNI etc.. While the list order seems quite arbitrary , it is quite enlightening as to how trivial mistakes by programmers could cascade into a potentially dangerous situation. Something every programmer worth his/her salt should be aware of.

The BBC also provides some coverage here.

Emergence in Computer security

A staggering number of PCs have been compromised with malware and are used for everything from spreading spam, viruses, phishing etc. – in fact every kind of malicious activity imaginable. While many users are at least nominally aware of the dangers and have some protection installed, such tools offer superficial protection at best, especially against the more serious infestations. This is often counterproductive since it lulls users into a false sense of security.
Caveat: we are not suggesting uninstalling your current protection tools.

At the core of this, lies the fact that most security software is very reactive i.e. as soon as a new threat is detected, antivirus develop an update against it. By the time the update actually is installed on a user computer – assuming the protection actually works – is often too late. The current deluge of malware calls for a paradigm shift in moving to a proactive, predictive approach.

At Cognika, we are exploring the possibility of applying the concept of emergence to computer security. Artificial Immune Systems (AIS) have been researched for a few decades however such approaches remain researchy. The concept of AIS borrows from the idea of biological immune systems, which constantly evolve to cope with newer and emerging threats.

Biological immune systems are remarkably effective against the countless pathogens that organisms are exposed to during a lifetime. Millennia of evolution have made biological immune systems remarkably effective. Our idea is to adopt some of those ideas to develop an internet immune system akin to bio immune systems. Such research would be at the intersection of evolutionary computing, machine learning, computer security and other fields.

Here are some thoughts along these lines:

• An evolutionary, adaptive system could be developed to cope with the current onslaught of malware: an immune system that is constantly mutating (much like its adversaries) and adapting to newer threats.
• Cohorts of machines form trust networks (Immunets) to warn each other of imminent threats and share mechanisms to thwart their attack. The Immunets could be layered around existing social networks or organizational networks.
• The Immunets employ a combination of evolutionary algorithms and machine learning to develop effective defenses, which do not require manual updates and examination.
• Such systems could be augmented by current security-ware, much as biological immune systems are augmented by medications and treatments.

We have developed some prototypes and have some exciting early findings. We would love to hear more from academics, researchers, businesses interested in collaboration.

Cognika is hiring!

We are on the lookout for superstar engineers who thrive in a dynamic entrepreneurial environment.
More here

Recruiting at Startups

Hiring good talent is a challenge at the best of times and at the most glamorous of companies, but it is orders of magnitude harder for a startup. At a small company you are typically looking for a very specific skill-set . However, it is very hard (even impossible) to find exactly what you are looking for, so a company has to compromise. Therefore, we have followed an approach where we look for the right aptitude - where a person has the background to build-on and the right attitude.

As they say, Aptitude = (Right) Attitude + P(erseverance) - T(antrums)

There is a great post by Joel Spolsky. The bottom-line is when you are applying for a position in a startup or small company , it is doubtful anyone is interested in your skills in managing 100s of people, or CRM/SAP skills etc. You should focus on your multiplexing skills: your ability to churn out code, while communicating with customers, and yet playing a good sales/marketing person, while offering technical support. Most startups and small-businesses need exactly that kind of "all-rounders".

p.s. Anyone applying to positions at Cognika ought to pay significant attention to these factors.

"Semantic Web" vs "Emergent Semantics"

One of the most common questions we often get asked is: "how is this different from the Semantic Web effort". The Semantic Web approach of Ontologies, Logic, RDF/OWL etc are not competing with the concept we at Cognika try to advocate. We think that semantics are emergent and not necessarily always well-defined through "standards" or other approaches. Instead emergent semantics are complementary to the top-down Ontological model. A good metaphor would be to view this as burning the candle from both ends.

However, we think while Ontologies and higher-level logical constructs have their place, the vast majority of semantics will be emergent through a combination of machine-learning and user interactions. An exemplar is how the web itself evolved through users linking to pages they thought was relevant etc. - so we think our approach is in the original spirit of the WWW.

Any comments?

Cognika gets some press

Cognika gets covered in Mass Hightech. We are proud of the fact that we are among the few companies to survive this brutal economy. As Paul Graham points out in his very insightful article, this is the best time for a startup: "why to startup in a bad economy".