ethical selling

Is it really possible to sell ethically?

What is unethical selling by the way?

“Selling something that you know is not the best for the customer, but it makes you money, and you go ahead and do the sale.”

That’s bad. Its worse than stealing and it should be punishable just like any other crime.

So, it it really possible to sell ethically?

I think so, very strongly.

  • Start with a product that is really good. Don’t compromise on the quality of your product. This is the foundation and it has to be strong.
  • When you meet with your customer, understand you customer’s needs.
  • If those needs are not met by your product, WALK AWAY.

Walking away from a prospect is the most difficult thing to do in a sale. You’ve done so much hard work to find a prospect and you are just one meeting away from potentially closing the deal. And you don’t want to step back now. Right?

Wrong. Unless you step back the moment you figure out that your product is not the right fit for your prospect, you cannot run an ethical business.

An organisation’s culture and values start with how you sell !!

opportunistic fraud

I did something very wrong yesterday. And I want to share with you all the cost of simple wrong doings.

In Prague, taxis are notorious for cheating tourists. We were conned by the taxi guys when we took two cabs from train station to the hotel. They charged us 30 Euros for a ride that should have cost us just 10 Euros. I felt robbed.

The next day, I was adamant that we take the train to go around the city and not use the taxis. So went ahead and bought day tickets for all of us and roamed around happily on trains and trams. The next day, I realised that the we didn’t get the tickets punched at the station the day before. You’d have to do this before you board the first train. Which means, we could use the same tickets the next day.

Continue reading “opportunistic fraud”

smart phones?

Smart phones should not be called smart phones because they are not smart on their own. By calling them smart, subconsciously we expect them to have smart thinking and cognitive abilities like humans, which they obviously don’t.

What if we call them something like “super fast doers” or “ultra quick computers”, that actually highlights their strengths?

AI vs human-computer collaboration

We know that the strengths of humans are the weaknesses of machines (I mean computers). And vice versa.

Instead of striving to strengthen the weaknesses of computers and make them more human like, why not collaborate with them to join the strengths of humans and computers together to make a stronger combination?

Instead of asking “how can I make machines intelligent?”, a better question to ask is “what are the best ways to use the strengths of computers to augment ours?”.

That’s the key. It’s not just about using the strengths of computers. It’s about figuring out the right ways and combinations of using those strengths.

A thought to ponder upon…

conscious machines

One of the biggest areas of my interests is making intelligent machines. As we all know, the promise of AI has been unfulfilled for the past 40-50 years and there have been quite a few predictions by a lot of eminent scientists that machine intelligence is imminent and singularity is just around the corner.

I must admit that I don’t qualify to make any grand claims about AI, but I strongly believe it is possible to make machines intelligent. Don’t know when, but its possible. How?

Until then, I have a theory on what we can do today…




1.  a strong desire to know or learn something.

This has been driving me all my life to pursue the things I didn’t know. In a way, I am afraid of the unknown, and to overcome that fear, I read a lot about a lot of different things, ranging from science, technology, philosophy,  movie making, art, photography, medicine, entrepreneurship, parenting, auto repair, agriculture…the list is endless.

Its a great feeling to be able to read about/listen to/watch something, get a reasonable understanding of what’s going on and apply that knowledge somewhere, sometime.

I prefer listening to audio books and watching videos. Listening allows me to let my mind wander and explore the topic.  And watching  someone explain something makes it so much easier to understand it.


I was not born an entrepreneur. I don’t come from an entrepreneurial family. I don’t have an educational background that makes me one. But I have the passion to become an entrepreneur.

Over the years of my professional life, I have built within myself a set of core values that have led me through a successful career. Here’s one …

Simon Sinek, in his TED talk and in his book made a very important point about successful companies. “People buy their products because of why they built them and not because of how they built them or what they built.

__name__ == “__main__” :-)

Hi there! I am a geek and I love building things, breaking things apart and putting them back, mostly without leaving any pieces behind…well, mostly.

I work as an independent consultant by day, writing software,  and the rest of the time, I aspire to building something that would make a +ve difference to the world, something that has a profound impact on humanity.

For a very long time, I’ve been thinking of starting to write a journal, mostly as a tool to help me look back in life and also to keep focused on my mission.

My current passion is research in Artificial Intelligence and I’m on a quest to find answers to questions like…

“can we mimic human intelligence in software applications?”
“can we build applications that can learn what the user wants?”
“how will machines look like in 10, 20, 30 years from now?”
“how will software look like in 10, 20, 30 years from now?”

Hope you find stuff here useful.

Reginald Vikram Garnepudi