For those of you who are subscribed to feeds from this blog, there are two options.

a) You can visit www.vijayanand.name, and subscribe to the feeds there. Also do drop a note about what you think about the new site.

b) If you are one of those folks who never visit blogs but dwell in feed readers, you can update it to the new RSS URL which should help you stay in touch.

Thanks again for your co-operation, patience and continued support.

Vijay

I’ve slowly been putting effort into parallely setting up a server, in my own host – finally, www.vijayanand.name will point to itself, rather than redirect – and if all goes well, starting monday you should be seeing a brand new site.

I will do my best to keep it current. One of the things I am consciously doing is to get out of “blogging” mode and into writing mode. With Twitter being so pervasive, it would be fair to keep the conversations there itself, and to keep the blog to some quality articles – articles worth revisiting someday again. I also want to have a place where all my social and online presence will be aggregated and laid out. Hopefully the new location will do all that.

From being a skeptic on blogging, I’ve come a long way.

   There was a fantastic booklet a few years ago by a
   guy called Peter Brooke.  He’s a theater director,
   if you ever come across it.  He wrote a book called
   “The Empty Space.”  And he asked himself this
   question.  He was concerned most theater and is –
   loose entertainment — it’s not invigorating.  It’s
   like a passing time.

   His thing is theater as a vibrant,
   social and cultural force.  So, he also analyzed
   what goes wrong with the theater.  So, he asked
   himself this question.  He said, What is the heart
   of the theater?  What is it?  What is this thing we
   are talking about?  And to get to it, he started
   the process of subtraction.  He said, “What can you
   take away from it and still have it?”
  
   And he said, well, you can take away
   the stage.  Take away the script.  You can take
   away the lighting.  See what’s going on, you take
   away the curtains, and you can take away the
   building.  You can take away all the crew, and you
   can certainly take away the director.  All of that
   is very easy.  Take it all out.
  
   The only thing you cannot remove from
   theater is an actor in a space and somebody
   watching.  That’s the heart of it.  And if either
   of those parts is missing, there is no theater.
   You need a performer and an audience.  Theater is
   that relationship.
  
   And he said you should never add
   anything to that relationship unless it improves
   it.  If it gets in the way, if it encumbers it, if
   it makes it more difficult, you shouldn’t have it.
   And that’s his problem with theater.  Everything is
   a distraction from the main business.

More than once, and whenever you do find yourself trying to redefine an industry, change the way a system works, or maybe even build an ecosystem, these words are good to turn to. Define the basics of what makes that system work, and see how it can be re-tuned, rebuilt and made to work better. You have to go back to the basics, if you want to redefine.

When I am at home, and during weekends, I manage my Calendar on my Nokia Handset with an hour reminder. When I am in Office, I use Outlook’s calendar to manage schedules. The biggest issue is the first few meetings on Monday mornings – there are times when something comes up and there is no way for me to check my schedule.

So here’s the solution I’ve gone with.

Using Google calendar exclusively to manage my entire data. I found to my pleasant surprise that Google has a small app that can syncronize your outlook calendars with Gcalendar.

Secondly, after trying a host of free, opensource and cant-seem-to-get-it-to-work apps, I found CalSyncS60 which works like a charm with my Nokia Phone to do a two-way sync with my schedule in Google Calendar.

As of now, life seems to be in order. The fine line between, work and personal line is blurred forever, but it should atleast save me from breaking people’s hearts by forgetting scheduled meets and keep me on time. That’s a fair tradeoff.

i have almost come to believe that that is one of the primary reasons why once someone is fairly successful in this country as an entrepreneur, they run off to become a VC, and then become directors in a few companies and are never heard from again in the startup circles. Apparently they “graduate”. And this is somehow seen as the norm.

There is a certain thrill, passion, grit and energy in working with Startups. And if you do fall addicted to it, there is also more than enough means and ways to create wealth in this phase of creativity and corporate development.

But you are going to have to make a decision about staying put, sinking your heels deeper and committing to this space. As someone rightly said “My life never makes sense in the windshield. It only makes sense in the rear view”. Working with Entrepreneurs, working with Startups, and being an entrepreneur is also a lifestyle choice.

LESSON: MAKE THAT SACRIFICE. GROW WITH THE ORGANIZATION

Scenario: In the last three business plans that I have had the priviledge to look at and to give feedbacks on, it seems that the average entrepreneur wants a salary of around 2 Lakhs a month, seems to be hiring an office attendant or a secretary in the first year, is travelling extensively, starts a marketing budget even before the product is ready, claims a steady income stream, is absolutely immune to market changes, and can solidly break even in 3 years. And oh, they give a 4x return in the fourth year.

You cannot demand a salary that runs in the lakhs. You cant because If I were investing, I wouldn’t know if there is even an incentive for the entrepreneur to slog to make this company succeed anymore. Given the current employment situation, I would even have a slight doubt as to whether the guy lost his job and is getting self-employed with a raise. But I do understand if you would want to live comfortably. This is what I would suggest.

Take a pay cut in the first two years – till your product development is ready. Just so you get a number, You get paid at the same level as your Indian Lead Software Engineer (I have to specific about the indian part, since some folks also have high paid outsourced engineers). That should put you at around 40K a month. Once that is set, and once your product development is done, and your marketing and sales efforts start, align your salary so that a base of 40K and a incentive component from the sales defines what your take home package is. That will assure me as an investor that you are willing to take a paycut to keep costs low and burn things slowly to get through the initial phases and even as the company makes money you arent raising costs, but defining your salary from what is coming in. If you are a company that sells products that sells in the millions, or have several product packages, it would be wise to even define slabs, that define the percentage.

You do that, and all of a sudden I see a real entrepreneur, who could really use with some financial support, and the halo over the head glows and a lot more people just might be willing to seriously consider your financial proposition.

There is a troubling trend though. There is much talk about Entrepreneurship becoming a lifestyle – I still disagree with the notion (You are either built and wired to think like an entrepreneur or not). But there something very slithery scammy about entire groups of people and organizations working to make life for an entrepreneur “easier”. Support is another thing all together.

There was an incident at the Delhi Edition of Proto.in, where Sanjay Anandaram raised the simple question to the audience as to what all they expect from an Investor – and what should be the right metrics. The answers went all the way from “Should help hiring potential partners” to the obvious funding, to getting clients, to providing strategic direction. I must get a clip of that conversation, but when I did jot them all down, they were just about every element of a startup mapped. Nothing left. Sanjay did take the shot and ask the question “So what the hell does the entrepreneur do?” And he was bang on.

In my definition, entrepreneurs are risk-takers. They create wealth faster than anyone else because they are legitimate con-artists who’ve figured out a flaw in the system and they know that they can make money off of it – or by fixing it. They are also people with this innate capability to look at everything they got and can make a rocket out of it and be there before NASA can even fathom a trip. They are the junkyard Gurus, and they are great in survival tactics. They just need to fix things, and without that they’d ruin the world – so its better that they have something to fix. That’s my entrepreneur. And in order to make such elite ones – and rightly so – stand out, we need to go through our rights of passages. Without it, we are just recruiting lazy bums to the army and giving our entire freedom in the hands of those who wouldn’t know what to do with it.

And handing out entrepreneurship in a spoon, ah, such a thing doesn’t exist. Entrepreneurship will never be a lifestyle. It’s who you are.

Metrics. They are the easiest way to measure performance and to know that you are moving. Most of the times, as you are working with early and extremely early stage ventures, the only way to ensure that the focus of the team is on what is essential, is to set down a basic set of metrics that we can track and use to align ourselves as we go. It might seem like an extremely simple thing, but what you measure has to lot to say about what you value most. And when you make that decision in prioritizing, focus comes as a bi-product – a beautiful bi-product.

There is a danger to this. If you don’t think wide enough, then the easiest metric will be imposed on you, and in most cases its the rate at which your bank balance is depleting or increasing. Unfortunately, money is in most cases several levels down the chain in terms of processes, and measuring it directly might not give you much insight nor control to manage where you are heading.

So what am I getting at? As a startup, you need to measure, and measure everything.

I dont believe that currency is the only value system that exists. At the end of the day, even currencies are nothing more than a few numbers which give some standing among an audience. Find an alternate means to provide that and you would have created a different value system altogether.

How often do you check to ensure that you are on track? Atleast once every month. And when you do that, do keep someone who can guide you for better around. It will help, when you do notice you are not on track and need to scream out the words “Help!”

Technorati Tags: startup, entrepreneur, vijay+anand, metrics, progress, performance, evaluation

Even as Barcamps, Open Coffee Clubs, Startup Saturdays and several forms of informal support groups are emerging in this country, one of the biggest problem that we seem to be facing is the fact that we are still very urban-centric. All these meets happen in four or five of the major metros in the country – whereas we probably should be a bit more inclusive about it. There are issues such as the lack of experienced entrepreneurs to share from their life’s tale and help out emerging and aspiring entrepreneurs that seem to be stiffling some of the productivity in some of these informal meets.

Well, technology can solve that problem in some aspect, and we are going to give it our best shot.

We are opening up this Chat Application that we’ve had built, and testing in some occassions to see how we can spin this to solve this issue. Every Saturday between 9am and 5pm – and without fail, every week, we are planning to keep the Proto.in Chat [Link here] open and anyone can visit the site, and interact with entrepreneurs from across the country. We understand that Startup Saturdays happen on the same dates, so if possible we will get someone who is attending the sessions to live chat in the sessions so that the wisdom share can be spread to a larger audience if possible.

So, we’ve done and are doing our part to solve this problem. Now the request is that you be a part of this, to be there, spend sometime in the channel, interacting with, and helping out one entrepreneur to another, and in truly making entrepreneurship a lifestyle choice for those who wish for it – even beyond the metros.

Looking forward to seeing you there. And spread the word.

Technorati Tags: startup, proto, proto.in, entrepreneurship, india, technology

There is something good about being in a University campus, and working there. You sometimes feel younger beyond your years, and sometimes you just feel out of place. In either case, it provides you an alternate reality – not that I wish for it, but the difference in perspective in opinion and viewpoint is one that I thoroughly enjoy.

I overall liked the talk. It was simple, casual, touched upon personal lives – had a wee bit of self promotion – was optimistic, and the tone was real. But perhaps the message was exaggerated.

See, Gandhi said the words “Be the change that you want to see”. Quite powerful words, and one that finds itself many meanings, depending on what lens you are wearing. Nandita felt free to use those words to stir up a moment, and even an applause from an audience. I dont blame her, but I think its a very common mistake. Let me tell you why.

Those words are around sixty years old. Look around you and tell me what has changed. Probably a little. Thats what nobody tells us about. I think we have developed this over-romantic ideology of what “Change” is. It’s really the simple things, and the little steps really. India going from a country which was under an empire, to becoming self-governing, to actually being one of the “positive” news in the economic situation – That’s change. But none of it comes easily. And if you look at things from an individual standpoint, you probably wont even have much to talk about.

Societal changes take ages to come into being. I have almost come to the conclusion that people never change. Its nice to stand on stage and talk about not getting angry when we are insulted. But the man was right, man is social and we are animals. And the first instinct is to get angry. And those who do act differently are either insane or, saints – both of which takes some working internally. The masses simply don’t comply with those rules.

So why am I writing about this topic in a supposedly “Startup guy’s” perspective. Because I think change is at the essence of entrepreneurship. We all aspire for it. We would love for what we create to take the world by storm, but most of us will live to see that thats not true. The world in most cases will act quite indifferent to it – not even hate it, which is the worst part. My mentor raised me repeating those words as I was making my baby steps. That was his way of preparing me for the real world. I couldn’t thank him more for it.

So does radical change ever happen? Absolutely. It happens only twice. One, if people are chasing after something that they desperately want. Its the romantic change. People will go to hell and come out unscathed to get that girl, that house, that future for their child. And there is one other occassion when that beautiful transformation happens – when we are at the brink of extinction.

Tell the world now that we need to save energy, and preserve water, and take care of this planet. They wont. But when our own life is going to be threatened, we would shut down all of our gadgets in a heartbeat, and happily prefer to live in the forests, in an unconnected world, oh so easily. Drastic change does happen… yep, but when we are in the precipice of extinction. If you are a startup though, that’s probably not the scenario you want to aim for

Be the Change… inspiring words, but somehow I have a feeling that those words will be scribed in futuristic placards and placed in a museum eons from now, and we still wouldnt notice the changes around us… because we missed everything. Because the change really is in the smaller things. When you can raise the tolerance level amongst ourselves by a few seconds, when one atleast starts listening to another for his viewpoint, and simply when we start reaching out for our ancient trait – of being an argumentative Indian, I believe thats where change really takes place.