I got a really weird call today on my cell phone. Some girl called asking for "Om Malik". Now as we all know, Om is a very popular A-list blogger. So you can imagine my surprise. She might as well have been asking for Bill Gates (which actually might have just felt like a prank!) I asked incredulously - whom did you say you want to talk to? She repeated "Om Malik". I said, "Sorry, no Om here." and she hung up. Sigh. Just for a moment I was propelled from the F-list to the A-list ;-)
August 2006 Archives
A few months back, I went to see a cricket match. It is a rare privilege to catch a live game here in Delhi. So it was really good fortune to get those tickets. I had to leave really early in the morning to reach the stadium in time. It was a beautiful morning with a cool breeze and slightly cloudy skies. I had not woken up at 4 AM for a really long time. The road on the way was laden with beautiful flowers on both sides. So it was a picture perfect situation. VIP stand tickets, beautiful morning, nice weather, flowers lining the road. And yet I was not feeling the excitement. Even though I knew it was a lovely morning, I simply could not appreciate it. My mind, even at 4 AM in the morning, was completely clouded with work issues - client expectations, looming deadlines, month burn rate, tax filing, labour certification, office space expansion - the whole works! It was one big non-stop noise inside my head. I realized that morning that it is not supposed to be that way and I must be doing something wrong.
Entrepreneurship is, more than anything else, about passion. Starting and running a company is such a hard task that to take it up voluntarily requires you to have a very strong inner desire to accomplish something significant. That often translates into intense workaholism. At times your energy level is so high that you find it impossible to sit down and stop working. You have to work to keep the adrenaline in check! Work, as I have learnt, can be very addicting. Unfortunately, it can become a problem if work is the only thing you can enjoy. There does come a time when you realize that you are so deep down inside your work that you can see nothing else around you. That is not a good situation to be in. Because if you stop enjoying everything else, eventually you will stop enjoying your work as well.
So what is the solution? I am not sure but I think some the following things help (not that I myself follow all of them but hey, I am trying!)
1. Choose your battles carefully: You can't do everything. You can't take up every project that comes your way. You can't pursue every interesting product idea that sounds appealing. You can't attend every conference. You can't blog every day. When wise people say "learn to relax", this is what they are trying to tell you :) Its OK to be not doing something every living (or sleeping) hour of the day!
2. Don't sweat the small stuff: This is a mistake I used to make a lot earlier. Every little thing would be a reason to worry about - even something as trivial as getting business cards printed, or negotiating with the lunch vendor would be a important enough to discuss and negotiate. Every time you get worked up about something you think is wrong - you have to first see if it is worth your time, effort and energy to make that wrong right. It is sometimes OK to let somebody else take a small advantage off you because it is just not worth your time.
3. Delegate, empower and get out of the way: This is a very hard thing to do. To give up control is hard. Unfortunately not doing that is also the best way to make your life and everybody else's life hard! It is difficult to accept that you are not super human and you simply can't do everything yourself. But once you accept it, things become a lot easier. Having a great team that you can trust is important. Delegating responsibility alone is not sufficient. You have to be able to delegate a lot of decision making as well. You have to learn to trust your team and learn to get out of their way at the right time. If all decision making rests with you alone, not only does it hinder your team, it also makes your job that much tougher. Decisions taken under pressure of time and without understanding all the facts often go wrong. So don't be a control freak! Learn to let go and trust your team!
4. And finally, don't forget to stop and smell the roses: The joy is in the journey. You can't postpone life until your company is this big, or until you ship that product or until the big liquidation event happens. Work is never going to end. And if anything, it only keeps increasing. So it is really important to take everything and especially yourself less seriously. Its important to enjoy things outside of work. Its crucial to have friends outside of your office. Its imperative to read books. Its important to just not work on some days. Its important to stop and smell the roses!
What do you do to reduce stress? I would love to hear back more on this topic!
UPDATE: Thanks everybody for some really useful discussion in the comments. I guess the common message from everybody was that hobbies and activities outside of work are best stress relievers. Blogging, I feel, is also a great stress buster!
Here is wishing all fellow Indians a very happy independence day. In Delhi, there is a (fast dying) tradition of flying kites on this day. Unlike in the US, where flying kites is a purely recreational beach activity, we fly figher kites with special glass laden thread called manjha. I used to be an ardent kite fier in school and college days. Even then, there used to be a lot more kites in the sky. But in the last 10 years, we have almost completely lost this art form. For example, today there were hardly 10 kites in the sky where I live. So when I went up on the terrace, there wasn't much competition for a kite flying pro like me (even if I say so myself :)) We ended up cutting 7 kites and lost just 1 kite in return. There was a strong breeze and since I prefer heavy fighter kites, two of my fingers got bruised from the manjha. But bruised fingers are mark of a true kite flier.
Flying fighter kites is an art. There is lot of strategy involved in a kite fight. The weight of your kite, its stability, the sharpnes and strength of your thread and your own skill all matter. In general, heavier the kite, the better it is. Contrary to common perception, very stable kites are not very suitable for kite fights. Stable kites simply keep going up in altitude. So its hard to get your kite to swoop down quickly for attack. There was a time when I used to spend hours on the terrace flying kites. I used to actually go to old Delhi to a place called Lal Kuan to buy special manjha. I even made some kites of my own. Looking back, I think kite flying is the only thing that I had been truly passionate about before Tekriti. It is unfortunate that I dont get enough chances to pursue it more. But at least, it is good to know that I still haven't lost all of my old touch ;-)
We are at IIIT Allahabad for campus placements today. This is our first visit to any campus and will be followed by a visit to MNNIT as well tomorrow. It has been pretty good so far. IIIT played a gracious host and took care of most of the organizational elements. It is always fun to interact with freshers. More details when we are back on 15th.
For the record, I ended up celebrating my birthday working all day and then sleeping in a train in the night. It was only a slight improvement since last year when I had spent the entire day and entire night working in office. At least I did manage to celebrate the night before. Oh well, maybe next year I will actually be able to get out of office!
Pardon the shoddy artwork. I am an engineer, not an artist. :)
Niall Kennedy is leaving Microsoft. That is a big blow for Microsoft. Niall was a high profile recruit and had joined just a few months back. I had briefly met Niall at Gnomedex. Niall's reason for leaving is very typical of why many smart people are leaving big companies (emphasis mine below):
I'm happy with what I was able to accomplish as a team of one attached to the Windows Live Alerts group. If we had the resources I truly believe we could have tackled the number of users Hotmail, Messenger, Spaces, or even Internet Explorer might supply, and then ask for more by opening up the platform to the world. I was able to borrow resources here and there, but there was no team being built around the platform in the foreseeable future. I could have stayed at Microsoft, waited for the other 85% of the company to ship their products, and then hope support for my group might be back on track again, but I didn't want to sit around doing little to nothing until Vista, Office, and Exchange ship. It's easier to get funding outside Microsoft than inside at the moment, so I am stepping out and doing my own thing.The first point above might come as a surprise to many. How can there be lack of resources in a big company like Microsoft which is flush with cash? While that might come across as an anamoly, resourcing is very convoluted process in big companies. The ability to add headcount rests quite high up the hierarchy. Several layers of management needs to be provided justification for why more heads are needed. Besides, several groups within an organization are competing for additional headcount. So naturally, inspite of best intentions, adding headcount becomes a slow and frustrating process. Unfortunately, in today's "web 2.0" world (loosely the domain in which Niall works), time is money. Startups deliver entire products in the same time a product manager in a big company could barely get her headcount sanctioned.
The second point that I have hightlighted above is perhaps specific to Microsoft. Microsoft is such a huge company that in effect it is really like 50 different companies trying to work together. This creates huge interdependencies between product teams. I personally experienced it first hand while I was there when what I was developing depended on Windows messenger, Avalon, WinFS, MSN, XBOX live to count a few! As a developer, having so many external dependencies is frustrating. It means, having to wait on 7 different teams to deliver before you can deliver your product. It means having to spend too much time in meetings and too little time developing. It means seeing your competitors deliver several versions of their product while you are still held up on your first release.
The final point that Niall makes about doing his own thing is a common reason why many people have left big companies of late. The next generation web is being defined by startups. All the recent innovation in recent times (Flickr, del.icio.us, MySpace, Netvibes etc) has happened in small companies. Companies like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have been playing catchup by either buying out these companies or trying to imitate what was pioneered elsewhere. For many smart people in big companies, this is a despairing situation to be in. It is like standing behind a glass pane and helplessly see the ship sail by. What they can build in a matter of months outside will take years to build inside a big company. Moreover, with so much VC money available today, startups are well funded and can manage to attract smart people.
These are interesting times in the tech. industry. The innovation is happening in nooks and corners. The talent is gravitating away from the big companies. The small companies are cash strapped but talent rich and nimble. The big companies are quite the opposite. It remains to be seen who will prevail! You know on whom I am betting on :-)
Recently I saw a nice Hindi movie called Iqbal. The movie is about a mute and hearing impaired boy whose passion and dedication towards cricket takes him places and eventually lands him in the national team. The movie is very well made and by the end of the movie, you find yourself cheering for this kid hoping he makes it big. The story of pretty much anybody who can manage to find a place in the national team would be fascinating. Yet, there is an altogether different thrill in cheering for the underdog. In the recent football world cup, in the game between Japan and Brazil, Japan had scored first and was actually leading for sometime. I remember all of us had dropped what we were doing and had headed out to the nearest pub to catch the game live. The chances of Japan actually winning the game were very less - almost nil - and yet in the back of the mind, eveybody was thinking - can they really pull it off! Everybody loves the underdog. I like to call it the romance of the underdog.
Startups are also underdogs. They have odds heavily against them. Every day is a struggle for them. They get pushed around by the big guys. They often have very little money, a tiny garage for an office and the CEO is also the office boy. What thrill could one possibly get out of building a startup, or working for one or even simply supporting one? The answer lies in the romance of the underdog. For many people, being the underdog is more fun than being a top dog. It is like climbing Mt. Everest knowing well that many before you have perished in this quest. It is like being David in David v/s Goliath - only this time you don't know if David will win or not. This quest for the improbable is what makes entrepreneurship seductive. This is also why startups find popular support - both in terms of attracting people and attracting investments. Because everytime you see a promising underdog, you wonder could this possibly be the next Google?. The chances are nearly zero but not exactly zero. And many are willing to take the bet on those odds.
Yup, you cant have it all. In fact you cant have most of it. So choose what you want carefully. Not that you will get it. But just in case you do!
p.s: Hugh is a genius!
We just added a new feature to Venturewoods.org. The idea is to create an online job exchange targeted at startups in India. The Venturewoods group blog is focussed on discussing the startup/VC ecosystem in the country. So this job board nicely complements the blog and should interest the Venturewoods readers. If there is sufficient interest then we will think about setting up a more elaborate system. For now, we have kept it simple, by creating two posting areas:
1. VentureJobs Please feel free to post your company profile and jobs here
2. VentureTalent If you want to become part of a startup team, please post your brief bio here
Do check it out!
