Category Archives: Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship, India, Marketing, Sales

Always be an individual contributor as well

November 19, 2012 Mukund Mohan 9 Comments

Most of the entrepreneurs I meet and share thoughts with, tend not to be engineers. Or at least not practicing developers, marketers, sales people or business development individuals. This is consistent with the anatomy of the Indian technology entrepreneur, who is typically male, between the ages of 29 and 40, has about 2-10+ years of experience and had been an individual contributor “several years ago”.

I read the quotes by multiple folks in the piece shelf life of an engineer in technology . They consistent theme is one of constant learning, which most of us are probably aware of. Ignore the age bias that’s blatantly obvious in the piece for a few minutes, which is what most of the 250+ comments are focused on.

Two things stand out: (1) Ferose’s quote on “I can’t be just a manager, I have to be technically hands-on.” and

Ravi ” In the first five years, the employee is a technical contributor. In the next five, he or she moves on to become a team leader or an architect , understanding the P&L (profit & loss) requirements of the company. Subsequently , the employee takes on much stronger leadership responsibilities”.

From what I have learned, there’ no choice but for every level of individual to be “hands-on” and play the role of an individual contributor as well at a startup.

If you are an engineer, you cant just be focused on hiring and managing your engineering team (however small or large it is). You have to pick up a few pieces of the puzzle and solve them yourself. Which might mean deploying, developing and shipping parts of your software.

If you are a marketer, then not copy writing or doing your own SEO, or running your ad campaigns is a disaster in the making.

If you are a sales person, and if you are not doing cold calls or opening new doors to customers each week, you will find it extremely hard to direct and motivate the team.

Most founders who come from larger companies have not been been doing any individual contributor roles for several years. So the reorientation is very hard on them. They find it hard to do things they did a few years ago and since in most every area the specifics have changed so dramatically over the last few years, the adjustments are hard.

The best way to do this is to keep 30% of your time each week to have a personal accomplishment.

What I have found is the the FIRST thing I do each Monday on my weekly to-do list is to identify one deliverable that I will work on to complete without anyone else’s help.

Over the last few weeks it was working on website copy and mockups for the new design. Over the next few weeks it is cold calling multiple prospects for making some inroads for a few of our startups. The weeks of Dec 15-30 is mostly going to be spent on writing new pieces of our Borg’s UI using Twitter bootstrap (which is surprisingly easy to pickup).

So on your quest to be a leader and entrepreneur dont forget to be a doer as well.

Angel investing, Entrepreneurship, Mentors, Venture Capital

Commitment delivery percentage – an indicator of future success of startups?

November 6, 2012 Mukund Mohan 5 Comments

Here’s an interesting new term for entrepreneurs to be aware of – Commitment delivery percentage. I dont know for sure but I think in a year from now, most startups will start to follow this metric more seriously than others. Some investors are already claiming this metric to be the #1 indicator of future success of startups.

At the Microsoft Accelerator in Bangalore, there are 11 companies in our current batch (Sep to Dec). Every week I send our reports to all our mentors with the weekly commitments that startups have signed up for and how many of them have met their commitments.

Since startup discipline is something I am very passionate about, it goes without saying that I track everything at the accelerator.

Commitments fall into 2 buckets – product and customer. Overall we focus on 3 areas in the accelerator – Product development, Customer development and Revenue development, but initially revenue development is largely ignored since most folks are building MVP and getting early adopters.

Each of these 2 buckets of commitments is not something the startup comes up with alone in a vacuum. I typically discuss the commitments at our weekly all hands and it is a fairly public affair. While some teams try to lower the bar for their commitments, most are aggressive with what they commit to.

Product commitments are delivery of new set of features, versions or changes per a customer / early adopters requirement. Since many companies have mobile or web applications, most startups at the accelerator become customers of other startups so the feedback loop is quick and immediate.

Customer commitments are a combination of # downloads (if mobile app), or active users, engaged users or user feedback. Since I fundamentally believe that nothing’s possible without customer’s (who have a problem) at a startup, most companies have customer commitments from the first week. During the early days it was mostly meeting customers to get feedback and showing mockups, wireframes, etc.

The weekly report I send out to all mentors (currently over 70 folks) are to people who are committed to helping these startups and are engaged with them every week, either making introductions or reviewing progress and trying their product.

As with most reports, I can tell quickly who has read the report and who has not. On average 30 mentors (less than 50%) read the reports each week. They dont take more than 5 min to read and review.

Most of the investor mentors were reading the reports (of the 13 investor mentors, 8 were diligent and even asking questions every week to clarify certain points).

Over breakfast and a few lunch meetings I had a chance to get & give some feedback to some of our mentors. One question most people asked me was:

What % of commitments were being met and which companies were best at meeting commitments?

The answer is a surprising 70% of commitments were being met consistently and 63% of companies were consistently (with 1-2 exceptions per company max) exceeding their commitments on both product and customer traction.

Most seed-stage investors in India have a revenue requirement (not all, but most) so I was surprised they were the most aggressive in asking me questions about commitments. Seems to me, thanks to the early visibility, investors, were willing to make earlier bets, but needed some sense of the team’s performance.

What better way to judge performance than see the team making commitments weekly and delivering on them?

Investors have mentioned to me the in their experience the #1 indicator of a venture funded startups’ success is crisp execution and if they are going after a large market, then fantastic execution makes a good team great.

So how can we help more companies get on this instead of just Microsoft Accelerator companies?

We plan to release a version of our startup connection system (internally called The Borg) to all Indian companies by mid January 2013. With this solution all companies (who opt to do so) can make their commitments and report them to over 250 seed and early stage investors, mentors and advisers. And yes, its free to all startups.

The next experiment is to see in June of 2013 if the improved visibility into a startup’s execution increases the chances of funding for entrepreneurs. We are currently tracking that as well, and will be able to report in an automated fashion.

Entrepreneurship, Hiring

What constitutes a “Rock star startup team” ?

November 1, 2012 Mukund Mohan 19 Comments

Here’s another question I have been pondering over the last few weeks.

I am personally not very fond of the word “rock star”, but have heard it from several investors in particular. They all claim to have invested in rock star teams.

So it begs the question – What is a Rockstar startup team?

It would be impossible to list all skills, qualities, attributes and traits of the individuals in that team because the list would be endless.

Let me first write down a set of things I’d like to think that its not, but I am open to be challenged on these.

1. Bunch of guys who have all graduated from the same “top schools and colleges”.

2. A team of people who had CXO title’s at large companies and have never worked together.

3. A set of high IQ mensa-type individual contributors who dont work well in teams.

If I were to put a set of things I believe they should have before with the attempt to put a 1 line definition before it would be:

1. They have spent time together and understand each other well.

2. They have previously solved a similar type of problem before.

3. They have great communication among themselves.

4. They have a very good understanding of the market they are looking to operate in.

5. They execute crisply and meet their deadlines consistently.

If I were to simplify the definition of a rock star team, I’d say a team that’s worked together and solved the same type of problem a startup would face at their current stage before in their career.

Or people that have been there and done that – together.

But this definition does not cover a team of co founders who were fresh out of college.They may have certainly worked together, but not have solved the same type of problem before.

I am open to a more crisp definition.

Here are some others that I reached out to who have defined it in their own words.

Shekhar Kirani from Accel

“Deep insights, exceptional performance in their previous jobs, pedigree as an indicator of competitive spirit, and commitment not to give up.”

Ashish Gupta from Helion,

Customer focused, Iterative, Nimble

Sameer V from Nexus,

Scrappy, Hyper-efficient (multi-taskers) with a solid focus on customer needs

Abhijeet M from BVP,

Somebody who knows the market quality, competition, his product, and its value proposition inside out and backwards.

Kiran B Nag from Saama Capital,

Experienced, Synergestic, Adaptive

Raj Chinai from Kalaari,

Exceptional track record, passionate, creative and execution oriented

Gautam B from Ojas,

Energetic, Honest, Complimentary skills, Go-getters, Though not necessary, would help to have relevant backgrounds, Good understanding between themselves

Ashwin R of India Innovation Fund.

Driven, Make things happen, Visionary, And of course the cliched term X factor comes to mind

Mukul Arora from Saif partners,

Super passionate about the idea, ideally with relevant and complementary skills/expertise, and capable of hiring high quality talent.

Rahul Khanna from Canaaan,

Bejul Somiah from Lightspeed,

Passionate, Force of will, Outliers, Unusual

Shailendra S from Sequoia

Bharati J from SeedFund

Rock star team – that finds unique idea and executes brilliantly

have also been asked to contribute to this definition.

I will update this post as they provide me their answers.

Angel investing, Entrepreneurship, India

One person can change the world – How Dave McClure being in US is disrupting Indian early stage investing

October 20, 2012 Mukund Mohan 12 Comments

Last week over dinner with 4 top Venture Capitalists in India, the thoughts turned to early stage funding in India. As most entrepreneurs will tell you, seed stage investments in India are hit or miss. Entrepreneurs struggle to get angel and seed stage investors to move quickly. Most AA rounds take 3-4 months to close. Early stage (Series A) takes 6 months. There are angel networks that take longer.

I have been privy to several discussions that entrepreneurs have with their investors and its hard to help them close faster because many Indian angel networks and investors believe they want risk-free investments.

That all is about to change to a large extent.

The VC’s initially told me they were thrilled Dave was making these $50-$100K bets in Indian companies, since it gives them a bigger pool of good startups to fund.

Little do they know that most of the Indian entrepreneurs have different ideas.

Over the last week 500 has announced over 10 investments in the India (in less than 6 months), have hired Pankaj Jain full time to invest in Indian entrepreneurs and have publicly declared their intent to invest in 50 startups in 2013.

Just so we can all understand the magnitude of this commitment:

In all of 2011 angel and early stage investments went to 52 companies in India in the technology sector.

500 will match that in less than 1 year and will possibly do more than all other “angel networks” and individual angel investors in India – COMBINED.

I have talked to all the 19 company founders, who have received money from 500, yCombinator, TechStars, Startup Chile.

They have no intent to come to Indian VC’s to raise their series A.

They have access to US investors who move quickly, respect their time and are willing to make decisions with very little information.

Does that mean Indian VC’s are done for?

No.

It means a big chunk of the best and brightest who want to build global, scale-ready and capital efficient companies in Cloud, SaaS, Mobile and consumer Internet will go abroad and get money from investors in the US.

And Boom – just like that, Dave, Paul and Pankaj have changed the equation for Indian startups.

Sitting largely in the US.

Yes, that Pankaj is in Delhi is not lost on me.

One person can change the world – Believe you can do it and get it done.

Entrepreneurship, Focus, Learning, Management, Marketing

My discipline will beat your intellect

October 7, 2012 Mukund Mohan 21 Comments

I meet 4-5 new entrepreneurs every week as part of my office hours on Go-to-market help for young startups. Most are based in Bangalore, but surprisingly some are from other parts of the world (Chennai, Singapore and Estonia, even, via Skype).

I have an observation about work ethic that I wanted to highlight among startup entrepreneurs from various parts of the world.

Most every entrepreneur will tell you they work extremely long hours. That’s par for the course. Some “older” entrepreneurs (usually over 35 years of age) will share their ability to “strike a balance” between work and life. Practically speaking (I hate to break this to them) that does not exist in a startup. If you have that balance, you are not serious enough about your startup.

I understand they have families and kids, but I have come to the realization that both smart work and hard work are necessary (but not sufficient) to run a successful startup.

For purposes of this post lets define success as a company that’s growing significantly and rapidly, but does not have an exit yet.

The difference between a rapidly growing startup and one that’s growing “well” is productive (smart) hard work, not just long hours.

If you mistake activity (# of lines of code, # of code check-ins, # of customer discussions) with progress (shipping product, usable and must-have features, or # of active users) then you are just doing long hours.

If you mistake milestones (funding secured, new employee hired) for achievement (# of paying customers, churn rate of existing customers) then you are just doing smart hours.

What then makes smart and hard work such a potent combination? And what really is “smart work”? And how many hours make up “hard work”?

I define “smart work” as a combination of 3 things – asking the “right questions“, having a plan and maximizing the number of experiments in unit time.

I define “hard work” as the most amount of productive work time, with limited to no distractions and ability to do it consistently, for years (not bursts of weeks, not months and certainly not just for a few hours).

Lets look at both smart and hard in detail. Smart, first.

The smartest people I know have learned the art and science of asking the right questions. They usually start with asking a lot of questions, and having literally, no or very few answers. Each answer leads them to more questions. Asking the “right questions” is what they derive from experience.They have assumptions that need validation, hypothesis that need testing and results that need to be measured.

They are also willing to conduct a maximum of 2-3 experiments and have a DIY (Do it yourself) approach towards conducting those experiments to see if their assumptions and hypothesis were valid.

Finally they have a plan to approach their experiments. Not just a “lets try this and if not lets try that”. They rarely “wing it”.

Its very easy to spot smart teams. They have a sense and measurement of what “Continuous Visible Productivity” is. They come to me with a list of 2-3 questions that they want to address in a meeting. They dont just come to the meeting and pick up the whiteboard and start to “brainstorm”.

Now lets look at teams that work hard.

Hard working teams dont ever mention “how many hours they did put in last week or yesterday or that they hardly got “any sleep”. They realize and are aware of their physical limitations and are usually well within those limitations. Rarely do I hear from them “We work the hardest of all the teams” or “We have not slept for 2 days”. They keep looking for time they can cut away from unproductive work to do more questioning, experimenting and planning. In other words they dont brag about their long hours. They assume its a given.

Hardworking teams also tend to compartmentalize very well. Some people call this “bucketing” or “chunking”. Just because they work hard, does not mean they dont give their brains a rest and goof off for a while. Rather, they “compartmentalize” their goofing off or exercising to derive the benefits of a relaxed mind and body.

Finally hardworking teams are consistent. They show up day after day, week after week and go through questioning, experimenting and planning with rigor and consistency.

I realize a that being smart at work and working hard as I have laid out is extremely difficult. In fact its rare. That’s why successful startups are rare.

The combination is what I call startup discipline. Which is why I firmly believe one startups discipline will beat another’s pure intellect (given that hard work is assumed) any day.

Entrepreneurship, India

Should we aim for quantity or quality in Indian startups?

October 5, 2012 Mukund Mohan 10 Comments

I had a very good discussion with 2 folks over the last week about the current state of technology entrepreneurship in India. The rough estimates from multiple sources indicate a varied number from 250 (low estimate) to 1000 (high estimate) technology product startups each year in India. Compared to that, the US produces tens of thousands and even Israel beats India by having 3-4 times that number.

There are a few folks in the ecosystem that suggest that we should focus on fewer but better quality startups in the technology space. They have some strong points in their argument which include a) the total amount of funding available in the system will only support 50-100 companies annually b) if more companies were to be started, more will fail, which will deter more folks from becoming entrepreneurs and c) there are not too many experienced entrepreneurs & seasoned executives who can tackle issues of scale yet.

I fall on the other camp and my focus is to get more people to buy into the religion. I agree with the premise that most startups fail and that’s the nature of the beast. That has not changed much (or at all) with the number of accelerators or incubators in the last few years. Startups die for multiple reasons and many of them are not easy to fix.

The main reason I think we should focus on quantity first is so we can increase the pool of risk-takers in India. Entrepreneurs take the most amount of risk in the ecosystem. We need more of them, in fact more than the system can really handle. So how do we address the arguments from the “Quality first” side?

1. Most product entrepreneurs I meet in India (I meet a new batch of 5 EVERY week) dont really want to build a company to exit. They would prefer to build strong profitable companies and run time for a long time. They do need some funding initially when they are ready to test a few of their hypothesis. Many build products that take a few pivots to get right and most operate in markets that take long to mature. So what if the ecosystem can only support 50-100 currently? We should be able to find ways to get the not so successful ones to pick up, dust-off and get on the horse again. The other point I make that we really have a lot of money sitting on the sidelines in India, with a fairly immature angel investment ecosystem. Each week I meet one new person interested in investing in technology companies, usually a technology executive at a large software company like Microsoft, SAP or VMware. They are enough to get our entrepreneurs started and build good companies.

2. If the percentage of startups that succeed is fairly constant, then the argument for more startups is even stronger. If we increase the pool of startups and the failure rate is still a constant, we should get more successful startups. The failure rate has not dramatically increased or decreased over the last 5 years, so if we have 2000 startups and a 99% failure rate we will still have 20 successes vs. 250 startups and 95% failure rate.

3. The best way to have “serial” entrepreneurs is to have more people go through the experience once. Regardless of whether they failed at their first startup, the success rate of a repeat entrepreneur is dramatically higher. They are more experienced, seasoned and more willing to understand the importance of persistence.

I believe that we need more, not less technology startups overall to help our ecosystem grow dramatically.

Entrepreneurship

The early adopter customer database & connections for startup entrepreneurs

October 2, 2012 Mukund Mohan 16 Comments

As a startup entrepreneur one of the first things we need is customer validation. It is the one thing that takes the most amount of time in India. Most young entrepreneurs dont have enough connections with potential customers (both on the B2B or B2C side) and neither do they have the resources to acquire customers initially.

As part of the Microsoft accelerator, we realized this problem for most of our startups. So we are building connections to 100+ early adopters among large companies (we currently have 63), over 70+ SMB companies and about 15,000 early consumer adopters (our goal is to have over 100,000) in India. This is not just a database. We are actually building connections into these early adopters using our network so every person in this private connection network will answer calls and respond to emails from our startups.

Our goal is to setup meetings with top executives & customers within 3 days for entrepreneurs.

In the large enterprise side, these are companies like Microsoft, Times of India, Nokia, etc. which have over 5000+ employees and have problems that startups can address. If an entrepreneur wants an introduction to the head of marketing to discuss a new campaign solution, or an introduction to the head of HR to possibly demo a new recruitment offering we can make that connection.

The companies in the early adopter list have made commitment to try any new technology to give it due process quickly and provide feedback very fast. The benefit to them is the ability to see and try new technologies before anyone of their peers do. The current list of companies are from primarily technology, telecom, retail, financial services (banks and insurance companies), education (colleges) and healthcare (hospitals and pharma companies).

Our next step is to have a demo day exclusively for the top executives of these companies so they can see all these in 1 day rather than setup one-one meetings with each. That will probably happen in the next quarter.

In the SMB early adopter side these are CEO’s of companies that are between 1 CR ($250K) to 10 CR ($2 MM) in revenues. Currently we are focused primarily on the manufacturing and education spaces, besides smaller and mid-sized technology companies. Since most SMB decision makers in India tend to be the managing directors themselves, we are also thinking about using the connections to educate them about the advantages of being an early adopter.

Finally for consumer Internet startups, (who sadly have the toughest time in India) our goal is to have 100,000 early adopters in the mobile (Android phone owners, Windows phone 8 owners and iPad/iPhone) and most with 3G connections. These users are across demographic segments of age (many are college students, and most are in technology companies & financial services) and gender (currently 8% are women). Most are in the large metros (Delhi tops the list, followed by Bangalore, then Mumbai and Pune, Chennai and Hyderabad). We are maintaining a list of their email address, phone number and facebook, twitter accounts. This is a dual opt-in, invite only list. The obvious benefits to them are the bragging rights to be part of any new product and get it to try it before anyone else does.

As the number of startups in India grow, these are the things I believe that will really make a huge difference in helping companies move as quick as our Silicon Valley counterparts and encourage more people to join & start new companies.

Entrepreneurship, India, Marketing, Mentors

Startups and mentors: How to look for a great marketing mentor? & A list of top marketing mentors in India

September 23, 2012 Mukund Mohan 5 Comments

After the first post on technology mentors in India, the next person who can help the most as a mentor to startups < 2 years old is someone that can help with product & customer knowledge (or understanding user / customer behavior if its a consumer startup).

There are 3 primary categories of “marketing” mentors I’d recommend you think about. You dont need them all, just be clear who you need for what kind of mentorship.

Product mentors are people who can distill what customers would need and say into what you need to build in your product. There’s a big difference between a product manager and a business analyst. The latter, typically found in many Indian services companies, tries to give the customer exactly what they want, and end up building largely a custom piece of work for that client. Product experts on the other hand, observe customers, ask them tough questions and direct the technology team to build what the customer really wants.

Sales mentors are people carrying a quota (target). They are pounding the street or directing teams that are selling every day. They understand targets, compensation, lead nurturing, managing deals and sales opportunities. There are many types of sales people but largely they are either “farmers” or “hunters”. Farmers end up expanding your current opportunity and Hunters get new business from new clients. They both have their place. Mostly, I have found sales people dont make very good mentors because they are largely unavailable, but there are a few good guys around. Ideally they would help you understand and grow your sales team from “CEO is the sales guy” to building a repeatable, growth-oriented team.

Marketing mentors would help you with positioning, building awareness, lead generation and digital marketing. They can typically help you at the stage when you need to launch (largely after product-market-fit). Most marketing people tend to talk lots and do little, so if you get someone that can give you practical tips on how to build your funnel and grow your customer base by spending as little money as possible, then you have the right person.

The question usually is why do you need so many mentors. The answer is you dont. It all depends on the team you have and if they need advice, help and mentorship. I have seen startups with 5 mentors and many with none. Most have 2-3 mentors to complement the team. You can get as much value from mentors as much time you put into the relationship. I typically recommend most entrepreneurs to setup 1 hour every other week during the initial days (<6 months) and then 1 hour every month and finally 1-2 hours every other month.

Some recommended Product mentors:

1. Amit Somani (Make my trip)

2. Varun Shoor (Kayako)

3. Vijay Anand (The Startup Center)

4. Girish Mathrubootham (Fresh Desk)

5. Sridhar Ranganathan (InMobi)

6. Amit Gupta (InMobi)

8. Preetham VV (InMobi)

9. Dhimant Parekh (Hoopos)

Some recommended Sales mentors:

1. Madhu Lakshmanan (ex Photon)

2. Abhay Singhal (Inmobi)

Some recommended Marketing / Online customer acquisition mentors:

1. Pankaj Jain (Startup Weekend)

2. Ravi Vora (Flipkart)

3. Karthik Srinivasan (Flipkart)

4. Sanjeev Gadre (Consultant)

Angel investing, Community, Entrepreneurship

Technology product startups, angel and venture market comparisons – US and India

September 19, 2012 Mukund Mohan 12 Comments

There is a lot of activity and interest in technology product companies in India, as there is in the US. I spent some time reviewing numbers from NVCA, VCCircle and pulled some numbers specifically in the areas of Internet, software, technology products and eliminated services companies. Here is a simple table to keep things in perspective. All sources are at the bottom.

	USA	India
Total number of technology (Product & services) companies formed annually (average)	24,169	412
# of companies that secured angel funding	15,233 (1)	65
# of companies that secured seed / early stage from VC	1,682	58
# of companies that secured late stage funding from VC	658	31

I am yet to do any “analysis”. Right now the data validation process is what I am going to embark upon.

What is your analysis.

Relevant Links:

1. Crash Dev – eye of the needle

2. UNH center for angel investment research.

3. NAV Fund John Backus

4. Product Startup Landscape in India from Zinnov . (Thanks Pari!)

5. NVCA National aggregate data for US investments (Excel spreadsheet)

Entrepreneurship, Management, Mentors

Startups and mentors: How to look for a great technology mentor? & A list of top tech mentors in India

September 16, 2012 Mukund Mohan 20 Comments

I am going to write a 3 part series on mentorship and technology startups. Rather than write about why you need a mentor or how to engage with a mentor (next series) I thought the first step for most entrepreneurs would be to seek out great mentors.

As an additional bonus, I thought I’d list some good mentors in India so there’s a starting point (not comprehensive). Please feel free to add people who deserve to be on this list via comments (you cannot add yourself, someone has to recommend you, preferably 2 people).

We will focus primarily on technology startup mentors, which are < 2 years old. I believe there are 3 types of mentors you need at this stage: Technology, Marketing & Industry specific ones – that’s it. Everyone else is a ~~nice to have~~ waste of time.

Why?

Early in your startup, you should be focused on solving a problem and building your product, while at the same time, talking to customers and understanding their pain points. So if you are spending time doing anything else, its a waste. Mentors should help you do these things alone.

So, if you are thinking of getting that CEO of a 3-4 year old company which is doing well, as a mentor, he should fit in one of these buckets, else he a) does not have enough time to give you or b) does not have enough practical knowledge to share.

This post is about technology mentors. The next two posts are on marketing and industry mentors.

Technology mentors should help you think about the solution architecture, build & recruit a great engineering team and understand how to solve complex engineering problems.

I define technology mentors as people who are engineering managers, UX designers, architects & hands-on senior technical staff members in their day jobs. No one else qualifies. I would not put ex-engineering manager (now consultants at large, etc.) on this list. The reason is simple:

If you are not practicing, in the trenches, you don’t know the specifics and tend to give “Gyan” at a high level.

ps. US folks, I am trying to introduce some cool Indian lingo into your vocabulary, so please click on that Wikipedia link about gyan. 🙂

So how do you look for a great technology mentor?

1. Social proof – GitHub, Hacker News, Hackerstreet.in, HackerRank and Stack Overflow are great places to start. Also seek out folks at offline events such as Startup Weekend, Yahoo Hack Day and other such developer events. Dont look for technology mentors at generic industry or startup events. You dont find good technology mentors there.

2. Look at some awesome product companies – Cleartrip, Flipkart, Komli Media, Yahoo, Google (Map Maker), Microsoft Surface, InMobi, Facebook, etc. Get to know who runs their engineering and technology teams. Find out who their good senior, hands-on, architects and engineering managers are.

3. Reach out through your technical network: E.g. I am trying to solve this complex engineering problem, and we have a few areas where we’re stuck and would love some help. Can you please recommend someone who is a <machine learning expert> who is working on this area at <company name>?

Most good technology mentors I know like to work on really hard engineering problems, so the harder & more unique your problem the more likely you are going to attract a great mentor. Its a self selecting list (which is good) so if someone believes the problem you are trying to solve is not in their interest area, you dont want them anyway.

So now, on to a short list (soon to get long thanks to you all).

<EM> This list is biased right now. These are people I know, like and admire. Please feel free to help other entrepreneurs by recommending good people I dont know to this list. </EM>

Some recommended Engineering manager mentors:

1. Sachin Desai (Ericsson)

2. Mekin Maheshwari (Flipkart)

3. Hari Shankaran (Interview Street)

4. Jayanth Vijayaraghavan (Yahoo)

4. Indus Khaitan (Bitzer)

5. Bharat Vijay (ex Yahoo, Amazon)

6. Amod Malviya (Flipkart)

7. Srinivasan Seshadri (ex Kosmix)

8. Amit Ranjan (SlideShare)

9. Arvind Jha (Movico)

1o. Pawan Goyal (Adobe)