I was talking to a friend based in Mumbai today. He works as a product manager at a fairly large Internet company (large by Indian standards).

Mumbai has been the center of endless controversy about “local” language usage and its seems to be civil xenophobia bordering unrest.

The short of it is that India has a national language – Hindi. Its mostly spoken in the north of India. Each state pretty much speaks its own language and are close to 15 major and hundreds of minor languages. There’s a little bit of the Lexus and the Olive tree in most states. Southern states like Tamil Nadu & others staunchly prefer their own regional language and pretty much ignore or refuse to acknowledge any Hindi. So, the default becomes English, which is spoken by many of the literate. Many Indians that migrate to other states from their home state dont quite learn the local language & customs at all – which is the big beef of the “locals”. There’s a fear among the locals that their traditions, customs and values (and most importantly their language) will get overwhelmed by English.

My friend lamented that most Indian Internet startups have very little “local knowledge & language” advantage because we are so heterogenous. The top Internet properties in India by # users are mostly global, since the “literate” Indians know English. That’s served us well in the backoffice outsourcing, but unlike China where Sina, Alibaba and QQ dominate the web thanks to their largely Chinese language content.

What is local knowledge (besides language) and how can startups in India use it to their differentiated advantage? Here are some examples of successful, and I would love some more examples outside of India (maybe Europe) to help understand this.

1. Shaadi leveraged the knowledge that Indian parents tend to have significant leverage on their kids marriage and launched Shaadipoint to help parents look for prospective brides and grooms for their kids. This is different from the 10000+ dating and match.com variants in the US and other places.

2. A local Indian real estate 2.0 startup leverages their knowledge of local districts and suburbs to build a manual / automated database of real estate properties.

My bigger question  is: What’s the future hold for the largely speaking English Indians vs. the largely Chinese speaking China? Is it important that we teach our kids local language and customs to preserve them or look to integrate in the global economy. I know the easy answer is do a bit of both, but its not practical.

The economist wrote a piece on my friend Sridhar from Zoho. There’s a quote which caught my eye – As Mr Vembu puts it: “The India or China price will effectively become the world price.”

These are my first reactions and thoughts and I may change my opinion as I think more about this. As a software entrepreneur and from India, this is the MOST scary thought and prediction ever. I am not saying this wont happen, or may not happen, but its absolutely awful for the software industry if it does.

First to understand what that means, the “price” paid in India for software is non existent. Same for China is my guess, but I cannot confirm. A significant portion of the industry is bootleg software. India does not in general value software. That is because the “price” paid by Indian companies. So what are the ramifications if what Sridhar says does happen?

1. Innovation becomes minimal to non existent: Its fairly relatively easy for Zoho to tell their engineers to copy and
paste the functionality that’s in Word, Saleforce.COM, Webex etc. (Side note: Most would argue Microsoft and Google are not innovators, but fast followers, so that makes it a good model).  Innovation is underwritten by profits from products that are priced at market price NOT cost of development. If the rest of the world pays the India price, there’s a) no incentive to innovate and b) no return for the risk taken to break new ground.

2. It would lower the standard of living overall. If developers in advanced countries dont see a premium for their talent and creation, they wont spend the time and effort producing good software. The cost of living (even in a place as inexpensive as Idaho) is a lot more expensive than most places in India. If you get paid about $7-$12 / hour (more than minimum wage but not by that much) then its a race to the bottom, because that’s what Indian developers get paid. The annual 20% increase stories notwithstanding.

I admire Sridhar for all his accomplishments, and think he’s been a great role model for many Indian software entrepreneurs. Pricing your software not on what the market would bear but more on what it costs you to build it is not the right way forward for the software industry.

I talked to a few entrepreneurs the other day looking for funding. The have bootstrapped their company and have done an excellent job getting their company to a point where a venture investor can put money to accelerate their growth as opposed to funding product development. I was extremely impressed by their market understanding, commitment to the cause and the traction they had gotten with literally no marketing budget. It spoke volumes about the problem they were trying to address and the product they built.

I sat down to do the “introductions”. I explained my background and gave them an opportunity to give me their background. The first one said “I have a fairly boring background”. Those were the first words out of her mouth.

Now I understand and appreciate modesty and understatements, but this was over the top on the other end of the spectrum.

The amazing part was her background was great awesome. She started early at a very high profile local software company, grew up the ranks, and did extremely well at a fairly male dominated industry to achieve a very commanding position, but she chose to downplay it. Maybe because it had nothing to do with the current venture, or maybe because it was in a different industry, but that’s not the point.

I am very aware of the Indian (and also German BTW, but more on that later) approach and culture that expects you to not blow your horn, but I dont think it does any justice to the potential investor for you to say you had a boring background.

Here are my tips on introducing yourself and your background:

1. Talk about tangible accomplishments. What you did on any project that grew revenues, delivered returns, or saved money.

2. Discuss unique experiences that changed the way you view things. Put them in perspective to what you are trying to do next.

3. Share some customer experiences (bigger names better, name dropping is okay here) and how what you did helped them.

4. Relate skills that you gained which are relevant to the new role / position you are fulfilling.

5. Highlight about your ability to either work in a team environment, grow strong independent high performing teams or your ability to bring people’s different opinions from different backgrounds together.

I believe you can do this in 90-120 seconds with a sentence max (and you dont have to cover all 5 points) on each area. What do you think? Am I off base?          

I have never met Blake Rhodes. I dont profess to know him well. I know about and have used the blog search engine iceRocket. Blake’s iceRocket’s CEO. I dont have a good photo so you’ll have to make do with this one.

We have been working extremely hard to get a solution that required his blog search engine. But as luck would have had it, like most other online web services, they block requests over 100 per day. This is the same for flickr, delicious, etc. Nothing new. My previous experience was with another company which after 6 weeks of back and forth did not give us any information (even though we documented exactly how we were going to use the API for non commercial use) about putting us on a “white list” of API users.

With iceRocket, in a matter of 14 minutes and 2 emails the issue was resolved. 14 minutes – that’s it. I was expecting like close to 20 days, extensive back and forth and lots of hedging.

Very pleasantly suprised. Kudos to Blake.

Apparently I am not the only one. He has built a reputation of doing this.

I think I learned a lot from a simple email interaction today. He further reinforced a key tenet of building great companies – be responsive. It pays off big time.

SF Chronicle has a great piece from Jon Stewart on the DNC ’08. There’s are several money quotes:

“We’ve fallen into this false sense of urgency that they create,”
Stewart said. “That idea that everything is breaking news and that if
you’re not watching us, you’re going to miss this thing.

“But nothing they’re saying is of any import because nobody filters
it. (Print reporters) are able to step back for a moment and think.
They’re not. They’re just pointing a camera and saying, ‘What do you
think that is? I don’t know. Let’s go to ‘The Situation Room.

He’s frustrated that the cable networks don’t have the attention span
to explore stories – particularly about the run-up to the Iraq war –
that aren’t easily digestible for TV. Stewart said he loves newspapers,
and reading them makes him feel like they’re writing about a different
world from the one he sees on television.

I think liveblogging is similar to Network news. You have no time to process, not time to think and really understand what’s going on. I did that during the Bangalore blast attacks and while it served its purpose, it was mostly a real-time perspective, which somehow in the grand scheme of things seemed small.

So what have I learned from Jon Stewart:

1. It’s about earning your authority back. If you want to be taken seriously in any field, blogging is a good way to gain credibility by sharing your thoughts, analysis and perspectives. But if you dont spend serious time thinking about it and primarily just repeating what you heard, its just yet another source NOT an authoritative source. You have to be a thought leader not just another repeater. I think TechCrunch is good, as a news breaker, but they dont have depth and authority as some of the reviews I have seen featured on Hacker news.

2. Constantly aim to get better even if you are the best at what you do. After each show, Stewart gathers his cast and crew together to discuss
that night’s successes and directly points out what could have gone
better.

3. Focus in a blog beats exclusive stories most times. Jon’s very focused on what he wants the show to be.
I have watched my blog traffic and on days I dont post I get a ton of traffic (wierd isnt it?). I figure its because people take some time to read, form their opinion and then either link to me (which is the #1 source of my traffic BTW) or search and get to my website (#2 source of traffic). I used to focus on exclusive stories which no one else talks about, but then realized it was more about consistency and focus than just being exclusive.

Anyone that thinks that newspapers in India are going to go away the US route is just smoking something. Not for the near (10-15 year) future. In fact their readership and revenues will go up not down.

Why?
1. Literacy is going up – WHERE? in the rural NOT as much in the  urban areas. Urban areas have always been more “literate”. What’s the least expensive and most accessible medium for the rural poor – Newspapers. Then radio followed by television and finally Internet. Only the Urban few are using the Internet for their news and that’s also the small minority. Most young Indians BTW prefer to sit down with a cup of coffee/tea in the morning and read the newspaper before they do anything else – its like a ritual.  The ones that dont have time, read the news paper during their commute or listen to radio.

2. Growth of PC’s and broadband in India is still abysmal. I dont see anything changing this dramatically in the near future. Granted its faster than most other places, but its not big enough to make that dramatic a difference.

3. Mobile growth is happening in the rural areas also. And its happening in the Rs. 350 voice plans NOT in accessing the Internet plans. So it will be a few years (15+) before Indians start to read on the mobile given they have to pay download charges for data on the mobile.

A few weeks ago, I wrote this post on the lack of security in the Bangalore International Airport. I even got some good and indifferent comments on it. Mostly people that emailed me either said that was funny, or they opined that its was the same case in most Indian airports.

I was very surprised when on Monday at 915 AM I got a call from Gautam Banerjee from BIAL. He wanted to follow up on my blog post and said he would like to spend a few minutes to address the issue and tell me how they are fixing the problem.

Wow! To think an Indian company (for those of you that know India, this is pretty darn amazing) would actually a) Read a blog b) Do an investigation and c) Follow up on the complaint and communicate the results is short of unreal.

Added to the fact that they called up, I was pleasantly surprised with his matter-of-fact approach towards reading my blog. I did ask a few questions, and they have a google alert setup on BIAL and also Bangalore International Airport and they track it pretty frequently.

They could have acted much faster, but hey the fact that they even did something is amazing.

The end result is that every traveler now leaving Bangalore is asked to provide a legitimate ID besides their e-ticket. I can hear the brickbats already from others in Bangalore. I would also be the first to admit that the result of their “process” would not make flying any safer, but cause unnecessary “hassle” according to a few, but I think its a great step in the right direction.

Image credit: http://www.janchipchase.com

This post is meant to be a reminder and “sharpen the sword” type piece for myself. If you get value from it, that’s awesome. If not I apologize for wasting your time with statement of the obvious.

I have always wanted to know how successful people are different from others. I define successful people at a very broad level. I would call Michael Phelps a superhero, beyond successful. I derive immense inspiration (for both software and startups) from him. I have read close to 120 different articles and news mentions after his 8th gold medal win. What I gathered about his success, was 2 defining characteristics:

1. Drive (passion, intense obsession) and setting goals: He lives, breathes and dreams swimming. I know this is a very abused term now (especially passion) and finding one’s passion is very difficult. A few lucky ones either stumble into it or have an innate sense of what’s in store for them. For the rest of us its what we enjoy doing. The goal setting process is the difficult one. Translating the passion into tangible, measurable milestones is very hard for a startup. Empty goals like make a million dollars in revenue or the new favorite – “make users happy” is easy to state and very hard to accomplish.

2. Discipline: Seth talked about patience, a few days ago, but its more than just being patient. Its having the discipline to “keep at it”. Day in, day out. Endlessly, consistently and without fail. Showing up to make 10 calls, making those calls, handling the nos with aplomb and still showing up the next day to make a fresh set of new 10 calls with a revised pitch.

I was given a book a few years ago by my ex CEO Warren Weiss that was titled “Hope is not a strategy“. Got a good reminder of the same when I read this post by Robert. Summary of his post is he prefers not to get PR folks not to get him to cover a company, instead get users of the product / service to tell him about why something is relevant.

We should all be so lucky. Of course he’s probably advocating you dont need Venture Capital for your startup also and everyone can be as wildly successful as HotOrNot – “just build the right product and users will come and make the rest of the magic happen”.

Shows a basic lack of understanding of the PR world, but he did say that’s the way “he” prefers to cover startups. PR creates awareness. Its difficult to measure, not easily accountable, but its “yet another” avenue to get your name out in front of potential customers and users in a “mass medium” way than doing it one customer at a time in the trenches.

He’s right about customers (or users) telling your story than either you or a PR person. That’s what good PR folks do – they help you create situations where your customers are telling the story to the press, reporters etc.

So what are issues? Why cant every startup be like the one he’s profiling?

1. Over 90% of customers (regardless of how passionate they are) are indifferent. Yes, you solved a problem. Yes they like your product, but they hate telling other people. There are lots of reasons why – they are shy, or they dont like talking about new products or they will tell everyone – AFTER they are sure it really, really works (which is a really long time) or the worst (in the enterprise side) – they view your product as a competitive advantage so they wont tell anyone else.

In reality if you look at the pyramid of customers, less than 1% of any customer (early adopter or otherwise) is so passionate about the problem your specific startup is trying to solve. They have to tell the story. If you find such customers, hang on to them for dear life. Realize you’ll make mistakes, since choosing the first few customers is an art. More on that in a later post.

2. Time: If you had to wait for your users to love the product, tell the world and then generate press, you’ve got to have either time, money or both on your side. Why? It just takes longer. User have to be given your product, it has to work, it has to give them tangible benefits (which is not easy in enterprise software quickly) in a short enough time frame for them to say good things about you. Dont think that’s the same for a consumer startup? Ask LinkedIn. It takes time to create value. You have to get more users (people that try it) so you can have a bigger base of users who are passionate about your company and your product to tell others.

3. The credibility factor: Its a lot easier if you are Max or Joel to have the street credibility of having created something of value before for the press and users to immediately cover something. Reality – most software startup entrepreneurs are “first time”. They dont have that credibility. I noticed on YCombinator yesterday another user posted a new site he had created that does say 40% of the same thing as another well known site does. The user was hardly known and a first timer. Reaction – none. Good PR folks I know bring their credibility and value to your startup. Even if you are unknown to the rest of the world.

4. The lack of a story: Its very important for startups to “tell a story”. Not a fake one, and not a fairy tale either. But a simple, coherent and compelling story. Most engineering entrepreneurs I know are not good at that. They would call eBay a 3 tier web technology that has implemented the Boyer-Moore matching algorithm. I exaggerate, but to make a point. Good PR folks help you create and then tell the story.

5. Creating opportunities. If you have a startup, you dont have a dozen people (especially if your product is just being released). You are either spending time building product or selling (either to customers or investors). Nurturing new users and customers is hard but a very required aspect of your business. PR folks help nurture them to be press ready. They also create opportunities for your customers to be in the press more for the benefit of the company than for the personal benefit of the customer. Its a subtle art and nuance, but very important.

Oh, and Robert, as you say “I’m tired of seeing crap after crap after crap. If someone pitches me
another social media aggregator I’m going to scream. Even when you
bring me stuff I check out reactions of real users who don’t have some
vested interest to see what they think“.

Stop getting pitched. Oh! I forgot that’s your new job right?

Disclaimer: I know Robert, like his writing and think he’s awesome. But I also think he’s wrong on this one.

Ever notice those tiny images that appear when you bookmark certain webpage’s on your browse?

Sacre Bleu! Moi? Bookmarks on the browser? That’s so 1999. Yes. Of the 167 Million US and over 1 Billion Worldwide Web users, only about 15 million (includes Delicious, Stumble Upon, Diijo, Mag.nol.ia. etc.) use social bookmarking services.

Most are not into the whole share your bookmarks on the cloud thing.

Granted over 40% of the are not working on a computer that’s “theirs” – its either shared or accessed from a cybercafe.

So then, when the rest of the “non Web 2.0” world bookmarks a file, its on their browser. And when they do a small image appears (or can appear in the new browsers) to further brand your website. Its called a favicon file and I just sat down with 5 random users who have things bookmarked on their browser. The only way they remember certain websites is by the logo (favicon logo) on their browser.

Its yet another opportunity to brand your website on their minds.

You can get one like I did. You’ll thank me for it.

Image credit.