Netizen: Background

My Background: Paramendra Kumar Bhagat

Tech Startups

I have several tech startups in the past. When you launch and fundraise and scale a tech startup, you read voraciously about many different business functions, other tech startups, and various industries. It can be said, each tech startup has been its own MBA. A tech startup hones your innovation instincts. You stay on the lookout. You do out-of-the-box thinking on the sly. You rethink old ways of doing things. You learn about your strengths and weaknesses. My strength is I am very good at building and leading teams and equipping them with a bold vision and clear purpose. My weakness is that I do the forest, not the trees. But if I have people on the team who do the trees, I can do excellent work. I am an artist and people and teams are my buckets of paint. The most important thing I have learned is the ongoing explosion in technology and innovation is not just for cutting-edge tech startups, but for every industry, every company, and every job function.

I have been studying tech startups like they were some exotic biological specimens since the first dot com boom. The past quarter-century has been but prologue. The real action is only now beginning.

Fred Wilson quoted a blog post of mine on his blog in 2009. That blog post became his most popular that year. In my blog post I said when you are on the FourSquare website, it feels like you are sitting in a bus that is not moving. https://technbiz.blogspot.com/2010/09/netizen-has-arrived-link-from-avc.html And here’s Paul Grahm, Brad Feld, and me in the same BBC article. https://technbiz.blogspot.com/2010/05/me-bbc.html

Digital Marketing

I have the equivalent of an Oscar in digital marketing. Adobe declared me the Top Influencer during Social Media Week 2012, the top global event in the space happening simultaneously in 26 major cities around the world and reaching 800 million people today. https://technbiz.blogspot.com/2012/02/top-influencer-during-social-media-week.html

I am a Top Photographer on Google Maps with over 50 million views. That is more than the population of my native Nepal.

I am active on most major social media platforms. I am one of the top people on Twitter in NYC. I have been an avid blogger since 2004 and wrote online long before that.

I am an accomplished writer. I got a poem published in the top poetry magazine in my native Nepal when I was in Grade 10.

A big mistake a lot of people and companies make is to think digital marketing is only about broadcasting. Digital marketing is first and foremost a listening tool. When Elon Musk wanted Tesla to build a pickup truck, he posed the question on Twitter. What features would you like in your truck? His fans responded. Those features ended up in the truck. Digital allows you to listen to your customers and your team at granular levels not possible before.

Political Work

My political work shows my agility for large-scale group dynamics, like e-commerce. https://democracyforum.blogspot.com I became Barack Obama’s first full-time volunteer in all of New York City.

I was the top student in class at the top school in Nepal for seven of the 10 years I was there in Kathmandu. My SAT score was 1450/1600. The school has sent alumni to all top colleges and universities and companies across the US. I showed up at the top liberal arts college in the US South whose endowment per student matches that of Harvard. Within six months of landing, I got myself elected student body president. They had to change the constitution so I could run as a freshman, the first time that had happened since the time of Lincoln when the college was founded as an anti-slavery institution. Before you needed to have been at least a Junior. I won an election in the US South almost a decade before Bobby Jindal.

A month after 9/11 I hit the road in an 18-wheeler and went to all 48 states in the continental US on and off for two years. The savings from that trucking came in handy. In 2005 and 2006 I was the only full-timer Nepali across the US to have worked for Nepal’s democracy movement. The king of Nepal had pulled a coup. I toppled a Third World dictator without the trillions. My methods were 100% digital. All my moves are archived and in the public domain.

There is a concrete mathematical theory called the butterfly effect. A butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon forest could be the reason a cyclone hit Bangladesh. What happened in Nepal in April 2006, January-February 2007, and February 2008 were political cyclones. I was the butterfly flapping my wings in New York City. In April 2006, over a period of 19 days, about eight million people out of the country's 27 million came out into the streets to shut the country down completely to force a dictator out. My methods were 100% digital. German Radio called me Robin Hood On The Internet. https://demrepubnepal.blogspot.com/2006/02/robin-hood-im-internet.html

I am a born leader with a tremendous feel for group dynamics. During my Grade 10 year, I was House Captain. A British teacher wrote: “I have never seen morale raised this high in any boarding house anywhere ever!”

Photo: 2015, the year I attained enlightenment. Sadhguru also has attained enlightenment: "You see something brighter than the sun, but it is not hurting your eyes, because you are not seeing it with your physical eyes."

Tech Startups: Three Instances

Dot com boom: I was one of the early team members of a team that ventured to build a South Asian online community. Social. It went down when the dot com crash happened. As to why I got into a semi during the nuclear winter I only understood when I moved to NYC and became friends with the Meetup.com Founder Scott. He had gone to work at McDonald's for a week. That had been his first reaction. ..... I went to see the Founder CEO one day. I said, I understand we don't need revenues right away, but we do need it eventually, what are we doing about that? I was majorly reprimanded. The whole business model was eyeballs, then IPO.
In late 2007 me and my Co-Founder met our goal of a 100K raise for an IC idea. When the 2008 financial crisis hit, we gave the money back to the investors since it was so obvious to us the next round of fundraising will not happen. IC: Internet Computer. A few years later came to the market as Google's Chromebook.
I was an early team member. The Founder was on a trajectory. I nudged. I said, this does not take this to a billion. He refused. We parted ways. Both of us were proven right. He sold his company for 36M a few years later.

Right now is the best possible time in human history to do a tech startup. I have studied tech cycle after tech cycle. In 2016 I read the Bible cover to cover and wrote what I would like to believe is the definitive book on corporate culture. No company ever became a great company without a great corporate culture. Corporate Culture is the operating system of a company. My book is Android. Any company can integrate it and get great corporate culture.

Cisco was what NVIDIA is today. It was led by a people person, a non technical person. John Chambers. I am that people person.