1/ HOW TO ASK FOR HELP AS AN ENTREPRENEUR -- Every week entrepreneurs reach out to me cold on LinkedIn, Twitter, and email asking for help. I love helping if I can!

Unfortunately most people are terrible at asking for help. Here is how to do it properly.

2/ OFFER CONTEXT on who you are first -- If we have any connections in common, highlight them. If we met somewhere, remind me. If we went to the same school, know people in common, are from the same place, anything. If you have done anything impressive, tell me.
3/ BE PRECISE in your request -- "can you mentor me?" is bad. "Can we get on a call?" is bad. "Do you know person X and could you forward the following blurb to them?" is great. "I am applying to YC. Does our application make it clear what we build?" is great.
4/ TELL ME WHY I CAN UNIQUELY HELP -- Do your research and don't ask me for help on things I can't help with. If you didn't articulate why and how I can uniquely help you, I assume you are spamming a bunch of people to ask for the same thing.
5/ DO NOT UNDERCUT YOUR OWN AUTHORITY -- Don't apologize for asking. Don't tell me a sob story. Stay factual. If you demonstrate you are not confident or irrational, I am less likely to want to help you.
6/ BE CONCISE -- Use three bullet points max. If you can't describe why who you are, why I should help, and how I should help in 3-5 sentences I will probably not read it anyway.
7/ PERSISTENCE IS ANNOYING -- If I don't respond after the 1st email, I'm probably not going to respond. Don't email me 6 times/week asking if I saw your email. That's only going to make me ignore you in the future. Email in a month with another request, and if I can I will help.
8/ BE GRACIOUS -- If I don't respond, it's probably because I have a deadline for my day job. If I can't help, I will let you know. If I say I can't help, say thanks and move on. If I can help, I will do my best to do it quickly.
9/ LET ME KNOW HOW IT WENT -- The only payback required is a thank you and a follow up. I've been emailed years later by entrepreneurs where I made an intro and it led to a critical outcome (e.g. a company being acquired). There's no better feeling than knowing you helped someone
10/ DON'T BE AFRAID TO ASK -- Silicon Valley works because people pay it forward. You'll be surprised at how many people will help, do introductions, or give you quick feedback if you ask kindly, are precise in your request, and concise.

More from All

How can we use language supervision to learn better visual representations for robotics?

Introducing Voltron: Language-Driven Representation Learning for Robotics!

Paper: https://t.co/gIsRPtSjKz
Models: https://t.co/NOB3cpATYG
Evaluation: https://t.co/aOzQu95J8z

🧵👇(1 / 12)


Videos of humans performing everyday tasks (Something-Something-v2, Ego4D) offer a rich and diverse resource for learning representations for robotic manipulation.

Yet, an underused part of these datasets are the rich, natural language annotations accompanying each video. (2/12)

The Voltron framework offers a simple way to use language supervision to shape representation learning, building off of prior work in representations for robotics like MVP (
https://t.co/Pb0mk9hb4i) and R3M (https://t.co/o2Fkc3fP0e).

The secret is *balance* (3/12)

Starting with a masked autoencoder over frames from these video clips, make a choice:

1) Condition on language and improve our ability to reconstruct the scene.

2) Generate language given the visual representation and improve our ability to describe what's happening. (4/12)

By trading off *conditioning* and *generation* we show that we can learn 1) better representations than prior methods, and 2) explicitly shape the balance of low and high-level features captured.

Why is the ability to shape this balance important? (5/12)

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शमशान में जब महर्षि दधीचि के मांसपिंड का दाह संस्कार हो रहा था तो उनकी पत्नी अपने पति का वियोग सहन नहीं कर पायी और पास में ही स्थित विशाल पीपल वृक्ष के कोटर में अपने तीन वर्ष के बालक को रख के स्वयं चिता पे बैठ कर सती हो गयी ।इस प्रकार ऋषी दधीचि और उनकी पत्नी की मुक्ति हो गयी।


परन्तु पीपल के कोटर में रखा बालक भूख प्यास से तड़पने लगा। जब कुछ नहीं मिला तो वो कोटर में पड़े पीपल के गोदों (फल) को खाकर बड़ा होने लगा। कालान्तर में पीपल के फलों और पत्तों को खाकर बालक का जीवन किसी प्रकार सुरक्षित रहा।

एक दिन देवर्षि नारद वहां से गुजर रहे थे ।नारद ने पीपल के कोटर में बालक को देख कर उसका परिचय मांगा -
नारद बोले - बालक तुम कौन हो?
बालक - यही तो मैं भी जानना चहता हूँ ।
नारद - तुम्हारे जनक कौन हैं?
बालक - यही तो मैं भी जानना चाहता हूँ ।

तब नारद ने आँखें बन्द कर ध्यान लगाया ।


तत्पश्चात आश्चर्यचकित हो कर बालक को बताया कि 'हे बालक! तुम महान दानी महर्षि दधीचि के पुत्र हो । तुम्हारे पिता की अस्थियों का वज्रास्त्र बनाकर ही देवताओं ने असुरों पर विजय पायी थी।तुम्हारे पिता की मृत्यु मात्र 31 वर्ष की वय में ही हो गयी थी'।

बालक - मेरे पिता की अकाल मृत्यु का क्या कारण था?
नारद - तुम्हारे पिता पर शनिदेव की महादशा थी।
बालक - मेरे उपर आयी विपत्ति का कारण क्या था?
नारद - शनिदेव की महादशा।
इतना बताकर देवर्षि नारद ने पीपल के पत्तों और गोदों को खाकर बड़े हुए उस बालक का नाम पिप्पलाद रखा और उसे दीक्षित किया।