Proto Jan'09 Edition

Proto.in '08 Delhi edition was one event that really helped us (Eko) in many ways- the least of which was giving us a chance to learn the art of making a good demo (or 'proto') presentation that fit in a 3 minute slot:).  It is an event that is a queer but mature mix of professionalism and volunteerism.

The enthusiasm shown by the organizers esp. the 'curator' Vijay Anand (must try and get to know what energy drinks he gulps) is plain infectious. Trust me, the exercise is well worth it especially if you do get a chance to be one of the dozen odd companies that can get a slot to present there. 

Even otherwise, the event is a good dip-stick to gauge the current state of affairs in the startup space. Also, given the right circumstances, vital-statistics, and some match-making magic, it could be a potential dating opportunity for an entrepreneur with an Angel/ VC/ Mentor. So if you are a startup guy located elsewhere in India and dont mind heading to Bangalore (/Bengalooru - I hope the spelling is right!) or are there already - do try and make it a point to attend the Proto.in Jan'09 edition.

Here's the badge for the event. Do spread the word around.

Happy Proto and Best wishes!

Beating Recession

While stock markets are crashing left , right and center, I salute the spirit of its entrepreneurs who despite the seemingly pervasive gloom are battling on with their dreams. If there is anything that can get us all out of the mess we are in - its folks like these.



Beneath the speculative value of any company lies its real worth, based on the value it delivers to people it touches. As long as these foundations are strong, I guess it will be able to survive the bloodbath. While it is true that the prevailing conditions will pull even the strong ones down, persistence will pull them through sooner or later.

It is important for all leaders to now focus on shedding their flab and concentrate on sharpening their cutting edges. If possible - spread a little cheer around. Even 'recession' is a matter of the mind, if you don't mind it does not matter. If there is a collective decision to beat it, we should be able to beat it.

To all who have lost a lot the past few weeks, as difficult as it might sound - let go completely or hold on blindly. The few fleeting moments in our life are too precious to be wasted on whats past! Dream on!

Startup and Family

A few weeks before my wedding, one of my good friends called up my fiance and told her that she better be aware that I was already married! Thankfully, before she could slam the phone down, they explained that the 'other person' that occupied a major share in my life was my laptop . 'Phew!' she thought.; A laptop, huh; my friends sure had a good sense of humor; surely that was a harmless joke!

To cut a long story short, we got married, were blessed with a child and have lived happily ever after :). That's too good to be true, too true not to be a fairy tale! The truth is, she's had to adjust a lot, sacrifice a lot and lower her expectations a lot; thanks to all that - we've had a great adventure together. I'm now in my second startup. The first was as a founder and the second is as an employee. Interestingly however, I don't find too much deviation in the state of affairs in either roles. Bottomline: a startup is a startup because its a startup! otherwise it would've been called something else. A cosy life in any startup is a non-truth/ delusion :).

Trust me on this one - startups and family rarely gel well; they're kindof like oil and water - shake them up together as much as you want, but in the end - you'll see a clear but thin line separating them. One might argue that the same holds for any job - perhaps so, I really will not be the best person to comment on that. There are a few things that make life in a startup different.

1. Commitment. Startup is a commitment that stems from you, especially so if you are a core founder, but none the less if you are a committed employee. A true commitment is a strange force of nature. It is one binding, blinding force that makes one oblivious to other forces. A Family too is a commitment, it too requires a great deal of attention and care. When two equally strong commitments come side by side, it is quite possible at times to slight one and lean more towards the other. Thats when either or both suffer; either the startup or your family or worse - both.

2. Money. This is one big factor that truly differentiates a startup from a regular job. You will see/ hear of your friends having a weekend party in Tumbuktu, buying an apartment, car etc... while you sit day and night on your laptop to make sure you meet some stupid deadline that just might pay you just enough to clear the credit card bills. Prepare to be not able to buy that home theater system, not to be able to gift her a diamond pendant and even cut down at times on your grocery spends. Sure, the entrepreneur in you might understand all that and consider it a 'part of life' but trust me again - its not easy (or proper) to expect your near and dear to 'appreciate' the same.

3. Time. Consider this: On an good day in a typical job, one might use 1 hour to get ready, 2 hours to commute, spend 10 hours at a desk, 1 hour with an 'important' client (imho - all clients are important) and 7 hours to sleep and rest. Now, a day can't be stretched beyond the 24 hours it wholeheartedly offers and that leaves 3 hours with your family. A startup can squeeze even the 3 hours out and leave you feeling high and dry. If one is lucky enough not to be flying around the globe on sales assignments and one does have a good day as mentioned above, let me assure you that good 'ol Murphy will ensure that the kitchen sink develops a leak or some obscure electric fuse blows off or some client threatens to impose the penalty clause. All that translates into - very less time.

4. Mindshare. Perhaps all the three above are just different faces of the same thing. In a startup you have to be as cunning as a fox and as agile as a snake - soon you're soon vulture food. Running a startup needs a lot of thought - deep thought. It is difficult to think about the strategy to blow your competition out of the sky while thinking about how your child might be coping with the recent bout of flu and worrying about your spends zooming towards your credit limit.

Here's my honest advice to anyone willing to be a part of a startup - make sure you understand what you're getting into.

If you're about to get married and are passionate about your startup - think twice. If after a lot of thought, you still feel you need to take the plunge - make sure your fiance understands what you've gotten into and are getting her into.

If you're married and are planning to have a child, think thrice. -If after a real lot of thought, if you and your spouse are really determined, prepare well in advance for the additional expenses and responsibilities. Care before and after childbirth and raising a child is no child's play.

Try and cultivate a sense of adventure. If you get a chance - try and learn tightrope walking. Learning how to concentrate and balance while swaying on a thin line is an essential trait of the trade.

Having said all this;Having someone to talk to when you're down and seeing your little one smile when you get back home - priceless. For everything else you will need a MasterCard. Even a Visa might do just fine.

Who can be an entrepreneur? Part II

(Continued from part I)

In my last post on this subject I presented my reading on the Grameen Bank initiative by Muhammad Yunus and found that entrepreneurship as a yearning is innate in all and that success is relative. In this post I'd take my study further on a slightly different viewpoint.

This viewpoint is based on this article that I'd come across a few months back by Clay Shirky titled, The (Bayesian) Advantage of Youth.

It postulates that entrepreneurship is a byproduct of inexperience, youthfulness and an idea. Or in other words - it is the result of not having a preconditioned mind and an ability to unlearn some things and start from scratch.

The author argues that experience, that comes through age is all about being exposed to a set of conditions, knowing its limitations and thus calibrating oneself to 'learn' how to handle the same or a similar situation based on this learning. Now, this process of 'learning' is by nature a process that aims at minimizing risk and moving towards stability and away from unknown territory.

While such experience might be advantageous in certain situations, the author further argues that the predictable-reactionary nature that experience brings is a contra requirement to entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is mostly (not all) about making that dangerous leap that the experienced might think foolish or feel scared to. A beautiful analogy based on Bayesian logic is also presented in the article.

Another interesting book that I had read was The Ten Faces of Innovation by IDEO's Tom Kelley (thanks to Jayadev). In this book the author says that in most organizations, many an innovative idea is killed by people who love to play the Devil's Advocate. The 'idea-killer' role is kinda addictive, it kinda becomes a part of you once you've made a 'kill'. Unwittingly, while you might pride yourself in your devilish skills, some bright spark might get silenced forever.

While I subscribe to the fact that youthfulness coupled with wild imagination and creativity does lead to innovation, I would also like to have it tapered slightly (only slightly) with some expert advice. Which is to say - have a young person as the key ideator but make sure he has an experienced adviser. An adviser would be the dampener, but every useful coiled spring knows the importance of damping factor! Remember the dot com vagaries (ah... thats the devil's advocate in me speaking again - hushhhh!). Am I getting too old for the game ;) ?

Who can be an entrepreneur? Part I

Lately I've been reading on 'who' can be/ is an entrepreneur. Perhaps a better way to phrase it would be - what normally/ usually is the profile of a person who becomes an entrepreneur? Is it an 'in-the-mind' phenomenon? How much do external factors influence? What roles are played by family, upbringing, education, society and others?
And finally, which of these factors influence success? And what is 'success' in the first place?

Whew! quite a few questions in one breath and none new. I'm sure these have already been dissected and studied elsewhere to the minutest details - I'm also learning, my way. I'd first attempt to review some articles written by different people and analyze them and then maybe, over a period of time try and answer at least some of the questions I'd started with.

I'll start with this recent interesting article that appeared in the businessworld magazine written by none other than the Nobel laureate and founder of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh - Muhammad Yunus.
Here is the link to the online version of the article.

Muhammad Yunus provided me a really wonderful insight - entrepreneurship is innate in almost every human being! Whats even more interesting about this 'gyan' is that it is a demonstrated fact and not a mere management-guru rhetoric. And demonstrated at a scale that should silence even the staunchest shadow critics - 90,000 'part time beggars' transformed into entrepreneurs with nothing more than 20$ worth of seed funding in each. Excellent!

Two things worth pondering
1. Definition of success. It shows success is relative. (I guess the happy beggar is in his own way as happy as Bill Gates - at least almost ;-) )

2. Incentive for the investor. I cannot but accept the fact that one common thread that runs through most entrepreunial stories - someone who acted as the catalyst - supplying either the push or the money and expecting something in return. All such catalysts also set their sights on 'returns' to be rightly expected. Will all investors be satisfied with the kind of returns that say, 'the Bangladesh experiment' brings, coupled with the higher level of micro-management that might be involved - I don't know. Again, the 'success' criterion on returns are different for different investors.

Thats all for now, part II continues this journal focusing on a different article.

Entrepreneurship and me

My tryst with entrepreneurship started on a rather weird note. Back when I was in school, it was an incredibly twisted word with an equally twisted pronunciation. From the time that I can remember, I've been a creative person. So as kid, cardboard boxes lying around would get wheels added and get turned into toy buses; There'd be NO electronic or electric or mechanic device in my house that I'd NOT opened and put back together (mostly in one piece) ever after I'd found how to use screw-drivers. By the time I was in high school, I was playing with diodes, LEDs, capacitors and soldering irons. But there was one tool that I'd admit had provided a really wide canvas - the humble PC. I would've been eleven when I wrote my first program in BASIC - all I can remember are the green pixelated dots that formed the characters on the 'screen' of its monochrome display (I'd reckon, most mobile phones today have screens and processors that are an order of magnitude better than those). Anyways, by the time I graduated as an electronics and communications engineer, I'd made my mark as a hobby programmer (thanks to a few of my seniors who'd introduced me to C++ and VB), I even got offers from a few schools near our college to develop custom software for them (While I did a few demos, none of the 'deals' materialized) and it felt good! I had a dream of being able to do this as my vocation - but then it had to remain a dream. Personally, it was an intention to completely express a God given talent - creativity. I consider myself compulsively creative - almost a software artist and so when I got a chance, I thought that the best way to express it would be in the freedom offered by an entrepreunial context. Creating, understanding and solving give me an 'adrenaline rush' - my highs. My choice of not joining a regular IT company (I was even placed into one through campus recruitment) was more providence than a real 'choice' because at that time I really did not have anything else to chose from. My association with Tandem Infotech (a 30-40 member strong IT company which was a part of my friend Jayadev's Tandem Group) was supposed to be a stop-gap arrangement till I'd found something else (I'd even written the GRE). My initial role there, as a consultant, was to come up with an anti-piracy solution for their cafe management software. Along the way, I got to work on a few mobile games as a part of an international project and then in late 2002/3 (after a brief crisis), it was decided to spin off the then nascent mobile arm into an independent division and eventually into a separate entity in which I'd also be a significant stake holder (if not, I'd probably have looked elsewhere for a living). And thus started my real rendezvous with entrepreneurship (though the new company Tinfo Mobile actually got registered only in 2005). Its been a wonderful journey. I have learned a lot though I'd admit I haven't earned as much ;-). Here's a gist of my most important takeaways: 1. Be optimistic, but expect failures - they are bound to come - in droves. 2. There will be the occasional good times - most projects do go right, media spotlight etc... 3. Not every entrepreneur ends up with a money-spinning juggernaut of an enterprise. 4. The entrepreneur's role gives one a chance to work against all conventions and established norms. 5. Money does not grow on trees. Ideas alone cannot seed money trees. Ideas can grow into revenues, if combined with - people who can implement it - people who can sell it - money to fund the above two - money to market it - lady luck / divine providence. 6. Abraham Maslow was right. 7. Work towards customer delight and at the same time NEVER promise what you're not confident of delivering. 8. A satisfied customer is your best asset and an unsatisfied one could prove to be your undoing. 9. Let go when you must! Nothing lasts for ever and there are no guarantees. 10. Avoid getting emotions involved in taking pure business decisions. 11. The core team must be dedicated to a plan and a goal. People with other commitments and other goals will inevitably stall progress. 12. While one needs to multi-task, there would be one thing that one is really good at. Just creating an environment where people are free to do what they are best at is a good strategy. 13. Factors like aesthetics, design, location and packaging do matter. 14. Never stop learning. And finally, as I'd mentioned in an article earlier: An added advantage of being an entrepreneur; borrowing Edison's words after thousands of failed attempts at his inventions - "At least I know 10,000 ways this will not work!" :-) (In my next article, I plan to review another article written on why certain people might be more successful entrepreneurs than others.)