New Delhi Times

It was an interesting day at TiECon Delhi today. Some quick observations:

1. VCs are everywhere! I think there were more VC firms in presence than aspiring entrepreneurs! This is of course great news for the local startup scene. VCs were lamenting on lack of quality entrpreneurship. A few moderators and speakers took light hearted digs at the “vulture” capitalists. All in good fun!

2. Mobile and consumer internet remain dominant ares of interest in both VC and startup circles.

3. Web 2.0 and KPO are the latest buzzwords. Everybody is using those terms (I know I am myself guilty of hyping the former!)

4. I was impressed by the concerted effort that Orissa is making as a state to attract investments. I was also surprised to hear that more than 11% of all FDI flows in via Orissa!

5. Movie stars Anupam Kher and Satish Kaushik announced the launch of their new movie production house. I got a chance to talk 1-1 with Mr. Kher! They are looking to raise money for their new company. Mr. Kher and Mr. Kaushik drove across the point that the Indian film industry is making a very conscious effort to become more professional in its approach. Mr. Kher categorically stated that today not a single movie star accepts or demands cash renumeration. Impressive!

6. TiECon is one of the best conferences for networking. Though I am noticing that ultimately its the same usual suspects you run into in all conferences! I think after attending a dozen or so conferences, I will run out of new people whom I can meet up at such events

This post also posted on the Venturewoods Blog.

One of the laments of Indian technology entrepreneurs is that we lack a healthy vibrant ecosystem for fostering entrepreneurship. Often we site example of the Silicon Valley and how absence of such an environment here inhibits entrepreneurship in India. While, that argument is true to some extent, we should also not forget that historically India has been a very entrepreneurial nation. In fact according to statistics (which I can’t find right now!), majority of Indians are self employed. To the eyes of your average technologist, the andewaala (egg seller) on the road side or the local panwari (grocery seller) don’t appear to be entrepreneurs. For that matter, the rich uncle with a thriving “business” or three “factories in U.P” also don’t qualify. Fact of the matter is that all these people who we come across in our daily lives have built sustainable profitable businesses. At its core, a business is a business is a business. It doesn’t matter whether it is a hi-tech business or a manufacturing business. It doesn’t matter whether it is VC funded or bootstrapped.

Having interacted very closely with a few successful ”traditional” Indian businessmen over the last two years, I have realized that for an entrepreneur here, the real lessons are to be learnt from these traditional businesses. So instead of cribbing about lack of “ecosystem” and constantly looking towards the Silicon Valley for guidance, let us learn from our non-tech. local entrepreneurs. Here are some lessons I have picked up:

1. Bootstrapping works Most traditional entrepreneurs here have never heard of the phrase “venture capital”. Almost all businesses are bootstrapped with personal savings or bank loans. Raising money against equity is rare. Yet, a lot of businesses succeed and scale. It takes time and sweat but it is definitely doable. The biggest Indian businesses houses, right from TATAs to Reliance were built without any venture capital.
2. Selling price – Cost price = Profit Seems obvious but somehow we (especially the web 2.0 enthusiasts amongst us ) overlook that fact when we think of a new idea or a business. My friends from the traditional business background ask this question first – how are you going to make money in that business? Technologists often ask that question last (if ever they do!)
3. Business plans and excel sheets are overhyped A lot many successful businesses get started without a formal business plan. Initial cash flow projections and sales targets are often based on gut feel and past experience. More often than not, it works out fine. Sure, to scale a business beyond a point, more formal business planning is required. But to get a business started, a formal business plan need not be a bottleneck.
4. Indian consumer is really hard to sell to This is a really valuable lesson for anybody targeting a product at the Indian market. The Indian consumer is a tough cookie to sell to. He expects best quality and world class of service, wants to pay lowest possible price (and still bargain on that price) and has almost no brand loyalty. It is yet to be seen if the Indian consumer will pay a premium for intangibles like better customer service. Traditionally he hasn’t.
5. Don’t build to flip. Traditionally, businesses have been created to generate enough profit to sustain livelihood of the stakeholders (employees and promoters). Promoters make a living solely off the dividends that their business generates. This is very different from how many technology startups start. Promoters are often salaried (from venture money) and on day one, an “exit strategy” is incorporated in the business plan. The whole concept of a “liquidation event” as a means of wealth generation seems “absurd” to most seasoned traditional entrepreneurs. I agree with that line of thought. When you are building a new business, you need to build it as if your livelihood depended on it (and in fact your livelihood should depend on it!). That is the best way to keep focussed on point 2 above too.

There is a lot more that technology entrepreneurs can learn from traditional entrepreneurs. So about time, we stopped cribbing and started making the most of the rich entrepreneurial experience that exists in India!

Youtube got bought over by Google for a whopping $1.6 Billion (no links here – its all over the place!). Going by how popular the site has become, it was only a matter of time before one of the big guys bought it out. Congrats to them! Our company, Tekriti, started off building one of the earliest video sharing sites back in Feb-March 2005 for our first client. Ourmedia.org was launched in March 2005. YouTube came along almost 9 months later. Ourmedia had a host of video and media experts on its panel of advisors and it had (and has) a team of volunteer editors to wean out copyright content. YouTube on the other hand has the policy of letting copyright content remain online until the copyright owner objects. Ourmedia allows users to download the original high quality video while YouTube only allows online viewing of very low res. flash versions. So for a site that started with a 9 month lead, it feels like Ourmedia was a missed oppurtunity. Of course, to be clear, Ourmedia is a non-profit and making billions of dollars wasnt even the aim and it still gets significant traffic and has over 100,000 videos hosted. But the kind of popularity that Ourmedia should have seen never came along. At a personal level, it helped us get our company started and gave us the initial credibility any startup needs. So Ourmedia remains very special to me.

Looking back, I think there are some very useful lessons to be learnt:

1. Keep it simple and stupid. A lot of time was spent on defining what metadata should be captured while uploading a video. The result was this huge page (login required) with hundreds of form fields to be filled in. Even though most of those fields were optional, it was daunting for the average user to figure out this form. A simple minimalistic user interface helps!

2. Reliability is the key. Ourmedia uses the Internet Archive for storing media. This is great because it provides for free storage. But there were major problems with getting this integration to work. Essentially the video was first uploaded to Ourmedia and then copied over to the Archive using FTP. This was slow and often the servers would simply not respond. I think this is the killer feature of YouTube. It just works!

3. Focus! In my opinion, Ourmedia tried to be too many things at the same time. The site supported audio, image and text uploads along with videos. It supported forums, groups, user profiles and social networking as well. All in the alpha version. In hindsight (which, of course is 20/20), it would have been much more prudent to have done just one core feature (video upload and view) and make it work 100% of the times. Feature bloat is also a side effect of using a prebuilt platform (Drupal in the case of Ourmedia) since you seem to get so many features for “free” so you might as well add them to your site. In reality, adding a feature to an application should be driven by user demand and not by how easy it is to implement.

4. Virality. YouTube allowed embedding videos published there on other websites and blogs. This contributed in a big way to the exponential growth of YouTube. Same can be said for Flickr as well. Ourmedia did not have that viral effect because the user had to come to the website to view a video.

To be fair to Ourmedia, it came into existence in the very early phases of the “web 2.0″ phenomenon. So a lot of things that seem obvious now were very new or unheard of back then. Besides, Ourmedia does have the cleanest terms of use – you own everything that you publish on the site. Very few (if any) other video sharing sites offer such generous terms of use. Ourmedia was also not backed by funding so it was challenging to develop, maintain and upgrade the website on a shoestring budget.

Based on our experiences in doing Video portals, we developed a platform for easily creating video sharing websites – its called TekMedia. You can read more about it here.

Usability is my new obsession. Even after over three decades of the beginning of the personal computing revolution, we are completely inept at producing usable software. What is worst is that inspite of this, we – the engineers – simply refuse to acknowledge the importance of interaction design. No sir! What we care about is new progamming languages, code optimizations, scalable software and fancy terms like AJAX, RIA and RoR. User interface ranks right at the bottom, just below writing readable code and just above remembering to take a bath.

The perception amongst engineers that user interface is unimportant is a worrying trend. I think this attitude is a little bit more prevalent in India because traditionally Indian services companies have primarily been involved in building server side enterprise software. This is the kind of software that often runs without any interface or has an interface that is visible to very few technically savvy people. So historically, all the important development was handed off to the best engineers while the newbies were consigned to building the UI. The after effects of this linger on even today when we are working more and more on consumer facing products. The user interface is the single most important reason for success or failure of any product in this domain. Take, for example, this article about the increase in sales a travel site saw after they redesigned their site (http://www.usabilitynews.com/news/article3330.asp):

Following major site redesign work, MyTravel, one of the UK’s leading holiday and leisure groups with brands including Airtours, Going Places and Mytravel.com, is reaping significant improvements in online sales.

The three-phase redesign, developed in partnership with Foviance, has already resulted in a 20% increase in online booking conversion following the completion of the first two phases. Work on the third phase is to commence later this month.

The first phase, which went live in December, reduced booking times by up to 40% by simplifying the number of steps needed to book from eight to five. This resulted in a 10% improvement in conversion levels across all MyTravel’s websites.

So far most software companies in India have been reluctant to invest in developing interaction design expertise. This has in turn, meant that interaction design is a profession few understand and even fewer choose to pursue. This is unforuntate because we lose all the creative talent to other disciplines like advertising, toy design, corporate branding etc. If we want to build truly world class products, we must start to understand the importance of usability. We must make a concerted effort to make it a glamorous, high paying career oppurtunity. Just like we work hard to attract technical talent, we need to work hard to attract creative talent. Believe me, the “creative types” are scared of us engineers. They think we dont understand them and dont appreicate them. We have to tell them its not true! We love you guys! Please come work with us!

Bonus link: So you want to be an interaction designer?

The latest version is live now! We got lot of feedback on the old UI and have made an effort to clean up navigation and user interface. A lot more is in the pipeline but 1.1 is a big step forward from 1.0. Do check it out!

“Work hard. Play hard. Make History.”

This was the email signature of the recruiter who brought me to Microsoft. These words have stuck with me ever since and we use them often to describe our philosophy as a company. Last to last Friday was a good example of the “play hard” part. We had a great party in office. Manish (who btw is finally blogging again!) has a great writeup on it. It was one of those days when everybody was in their elements. Everybody had something funny to say, everybody had a witty retort ready and everybody was ready to laugh at the silliest jokes. Truly memorable and fun!
I have been told a few times that as a company, we have a little too much fun. That might be true. In the last month or so, we made a trip to Jaipur, and had two big birthday bashes. Besides that, on days when a lot of us are working late, we often end up ordering food from outside and end up having a small impromptu after-hours party.
So yes, maybe we are partying too much. But its not a bad thing. Because for all the fun and frolic that you might find on our flickr feed, what doesn’t show up is the hard work that happens rest of the time. As a team, we always take our deadlines very seriously. In fact the last party was postponed by a week because a couple of us had to meet some client deadlines. We have ended up working all nights on our birthdays. We have spent many a Sundays cranking out software. We have woken up early and stayed up late to take client calls. If we are partying hard, its because we are also working hard!
I think this is the best part of being in a startup with a young team. There is so much passion and energy all around. Besides this kind of fun and masti is a privilege of a small team. When you grow big, events take longer to organize, require budget approvals, prior planning is needed and you don’t really know half the people in the party. Friday’s party took just  a day’s worth of planning. We ordered food and drinks and we were ready to rock-n-roll! It was one cozy group eating, drinking and making merry.
I am sure one day when (God willing!) we are big and famous and stuff, we will look back at these times and miss them. TeknoKrats – these are the “good old days” which you are going to talk about tomorrow! So until tomorrow comes, lets work hard, play hard and make history! The joy is in the journey!

People Aggregator V1.1 is coming this week! This release is all about improving the user interface and site navigation. Lots of bug fixes and some new features too! Stay tuned!

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!

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!

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