All posts by Mukund Mohan

My discipline will beat your intellect
Entrepreneurship, Funding, India

Some exciting startups in the HealthTech Space #health2india

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James Matthews, a good friend and entrepreneur invited me to attend the Health 2.0 Conference for entrepreneurs and healthcare professionals today and speak about Health Tech investments. About 80 to 100 folks were in attendance, featuring about 30 entrepreneurs, 25 investors and the others were from Pharma companies, Hospitals and diagnostics chains.

Our panel featured an entrepreneur (Poonacha), a healthcare product company (GE) VP (Partha) and Ravi from Zanec.

There were 4 startups that were allowed to pitch the investors, and while there was no commitment from the investors, the startups were not looking to raise immediately either. This was a session for them to get some feedback from potential investors.

There are 3 high level observations that relate to investing and entrepreneurship in the space that I want to highlight first and then talk about the interesting companies.

1. Older Indians overall have little respect for preventive healthcare or do not value it at all. If you are in the wellness space or “be healthy” space, the market will be relatively small is what I gathered. I hear many entrepreneurs say their target market is 25-40 year olds. I think the real market for wellness products, services and solutions is 25-30 year old’s. How can I prove that? Look at gym membership in India. There are 70K members for the 300+ gyms and the prices are fairly high. Why? Because gyms are a luxury item in India. The average cost of a membership is between INR 500 per month (non chain) to about INR 4000 (Gold’s gym). It is not that older Indians dont want to live healthy. They think that paying for “wellness” is overrated.

2. Going after solutions for doctors, clinics or hospitals is a curse from hell for startups. Most smart entrepreneurs are focusing on the patient (consumer) via the influencer (doctor). Which means that for healthtech startups, distribution and sales are less of an issue, but consumer adoption and more importantly usage is more critical. Most consumers in India dont have the discipline to master wellness and focus on preventive health choices, and the ones that do are far and few between.

3. Indian doctors see almost 2-3 times the number of patients a day as American doctors do, and still make 1/3 as much them. Solutions to make doctors more productive by educating patients, transferring more work to nurses, etc. will likely do well.

Here are the 7 interesting companies I met at the conference today, and here is a summary, in the order of when I met them.

1. Diabeto: is a diabetes management analytics application and device. It transfers your glucose readings from your Glucometer into your smartphone and cloud so your caregiver can monitor it. Rather than do a lot of automation, which will force the company to get an FDA approval, they do just enough. Very interesting company and a neat product and they have many inquiries from distributors from other countries. The global diabetes care market is fairly large so I think they are on their way to raise some amount of early seed funding.

2. Zest.MD: is an online clinic for nutritionists. The SaaS solution helps bring any nutritionists services online so consumers can review and purchase via the web. Longer term the company is looking to be a curated marketplace for people wanting to make healthy choices. I thought this was fairly good, but I am still skeptical of the size of this market.

3. Praxify: is a connected patient records management for doctors and patients. They were positioned as an EMR (Electronic Medical Records) but the market for that is long gone and dead. The average doctor hates using the EMR product and the patients dont understand its benefit enough. Good team and product, so this is a company to watch. Disclosure: they are a Microsoft Ventures company.

4. Fitternity: is a directory, content website, ecommerce platform and database for people wanting to be healthy. The product is aimed at people who care about being fit, by offering advice, products and service referrals. I have seen many such offerings, so I am not sure what their differentiation is.

5. Care Companion: is a education tool for care-givers: nurses, wives, parents, etc. Since doctors dont have time to explain the same things to each patient’s care givers, this product aims to provide the standard advice my means of videos. E.g. Assume that your child, after a doctor’s visit has to to avoid certain foods, take pills in the morning and night, but not afternoon, etc. this product will provide those simple instructions by disease or symptom.

6. Cyber Liver: They provide a breathalyzer which nudges you to avoid drinking too much alcohol. This is a extension (hardware) to your iPhone or Android phone that you breath into every time you drink. It keeps track of how much you drink each week and uploads that to the cloud, ensuring that you know if you had too much to drink. Very interesting idea, but users have to remember to breath into the device after they consume alcohol each time, and I don think they will do this often enough to make a difference.

7. mTatva: is a prescription transcription and alerting tool. Your prescription is scanned at the hospital to the cloud and your dosage and medicines are sent by SMS. Then it also send the prescription to your favorite pharmacist via SMS and will alert you each day and time with the dosage information. I liked the idea, but adoption is currently sparse.

There were a few other companies, measuring (using multiple sensors) the weight of your pill box to intelligently alert you when you dont take your medicines, etc.

Overall the signal to noise ratio at this event was VERY high. James has curated an excellent set of entrepreneurs and I was pleased to see such a diverse set of folks innovating in Heath Tech.

Management, Tips

Surveys or open questions – What works better for initial product validation

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Over the last few weeks, the new batch (fourth) of 16 companies at the Microsoft accelerator has been getting started with customer development. Some companies are fairly advanced, doing hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue, but most are early stage. Last week our CEO-in-residence from the Israel accelerator, Hanan Lavy, came by to lead them through our customer development framework. The first thing I gathered from many entrepreneurs after that session, was that they were surprised at how it helped them revisit some of the assumptions they had made when they had the first idea about their product.

There’s an old saying that good sales folks are used to quoting “Always be Qualifying” (as opposed to the more popular ABC – Always be closing”, which never quite works, but is popular). The “lean startup” generation has its own version of that at the early stages of the startup – Always be validating – your assumptions, your plan, your pricing, your offering, etc.

Customer validations, early on, start by asking questions of customers, mostly in face-to-face meetings and then “graduate degenerate” to emails and phone conversations when entrepreneurs are unable to scale. I dont think there’s only one way to validate though – a good product manager uses all techniques to get in front of her customers / users as often as possible.

There are pros and cons to each of the techniques to validate your idea and assumptions, so rather than focus on all of them and their efficacy, I thought I’d take some time to share what I learned from 5 of the startup founders who have been trying 2 techniques over the last week with both Indian and US customers to validate their problem statements, ideas and positioning.

Think of this as A/B testing the format of communication as opposed to the medium or the message.

The medium most of them chose was email, given that they had to provide a quick turnaround back to Hanan (they were given 2 days to speak / connect with at least 10 customers. They could have chosen face-to-face meetings or focus groups using Webex / Skype, in app questions or real-time in-app chat, but they all chose to email their potential and few existing customers.

Now that most chose email, the next question I asked them was how many of the sent customers open-ended questions versus an objective survey with 3/4 choices for answers.

Turns out 2 of them used an online survey tool with 5 questions and 3/4 choices per question and 3 of them chose to send and email with 4-5 open-ended questions. Response rates varied from 40% to 60% I was told (fairly high given that their potential customers had only 24 hours to response). The survey’s got more responses than open questions.

What I did learn was that for companies that were earlier (had started building product, but did not have a prototype) the survey format worked better since they were able to get specific answers to questions and make decisions on 3 features they had to drop so they could ship quicker and gain more feedback quickly.

The open questions format worked for those that had worked longer with their customers and prospects since they got good qualitative feedback and a suggestion or two, which they had not considered before.

I have a personal bias against survey questions, since the choices are predetermined. Survey’s tend to be much better when you want a quick pulse to make feature decisions, not direction decisions. Surveys also work when you have a large pool of responses. Open questions on the other hand work just as well with 5 people as 50 – but at 50 people you have a hard time collating the responses. Open questions also requires you have a better relationship with the folks responding since their commitment of time is more.

What I also learned was that while there are pro’s and cons to both mechanisms, the decision you are trying should guide your choice of format, not the speed of the responses.

There are many types of decisions one takes at the early stages of the startup. Product direction decisions are rarely going to be resolved with surveys or email. Those are the type that many people leave to gut, data and lots of soul searching.

On the other hand, validating assumptions is always better with open questions is what I have learned.

Angel investing, Entrepreneurship, Funding

Why I dont invest in non tech startups #IIT #entrepreneurs

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I was at the IIT Mumbai eCell event on Sunday and had a chance to meet students from various colleges all over India. The event was an eye-opener for me, given how many students were interested in entrepreneurship. This event had over 1200 people this year, and that was a 25% increase from the previous year. It is exciting to see the uptick in interest from students on becoming entrepreneurs in India.

I was on a panel with Suvir of Nexus Venture Partners and Bharat of Aditya Birla PE fund. A quick poll of the audience indicated that over 70% of the students were interested in starting their own venture and a similar percent were keen to build a non-software, or Internet / Mobile venture.

I clearly disappointed the audience when I said I would never invest in a non software / technology venture, and I had over 20 students come to me after the event to express their dismay. They were also very upset that I would be so categorical about my position both on a personal level and also as an investor at Microsoft Ventures. While they understood that Microsoft would not be interested in a non software company, they were curious as to why I would, on a personal basis, avoid these companies.

This post is primarily me addressing the question as a seed investor in the early stages of a company.

There are 3 parts to my answer.

1. Expertise: I dont have any knowledge, connections and value to add in a non-tech company. I invest primarily small amounts of money in an individual capacity so I can help the entrepreneur grow their business, besides just give them money. I dont have the background and intrinsic know-how of domains such as healthcare (if you want to run a specialty hospital) , education (if you want to start a school) or a restaurant.

2. Growth: My personal experience has been with about 30+ companies that I have invested in over the last 15+ years. I had invested in a Sports bar (restaurant) and also a real estate company. Both companies were started by entrepreneurs who I knew well for over 10 years. They both returned about 12% in interest each year for 3 years. Which is great, but does not move needle. Software and technology companies, grow much faster and in a short period of time. As an example if you look at the 39 companies that are “Unicorns” with over $1 Billion in valuation over the last few years, on average they have taken 5.7 years to achieve the $billion valuation. For non technology companies that have gone public over the same period and have a valuation over $billion, the time period has been 9.7 years. Almost twice the time.

3. Capital efficient in the early days: Do a simple analysis of the need for capital among the companies until year 3 and you will realize most of need very little money in the early (<1 year) and tend to be fairly capital efficient until year 3. After that they take a lot of money to get to $1 Billion. Since most of the companies end up failing, I’d rather put less money early in more companies than more in fewer ventures.

Mobile

The smartphone BOOM in India (2014)

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Worldwide there are over 7 Billion people. The total number of mobile connections (active) worldwide in 2013 was 6.2 Billion. In 2014 that number will reach 7.3 Billion. There will be more mobile phone connections than people in the world, even when you account for kids and those who cannot afford a phone.

Of those 6.2 Billion mobile connections, 1.1 Billion are smartphones. 2014 will see 1.05 Billion smartphones shipped. About 273 million of those are replacement and 753 Million are new smartphones.

India has over 800 million mobile connections and 603 million active mobile connections.

Currently of the 603 million mobile phones, 73 Million are smartphones.

India will add 172 Million new smartphones in 2014 to have a total of 250+ Million mobile smartphone users overall.

Imagine that.

170+ Million smartphones this year that are NEW users.

That is almost 2.5 times the number of existing smartphone users in India.

BOOM.

Suddenly there are 2.5 times the people having access to the Internet from India.

By most estimates, India has about 150 Million English speaking users.

These 170+ Million smartphone users in 2014 are not the same as the 70+ Million current users of 2013.

They largely will use the smartphone as a phone, maybe some text messaging, music, movies and videos, and some (or very little) social networking.

Guess who’s making money from these smartphone users in India?

Chinese manufacturers of low cost phones. And resellers of used smartphones in India.

References:

1. 100 Million club.

2. Handset marketshare

3. Smartphone explosion

P.S. As an aside, Facebook claims 94 Million users in India, and 70% users on mobile. There are 70 Million smartphones in India, so you can safely assume that 25 Million fake facebook accounts exist in India. (I am joking, of course, but not by much).

Other

A Solo founder’s manifesto

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I can be successful, alone. They will recognize that the journey lifetime begins with one step. One person can make a change. I believe the stereotypes of solo founders are a huge risk are false. I refuse to believe that I was unable to convince one person to join me in my entrepreneurial journey. I think of all the people who came with me during my journey as co founders. I would rather take responsibility for my failures than blame a co founder who was with me. I seek advice from many but end up following my own path. Solo founders make decisions quicker than consensus driven teams. Single founder companies have generated as many jobs and created as much wealth as two or three co-founder companies.

Go on – start a company even if you are a single founder.

Hiring, India

How much should you pay for an engineer / developer in #Bangalore? Winter 2013 edition

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Many entrepreneurs from outside Bangalore and larger company VP’s of Engineering from the US, who wish to relocate often ask me this question – How much should I pay developers / engineers in Bangalore?

That is a very tough question to answer overall, but I have noticed some patterns based on working with many startups here and also have the information on the salary bands for several large technology companies here in Bangalore.

The best way to think about how much to pay is by giving salary bands and considering the parameters.

There are 3 primary parameters I have seen used when people hire folks to determine their salary.

1. Experience – usually measured in # of years working on relevant and related technologies. A rule of thumb I have seen is 1.2 to 1.5 times the number of years of experience + starting salary of a fresh graduate at 2L ($3K) per year to 6L ($10K) per year. For example, if you are looking to hire a developer with 5 years of experience, then you will pay 5 years times 1.2 plus 2L per year if you are a startup that’s not funded.

2. Type of technology – The more arcane the technology the more you can expect to pay for it. For example, you can expect to pay much less for a person who knows PHP and more for someone who knows Android app dev or Ruby on Rails. Some common technologies and your base times multiple is below. I am assuming php developer is the base at Rs. 1. All others are multiple of what you’d pay the php developer. I dont mean this to think of php developers as bottom of the pool, but that’s the most prevalent skill, so the supply of engineers is more than the demand, making it a skill that’s easiest to hire and least expensive as well.

a) php developer = 1

b) Javascript + HTML (front end) = 0.9 – 1.2

c) Ruby = 1.2 – 1.5

d) Python = 1.4 – 1.7

e) Android = 1.3 – 1.8

f) iOS = 1.4 – 1.9

3. Stage of company. Generally a company, which is bootstrapped pays less and one that is funded pays more. Larger the company, the more you are likely to pay, If the unfunded company pays INR 1, then I have seen number of upto 2.3 times that being paid by larger technology companies.

So, if you are looking to hire a developer or a team, how do you decide how much to pay?

Step 1: Start with fresh graduates at 2L ($3K) per year if you are a new startup and go up to INR 6L ($10K) if you are a larger established company in the US for the same fresh graduate.

Step 2: For people with experience, expect to pay 1.2 times their # of years of experience added to their salary. So someone with 2 years experience would get 2.4 (1.2 times 2) + 2L to 10K depending on your company size.

Step 3: Finally depending on your technology stack add the multiplier above. So if you are looking to hire a Ruby on Rails developer with 2 years experience for a startup, then:

(2L (fresh grad at an unfunded startup) + 2.4L (for 2 years experience) ) * 1.2 (for Ruby) = ~5 to 6L per year or about $9K to $10K.

Two other points, that are VERY important.

1. To determine if the person is *good* I’d recommend you get them on board for a week to a month before you hire. Don’t use this formula blindly and pay a person who is not good a boatload of money to get disappointed.

2. Most people use salary at the previous job plus a 20-50% uplift (or raise). I think that works for most, but if you have a superstar candidate I’d go back to this formula.

P.S. There’s no good way to determine a good candidate except working with them. I dont take reference checks in India seriously – more on that for another post. I prefer recommended candidates from people I know very well.

Learning

When private emails are made public, everyone loses

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There are 2 news items that came up consistently yesterday in my facebook feed. One was the tweet that Evan, the CEO of Snapchat shared, in which he showed the private email exchange between Mark Zuckerberg and himself.

Snapchat tweet
Evan Tweet

This was a private email sent from Mark to Evan, which he made public.

Another one was from the founder of Zomato, Deepinder who also shared a private email (now deleted) from Satyan of Times of India.

Some thoughts:

First I always assume that every email I send, will be made public. So I write like I am speaking to the person in a public forum.

That said, I am disappointed that they chose to make the emails public. I think a paraphrase would have sufficed.

Second, I am actually glad that both Mark and Satyan reached out instead of the other way around. Shows that both these folks are aggressive, not willing to wait for things to come to them, even though the run large, established businesses.

Finally even if they did choose to make their emails public, it would have been better to have gotten approval from the sender before doing so.

What do you think? Are emails sent from one person to another private or available for everyone else to view?

Mobile, Personal

Why I published a personal social network app

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I started blogging in 2006. It has taken me over 7 years to build an audience of 60K. When I started, I believed that the best content always won. Now I know that the best content with the best distribution wins.

In 2006-7 the prevalent method to distribute my posts was RSS feeds. I focused a lot of effort to get RSS subscribers. Then FeedBurner got acquired by Google and I noticed that my subscriber base was dropping slowly from 2000+ to under 1000.

I realized that SEO was another mechanism to get new readers to read my posts, but I was not going to do anything unnatural to optimize my content to be “search” friendly.

I focused my efforts on Facebook to distribute my content between 2007-2009. I grew my readership from over about friends and readers to over 4000 in 2 years.

I realized late in 2009 that the Facebook feed algorithm was being changed constantly. This meant fewer friend had a chance to see my posts on their news feed. From an average of 25% of my friends who would read my posts via FB, it started dropping to < 10%.

From 2009 to 2011 I got focused on getting more users on twitter to follow and read my blog posts. I have over 10K followers and about 10-20% of the users come to read when I post.

Some of my friends were in the US, others in India. To optimize time and delivery I created 2 accounts. On one, I’d post at the local US time and at local India time for the other. This was to ensure a better chance of delivery on their twitter feed.

In 2012 I noticed many of my friends and readers from twitter coming to my blog also started to drop. Turned out that most folks were following multiple people and unless you timed it right for that person, it was near impossible for them to see it on twitter.

From 2012 to 2013 I put a lot of efforts into building my email subscriber list. Which has helped me go to about 60K+ readers. Then Google tabs happened and my email open rates dropped from 25% to ~18%. Many of my friends asked me when I stopped blogging. Turns out my blog posts were going into their social or promotions tab in their Gmail. There were not seeing my blog posts at all thanks to the new Gmail tabs.

It was frustrating to see the effort I put into building a channel go waste in 2 years. The more frustrating part was that in all these cases I was not in control.

During the last 7 years I have been constantly posting my thoughts and have not significantly increased or decreased the # of posts per year. I still average 120+ posts a year or about 2-3 a week.

The other part I wanted to clarify was if the quality of my posts dropped, which may have been the reason my readership rose (expectation) and fell (reality).

I think there might be some truth to that, but  engagement with my posts has constantly risen throughout this period. I measure engagement by time spent on my blog, average number of posts per visit, the number of comments and the # of Retweets / Likes on Facebook.

By all measures except Retweets my engagement has steadily risen over the last 5 years.

Over the last 6 months I noticed that more users were reading my posts on their mobile phone than PC or tablet. I also wanted to create a deeper sense of engagement with my friends and readers, and since I like to build a deeper connection I thought the best way to do this was to build a mobile application.

It is available on Apple app store and the Google play store. The Windows phone version will be out soon.

The apps are going to be my primary means of engaging with my friends and folks in the startup community. I am giving up on email and slowly paring down from facebook. It’s lack of immediacy in a real time world bothers me a lot.

There are 3 primary features I wanted in the app:

1. Ability to post items and get feedback / learn from my friends.

2. Find ways to meet friends and readers when I am “close” to their location.

3. Create a close network of friends who can help each other.

The beta version is out now and I’d love for you to give it a spin and connect with me there.

Other

2014: A look ahead for tech #startups and #investors in #India

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During the month of December, I had a chance to meet 10-15 investors, about 100+ entrepreneurs and many startup evangelists across the country from Mumbai (NASSCOM event), Hyderabad (TIE) and Delhi (multiple events) and Pune (iSpirt event).

There’s one theme for 2014 that emerged across all my conversations.

Consolidation.

I dont know how I feel about that. Mixed. Some good, but more not so good.

Over 80% of the folks will be looking inward this year. Most investors are taking a long hard look at their portfolios and trying to make sense of them. Which ones to cull, which ones to double down on and which companies to tread water with.

That does not mean no new investments into new companies and ideas, but it does mean, the bar will be much higher in 2014 than in 2012 or 2013.

I think what it means is that you will see more Series A and Series B happening – follow on rounds for existing companies.

75% of the transactions you will see in 2014 and maybe 80% of the investment will not be the first check in a company.

At the early stage when I talk to Mumbai Angels, Indian Angel network, Blume ventures and Kae Capital, this year is one of putting more money into what you have already put money in.

In the series A stage, I spoke with Accel, Sequoia, Helion and Seed Fund. While they will continue to invest in new opportunities, their focus this year (70%) will be on the investments they have already made.

You will see the same among accelerators and incubators. They will spend a lot of time on their portfolios and see how they can help the entrepreneurs they have already invested in.

Which is why there’s an opportunity ripe for an early stage investor to put seed or pre-seed investments to work in 2014, which will bear fruit in 2015.

That also means if you are an entrepreneur with some funding and are looking to raise in 2014, talk early and often to your existing investors and be on their radar. Give them traction numbers, metrics and keep them updated.

Entrepreneurship, Marketing

The transition year of 2014 – from developers to customer acquisition specialists #startups

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Here’s a prediction for the year 2014 based on talking to over 1400 startup entrepreneurs in 2013.

2014 is going to be the every entrepreneur will start to focus on hiring a “customer acquisition” specialist. This could be someone who can be called a hustler, a growth hacker, a marketing developer or any other title.

What I have realized after looking at over 2800 applications at the Microsoft accelerator and interviewing over 300 entrepreneurs is that they have little idea about how to acquire customers that pay for their solution.

They can do the first 10 customers, but after that, it is a slog or a stall.

They dont have a way to scale their customer growth.

Many developers who stall in their careers will take up growth hacking courses and classes. The reason they will do well is because developers will make the best digital marketers in the next decade.

The #1, #2 and #3 questions I get from entrepreneurs, is trying to find a way to get paying customers.

The #1 question last 2 years was around funding.

That has dropped dramatically this year.

The years prior to 2011 I got most questions around hiring good quality engineers and finding and hiring good engineering talent for startups.

Maybe it is the maturity of the ecosystem, but this is the transition I am seeing.