Archive for the ‘Business’ Category
Getting to the Heart of it.
Posted on: April 8, 2009
I am reading the transcript of the conversations held by the Union Square Ventures, and reading a quote by Sir Ken Robinson (who is now fairly well known in the education circles for his TED Talk). In the talk, he quotes a note from the book “The Empty Space” by Peter Brooke. In a way of not breaking what he said, Let me quote him.
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.
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Once life starts picking up the biggest problem for me seems to be managing time, and most of all trying to avoid the moments when I end up cross booking the time slot for two people – yep, that isnt an easy situation to get out of.
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.
Fearing the State of Not Climbing
Posted on: April 1, 2009
There are quite a bit of people that I come across, good and very good people who sometimes have this fear of not being in the ladder. They are great with startups, but are afraid of being left behind in the startup world and constantly keep looking over the shoulder to move up to becoming a corporate and then join the old boys club of retired entrepreneurs.
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.
Making That Halo Glow – Part I
Posted on: March 28, 2009
- In: Ask Vijay | Business | Entrepreneurship | India
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Even as the current economic situation hasnt seem to have harmed the Early Stage Investment scene by much, there is some major misunderstanding by First Time Entrepreneurs, starting off in India, who are looking to raise funds. This series hopes to shine some light on some of them
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.
When We Know What We Want.
Posted on: December 2, 2008
- In: Ask Vijay | Business | Entrepreneurship | tips | Web 2.0
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This world is supposed to be full of systems, and systems that carry inefficiencies. Entrepreneurs are in my dictionary, those that can look at those systems – ticking and clicking, and notice where and how the systems can be improved. Some are driven by their hearts and start NGOs, and others get all logical and while at it, also make some money.
In my book, entrepreneurs are those unsung heroes who get set to transform the way – hopefully for the better.
That’s quite a long topic, if we step into that world, and let me narrow it down to the aspect of understanding your end users. Time and time again, we hear phrases such as “Understand your customer” “The Customer is always right” “User-centric design” which in most cases is defined as keeping the customer, and his demands at the centre of the equation and coming up with solutions around them. Do Customers, and users… and most of all humans know of what they really need?
I think this is a crucial question to ask, because analyzing needs and the capacity for a user to pay for a service defines sustainability and in some cases survival for companies – and in this economic situation, for a whole lot of them. So what do users want? Men or Women, as they might be.
I think we have kind of oversimplified the equation at most times asking direct questions about a product. If you get into the details of a product asking questions such as “Imagine if you had an ipod, but better and cheaper, would you get it?”, the obvious answer would be a yes. What one needs to understand, especially an innovator or an entrepreneur is to understand the intangibles. How would buying that product do in terms of the pride, and show-off calibre of that person. A lot usually tends to matter. Long story short, I’d strongly recommend not to ask direct questions. The answers are always in-between the lines. If you interpret it right, you win, otherwise not. But you get better at it over time. Thats the good part.
There is a reason why I am writing this. There was a recent study that I came across that was asked to a group of single men and women as to what is it that they look for in potential spouses. The answers were all tabulated, and then they were observed over a couple of sessions of speed dates. Most of the time, the kind of people that we are “attracted” to, arent the ones that we define as our perfect spouses. And the eerie thing is that, when they did the same survey right after a date, depending of whether a candidate liked a person who didnt match their previous opinion, the answers would sway totally on the other direction. Come back to them after four more weeks and you’d get their old answers back – as the infactuation wears off.
In Summary, we arent capable of knowing what we want. Thats why B2C businesses have such a hard time understanding what their customers are looking for, what ticks, what doesnt, and what makes it all worse.
B2B businesses in that sense are slightly easier, since businesses do tend to have measured and analyzed every process in terms of metrics – either as costs, expenditures, manpower, transactions, or revenue and its all about making a number rise and one go down, and thats easier to measure and deal with.
Do keep that in the back of your head, if you are ideating. As much as customers are king, and their word is final, in most times they also don’t know what they want. You would have to do a little match-making on their behalf. And with time, you’ll get really good at it, if you like doing such things – and that’s the thrill of building a product that clicks.
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This is a continuation to a Post that I had written Earlier.
“Yahoo could emerge with an edge, if they leapfrog into other verticals following the same web-based advertisement network.”
For a company which has entrenched itself in the media space, managing advertisements networks i probably the holy grail. I wouldnt recommend that Yahoo give up that leverage. Instead of going head on with Google and losing out on that battle, all they need to do is leverage that asset in a different vertical.
I wrote about perhaps using advertising networks, especially multimedia (audio/video) ads in Radio and television networks. One could argue that the ad server requirements, the infrastructure requirement and cost of operations would significantly vary because of the medium. I’d agree to some extent. But there is also a way to deploy the already existing asset, as-is, into different verticals. Read on.
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So I know that there are a gazillion guys out there in the whole wide world, who have given “open” advise to Yahoo as to what they should do. I am neither an expert, nor am vested into the company to have such generosity towards them 🙂
A friend of mine and I, over some conversations were discussing about some of the bigger brands that we see around us and something along the topics of Return on Equity. Not sure if you are aware of, but Microsoft has a 52% return on equity. Yahoo has roughly about 7% and falling drastically and Google has one which stands at around 26% – and growing steadily. Whatever you may say, Microsoft has played this game with a whole new set of balls and one most people simply won’t understand. And if you ask me, they are a much better company in terms of strategy and products compared to Google, anyday.
Yahoo could emerge with an edge, if they leapfrog into other verticals following the same web-based advertisement network.
But that’s not the focus of this post.
The conversation was that, if a company has Advertisement as its core strength and has built a competence in it, then its going to be very hard for the company to drop that and adapt the advertising network of its partner/rival. Well, for the case of survival they might, but since they do have the core competence, the resources and the minds that can think in that direction, what could they possibly do, was the question.
Fact: Yahoo makes most of its money via advertisement, and that too on banner ads.
This becomes an issue when you have so much internet portals and properties, but just simply have to fill them with advertisements in order to make them viable. And in this day and age of APIs, nobody might even come visit the site to get hit by the advertisement. You are forced to rethink in terms of strategically placing the advertisement within the content, but thats a very very hard thing.
My Take: I think this is probably the same route as making fiber out of rocks. There might be some way to do it, but whatever it is, its one rare, long process.
I’d say, flip the coin, and lets look out to the horizon. Go after other streams, television and Radio… to be precise.
What Do Startups Need?
Posted on: September 9, 2008
- In: Business | Entrepreneurship | India | Technology
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"What do Startups need" is the Question asked these days.
Seems like that’s the kind of question a lot of companies which are looking to support, nurture and grow alongside Startups are asking themselves these days.
I’m invited to be part of a fairly small panel that is to discuss on this very topic tomorrow in Bangalore in a short meetup that Sun Microsystems is putting together.
The more I think about it, I think the sheer number of pages where business opportunities, support systems, efficiencies can be made all seem to just go on and on and on.
I think the key element that it comes down to is not “selling”, but “enabling”. Really, if you think about it and put all the power law distribution to a graph of economy (financial status and revenues) versus size of the company, it’d be quite easy to see the bigger corporates easily contributing to 80% of the economic wealth that is being garnered. That’s almost a no brainer.
I think the insight is this: An average startup entrepreneur is young, imaginative and full of ambitions and dreams. The key is to enable them. Not sell to them, but help them achieve their dreams. Its going to be pretty much the same way that you would want to support artists to come out with more creativity.
Someone wise once said that the role of a supporting organization to a startup should help startups make truck loads of money and make a small slice out of it. We need to tie in our success with that of the startup. Everyone wins in the end.
So now, most organizations are not gonna want this headache. Go after all the small companies, give them that additional support and handholding, just for 20% of the revenue. But isnt 20% quite a lot? I dont think it would ever make sense for a company to focus on just this 20%, but if they were already saturated with the market share in the corporate world, a 20% extra market share will give these companies a lot of footing, wouldnt it?
Now obviously, the number of companies very much increases. The queue of companies to support would almost be as long as the infinitely long tail itself. Thats when shared resources make a lot of sense. Technology helps to scale. Thats what it does beautifully. And if a technology company says that it cannot cater to this group,.. they woe.. something is truly terribly wrong.
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- In: Business | Entrepreneurship | India | Proto.in | Technology
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My mentor oft used to say that everyone had something to teach us. It was all a matter of either what you should do, or what you should never do. If you look back at everyone in your life, that’d probably quite nicely fit the bill.
If you are at all interested in Startups, or are an entrepreneur, its quite hard to not notice whats happening in the Silicon Valley from time to time. And right about this time, it seems to be the humorous series of incidents – or some might call “planned coups” – that are going on in the valley amongst DEMO and Techcrunch, all in the name of “giving startups a platform”. There are 50 techcrunch companies, and close to 70+ DEMO companies going head on today, and amongst all the angry voice of one group accusing, and the other group defending, and then silly bystanders calling all the startups stupid to be sucky, they have all seemed to have forgotten the one reason for their existence – startups. Seems like in an attempt to settle the feuds amongst them, the startups are essentially the ones taking the beating by the supporters of both sides who are trying to discredit the both equally reputed conferences. Both are equally great conferences, which cost equally high amounts of money to pull through and lets not kid ourselves from the fact that both of them have equally made enough money through all this.
I have no interest in all these silly disputes. But it goes to say how even the “valley” can get distracted from whom their customer is. The startups.
We will, and trust me, we will soon come to that point as well – and I doubt that it will be too early when there are going to be a gazillion new startup showcases going on. If its a good thing, people are going to swarm and imitate, and there is absolutely no harm in that – just as long as they remember what the whole ordeal is all for.
I think India is doing amazingly well. Compared to most of the companies that are taking the stage, I am real proud of the kind of companies this country is churning out. We probably still dont have the reach or the spotlight, but there are equally amazing ideas, teams, talents and companies out here – probably better in some cases. I’m lately coming across a host of companies, some in the design space – making of intelligent home appliances, and a company that does design services – and is designing the torch for the commonwealth games (and its said to be quite sophisticated), companies in biotechnology, energy etc etc, that I have no doubts that in a few years, we will be more than what we ever dream, or dreamt to be.
This is also a time when the lack of support for an entrepreneur is probably the least pronounced issue. From capital to mentors, if you are knocking on the right doors, the right support is available and with local support peers such as Open Coffee Clubs and Startup Saturdays, I am really happy at the way we are strengthening this community.
As I am watching the companies at DEMO and TC, there is just one yearning in my soul. If we make better companies, and if we are darn better in hard work, and are more than well aided in terms of talent and capacity, whats it going to take us to the global spotlight. I think its going to take the support of the community as a whole to make that happen. This December as the fifth edition of Proto.in comes together in Bangalore, we’ll definitely take a shot at that – but not without your support. How do we make that happen? Now thats something I want you to help us, nah, ourselves with.
May the startups always win. For a long, long time to come.
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There was sometime back when was doing a rough math on how many live camera streams there are. There are some that are pointed towards the “habitat” of the Loch Ness Monster, there are enough live traffic camera, and plenty of them pointed towards a birds nest or so. And if you take the example of Justin.tv (which seems to be inspired by The Truman Show), even people are willing to play their part in all this.
Ofcourse all of this is a one way broadcast. Apart from adult sites which are apparently making their niche through two way interaction, there is not much that is happening in this space.
Is there any of that, that can be adapted into the “green” scenario? A couple of light bulbs went on and off and here’s the thought (or Idea):
The forest department today plans thousands of saplings every year on barren lands to convert them into lush green forests, but the biggest problem with it has been the case of watering them. There is not enough manpower to do those menial tasks – at the salary that the govt is providing – and there is also the issue of accountability where all the saplings near the roadside stand straight and well watered, but the ones in the interior die away because laziness kicks in for most of these workers. They are not to be blamed either when the scorching sun is merciless on them and they are poorly prepped for all that.
The idea is to basically plant all the saplings as the forest department does and then have water drums which can be filled periodically with water from trucks (much simpler task). The pipes to the saplings will be set on drip irrigation and there will be a soil moisture sensor in the soil which measures if there is water or not. Set a Camera that overlooks this area, connect it to the Internet and create a frontend to a MMORPG (Massively Multi-user Online Role Playing Game). If that’s too much of an acronym, think Second Life. People can “adopt” grids of these fields and take care of them. All they have to do is, once the soil moisture turns a bit low, hit the buttons that will start the drip irrigation and stop them when the moisture level is optimal.
There are already countless number of such “events” that happen in Second Life, where if one plants a sapling in the virtual world, an organization instead plants one in the real world somewhere. This would just be an extension of that.
Now, technically you can take this to the next level. Think of all the Wild Life Sanctuaries. The biggest problem today is Poachers (I am still worried if I have to show stuffed toys of Tigers as our National Animal to my kids someday), and the forest officers are not nearly paid enough to scout the areas – and they are very ill armed to protect themselves from these animals as well. What if we could setup a range of Wifi cameras, stream the videos and let people monitor them. I’m sure there are enough animal activists around the world that some might even take it up while we sleep. All they would have to do is to hit a button which will alert the officer if a Poacher is spotted. And give the front end the control to click a snap if they want to document something and we might capture poachers and exotic wildlife as souvenirs.
I think finally, and its about time that the conscious of having to go green is kicking in. And we are gonna have to do everything – not just to sustain – but positively influence this planet to make it sustainable and even stay on the existential path. Maybe entrepreneurship, technology and the enthusiasm of the global audience can create a network of Global Watchers, to take care of the assets around us – All this while getting to “play” their roles.
Vijay Anand | The Startup Guy. 