On Sales

While CS3216 is not a marketing class, one of the key points that I would like students to take away from the course is the importance of sales.

While the hope that is that good engineers will be able to build insanely great products that will eventually "sell themselves", the road to success is hard and often times all we have are not a real product, but a dream.

To get to the actual product, we might first have to sell that dream.

First, come the idea and then comes the execution. Sales is part of that execution.

I would like to put on record my gratitude to Yanjie for taking time off to teach a Presentation workshop last Saturday. Sadly, attendance wasn't that good.

I would like to take this opportunity to highlight two classic TED talks that I think all the students should watch and understand:



In addition, Yanjie highlighted the following clips during the workshop:






I hope that the students who missed the workshop will check out these video clips.

This Friday evening, we will be holding our customary Final Project pitching party. The party serves as an opportunity for the class to come together to celebrate the completion of half the course and also to come together to share their ideas on what they think would make for a good Final Project.

This pitching session is also about community. Many ex-students of the course will also come back and hang out. To listen to what the new batch of students have to say, to share their two cents or perhaps just for some free food and fellowship on a Friday evening.

Finally, I would like to take this opportunity to thank my trusty TA Kok Wee and the tutors Eldwin, Zhao Cong and Haocong for the work that they have put in thus far to keep the course running like clockwork. Another 7 more weeks and we'd be done with yet another offering of CS3216.

Time really flies. Hard to believe that this is already the fourth year.