Half-Blood Prince Tomorrow!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Will be enjoying the services of complimentary baby sitters ( aka Sudha & SSV ) and watching it tomorrow night.

The Day

We are making our final Venture Capital presentation tomorrow. Stay tuned for results.

I have a fan

I was humming jagadapu chanavula jajara and Aditya came and said "mommy I like your singing." At least that was better than the compliment he gave me on my drawing of a triceratops, "mommy that looks like a cow!!!"

Don't I look Indian?

One guy at the car wash starts talking to me in Spanish before I say "Whoa, wait a minute. I don't know Spanish". Today a guy at Fry's checkout asks me if I am Ethiopian. What's up with that?

Pass available to hear Warren Buffett speak

Vidya / Madhav,
I have a single student pass that gives access to the Berkshire Hathaway shareholders meeting in Omaha. Considering the fact that the Class A-share(BRKA) costs about $88,000+ and the Class B-share (BRKB) costs about $3,000, this is a rare free opportunity to attend the meeting and hear Mr.Buffett speak. The meeting is on May 2nd, Saturday. Let me know if you want the pass and I can fed-ex it over ASAP.
After hearing him speak in November, I can tell you it is an absolutely amazing experience. You can read my blog entry about my experience here.

http://krupasingampalli.blogspot.com/2008/12/day-with-warren-buffett.html

A day of triumph

As part of my entrepreneurship class, we take an idea, refine it and pitch it to Venture Capitalists for funding.

Our team picked my idea, but our team consisted of 4 "engineers" who had no idea about the business side of things and me. And our project was NOT moving forward and sometimes even regressing. As late as two weeks ago, we were in such bad shape that our advisor thought it needed divine intervention for us to complete this project to a reasonable level.
So I decided to take charge two weeks ago, emailed our professor to request for a chance to present in class, vastly raising the stakes in embarrassment and took over the creation of the powerpoint slide deck, which entailed refining our business model to extreme levels. I also paid a guy to do a mockup of our site. We worked Saturday from 1PM to 1AM, with me pushing to get it done and I worked on the slide deck sunday night, took ownership of presenting the first part of explaining the business which the most crucial role since this sets the tone for the entire presentation and practiced the heck out of it, in the shower, in front of a mirror, in front IS, to a level where I was comfortable, scripted up what the rest of the team should say, got them to practice and delivered it tonight.

It was a spectacular success and the rest of the advisors who were hearing from our advisor on how bad we were, just sat there, simply stunned. Of course they had lot of feedback, but overall were quite impressed.

In fact, a guest in our class, the CEO of a Venture Capital firm( who was employee number 5-6 in Oracle ) pulled me aside after the class and told me, and I quote, " You have great leadership potential and you can go places". He complimented me on my presentation style, and again I quote "a relaxed, unassuming manner that hides a lot of knowledge", and a "great presence" ( which was funny, considering I am under 5 feet :-) and told my professor "This is a very talented young lady". Apparently he was quite impressed with how I was not intimidated during the private feedback session he and another VC guest gave our team and how I was able to calmly respond.

It was a great feeling that made all the effort in the last week totally worth it. Amma and Nanna know how I was so disgusted with our performance two weeks ago but today I am on Cloud Nine!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

A day in my life

On a working day:
6:30AM Wakeup ; Get Ready; Pack lunch; Eat Breakfast
7:20AM Leave for office ; Catch up with Mom, MIL, Friends; Customers while driving
8:00AM Reach office
12:00PM-12:15PM Eat Lunch at desk
5:00PM Leave for Aditya's school; Listen to news on radio
6:00PM Pick up aditya; Listen to ramadasu kirtanas; bhajagovindam etc in car
6:15PM Reach home; Play with aditya; feed aditya; bathe aditya; read bed time story
9:30PM Put aditya to bed
9:30PM-10:30PM Conference call on some project ( class, extra curricular)
10:30PM-12:00PM Homework ; Office work catch up
12:00PM-12:30PM Watch some program on TV; Fall asleep sometime in this range

On a non-working class day:
7:00AM Wakeup ; Get Ready; Eat Breakfast
7:30AM Wake up Aditya ; Get him ready; Feed him BF;
9:00AM Drop-off Aditya at school
9:00AM-11:00AM : House related stuff ( Pay bills, mortgage broker, security system, Homeowner association, handyman etc gazillion things required to do in maintaining a home)
11:00AM-11:30AM: Grab food
11:30AM - 5:30PM : Networking, extra curricular activities; drive 30-50 miles to be somewhere, volunteer for some stuff ; whatever......
5:30PM - 9:30PM Class
10:15PM reach home
10:30PM - 12:00PM Homework; conf calls ; work catch up etc

On weekends
All day: conf calls, team meetings, project research, project report, extra curricular events etc etc etc

My list of activities this semeseter
5 workshops on various topics
4 Courses
3 parties
2 Consulting Projects ( Visa, Wells Fargo Bank )
1 Startup B-Plan help
1 Own Venture idea
1 international trip

Bottom line: DOG TIRED!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Remiss of me

I apologize for not extending the authorship to Madhu and Madhav. Sasanna and Vidya, email me their email addresses ASAP so they can be properly welcomed into the bosom of the family on the web.

Update on my job situation

While I did not lose my job as I anticipated last week, I am now working part-time. 50% work and 50% pay.
For me, it is a blessing in disguise, as this would give me time to focus on the all important interviews that will start in September.
Rogi pale koradu, vaidyudu pale ichadu.

My business idea

Go here to read more about it.
http://elearnwhiz.weebly.com/index.html

Looooooooooong Post

Well, well. Lot to share but so little time. Lot of things happening here but things moving at such break neck pace, I don't have time to even break my neck.

Of course, the posts from atta, sasanna and kupanna are, much like water in oasis, a welcome relief in my daily hectic life.

So before anyone can accuse me of completely disappearing, here it goes.
1) Aditya had his first "test". Aditya got admission in Challenger after passing an "admission test" with 95%. THERE! I have officially become the mom obsessed with exams, grades and percentages. He starts this school in August. It is basically an Indian school with 95% student body being "desis", as we are fondly called here, except for the corporeal punishment part. Bandedu homework, prati vaaram unit tests.

2) Aditya entered his first competition. He entered the BATA kids talent competition for 4-7 year old age group, the only 4-yr old participant. He did not win a prize but was very rational about it. In his own words, "Awwwwwwwwwww. I did not win this time. Next time I will practice more and sing really well. The people who won practiced a lot more.". He is very enthused about learning Karnatic music after the competition. Await the Video shortly.

3)I will probably lose my job by the end of this week. Being in the marketing department means your job will be the first on line if things get dicey, so I have to get used to these kind of affairs. I was planning to quit in June to focus on my post MBA job search anyways, so this just acclerated that decision by about 3-months.

4) I am exploring a possible business idea of mine and I am working on it as part of my entreprenuership class. If it works out, well and good. Otherwise it will be a good end-to-end experience.

5) My classwork is keeping me extremely busy. The first is the entreprenuership class, where we essentially do everything needed to start a company, right from finding the idea to finding the customers, estimating costs and pitching the idea to venture capitalists to raise money. It is extremely intense, a boat load of work but tons of fun. My other class is Game Theory, where we play "games". For example, our class was the OPEC cartel last week, where we had to come to a collective agreement on how much oil to produce to keep the oil price high. Very Capitalistic.

6) I did a consulting project to Visa, where I pitched them an idea on how Visa can make money from the allowance parents give their kids. The company loved that idea. I KNOW, I am joining the corporate baddies!!!!

7) I am going to China for 2 weeks for a class trip, from June 1 - June 15. I will post details of my trip when I am back.

8) We currently have a cook who cooks very well, except she comes and cooks once a week and we eat that for the whole week. She makes awesome sweets. Oh, did I mention she is a Pakistani? But she is a very nice lady and Aditya likes her beans kura and bendakai. She is a big fan of Hindi music and I gave her about 200 hindi songs which made her extremely happy.

Phewww! That was a long post. No wonder I am getting only getting about 5 hours of sleep per night.

While I may not post very actively for the next couple of months as I finish school work, work on my business idea and search for new jobs, be rest assured that I will be reading all the posts on the blog, so keep their refreshing posts coming.

Happy wedding anniversary

Dear Krupa and Seenu a very happy wedding anniversary