August 2005 Archives

Tekriti is now over 6 months old. We will be moving to a bigger and better office in October. I was looking back over the past months to see what we did right and what we did wrong. Its still early days to know the long term impact of the decisions we have made so far. But from how it appears today, here are my learnings.

Things we did right:

1. Worked hard We have worked really hard ever since we started. Everybody has put in several night outs, worked almost all weekends, and have had on an average, 85 hour weeks.

2. Hired right We have been very patient with our hiring. On several occasions we missed out on assured revenue just because we did not have enough headcount. But we have resisted the temptation so far and I hope we can continue to do that. Consequently, we today have a team which is really motivated, feels part of the company and realizes that it is part of an elite group.

3. Spent right We have managed to prioritize our spendings in the right manner. Almost all spendings went into infrastructure and hiring. I don't think we have been overly tight with our money but we have managed to put it to good use. Providing free lunch to all employees is an example.

4. Bent backwards for clients We have really bent backwards at several occasions to accomodate our clients. Often this meant taking calls late night, or working weekends or doing stuff that was not part of the original deal. I am told that this is usually not a good practice as it sets wrong expectations amongst clients. Perhaps that is true but for a young company like ours, client is king and I really hope we can continue to provide a delightful customer experience.

Things we did wrong or could have done better :

1. Did not hire an admin The biggest mistake that we have made so far (and continue to do so!!!). Not having an admin can divert you from your core responsibilites. Spending time on mundane activities like chasing vendors or paying bills is a total waste. We interviewed several candidates for this position but did not find anybody good enough. And then we stopped looking. That was a mistake. Now we are waiting to move to the new office because current office really doesn't have enought space to seat an admin.

2. Tried too hard to look into the future This is the best lesson I have learnt till date. Don't try too hard to predict the future. In a startup, things change everyday. One can prepare for the worst and hope for the best. But almost certainly, how things turn out eventually is something completely different from what you had imagined. This is where one has to go by instinct and take things one day at a time. I spent countless hours worrying about issues that never cropped up and never anticipated the issues that actually did come up. I have to admit tht I am still not rid of this disease of "analysis-paralysis" but I am starting to get better :)

3. Kept sitting on paperwork This was partly a consequence of not having an admin. But at times, we have waited till the last day to do our paperwork, handle our finances or just pay our bills. It tooks us months to even get a name registered for the company. Often time we were just so deeply engrossed in our work that these kind of things just fell off by the side. Now I have realized that as an entreprenur, all this part of the job description and as important as the technical aspects of work. That is something I am hoping to get better at in the coming months!

Even though Manish beat me to it by a day, I have finally attained wireless nirvana in my house. Jatin got me a wireless router (for some reason these things cost 2x more in India) a few months back. But thanks to some major bungling by my ISP, my internet was down and I couldn't put my router to good use till today.

We WiFi enabled our office at Tekriti day one. These are small things which don't cost much but increase productivity manifolds. Another such initiative on the horizon is setting up RAS/VPN access so that if need be, people can work from home as well.

Bill Burnham points out that according to a Neilson study only 11% of blog readers use RSS. I had gotten a similar impression while talking to fellow bloggers in Delhi. Many of those who themselves blog do not use an RSS aggregator.

In the light of these numbers, the recent announcement by Microsoft to treat RSS as a first class construct in Windows Vista is particularly significant. IE7 also supports RSS and allows viewing feeds formatted within the browser window. There is nothing like a gentle push from the software giant to increase adoption. That is the thing with standards. They don't mean much unless people actually use them. Microsoft was pretty notorious for flouting standards and its heartening to see them support more and more of open standards!

Om Malik points out that Google's Jabber based instant messenger is now available. Google is making a concerted effort to dominate the three most common activities that one does on the internet - email, IM and search. Since Google Talk is based on Jabber, you can connect to it using other clients as well. I hope Google Talk will integrate well with all the other Google services, esepcially Orkut. After all, both IM and social networks are all about keeping in touch. I don't see any obvious integration between the two right now in Google Talk but I sure hope that will change in the susbequent versions.

Google Talk is in beta right now just like every other application Google has ever come out with :)

Exactly ten years ago, Jyoti Basu in Calcutta called Sukh Ram in Delhi in what was the first mobile phone call in India. Brick sized cell phones used to cost Rs. 45,000 and each call costed Rs. 16.5/minute. Back then, cell phone was a status symbol. Today, there are over 60 million mobile connections in India (expected to double in number in next 12 months). A local call costs around Rs 1/min and a cell phone can be purchased for less than Rs. 3000.

Wireless technology has been a boon for India. In a country where setting up wired infratstructure is very expensive and time consuming, wireless is the perfect solution to connect remote villages. The timing was also just right as India escaped the burnden of legacy technology and reaped the benefits of latest GSM technology.

Cell phones have not been just about technology. They have brought about a cultural change in the country. SMS is the favorite means of communication for everybody today. Most television programs now come with an "SMS contest". A recent headline in a Hindi newspaper read "Cell phone companies to ban gayi, ab kaun banega crorepati" (Cell phone companies already became millionaires, now who wants to be the next millionaire) in reference an SMS contest to gain entry into "Kaun Banega Crorepati" (Who wants to be a millionaire).

Of late, cell phones have brought the "citizen journalism" revolution to India, albeit in an unexpected way. Camera phones and MMS have created our own desi papparazi which spares neither bollywood personalities nor corrupt government officials. The recent DPS MMS scandal even led to wrongful arrest of the CEO of Bazee.com.

Urban India has transformed completely in the last 10 years. Indians have demonstrated that they are not afraid to embrace technology and illiteracy doesn't hinder adoption of technology, provided it is useful to the masses. We have yet to see the same revolution in the computing space. May the next 10 years witness the computer revolution!

Rajesh Jain wishes to see more and more product startups in India.

First, salaries in India will rise faster than cost of living which would make it unattractive for employees working with the international majors to quit and create or join a start-up. Second, even the ones who are venturing out seem to be more focused on services than products. Third, the few in the products area seem content OEMing their creation to the market leaders rather than taking them on with full stacks. Finally, Indian companies lack vision to think big and global. I agreed with him on all four counts and added one of my own. It is well nigh impossible to do a tech, product-oriented start-up because angel and early-stage funding is simply not there.

All these are valid points but I think the biggest challenge for an Indian company trying to create a technology oriented product is that the domestic market is too small and the international markets are very hard and expensive to sell to. This is where China has an edge over us. With much higher computer and internet penetration, China has a huge local market for software. Companies always start small even if they have global ambitions. And in early stages, it is easiest for a startup to sell and cater to the domestic market. Could an Indian technology business recreated the success of a Baidu.com or Lenovo? I very much doubt that. Indian product startups need to think and act global from day one and do not have the advantage of a large test bed in their backyard. That could very well be the reason why there have been so few product startups in India.

I feel extremely honored that Tekriti has been listed as part of the TeNeT family. TeNeT group, based out of IIT-Madras and headed by Dr. Ashok Jhunjhunwala has helped incubate and grow several startup companies, including the highly successful Midas Communication Technologies. I came to know Dr. Jhunjhunwala in 2000 when I was preparing for a business plan competition at IIT-Bombay. Inspite of my complete inexperience and naieve ideas at that time, he was very encouraging and always made it a point to take time out of his extremely busy schedule to meet me. Today he is actively guiding Tekriti and helping us take the company to the next level.

TeNeT group serves as a common platform for a number of technology companies to share ideas and resources allowing them to all grow together. It is a great honor for us to be accepted as part of the TeNeT family!

Perhaps because this is review time at Microsoft, the mini-MSFT blog is getting lot of agitated comments. Amongst the commenters, a few are claiming that there is "reverse discrimination" at Microsoft - that Indians are in general given preferential treatment, in particular by Indian managers. That is a very serious allegation and making it on a public forum anonymously is very low in my opinion. I think the mini-MSFT blog was a good idea but it has degenerated into a public laundry washroom for a small set Microsoft employees to vent frustration. The author of this blog wants Microsoft to become a lean organisation and be able to attract the best talent. The blog however serves to do just the opposite. If a prospecitve candidate went about googling to learn more about Microsoft, she is bound to run into this blog with all the offensive and outright false comments. If an Indian kid fresh out of college was considering employment at Microsoft and came across this blog, she is bound to get an impression that there might be hostility towards Indians within Microsoft. Nothing could be further from the truth but Microsoft could still lose a great hire.

So here is my message for Mini - if you really want to do Microsoft a favor, then please moderate your comments and get people to focus on your real agenda. Right now, your blog does not serve the real purpose and presents a skewed and incorrect picture of Microsoft to the outside world.

Marc noticed that Ourmedia is #90 on the Feedster 500. Just like Marc, lists don't mean much to me, mostly because I ususally dont figure on them :) But this is good stuff! Congrats to the entire Ourmedia team!

You can read the part 1 here

Jawahar Lal Nehru went on to become India's frist prime minister. Nehru was a scholar and wrote several books on world and Indian history. He also had a socialist bent and that dictated much of India's course in the post independence cold-war era. Nehru had a grand vision for India. The now famous Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) were Nehru's pet projects. Concerned by India's dependence on imported technology, Nehru started laying great empahsis on higher education. I believe that India's proximity to the
Soviet Union also had roots in Nehru's socialist ideology. Nehru was also a founder of the Non Aligned Movement (NAM) and that was India's first assertion of its sovereignity and independence in a polarized
world.

Nehru's contribution to India's development is unquestioned. However, there were several decisions made during this tenure that in hindsight proved costly for India. Nehru's emphasis on higher education perhaps came at the cost of neglecting primary education. Nehru, an avid historian himself, dreamt of creating history with world class technological innovations coming from India. While that was a nobel goal, the more urgent need of the hour was creating a much less glamorous primary education system. Consequently, India's literacy levels hovered below the 50% mark for several decades. Even today, we are unable to assure primary education all children. It is ironical that a country with such low levels of literacy also claims to produce world's best engineers.

Another mistake that our founding fathers made was under-estimating the population problem. Even in 1930s, Gandhi Ji had cautioned against the high growth rate and the consequences it could have in the future. Unfortunately, rest of our leaders were not as visionary as Gandhi. In fact, "human resource" was (and still is) touted as India's strength. India's population more than doubled in the first 35 years of independence. JRD Tata, a leading industrialist and good friend of Nehru, often broached this subject with Nehru.
According to JRD (and I quote out or memory of reading this somewhere so I can be wrong), Nehru would start staring out of the window and ignore JRD each time he brought up the question of population! Population has since then become India's biggest problem. Population, illiteracy and poverty form the vicious circle that we not been able to break till today.

Finally, it is interesting to note the circumstances under which Kashmir became part of India and seeds of today's problems were sown. Nehru was a Kashmiri Hindu so it was natural that he wanted Kashmir to be part of India. How could the first prime minister of India hail from a Pakistani state! So, perhaps Nehru thought with his heart and not with his mind when it came to Kashmir, claims Patrick French, author of "Liberty or Death". Clearly, this was not the only reason why Kashmir became part of India and it will be unfair to blame Nehru for today's problems there.

Towards the end of his days, Nehru is said have been deeply saddened by the betrayal by the Chinese. India had signed the Panchsheel pact with China which was was blatantly broken by China a few years later and had attacked India in 1961. India had suffered heavy casualties during that war and it triggered massive upgradation of our armed forces.

As I mentioned in the previous post, India would have been a completely different nation if Nehru had not become prime minister. Nehru was the first of the famed "Gandhi" family, three generations of which went on to rule India (and fourth one waiting in the wings right now). If Nehru had not become the Prime Minister, would Indira have? Would we have seen the emergency? If Indira had not become prime minister, her son Rajiv certainly would have had no chance. And Rajiv's Italian wife Sonia could not have won the recent elections
for the Congress!

Next: India's iron man, Sardar Patel

India's independence day (15th August) is a good occasion to look back and reflect on how actions of a few men shaped our country's future. I have great interest in Indian history and my dad has even more so. So we often have engaging discussions on what-ifs of our past. The three central characters at the time of India's independence were Gandhi, Nehru and Patel. Each one of them influenced the course of India's history in their own ways.

I will start with the Mahatma.

Mahatma Gandhi was the undisputed leader of the masses. His call for Satyagraha, non-violence and non-cooperation had resonated well with the Indian public. For the first time in Indian history, the entire population came together as a nation. Before Gandhi, India's freedom struggle was fragmented and and regionalized. Revolutionaries were fighting against the British in pockets to gain freedom for their own princely state. Under Gandhi's leadership, whole of India struggled for independence together.

However, by the end of second world war, Gandhi was starting to get sidelined. The public was still behind him but Congress was eager to gain independence and seize power. Gandhi was vehemntly against gaining independence at the cost of dividing the country. He was in favor of letting Jinnah form the government if that would keep him from demanding the creation of Pakistan.

In his writings during this period, Gandhi confessed that his experiments with non-violence had been a failure. He was deeply agonized by the widespread communal riots at the time of independence. Throughout the 1920' and 30's, Gandhi had cautioned against blindly aiming for 'independence'. Gandhi had always held the opinion that independence should come when the country was ready for self governance. His worst fears came true in 1947 and he died a sad man.

Even though Gandhi Ji was assasinated within months of attaining freedom, he played a very key role in shaping post-independent India. At the time when Congress had to elect a leader who would go on to become India's first prime minister, the consensus was with Sardar Patel. However, Gandhi overruled the majority vote and elected Nehru.
This presents to us the most intriguing what-if in India's modern history. Nehru and Patel were poles apart in their ideology and principles and India would have been a completely different country today had Gandhi gone with the majority vote.

Next post: Nehru

The much awaited movie "The Rising: Mangal Pandey" turned out to be a disappointment. The movie, which apparently spurred leading actor Aamir Khan to start blogging (great marketing gimmick btw!) was released to coincide with the Independece Day weekend. The movie is about how the actions of a single man in 1857 had led to India's first revolt for independence (which British historians like to trivialize as a "sepoy mutiny").

Without going into the details of the movie (don't want to spoil it for those who haven't watched it yet), I will just say that the movie is more fictional and less historical. That is not without reason. Very little is known about Mangal Pandey. The British had introduced a new cartridge in 1856. It was rumored that these cartridges were greased with Pig and Cow lard. The cartridge had to be opened by clipping off the cover with your teeth. Since Cows are sacred for Hindus and Pigs are unholy for Muslims, the sepoys refused to use these new cartridges. The East India company failed to relent and that eventually led to the uprising of 1857. Mangal Pandey, a devout Hindu, happened to fire the first bullet that triggered this revolt. Some historians claim that Mangal had acted under heavy influence of alcohol and had no idea of what he was doing. Others claim that he had intentionally intoxicated himself to be able to do something as bold as what he was going to do. Perhaps it will never be known whether Mangal Pandey was born great or had greatness thrust upon him. The movie completely skirts this issue and presents its own version (which is what pissed me off).

The songs in the movie are insipid and uninspiring. Rani Mukherjee and Amisha Patel are completed wasted in fringe roles and add nothing to the story. Aamir's acting and characterization of Mangal Pandey is good. However, the life and times of mid-19th century India have been captured merely using stereotypes like Sati-pratha and rampant prostitution.

All in all, I would rate the movie a 3/5. Watch it once. But your money would be better spent in buying a good book on Indian history.

Its past 4 AM and Nazim, Amit and myself are pulling off a night out at work. Even though we are all really tired, our efficiency has been pretty high all night. I think once you are "in the zone", you shouldn't stop. Besides I decided to play DJ and belted out everybody's favorite bollywood tracks on my laptop :)

All in all, a good day's night's day work!

Lost in the complex tangle of life and work, I completely missed the fact that we completed 6 months as a company last Sunday! Congrats to all the fellow Teknokrats! It seems like ages ago when Ashish and myself worked night shifts in our home office using a dial-up connection. Oh wait, I am still burning the midnight oil. Only now there is broadband...and 11 other kick-ass Teknokrats! :)

This ain't no Texas but don't be surprised if you see cowboys herding kettle on the roads. Delhi is famously infamous for the tens of thousands of cows that roam the roads. There are cows everywhere - on the streets, on the highway, in front of your office, outside your home! These cows are the most thick skinned cows in the whole world. No amount of honking or prodding can make a cow move once its settled down in the middle of a road.

The High Court had passed an order asking the municipal corporation of Delhi (MCD) to get rid of this cow menace. The MCD in turn pleaded that it was unable to act upon this order because the task is too monumental for them to accomplish alone. So the court responded by ordering a cash reward of Rs. 2000 for anybody who turns up with a stray cow at the cow shelter. The news is that several desi cowboys can now be seen herding cows to these shelters to make a quick buck.

While this is an innovative approach and I hope it works, the problem is more deep rooted in our misplaced religious notions. Cows are sacred for Hindus. But how that translates to letting stray cattle roam the streets is beyond my comprhension. If cows are sacred, then treat them well and give them shelter. Instead we have chosen to make the city one big zoo.

Here is wishing our local cowboys all the best!

After the whole of India got flooded, Delhi finally gets a trickle today. But we will take what we get. The heat was getting unbearable!