Venky Nagar

Background

About Venky Nagar

Ross students excel at 1) numbers and 2) compassion for others. Such students can rapidly switch from a linear ‘numbers = absolute truth’ view to the multiconcept ‘numbers = people’s feelings’ view (muliconcept cuz people contain multitudes). This radical reconstruction of one’s mind and feelings is key to achieving P&L success. As Elon tweeted re: Rivian: “Prototypes are trivial compared to scaling production & supply chain. If those are solved, achieving positive gross margin is the next nightmare. Starting a second new vehicle line before first is working will divide resources & amplify probability of failure. “Their negative margins will be staggering. And indeed the complexity of multi-concept management is what is tripping all EV firms from Rivian to Lucid: they have the best prototypes, the best engineers, the best investors, the best visionaries, but no margins. — See my websites for my new course on algorithmic thinking that puts the theory computation (TOC) at the heart of business thinking. TOC revolutionized many scientific subjects from physics and chemistry to biology and human behavior, so it is foundational to business thinking. As the Microsoft CEO Nadella tweeted: “Excel formulas, the world’s most popular programming language, is now Turing-complete. Go check it out!‘ Elon also frequently tweets on TOC: “Transformers are replacing C heuristics for post-processing of the vision NN’s “giant bag of points”.[Side note: I hate the bloated mess that is modern C++, but love simple C, as you know what it will compile to in terms of actual CPU operations.]” TOC is also what ensures that neural networks will never be perfect at driving. But ginormous NN can get amazingly close to perfection, as proved in the theorems of Cybenko, Barron, and Fourier. Elon is rushing to make bigger and faster NN, and therefore obsessed with transformers, C, CPU, etc. See my transformer YouTube video below if you wanna get the intuition. — Student responses- Without question this was the best and most useful course I have ever taken. Venky's energy, enthusiasm, and curiosity is contagious and gave me the confidence to think differently about course concepts and how to apply learning in general. In fact, I now wonder why every single MBA class isn't taught in the same manner- This course was a hot mess. Sorry.