Mehtaphysics ॐ

I was asked by The Exonian to write an op-ed piece reflecting on life since graduating from Exeter in 2010, and any tips I have for this year's graduating seniors. The following is what I came up with. Any thoughts would be appreciated. Very strong PG and James Altucher influences. Thanks to my friends Dan, Hanif, and Caroline for reading it. 

I dropped out of college to start FamilyLeaf, a Y Combinator-funded startup. More info here. 

I have always been one to take risks, but they've never seemed very risky to me. I came to Exeter from Seattle just for senior year, against my parents' best judgment. I picked my college program just for the three required semesters of study abroad. I gave up a killer summer internship to work on my own web projects. I took a leave of absence after my first year-and-a-half at NYU to run a funded startup. I don't plan on going back anytime soon.

 

Here I'll share a few lessons I've learned since leaving Exeter two years ago. As a graduating senior, you're blessed with unusual wisdom for your age. You're in for decades of learning. You're one of the only high school audiences in the world who reads that last sentence and smiles knowingly. 

 

Your Harkness skill set might make it easy to coast along and get good grades. Resist the urge to just go with the flow, academically or socially. If most of your friends are doing something, it's probably too easy and you should do something different. 

 

The most important goal in college is simple: find out what you want to do with your life. This might happen much more outside the classroom than in it. Indulge your interests.

 

Live in an exciting city, but don't let it make you edgy or jaded. Live in a beautiful suburban town, but don't become complacent. 

 

There are no certainties. You'll grow to define yourself less by how well you adhered to the status quo and more by how you defied it, majestically and with permanence.

 

Most people wait for the right opportunity to present itself. The adventurer, the inventor, the entrepreneur, the artist is always on the lookout. They know their limitations, and purposefully defy them.

 

Take the time to self-reflect. Understand what you want to accomplish, even if vaguely. Learn from how others got there, and recognize that your path will be different. Try to hit a perfect mix of floating down life's river, and decisively aiming for something. 

 

Work forward from promising situations. Look at your available options, and choose those that will give you the most possible freedom moving forward. Don't shoehorn yourself. 

 

Make things. Please, make things. Extrapolate "make" as broadly as you'd like. Just don't lead a life of pure consumption. It's easy to mistake consuming as growing -- the more you know about cultural touchstones or esoteric subjects, the smarter you'll feel. It's nice to feel smart. But when you wake up each day, do things. Write something, run somewhere, sketch out an idea. Do something new every day. It will make the days pass more slowly. It might bring you love and contentment. 

 

Be in awe of the infinite beauty of the world around you. Take public transportation.

 

Your qualifications don't matter; your books don't matter; your body doesn't matter; your friends don't matter; your successes don't matter. Your conversation with yourself matters. Your choices matter. Remember that you are going to die.

 

And when you recognize a moment approaching its natural ending -- seize it. Don't look back.

We've had a good amount of press for launching FamilyLeaf lately, but I never thought it would be picked up by Exeter's newspaper, The Exonian. Unfortunately, they've hidden it behind a login screen -- so I thought I'd republish it here. The headline is omitted, because it's embarassingly bad.

 

Thursday, April 26, 2012

Ajay Mehta ’10, the co-founder of a new social media site FamilyLeaf, has been put on the spotlight for the site’s innovative way that allows families to connect. FamilyLeaf was founded nine weeks ago, and has already been mentioned in The New York Times, The Times of India, Gawker, Forbes and TechCrunch.

FamilyLeaf is designed to allow relatives to privately share photos and other information.

“We came up with the idea for FamilyLeaf from our own global families,” Mehta said. “We grew up with Facebook and were very used to using it with our friends, but as we left for college or Exeter and Facebook became more open, our parents and then random family members started adding us. We realized that family is so important to us, but also is such a separate part of our lives from friends and acquaintances.”

FamilyLeaf is a solution to the problem of finding relatives online. “The Internet has done a lot to bring together friends, work colleagues, even strangers—but it surprisingly hasn't done much to bring families closer together,” Mehta said. “So FamilyLeaf lets you share photos, contact information and updates with your whole family in one central place, and fully privately. FamilyLeaf is already operable in over 10 languages, and we have users in 95-plus countries.”

Mehta hopes that the site will continue to help families interact, even when they are thousands of miles apart. “Future goals for FamilyLeaf are simple: bring families around the world closer together online.”

Mehta, a one-year senior, graduated cum laude and entered the NYU Stern Business School with a dream to start an Internet company. Science instructor Townley Chisholm said he enjoyed getting to know Mehta as a member of the Williams House dorm. “As a student, he drank deeply from the Exeter well in the one year that he was here,” Chisholm said. “He also had a wonderful sense of humor and was a superb student.”

At the Academy, Mehta participated in the Boston Fed Challenge, and Economics competition. “Given what I saw then of his knowledge, interests and passion, I was deeply impressed when I heard the news that he had founded a new social network which caught the attention of The New York Times,” Mehta’s teammate senior Evan Soltas said.

Mehta also worked with History instructor Georgio Secondi in the competition. “He did a wonderful job: he loves a challenge, works very hard, learns very quickly and brings a lot of energy and a great sense of humor to everything he does,” Secondi said. “He has enormous potential as a tech-entrepreneur.”

Soltas was not very surprised by Mehta’s success. “I don't think I was surprised—maybe only to the extent that he had attained such a success so quickly—because this is very much in character for the Ajay I knew at Exeter and now continue to keep in touch with,” Soltas said. “I can only expect to hear of more achievements and read bigger headlines in the years to come.”

Starting last winter, Mehta began to work on web developments with co-founder Wesley Zhao. “We didn't know how to code at all, but we did weekend projects until we decided they were good enough to release to the public,” Mehta said. “They were simple, like a way to map out your Facebook friends around the world, but slowly they became more successful and spread virally.”

Mehta and Zhao soon attracted the attention of Y Combinator, a prestigious seed fund in Silicon Valley. Y Combinator provided Mehta and Zhao with the funds and direction they needed to launch FamilyLeaf.

 “We applied, interviewed and were accepted into the Winter 2012 batch of Y Combinator—they accept two batches a year,” Mehta said. “They interview thousands of teams and pick about 3 percent of them to fund.”

Mehta credits many different aspects of Exeter as inspiration for the development of FamilyLeaf.

“I think an important special thing about Exeter is the ingrained nature of its students to deviate from the norm, and the desire to build or accomplish something that will truly affect the world,” he said.

Specifically, Mehta credited Mark Zuckerberg ’02 as an inspiration to him, as well as “every other Internet entrepreneur.”

“Zuck was clearly motivated by that in his quest for Facebook world domination, and while I might not be quite that ambitious, I hope that FamilyLeaf will start to make families happier and more connected on a large scale,” Mehta said.

Lower Tyler Weitzman, who recently garnered recognition for his own app development, thinks that FamilyLeaf could be beneficial to families.

“Having an entirely separate, standalone website specifically for families has its pros and cons,” Weitzman said. “From one point, it's distinctively separate from the social network you use with your friends (Facebook). On the other hand, it might be tiresome to switch between the two.”

 

by Sarah Hannigan, staff writer.

Source

Here's a quick fix in case it helps anyone using the terrific Twitter Bootstrap HTML/CSS/JS framework:

We were testing our latest project in Internet Explorer, that scourge of web developers everywhere, and noticed that the gray "default buttons" (class="btn", pictured below) looked awful. They were dark blue with black text, and totally unreadable. 

After digging a bunch through the CSS to see what was wrong, it was this line right here that was causing the issue:

   filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient(startColorstr='#'ffffff, endColorstr='#'e6e6e6, GradientType=0);   

It's some weird Microsoft gradient stuff, but the buttons look fine without it! So just comment it out, and you'll be all good.

I managed to make it out to Morocco briefly last semester while studying in London, and among all the sights, sounds, and smells there's one indelible image I can't seem to get off my mind. I'll just let the story speak for itself:

A friend and I were winding down from a long day of exploring the souks, and we ended up and getting wrapped up in conversation with two English-speaking guys -- who I later found out made money as tourist guides, getting referral fees every time they brought an American lured by his or her home language to try out a favored restaurant or riad. We followed them to a nearby bar of theirs to just sit down and chill, and I noticed two of their friends on a padded bench, disinterested in the beautiful evening action around them and wrapped in a smartphone screen.

 

The main guy was looking down into his Samsung smartphone running Android, and the ubiquitous American top 10 pop song "Party Rock Anthem" by LMFAO was blasting from his phone. It seemed a little strange, because the music at these steamy Moroccan bars was all traditional and atmospheric, and the most American music I had heard on the trip was blasting out of used electronics stores. "Party Rock Anthem" didn't exactly fit within the ambiance.

But then I noticed his friend, a slightly lighter-skinned young man with curly hair but a similar leather jacket on, lean over and jab at the screen with his index finger sequentially in time with the beat. The video wasn't actually a music video, it was just images of the song's lyrics. The main watcher was trying to follow along. He already knew the lyrics from hearing the song dozens of times, but he matched sounds with the words he was seeing on screen. 

 

His friend spouted words of encouragement during the breaks in the song. First in Moroccan Arabic, but after he noticed I was watching intently he switched over to English: this apparently was how he himself learned English over the past year. And knowing English fluently was a major life upgrade for him. Now he was dating a Moroccan girl who was leaving to study and work in Canada. And he was able to converse flawlessly with tourists, leading to a new income source as a street guide.

 

The first lesson is one to app developers who want their new product to change the world in some material way: teaching English to Moroccans with an android app is a noble goal, but you really need to know (and might be surprised by) how people are solving the pressing need today. In this case it was something I would have never expected -- these young guys were literally learning through the YouTube app on their smartphones by following along with lyrics videos. Nothing can replace venturing out into the field and figuring out what users actually want.

 

The second takeaway is just pure amazement. I'm so surprised that people are using technology this way, and that Moroccan twenty-somethings are streaming American music videos on tiny handheld devices that almost all of them possess. And surprisingly, many of the guys we met didn't just have one mobile phone: they had two, three, or even more, with a whole suite of different SIM cards from different providers to save dirhams. The classy bros in LMFAO might be enabled more to help teach eager young Moroccan men than Khan Academy, Rosetta Stone, or even their own government. And that is a true revolution in education.

 

On November 30^th last year, Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain unveiled this crude image as part of his “vision for foreign policy and national security” on hermancain.com. Coming from a businessman who boasts his disregard for the “president of Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan,” this graphic based on a map of worldwide Facebook connections might not be a surprise. But my first inclination upon seeing this map was toward realism and interstate conflict in international relations. Cain states in his platform a desire to “re-examine [the US’s] role within the UN,” and takes a decidedly state-centric view of the world—labeling certain countries as “dangers” and others as “friends.” Cain is a silly man, but these views hint at grander ignorance of international relations theory in the most powerful nation in the world; and by extension, a possibly graver ideological situation in developing regions and extremist-prone states. It's dangerous that discussions of which country to attack or befriend are often ideologically-driven.

 

How did we get in such a bad place? The study of IR has existed as a formal academic discipline since 1918, and isn't as well-formed as other social sciences like economics or psychology. But most interestingly and possibly importantly, it's been evident for a while that gender is deeply embedded in international politics. States are mostly made in the image of Man, and not necessarily Woman. They seek power and growth, are aggressive, and strive for independence beyond rational means. And once you start digging, it goes all the way down. 

 

For a fitting parable on the power of gender in global institutions, one must look no further than Iceland’s collapse four years ago in 2008. Starting in 2003, the previously miniscule fishing nation underwent “the most rapid expansion of a banking system in the history of mankind,” and catapulted to No. 1 in the United Nations’ 2008 Human Development Index before culminating in the now-infamous unprecedented spectacular bankruptcy of the tiny island state. What led a well-adjusted, well-educated, and historically rational populace with no previous experience in finance to create a debt crisis at 850 percent of G.D.P. and start blowing up their Range Rovers for the insurance money? The answer can be found in the predominantly young business-schooled males who moved from studying fishing economics to the Black-Scholes option-pricing model, and whose eyes became bigger than their stomachs from examples of Wall Street excess. After Icelandic nationals placed two women in charge of the largest nationalized banks, a government minister was quoted as saying: “Now the women are taking over. It’s typical, the men make the mess and the women come in to clean it up.”

 

We only measure a society's progress by resources and production. Materialism is the exclusive emphasis in politics and economics, and men in society generally control production, work, exchange, and distribution. History, and therefore international relations study, is centered around these same metrics -- as Foucault argued, history simply exposes "the endlessly repeated play of dominations."

 

But sometimes, we can learn a lot more by focusing around social issues rather than material growth. Instead of focusing on war itself, Katharine Moon interviewed Korean prostitutes serving American soldiers during the Korean War. As the South Korean government undertook a policy of policing sexual health and work conduct of prostitutes, military prostitution interacted with “US-Korean security policy at the highest level.” What will be learned by "finding the woman" always will be significant.

 

It's not something I ever thought about before. But now, when I read something about history or current world politics events, I can't help but try to follow the motivations. If you look at assumptions held in articles about conflict, religious extremism, and war -- they're all centered around the male perspective. By pure definition, half of us humans are women. If you don't consider how the women of the world are faring in any particular foreign policy decision, you're making a huge myopic mistake. And once you peel back the layers, it becomes obvious how many of our thoughts on international politics are based in purely male-centric bounds.

While reading Listen to This -- a great collection of essays about music by New Yorker writer Alex Ross -- one passage in particular struck me as prescient and vibrant. It stayed on my mind.

Ross breaks down popular adoption of musical genres into five clear stages: youth rebellion, bourgeois pomp, modern rebellion, avant-garde, and finally, retrenchment. It explains music perfectly, but I think it can be applied across the board. What about action movies, video games, or political views? 

 

I love interesting categorizations, so I thought I'd share this. I'll let Ross take it from here:

All music becomes classical music in the end. Reading the histories of other genres, I often get a funny sense of déjà vu. The story of jazz, for example, seems to recapitulate classical history at high speed. First, the youth-rebellion period:Satchmo and the Duke and Bix and Jelly Roll teach a generation to lose itself in the music. Secord, the era of bourgeois pomp: the high-class swing band parallels the Romantic orchestra. Stage 3: artists rebel against the bourgeois image, echoing the classical modernist revolution, sometimes by direct citation (Charlie Parker works the opening notes of The Rite of Spring into "Salt Peanuts"). Stage 4: free jazz marks the point at which the vanguard loses touch with the masses and becomes a self-contained avant-garde. Stage 5: a period of retrenchment. Wynton Marsalis's attempt to launch a traditionalist jazz revival parallels the neo-Romantic music of many late-twentieth-century composers. But this effor comes too late to restore the art to the popular mainstream.

The same progression worms its way through rock and roll. What were my hyper-educated punk-rock friends but Stage 3 high moderninists, rebelling against the bloarted Romanticism of Stage 2 stadium rock? In the first years of the new century there was a lot of Stage 5 neoclassicism going on in what remaind of rock. The Strokes, the Hives, the Vines, the Stills, the Thrills, the White Stripes, and various other bands harked back to the some lost pure moment of the sixties or seventies. Many used old instruments, old amplifiers, old soundboards. One rocker was quoted as saying, "I intentionally won't use something I haven't heard before." A White Stripes record carried this Luddite notice: "No computers were used during the recording, mixing, or mastering of this record."

That was Seattle City Councilman Tim Burgess remixing Wiz Khalifa's "Black and Yellow" at last night's Candidate Survivor event. And it wasn't even the most ridiculous thing at the quasi-political event.

 

If you ever wanted to see a bunch of old part-time politicans proclaiming their support for marijuana legalization and rapping in Japanese, Candidate Survivor was crafted for you. It's organized by the great organization Washington Bus (who I've been volunteering with at the Capitol Hill Block Party and elsewhere) and Seattle stalwart indie newspaper The Stranger. It was essentially a debate, talent show, and popularity contest all rolled into one. Skinny dipping was admitted to, cookies were made and thrown out on stage, and 60+ year old councilpeople talked about sexting and danced around to disco music.

 

The pictures on the "Hella Bus" blog are great, so check them out. And man, this city council is refreshingly liberal. When there's 0/20 people on stage who are against same sex marriage, and our mayor is actively advocating marijuana legalization, I'm glad to be living in Seattle. The biggest arguments were about tunnels and trains -- they were functional and economic in nature, rather than emotional or partisan. I was happy to see the different breeds of progressive, rarely noticed in national politics.

Other cities should learn from Candidate Survivor and lighten things up. The humor and playful competition make our political system feel in touch, active, and actually likeable. We need more of that.

I just came back from watching Page One: Inside the New York Times, a new doc about our nation's "paper of record." The narrative mostly stayed out of any posturing, except for setting up the Times as a public institution by delving into history through the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, etc. Fortunately, it was mostly fly-on-the-wall; watching real journalists argue about Twitter, fret over unclear messages from Washington, and ship off to Iraq. 

 

As a younger media consumer, I'm not so into the whole David Carr narrative that everyone seems to focus on. He's hilarious and has a great story behind him, but the environment surrounding the Times was much more interesting to me -- it's how my generation knows and understands news. The scenes in the Gawker offices interviewing Nick Denton were emblematic of that: I recognized all the desks (and especially the "big board") from interning there a few months ago. The short (5min) interlude at SXSW also hit home -- I spotted Ev from Twitter and Dennis from Foursquare. Although they had one or two lines in the film, to younger media consumers like me they are the central movers and shakers in the story that Page One is attempting to tell. Through the lens of the Times, the film takes a flawed perspective on modern media.

 

For example, the film spent a ton of time with two tough issues: the Times coping with Wikileaks and also breaking the news of the Tribune Company going out of business. Sure, I liked Carr exposing the sexual harrassment and gross mismanagement at the Tribune with an air of NYC superiority, but it's stuff we've seen before and understand. The reason the Times is in such dire straits is because they're arguably too rigid and old to deal with stuff we haven't seen before, and don't understand, like dealing with renegade justice-dealer Julian Assange. Even the young, social media-savvy Brian Stelter couldn't decide whether to deal with Wikileaks as a source or a fellow publisher -- these are the rough areas that the Times has to solve in an age of increasingly open information.

 

Inter-media gossip and intrigue is interesting, but the grand trends of the internet, openness, and audiences being used to getting content for free aren't going away. The movie touched on them and tried to address them, but viewed it through the old world lens of the Times. Sure, they got Clay Shirky as a talking head, but it felt as if viewpoints like his were an afterthought. I hope the Times survives, but after seeing Page One, I'm not so sure it deserves to. 

 

Apologies for the sporadic posting. More posts are definitely coming soon, hopefully with some kind of regularity.

 

Everyone is falling back in love with the big G, with good reason.

Attribute it to the sweet "circles" UI in Google+, the new (hidden-for-now) Gmail design, the massive design change rollouts, or any number of specific visual/UX tweaks they've been pushing out at an unprecedented rate. More than anything else, I think it's evidence of a welcome return of joy and whimsy back to Google products. With Larry Page's CEO promotion earlier this year, Google is returning to its fun nerd roots -- a change best seen through four small apps they've launched recently:

A Google a Day -- a scavenger hunt acted out through Google search. 

Beat the Boot -- a ridiculously fun 1 minute game promoting the Chromebook's quick boot speed. 

Nexus Contraptions -- a puzzle game (great time-waster) promoting their new phone. 

What do you love? -- type in a search term, and you'll see how it's interpreted by all of Google's services.

 

I love this, and I think it's where the extreme popularity and worldwide love of Google's brand comes from. They have always been, and also only hire, interesting geeks that make cool stuff to change the world. That's who Larry and Sergey are, and now that Larry's more formally in charge, these moves and experiments make sense.

None of these apps have been widely promoted, but they're a return to form. And in a time of heavy competition from Facebook and Apple, these innocuous, quirky traits will be how Google keeps its cultural approach and succeeds.

Wesley, Dan, and my latest project has eclipsed everything else we've done over these past few months: Where My Friends Be?

The growth and press have been ridiculously exciting. As I write this, we have 30,000+ registered users and 3.25 million+ friends "mapped."

Here's my attempt to catalog all that's been written about us:

• Featured on Mashable. This started it all, and about 30 seconds afterwards our servers crashed. Hard. Here's Wesley's account of the ordeal, and we learned a ton about scalability and PR. 
• Reposted to CNN.com
• Featured and interviewed on Seattle King 5 Evening News. This was a total surprise, and I had to skip class to run back to my dorm and get interviewed on Skype. Don't tell my profs.
• Posted by a French tech blog that led to many more French posts: here are a few... here's one in Turkish. And one in Japanese. There's a few in Spanish, but I can't find them right now...
• A post we're proud of for this quote: "there's a difference between getting there first, and doing it right."
• It's taken on a life of itself in the Twittersphere, check out this tag: #wheremyfriendsbe
• Very proud of this one: a post about our "nicest fail page ever"
• Dan has written a three-part gripping account of the whole experience.

Hopefully this is just the beginning!