Hardware: Buy, Don’t lease.

Most folks who are starting up in the valley would ask you to lease and not buy. But with most hardware and computers, it would actually work out to be cheaper to just buy them, since you can. The Depreciation factor actually helps you out.

For God’s sakes, find a mentor.
I dont know what you will do. But if your industry, vertical and idea is frozen and you have started working on the prototype, you need to find yourself a mentor before its too late. It would be ideal to find someone who knows the industry and its painpoints quite well so that he can provide some insight into the industry that you are trying to tap into.

Keep a safety cash stash.
Don’t run from hand to mouth. Its good habit and practice to always keep a month or twos expenses as a secret stash (hopefully in a bank account) and try not to touch it unless absolutely essential.

Don’t be stupid and finance your venture using a credit card.
It’s simple as that. Credit cards are just money sucking systems and if you are planning on financing your venture using a credit card, lets just say that I have no faith in your financial planning or business sense anymore.

Use the Social Media platform Effectively.
Build the buzz from the beginning. Keep them curious, but satisfy them a little once a while. Manage your marketing, and balance your hype. Keep them swarming, but let them peek once a while. Given the low entry barriers to marketing and being in a connected world, you do not have an excuse to wait till you grow big so that you can hire a PR firm to do your marketing.

Plan your first hire.
The first hire of the company essentially is the royal diadem, if I may say so. The attitude that he or she posses will make a lot of difference. It is perfectly okay to reject 99 people to hire the 100th right candidate. Be picky, choosy and you can even afford to be a jerk, but not to make a bad hire.

Get back quickly.
One of the things that I get oooh-ed and aaah-ed running Proto.in is as to how quickly I do get back to them. I rarely let 10 hours – let alone a few hours get by before I get to anyone. I make sure that I respond to even the silliest queries in the nicest manner possible. Considering that you are just starting out and someone has actually taken the time to write, its the least you could do. Given that most of the guys from the startup sector are the ones who are in awe, I am actually a little scared. But learn, and remember. Get back to them as soon as possible. Do not let your customers hanging.

Get a sensible lady onboard.
I’d totally go with Guy Kawasaki on this one. There is a major difference between a venture that is run by all-men and one where there is a lady who is an equal partner and has a say in things. Women do have a way of looking at details and trust me, the perspective will definitely help. Also, considering that you will have a higher chance of women who will join startups – they are more daring than men, and will possibly spend long hours in the office, a lady around provides a safe and comfortable environment.

Exploit every opportunity you get to talk.
As Sanjeev Gadre of Subex Azure said in a talk, there is nothing that builds a brand building excercise than the opportunity given, to talk to a targetted and focused audience.

Create a work culture.
startups are a lot of work. But it can also be fun.

Invest in smart and cool ambience.
Get a bean bag. It is ergonomic. It is stylish. And its a statement that this startup is cooler than the other one. Enough said.

More to Follow…

Part I: The Absolute Startup Essentials

When you do start off, you most certainly want to make sure that you start off on the right foot. So here’s a list of things you definitely don’t want to cut corners on, or make compromises on:

The Name.
There are times when I just an amazed at the identity of a corporation. A corporation, essentially is an entity which even without the people has a life and identity on its own. As far as a corporation, or if you prefer the term “company”, is concerned, everybody is working to raise its valuation in one way or another. If the company benefits, eventually and in some cases quite directly the employees benefit.

Individuals cannot grow and make a large impact. It is said that the power of the chair that you sit on is always much more than the person who sits on it. I’d even dare say that the brand of apple, is bigger than steve jobs – though that’s probably the one example in technology history where we’d have a second guess about it.

The point. An identity unites people towards a cause. Start with the name, and a name that means something to you.

[Guy Kawasaki: The Name Game]

The Website, Logo and blog.

You need a website, to ensure that you get the domain name that your name goes with. You can come up with a very basic site that doesnt say much, but says enough or very little to catch people’s curiosity. You’d also require a logo that goes with the name to put together the site.

During your development period the one most crucial aspect that you need is your blog. And get your developers and yourself to religiously blog atleast one a week with an update and something that you guys are fascinated with. Brands are built over time, and building a brand takes more time than building rome. It all starts with one brick at a time, and a blog is a spring board in that direction.

The Gmail enterprise account.

You wouldnt believe how easy it is these days to not delete mails and quickly search by a person’s name to pull out all the conversations i’ve had with that person. And all that for free.

If a startup needs to pinch money, this is the golden pinch. Apply for one of those accounts and get it setup.

Setup a Central Server.

The code has to be in one place. I’d say that it should run a well maintained version of linux or some server-grade OS, and patched with the latest releases to ensure that there are no security issues. Get SVN or a revisioning tool running on it, at the earliest. You could also create a smaller partition to dump all your music collection to share from.

VPN your server.
Set up a VPN account so that you could connect to your server from outside. it will help to check out and check in code wherever you are working from.

Use Skype and Gtalk for Calls.
Every dollar counts. The popularity of skype is slowly weaning, or atleast their marketing efforts have slowed down, but last I checked, the number of skype users have gone up to close to 12 million online, compared to the 7 million, about an year ago. So yep, trust skype and get an account on it.

Visit a Barcamp or two.
The best place to learn how to pitch is in a barcamp. People will throw all sorts of questions at you, but its the place where you can learn to evade the questions you dont want to answer and answer what you want people to hear. You gotta love the brutality of the barcamp audience. It’s the best place to get some validation, and if you are two cool founders, you’d even manage to attract a talent or two to come work for you when you are ready for it.

If you can afford it, get a desktop, and two monitors.
Jason Calacanis says that an extra monitor can significantly improve your work productivity. The one thing you cannot afford to deprive yourself of, is the ability to dream and get those creative juices flowing. Productivity and “feeling good” are inherently connected.

Go with Airtel Broadband, and keep an aircard handy.
For the days when you would travelling, or even maybe walk into a coffee shop, find a corner and start working an aircard comes in handy to be online and perhaps pull out the latest production release code from your server to show off to someone.

Print some visiting cards.
Nothing snazzy, but anything different would be great. I’ll let your creative juices flowing on that one. Don’t print more than a 100 cards. Use them sparingly, and make it last till your beta is out. Imagine every card is a INR 50 currency. It makes giving away cards a little tougher. Hold on to them as sacred identities of someone’s affiliation with you. Be miserly about giving it to everyone.

Chuck out your titles.
In an organization there are three levels of people. There are the top level management, the middle level and the implementing level folks. In a startup, the top level does not exist. There is a rule said and unsaid about working your way up by finding a replacement. When you can eventually afford to – economically and in terms of time and energy – hire someone to manage the team internally, you can move up to the top level. But I can bet ya that it wont be anytime before five years. So Until then, I dont want to hear you calling yourself CEO, CTO, etc. Chuck those titles and get back to work.

Make time to go play, socially.
We know that half the world doesnt accept your lifestyle, but why are you adding more to their ammunition by denying your social life? I’d say you need to set apart time for family and for yourself on a regular basis. It goes without saying that you need to eat well, and take care of yourself. Honor it, at whatever cost.

Stop wasting time and energy on too many tech conferences.
You need all these meets and barcamps and etc, till you figure out what you are doing. After that, you need to get out of the play pen and start racing in the real world, where bigger mammoths are eyeing for the same market that you are aiming for. Cut loose your distractions and focus. Focus or die. It’s quite as simple as that.

Stop reading blogs that are coming out of the Valley.

Most of the stuff that are spoken about day-to-day operations dont work here in India. Even the post by Jason, apart from the second monitor, everything else seemed pretty pointless and unworkable here in India. The key is to read, but also know what to take and what not and keep context at the back of your mind.

Update: This post was made on April 7th, much before the recently concluded Barcamp Bangalore 6. Keep that in mind.

Barcamps, they are happening everywhere now. There are debates and raging discussions on as to whether we “interpreted” the format right, but whether or not, its still going on. Delhi, Chennai, Bangalore, Mumbai, Pune, Kerala, Hyderabad and maybe even more have joined that league of extraordinary unconference hosts. Here’s a random and crazy idea to mull over, debate and discuss. I can already sense half my readers getting ready with pitchforks and flame throwers, but as long as it leads to something beneficial, I am all for it. Here goes:

I know that everybody is thinking this but let me say it out loud: I think someone in India got the barcamp format totally wrong. Barcamps, as we do it in India are not conversational. They are very, and very speaker-centric. We kinda figured this out when the team in Chennai started out on this audacious project to write a book on Unconferences. The project, I believe is abandoned – or perhaps just a little dorcile, but we did learn quite a bit of stuff while we were at it, since the project brought together quite a bit of people from across the globe, including a fair bit of heavy weights. So I guess, I could say that I did hear from the source as to where we got the definitions wrong.

Contrary to Popular belief, Unconferences aren’t anything new. They are quite old actually – as old as 1970 actually. Unconferences just went by a different name – “Open Space Conferences”. It essentially meant that all the participants came together to run the conference. Hmm.. sounds quite close to the definition we use for barcamps and its sister camps I would say, wouldn’t you?

It was almost during the time when we realized that barcamps were too speaker centric, and getting diluted in content that the Chennai Team, under the Banner of TKF, decided to run with more focused verticals to drive deep into a topic. Hence, Blogcamp, Wikicamp, Podworks and the likes were born. The credit goes to Kiruba for putting the brains behind the inceptions, and the enormous energy of the team that makes it all happen.

Now that the pleasantries are over, lets get back to the topic.

Siddharth, a fellow blogger/unconference lover/startup entrepreneur and I had a discussion over our trip to Mumbai to attend the barcamp there. Its during that trip that he was discussing how he had attended a workshop on Agile Methodologies in Hyderabad which totally blew his brains out as to how “barcamps are conversational”. I must say that I agree with him. We are not doing something right.

A couple of things we could do to improve things:

1. Get rid of the Projector and the PPT. Stick with whiteboards, and even better, limit the audience of each session to 20 – 30 people max. Smaller groups are more conversational. Larger groups tend to sit back and act “audience”.

2. Small is beautiful. We need to let go of the obcession to get people signed up in the hundreds. The pain to organize an event in such a scale, is simply not worth it. In most cases I see the organizers burnt out before the morning sessions of the first day get over.

3. Focus. Focus. Focus. Pick a theme, topic and go deep into it. Don’t run topics which are as wide as “Politics. Technology. Startups”. One wouldnt know what to do with it. You arent really dealing with an uber smart audience. Most folks are spectators and the rest are there hoping to learn a thing or two.

4. Have some solid deliverables. Ten people in a room, all knowing how to count to three, cannot magically learn how to count to ten just cause they were debating, arguing and in the same room. You need to ensure that there is a mix of people who are willing to share, and people willing to learn, and even better if the sharing types are more. Lately I am getting nothing out of barcamps, apart from meeting people. And I am quite positive that I am not that all-knowing… Yet! There is definitely more to learn, with the pace at which platforms and technologies are evolving, and it would be great if that was looked into.

5. Keep everyone within the same room if possible. The law of two feet only works here, otherwise you might need cars and golf carts to carry you around

6. Keep it simple. Dont complicate it by having it in 17 rooms and three more “outdoorsy” spots included to that. Goes back to point 2.

I am not sure if anyone is listening, but if you are It’d be great to have all, or atleast some of these taken care of in future plannings.

As for the title, a few of us are mulling over a very radical different idea of a barcamp. It is going to incorporate most of the above mentioned points, and most of all will require the least amount of logistical nightmares. In a day when softwares could automate, and processes could be simplified, months of prep work for “barcamps” simply cant be justified. We are hoping to make things simpler, effective, with oodles of new learning, all done in a fun environment. Now, that’s a guarantee!

Saturday was Startup Lunch in Bangalore and kudos to the guys [Sridhar, Pradeep and Ashish Sinha] who are spearheading the effort there, it went really really really well. There is an account by the organizing team which goes through most of the details. I am quite impressed, and kinda glad to know that there is a positive response for this sort of initiatives. Delhi was the first to go, followed by Pune, followed by Bangalore. Chennai will have its lunch most probably at the last saturday of this month, since Barcamp Bangalore is coming up on the 19th and to avoid any clash of dates.

Like clockwork, the Chennai OpenCoffee club meet happened in Chennai today. I am quite happy with the way this group is heading and everytime we meet, we see quite a bit of new faces which is always quite encouraging. Today’s main discussion was about “How to hire and manage your team”. There was also an after thought discussion on the “personal life” of entrepreneurs, partly picked up by the post I had made on this blog earlier. I must admit that it was a little weird to write about personal emotions on a blog, but it certainly seems like it hit a common chord. That’s definitely something to keep in mind.

I believe I would be in bangalore on Saturday, if the chaos out there should subside, and we are also planning a trip to delhi to finalize on the venue for the upcoming edition of Proto.in, either on Sunday or the weekend following that. I guess the weekend after that is going to have Startup Lunch here in Chennai. Seems like i am already booked for this month, in terms of weekends. *sigh*

I just stepped back into my apartment after a long day in Barcamp Mumbai. I am in a split of a mind trying to figure out how productive the day was. On one hand, I met a lot of people. I had some 20 odd appointments with folks that I wanted to meet and greet and it seemed like a good day to do all that. Meeting Manish Jain, whose blog post I commented on three years ago, Meeting the faces behind Startup Central Snigda (though we’ve been interacting over the phone for quite a while now), meeting Krish Mony – with whom I get to have all the interesting discussions on venturewoods lately, quite a few startup companies and it was nice to touch base with the guys from the Sun Startup Essentials program, and also Vinu who is always quite a pleasant company to have around in unconferences.

While that on one hand, I am not sure if there was anything exciting and mind blowingly new that happened there – except for the talk about using asynchronous IO which actually seemed quite out of place compared to the other topics, especially when these were the kind of talks which actually would make a lot of difference. But in any case…

It was great to catch up with Aditya, and see the passionate exuberance of Arpit, and walking into that hall felt very much like being in one of the BCB meets. The clarity in thinking, the groundwork they had done in making all the preparations reeked of experienced and detailing. Kudos to those guys on that.

The startups, in my opinion were slightly disappointing. But I think they are in the ideal platform. This is essentially the place where one gets feedbacks on their models, the features and if the “cool web app” is any good at all, and I think the audience were true to their spirit of brutal honesty.

Overall, didn’t take away much, but met a lot of people, had some interesting discussions outside the hall with like-minded people, and am going to put this day to an end knowing that even Mumbai has woken up the tide of entrepreneurship rising! There are good, nah, Great days ahead!

Mumbai, though a little late, has been turning into the happening scene for techfests and they are organizing the third edition of Barcamp (quite shortly after their second one) on popular demand it seems. Mumbai, after Bangalore, has been one of the few cities to be conducting their MoMo meets quite regularly, whether rain or shine, and there’s definitely credit to those guys for that. The event will be in IIT Mumbai and I am quite excited to see these guys bringing barcamp back in its true spirit of on-the-spot planning.

I will be attending the event, along with Colleague Sid (Chennai Open Coffee Club Fame). If you are in mumbai and would like to touch base, do leave a note.

If you haven’t registered yet, do register soon. The word is that they are close to running full already.

When we first laid down the groundwork for Proto, one of the things that I sincerely wished to see was more initiatives like Proto spring up, so that – for one, we’d strive to deliver more value to the entrepreneurs who need all the support they can, and hopefully we can move on to focus on the next gap that the ecosystem requires attention on.

I am quite happy to see that the same ardent and capable team behind Barcamp Bangalore, working towards putting together Headstart.in.

My kudos to the team, and a happy moment for seeing the startup ecosystem come together with such grace here in India. Most certainly a dream come true.