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Posts Tagged ‘India’
A step by step guide to a Happy Holiday season
Saturday, December 26th, 20092010 Predictions for Indian technology ecosystem
Sunday, December 20th, 2009
As the year 2009 comes to close, it’s time to reflect on what has been done and also the time to dream what the world is going to achieve. Personally, I came back to India after a gap of almost a decade and have been playing catchup; trying to understand the changing business here with a perspective. Dreaming of things what could be achieved here, I thought I would throw some predictions for 2010 in the desi kitchen bag. Here is my list:
- A traditional media company or a telco acquires a 3-year young technology start up in the INR 100 crore range
- A mobile telco launches a domestic anywhere to anywhere unlimited talk time plan (long shot: for INR 3999/month)
- Indian internet users climbs up to be in the Top 5 spot in their share of online piracy. Positive is the surge in Internet usage.
- Infosys/TCS/Wipro launch initiatives to align their interest with the startup ecosystem in India (the offering may be on the lines of Microsoft Bizspark, Sun ‘Startup Essentials‘)
- Amazon CloudFront Content delivery network (CDN) launches an Edge location in India
- Government of India passes the legislation to legalize Voice Over IP (VOIP) traffic originating within the country and terminating to a local telephone
- The Indian Advertising community tries to block sales of Tata Sky Plus (DTH Recorder/Indian Tivo) as they realize that people are skipping ads
- 2 kids from an engineering college launch a brand new search engine and get international investments/coverage
- Amazon.in starts their online commerce operations, whereas Techcrunch kick-starts their Indian operations with a post on how they acquired their squatted techcrunch.in domain
- Reserve Bank of India launches a parallel payment network for credit and debit transactions; takes Visa & Mastercard head-on
The thumbnail is of Orion Nebula, favorite amongst amateur astronomers and casual sky watchers. It is one of the closest star formation regions from Earth at a distance of 1,500 light years.
Flipkart & Infibeam make the same data entry error!
Sunday, December 20th, 2009Recently, I was price-shopping to refill my cache of Tintin comics on two of my favorite online book shopping destinations in India, Infibeam & Flipkart.
To my chagrin I found that both the online retailers made the same mistake in the data entry of the title (or was it something else!) The first screen grab is from Flipkart.com the second one is from Infibeam.com
Flipkart.com: Tintin Explores on the Moon
Infibeam.com: Tintin Explores on the Moon
No remorse compensation: Bring friends to work with you, but don’t part as enemies
Friday, November 27th, 2009Two people get together and start developing a product. You are one of the founders. Few more common friends join. Everybody starts working towards a goal. Six months out, the product is still taking shape; Few people who contributed move-on to other things. This is a usual startup story.
In the above scenario a formal agreement or a compensation is the last thing in everybody’s mind (or like-minded people) when people start working together.
Moreover, working together for some time helps people gauge the ‘mutual fit’ before signing each other up for 4-5 years. It is quite possible that after sometime a few members of the team decide to mutually part way and move-on. The question pops — what/how much would be the compensation if things do not move forward into a formal agreement? How much should be the compensation for the person who has worked his ass off but now thinks that he needs to move on?
People leave because of several reasons; personal, financial, etc. 100% possible that they come back a year later when they have sorted things out.
You as a founder of the company need to worry about people joining your startup — at the same time you also need to think through of compensating people who came trusting you for shorter stints. You have to decide this upfront when the person starts working using a simple math.
No Remorse Compensation is a way of rewarding people (esp. friends) who plan to contribute in building your startup but may move on later to do something else. To keep things simple you agree on a compensation before writing things on stone say 6 months later. Here’s a simple math:
1. 2 people team, started, now looking for a seasoned techie to manage the codebase and developers while the two of you do sales/marketing/product as well.
2. The 2 founders decide that the techie would get 10% of the equity (and some salary, if any, but for now, none) — however, the techie says “lets work together before making a decision.” You don’t want to leave things hanging without making any decision on that. Assume that the techie would work 4 years (48 months). So the techie would “earn” 10% / 48 = 0.2% equity every month.
3. Most probably you are not paying any salary to him — so add 25% – 50% more equity. So the number becomes 0.3%. Assuming you have 1,000,000 shares outstanding, that becomes 3,000 shares every month.
4. The techie earns 3,000 per month until you come with a formal agreement which maybe in line with the 10% equity or maybe less. Make sure to arrive at a decision point in 3-6 months and convert this into a formal agreement.
5. If ok, you can sign a simple consulting agreement with the numbers mentioned.
The above idea is simple — You bring friends to work with you but don’t wanna part with them as enemies, if it did not work out. You may meet him again at beer in the evening!
TED, NED & politicians the last 50 years, India bred
Sunday, November 8th, 2009This is like a 360 degree view of India in less than a week. On one side; Lakshmi Pratury co-hosted the 1st ever TED in India; on the other I was watching the dirty politics of India. Whereas one Chief Minister had amassed Rs. 2000+ crore (around $500m) the other put 1 million homeless at stake after the worst ever flood in the state of Karnataka. The former state is the one of the poorest albeit richest in minerals whereas the other had people thronging to attend the glitz, ideas and dazzling display of innovation at the Infosys campus Mysore.
Amongst this I attended the annual National Educators Day — to which I fondly christened it as NED to make it more marketable. While NED had 2000 educators and students putting their best brains to solve some interesting issues like Robotics for masses, triple-powered Reva, a Traffic violation system, etc etc. On the other hand the best brains were showcasing personal power plants, raising the livelihood of rickshaw pullers to advancement in neuroscience to raising the bar of education in disconnected villages of India at the TED event.
Bewildered by the fact that on one side educators, innovators & think-tanks are pushing the envelope to take the country forward, while on the other the likes of Reddys, Yeddys, Kodas are taking the country backwards.
Do we think that the advancement in technology, media, innovation are automatically going to fix the larger issues of corruption which touch our daily lives in an infamous way? Or we simply ignore this like we ignore the garbage outside our own homes?
The corruption is especially high in the states as multiple regional parties clamor for power and the national parties “support” them to get the favor back for the national parliament. It flows all the way up from the policemen at the local region to the capital.
The big question is how do we cleanse the system — or does it flush out like a bad meal automatically? Boils my blood seeing all this but I have the same genetic defect like rest of the Indians — a nonchalant attitude until my pants are on fire.
PS. Huh, it does not even hurt anymore; Madhu Koda has already dropped to page 5 in the majority of national media papers.
Mine is a SaaS startup. We do…
Tuesday, September 15th, 2009Scratch that. Delete that title.
Start with “Mine is a <insert product here like, finance, healthcare, etc> startup.” The only time you are a SaaS startup when you are solving a fundamental SaaS need like billing, metering, security, auditing, etc. It has become a fashion to use the latest technology to pitch your business and has been successful like, “We are <Java/Web2.0/SaaS/cloud/blah startup”.
Don’t move with fads. India does not need fads. India needs products.
The average consumer does not understand the technology stack. They need a solution. Whether the product uses cloud, SaaS, Java, Visual Basic — the consumer hardly cares. If it solves a need and must be on the internet then it does not matter whether it’s SaaS or BaaP or cloud.
Morpheus Venture Partners, the new batch of 10 & my official onboarding
Saturday, August 15th, 2009Visitation rights is a term used when a mom/dad gets the right to see his/her child on a fixed interval basis. Most of the times, visitation rights & monetary support are also intermingled.
This is what is my observation of funded startups in general in India. They raise money — the investors come & “visit” them time to time — Best, you send weekly reports and harness few contacts in their rolodex. Question to ask; are they helping you in building your business?
Entrepreneurial ecosystem is in it’s infancy in India — resources are not available, event platforms are sparse, celebarations of success barely exist, peer support is meagre, etc. What we need is hand holding, support, building of business and not just money & remote supervision. Of course, money helps to reduce the friction of starting up — but it’s not the only lubricant required.
Comes Morpheus Venture Partners, a Business Accelarator out of India which I joined as a Partner few months ago. Our vision is to reduce the friction of starting up & provide end-to-end support ranging from building your pricing model to finding the right technology stack for a startup. Of course, we want to provide money too, which we are working on.
Less than 24 hours ago we announced our latest batch of 10 startups — each one of them is envisioning to bring a change using their model for people of India. Being a deep technologist, I always thought that the next big thing can only come out of technology and maybe the next Google is going to be from India. That’s very much a possibility but it’s hard to sustain a viable business when less than 40 million users are online (a large % of which use the net only once a week!).
So who are these guys? What’s the new batch of 10 upto? I totally resonate the way Nandini Hirianniah (Founding Partner at MVP) summarized these 10 heavy-hitters:
Adscoot’s Suyash, stands for hours in the major junctions at mumbai to learn traffic patterns and measure footfalls!
EasySquareFeet’s Ashu & Snehesh are the most positive people i’ve seen! I can see their smiles through the phone when i talk to them (serious!)
Viv & Hari of InterviewStreet are two rockstar techies who are consciously & fast learning other skills to take their product to market. They have the passion & drive to make things work!
Shashank & Abhinav started on Naabo right out of college – the freshness in approach & the passion they bring with them is infectious.
Arjun of Picsean is an engineer, but his passion towards photography is amazing! He’s a good friend & i’ve seen his focus and smart work in his past ventures. His attitude to learn is commendable!
Robin of ReachTax is a star CA, but i love his humility and the motivational skill he has to make his entire team perform month after month!
Pankaj & Gaurav quit their fancy paying jobs to work on Retail Vector. Focus, quick work and frugality of life is what they are committed towards as they scale this venture!
The first thing that stood out when i met Abheek first was such an young guy and such maturity & humility. (Often age and humility dont go too well). This guy was 7 years old when he started putting Lego pieces into perfect ensemble & several years later, he’s using them at RobotsAlive!
I loved their designs and the quality of tees – Rahul & Mohit of Scopial have their focus completely on “Quality” “Design” “Niche”! They sell tees one could die for! Check a sample out here
I read about these guys in a print article & the next time we were in Mumbai, we met Jayesh & Karthik of VeriCAR. Two guys crazily passionate about automobiles!
Thanks to the startups for choosing us their ‘limited co-founders’, I’m sure this association is going to go a long way. Now, for the next 4 months, we spend dozens of hours every week with the founders poring over the details of their business and helping iron out every possible kink.
Agreed, we can’t change how users would percieve their offerings and how big they could possibly get — Yes, we can influence the positive outcome to a great extent.
Update: Added VeriCAR’s sound bytes from Nandini’s post
Afghanistan’s hidden treasures
Saturday, July 5th, 2008The “care takers” of Afghanistan’s precious antiquities from the ancient era concealed the treasures from Soviets, then taliban. These were feared to be lost; with the help National Geographic society along with Afghanisatan’s National Museum the unearthed trove reveals Afghanistan to be a metling pot and major trading hub where people from “east” brought muslin, spices, and ivory while the people from the west brought exotic minerals, gems, tools.
While reading the recent article on this discovery, I found a stunning picture of Ganga, the river goddess, carved out in ivory.
See the original photos and story at NGM. The treasure is going to be on display at Asian Art Museum of San Francisco in San Francisco, California between October 24, 2008, to January 25, 2009.