Category Archives: Entrepreneurship

Angel investing, Community, Entrepreneurship

Unpluggd: a Quick take on Uber Labs

2 Comments

I was the first speaker on the Unpluggd series a few years ago. I have very fond memories of the event, which was held at Honeywell offices. A little over 50-80 people joined us at a fairly small lunch room converted into a hall.

I attended the latest Unplugged on Saturday at MLR convention center. The first thing that came to mind when I walked up the steps to the auditorium was “You’ve come a long way baby“.

First off, kudos to Ashish, Kunal and Pratyush and the many others who worked tirelessly behind the scenes to get this to happen.

There were between 500 and 600 people at the event and it was buzzing. The first event had 2 sponsors, and Honeywell sponsored the location. This event had standing (or sitting in the aisles) room only even for the last talk in the day and top notch speakers and sponsors.

I was very impressed with both the quality of the 10 companies that presented (disclosure: Vinita, my wife presented her company GitGrow at the event) and the quality of the speakers.

One company in particular, UberLabs talked about their product gazeMetrix. One word – awesome.

No other words.

I have been to 5 demo days in India and over 11 in the US. This product in any of those demo days would have been among the top 3. The quality of the idea and its execution was crisp.

The entrepreneur in me says – just fund this entrepreneur. The investor in me says – get ready for a tough slog for the next few years. The product is good, but the challenge is going to be distribution. B2B companies targeting India alone struggle even with the best products. Targeting US (the primary market) for this out of India is always a challenge. What they will end up doing I suspect is to go Westward (like InterviewStreet, Orange scape and others).

That’s no necessarily a bad thing, but I just wish we had more early adopters both in the consumer and business side to help companies like Uber Labs thrive in India without having to leave India.

Entrepreneurship, Hiring, Learning, Tips

How to A/B test your job description and hack your way to hiring success

5 Comments

The last post on hiring for startups touched a nerve with many recruiters, many who emailed me on why I was negative about their profession. I did not intend to throw them under the bus, but the post came off reading that way. So, to my recruiter friends, apologies. I could have been more judicious with my choice of words. I assure you though that my words are not worth their weight in gold, so many startup entrepreneurs will still call you to help them with their recruiting. To those that claim spamming is helping, please stop.

Onward and upward.

This post is about hacking your job description. Or in the new age way of putting it – A/B testing it.

I had to hire 3 engineers for our new startup. The first step I took was to send an email to a few good fellow entrepreneurs and friends.

Version 1.0 < or bachelor #1>

I told them:

“Ideal candidate will have 3+ years experience in web or mobile technologies. Should be a hands on developer (PHP, Ruby, MySQL, Java or Python)”.

After 2 weeks and 30+ emails later I got 4 resumes from friends of friends. They were “technically sound” according to my network and within my budget but were mostly out-of-towners.

I phone screened two of them to find them fairly challenged in terms of their communication skills, and the remaining two wanted me to assure them a job before they made the trip to Bangalore (I was willing to pay for their trip, but not assure a job until I met them and interviewed them).

Version 2.0 <or bachelor #2>

I added “Good communication skills required. Position is in Bangalore.” And posted it on my twitter profile, LinkedIn and facebook account.

3 more resumes landed on my inbox, but none of them were even a close fit. One person said in their email, he was a test engineer and wanted to move into development and the second was a ASP/.NET developer who “could learn PHP quickly”, but had been in Windows development for the last 3 years. The third sent me an email, saying ” I am currently 25K salary, looking for 40% hike”, in his 3rd sentence, without any questions about either the job, the company or the technology.

Version 3.0 <or bachelor #3>

I decided the simple useless job description I wrote was just that – useless. I had forgotten the cardinal rule – Sell yourself, sell the job, sell your company.

So I did a ginormous makeover. I posted version 3 on hasgeek – I titled the role “developer in residence” not tech lead.

Worked like a charm. I got 4 very high quality candidates asking for what a “developer in residence” meant. Two were very qualified, professional and very good fit for the role.

I did not stop at version 3, but went to a refined “pitch the value, not the features” version.

Version 4.0 or <bachelor #4>

I added the following and posted version 4 on hasgeek.

“We have a complete 12 quarter hands-on program outline for you to feel ready to start your own company, which we will invest in to get you best prepared for entrepreneurship.

Job perks

  • Catered lunch every friday.
  • Ability to network and meet venture investors and angel investors in special invite-only events each month
  • A working 12-quarter program to give you all the experience necessary to be an entrepreneur”

Worked even better. The posting intrigued enough people to deliver even higher quality resumes. I thought I was overreaching because and got 2-3 over-qualified folks for a “lead developer position” re marketed as “developer in residence”.

What I learned:

1. The most important part of your job description is the Job Title. Its obvious, but I see far too many “PHP developer needed” or “Web hacker wanted” and “Javascript Ninja Hatori” titles, which gets you a certain type of person. Usually that person is not the first 25 developer hires in your company. Be creative, but dont overreach.

2. Your job description is the first impression for 90% of your potential candidates. The next impression is a Google search with your company’s name. You control the first a lot more than you control the next impression. Realize that people will read your job description and decided quickly if its worth Googling your company. What you say and how you word it says a lot about your culture. Does it have many typos? Are you using cliche’s like Ninja, hacker, Superman, etc. because you cant really describe the person with a simple engineer title, etc.

3. Dont say too much, because people dont read too much. Most job seekers I found, only read keywords like PHP and sent me their resume. They did not read anything else. I mentioned “should have worked in a product company (not services company)” before in a branch version of the JD, but I ended up getting many resumes from folks who worked only at services companies.

4. Each version of the JD attracts a different crowd from a different job board. If you are posting on hackerstreet, or hasgeek – think and focus on being a little more creative. If you are looking for technical marketers, pluggd.in is pretty good and for fresh grads, yourstory worked best for me.

5. Describe the perks of the job. If possible please make it human by adding a P.S. at the bottom. People read the P.S. More people read the P.S. than you think. Make the P.S. memorable, or make it sound like a prize given for the one that had the patience to read the entire posting which you spent hours writing (or a few minutes copying and pasting from some other JD).

Next post – how I phone screened and what worked, what did not.

P.S. I do read and reply to every email, and I do like getting email, but I always prefer comments on this blog.

Community, Entrepreneurship, India

Bangalore Startups Group and the Big data meetup

5 Comments

I attended an awesome mixer and startup meeting late afternoon yesterday put together by Bangalore startups.  Umashankar, Rashmi and Subhendu had organized a technical Big data developer exchange.

First off, just having over 100+ developers in a room (with a VC to boot- Rajesh from Ojas) was great. There were multiple levels of maturity about big data and Hadoop in particular (Zookeeper, Pig scripts, etc.) but this was an awesome start to more technical meetups. I think the format was in beta but it was good to see the energy in the room.

I am a big fan of the unconference in particular, so for developer meetups, this is one of the best formats is my perspective. This one in particular would have been best suited for it.

There were 3 talks – one by Karan from Microsoft, another from Vara & Khadim of Search enabler and 3rd by Vikranth of Data Weave. All three were excellent, hands-on perspective from developers, by developers and for developers.

I personally thought Vara stood out. The most impressive part of the presentation was the confidence that there are folks in India doing excellent work on niche (but growing) and arcane areas, some of it very cutting edge. Vara actually builds his own servers (from cheap components), and has built a suite of tools to automate their imaging, provisioning and maintenance built on open source components. I thought they could offer that as a service to Indian entrepreneurs because even though Amazon is easy, its a tad expensive for Indian startups. Their infrastructure is at least 30% less expensive than Amazon was their perspective and best suited for companies hosting for Indian and neighboring markets.

Their stack had Lucene and Nutch (for crawling and indexing), pig scripts and Zookeeper on top of HDFS. There were over 30 open source tools they have used for the infrastructure management.

My biggest takeaway was that many of these folks are not too far away from contributing back to FOSS community. When I talked to many of the developers to find out why contribution to FOSS was low from India, their personal experience was the lack of confidence that their “code was not up to the mark”.

I think there’s an excellent opportunity for this team or another to build confidence by hosting and running FOSS contribution hackathons. If anyone’s up to it, I’d love to contribute with space, food or some freebies.

Entrepreneurship, India

What happens when your co-founder decides “Its time to move on”

6 Comments

Its that dreaded 6 month itch. Or the 12 month itch, or 18th – whatever. Its an itch all right. Your cofounder and you have been toiling away at your startup for what seems like ages now. Its not going all that well (if you compare yourself to others) and you both know it. You both get a sense that something’s missing. Or something’s not just right. Then she drops the bomb “I’m thinking of going to look for something else to do”. Or she’s going to pursue her MBA instead of working. Or worse, work at a big company with a large paycheck and some “stability”. Or his mom wants him to get married and his prospective father-in-law does not like the idea of a “startup” – “Go and get a real job at a big company, if you wish to marry my daughter”, he says.

I am going to assume you are both equal partners in all things (i.e. you both own the same amount of the company, and came up with the idea together).

So what happens next? Let me tell you the emotions I went though.

First, its okay to cry. I have personally done that a couple of times.

Then I dreamt revenge. Its okay if he leaves, I will make this so big, he’ll regret he left me in the first place. He’ll come begging back to me in 1 year asking for a job as a programmer in my company and I’ll ask him to come to interview with people who work for the people who work for me. I’ll claim we are a “big” company now and decisions to hire programmers are left to lower level people. “I only focus on strategy and vision and having lunch with my investors”, would be my email back to him.

Then I woke up.

I questioned everything. Why was I starting this company? What was the vision? Was it still valid? I started to create my own FUD. Was I a good co founder? Was the idea bad? Will customers now trust me? Will anyone else want to work with me? Is a startup even worth all the pain and suffering?

I spoke with most of the people involved with our startup – potential investors, some people we had interviewed, some customers, seeking their advice.

My first reaction was to tell them that my cofounder left for some bizarre reason. I told them he had to move out of town (which he did, but not for the reasons I mentioned) and so we decided to part (I did not want to leave Silicon Valley, you see). Most everyone saw through that.

Then all I said was “He thought this was not worth doing and it was hard on him and his family”. Which was the truth.

What I got back was surprising – “Get back on the saddle, and start to ride”. Or as some say “This too shall pass”.

Everyone pitched in with new ideas, different ways to solve the problem we initially set to solve. One prospect even gave me a consulting agreement, because he knew I was going through a rough patch.

So what happens when you co-founder decides to leave?

Lots, and then again nothing much. Many things change and most things remain the same.

If you really want to succeed with your startup, most external events will not matter. Most successful startups were born during periods of recession.

Regardless of whether you have a co-founder or not, the fundamentals remain – Is this a big pain / problem? Is there a better way that you can solve it? Are lots of people willing to give you lots of money to solve that problem? Is there a way you can take small steps towards solving that problem?

Go on, be a force of good.

Entrepreneurship, Learning

The difficulty in giving honest feedback to entrepreneurs

18 Comments

I met a cofounder-team last week at the Microsoft BizSpark event. They were fairly young, and were working on their first startup, after 5+ years of working in a large corporate environment. They were both a year into their startup and were looking to raise funds (seed round). They were focused on the consumer Internet space (are now considering pivoting to B2B instead) and have been building a version of their webservice.

They definitely caught me at a “not so opportune time”. Actually, a friend pulled me in adhoc after a bad call (bugs in our software, customers complaining, etc. you get the point) to introduce me to them and ask me for feedback.

The next 30 min was painful for us all is the best way to say it. After the 5th time of me asking what problem they were trying to solve and if that was a real problem, I think I had a breakdown.

I tore into them for the next 15 min with both my friend and another individual sitting next to them. I claimed they had no idea what problem they were trying to solve, who their target audience was, what their product actually did that any of 20 other startups did not do already and why I would not use the product even though it was meant for folks like me.

They were patient, gave me a hearing, but I you could cut the tension with a knife. I felt awful 2 hours later. I had forgotten the cardinal sin I kept repeating to others they should avoid doing.

If you cant give constructive feedback, you are a moron, not an investor. If an “investor” does not help you with a next step, he is a moron. Period.

I had become a moron. The very thing I had detested in many other investors (not all, there are several exceptions).

You know the type. They kill every idea and suck your soul dry. They dont think your idea is good, they dont think you can pull it of, they dont believe you have what it takes.

I used to believe this was necessary tough love. It is absolute B.S.

What I did was inexcusable. It bordered on killing the spirit of another individual, which no person has the right to do. Even if they are an investor.

So, what should you as an entrepreneur do when you meet this type of investor?

First off, try some mind-relaxation techniques.

Second, give them the benefit of doubt. You probably got them on a bad day/week/month.

Third, ask the question:

“How would you go about trying to solve this”?

Put the ball on their court to give you a SINGLE next step that they (the smarter ones) would take to get you further along on your path.

One last point. Being an investor, you meet many smart, talented individuals daily and its difficult to not do some form of “pattern matching”. So, if anyone tears into your idea, remember at that back of your mind, you are likely doing something (either right or wrong) and its worth doing some more digging.

The worst feedback to get when you are pitching your idea/product/startup is no feedback.

P.S. I did meet the team this week and offered some (my version of the story) constructive ideas they could possibly work on, and was trying to help as much as I could. That does not make me feel better about what I did last week, but its good karma to erase the bad.

Entrepreneurship

How to deal with startup failure. A personal story

38 Comments

I have failed in as many startups as I have been successful.

Since I tend to tinker a lot, I have also failed at many of my side projects. In fact I have the distinction of not having succeeded in any of my side projects in the last 4 years (4 side projects).

If however, you count the lessons learned, I have been enriched.

The first project was an idea that was going to provide “price transparency”. The site was registered as pricearoo.com. I had a team of 2 build it, got a prototype ready, did a lot of leg work to understand the products the site should give your pricing information about. But I never launched it. I realized that building stuff is rather easy, but I feared it was too small a feature for people to take notice. 6 months later Priceonomics was launched. I am not privy to how they are doing but its a good start.

Ship early. Your product will have a lot of bugs. Ship early. It wont be perfect. Just ship the product. You will feel miserable about the fact that its not “quite ready”. Ship it already. Get people to use it or at least give you feedback. Ship.

I also failed at an eCommerce company. Technically it is still going, but I was a miserable failure at it. I just was not prepared for the rough and tumble of both managing real “inventory” or lots of blue collar suppliers. I hired too quick, did not manage expectations well, and had negotiated a very poor deal with the investors. The capitalization table was so messed up, that no new investor was willing to fork up money for the company. There were way too many lessons I learned but the most important was work with people you like and trust.

These are recent (last 1 year). Let me tell you about my first failure.

I left Univ of Maryland, (Baltimore County) in 1994 to head to California for a startup. Fresh out of college, I was not quite a rockstar programmer that I thought I was. The first project required me to get up to speed on a language (Visual C++) that I was unfamiliar with and a functional area (procurement) which I did not comprehend. 4 months into a “delivered” prototype, the client kicked us out. The entire project had to be rewritten because we built a very buggy prototype. The company failed. I was not even sure what I learned at that point. Except maybe I needed more experience and I needed to be a better developer. That experience colored my judgment on services companies though. I never wanted to build a consulting company after that.

For all the young, newly minted graduates who are going down the entrepreneurial journey – Celebrate your first failure. Take your friends out for a lunch or drinks. Share what you learned. After that dinner / lunch forget about that failure but write down what you learned. Email it to yourself but leave it unread. Archive it. Open it after 2 years. If you dont laugh at that email you sent to yourself, I will send you a free t-shirt. Get a job at a startup where you can learn from someone else making mistakes.

If I could tell you one thing I wish I knew now that I did not know when I failed at those things, it would be: I am happier I failed. Not when I failed, but much later. I felt awful after each failure, but moved on.

Nobody cares that you failed. Except you.

Think about the last time anyone at an interview asked you if you got an F in school.

Entrepreneurship, Learning

Are incubators really necessary?

ReadwriteWeb had a relevant post about incubators.

As the infrastructure costs of “starting up” become lower, the barrier to get “funded” gets higher. Used to be you could get away with prototype. These days every investor wants traction. Traction is easier when you have help from an incubator.

You need not go to college to get a job, but there’s a correlation between higher degrees and higher pay. Similarly in 5-10 years

I can totally see a situation where 70% or greater of startups go through an incubator rather than go it alone.

It will increase the chances of getting funded and highly increase the chances of success.

I do think most companies will go through an incubator even if the founders are experienced folks in a few years. The current batch of incubators favor (either by design or natural fit) younger, fresh out of college grads.

The key part of this equation is that not all incubators are equal. If your incubator does not provide value (raising funding, getting customers or helping hire key employees), then its not worth wasting your time with them.

Entrepreneurship, Focus, Tips

The art of disciplined experimentation

6 Comments

Being a hobbyist is an awesome way to keep learning and test “theories” you have. Most cases, when I have a theory I’d like to prove or disprove, I’ve found the best way is to just try it out. That applies to a new product idea, new marketing technique or a new sales strategy that I have either a hunch for or have overheard from someone else.

The key part that I have learned from my experiments, is that you need a framework (or a model) to clearly outline what you intend to learn from it, what assumptions you made, what steps you took and what you learned from the experiment.

If you dont have a framework, you end up with a lot of experiments whose results might suit you at a later date, but you “forget” about those experiments.

The thing about experiments is you have to understand clearly why they succeeded or failed. 

If you do that and internalize the learning, it becomes a part of your decision making for the future. Experiments without learning is just wasting time – which is also a valid reason to experiment in itself, but you have to be clear about that upfront.

To be disciplined in my experimenting, I have found that doing one at a time suits me best. I found out from a expert in SEO about a much simpler way to track the keywords you want to rank for and a quicker ethical way (than the usual 2-3 months) to appear on the first search engine results page.

My immediate thought process was “that’s just not right” and “wont work all the time”. But it was right and it works, and the only way I would be convinced of it, was if I did it myself.

I also put a time frame for my experiment, to determine if its worth the result. Many of these experiments take several months, so doing nothing but that one experiment during that time, is hard. The results from that learning better make up for more than the time and effort.

Which is why I developed for myself a list of questions so I can be disciplined about my experimenting. These questions are fairly straightforward, but my lens for the questions is based on three criteria:

a) Will it be fun?

b) Will I learn something I dont already know?

c) What new things will I learn and where can I use the learning from the experiment?

Entrepreneurship, Learning, Tips

What makes a product “fit” a market? Or how to achieve product-market fit?

5 Comments

A relatively young term in an entrepreneur’s vocabulary is “product-market fit” (PMF). Attributed to Marc Andreessen in 2009, this term, has a relatively simple meaning but one that’s hard to really get a sense of:

Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.

If you go after an awesome market – growing fast, has excellent demand and a great growth curve, then you’ve got 90% product-market fit, even though technically 50% of the challenge in any startup is coming up with a good product.

Lets assume you are going after a great market.

How do you know its a great market? Besides the fact that its large (obvious) the speed of adoption is tremendous.

What then makes a product “fit” a market?

First there are 3 important assumptions I make:

1. The best team does not necessarily create the best product.

2. The best product does not necessarily win in the market.

3. It is rare for startups or entrepreneurs to create markets.

A product “fits” a market when

1. Your metrics for adoption of your product exceed adoption of all your “competitors” combined (Instagram had more downloads in 1 week than other competitors did in 6 months)

2. There are so many missing features in your product but its still being sought after (HotorNot had no other features except an upvote and downvote)

3. The problem you solve for the user is such a big one that they are willing to forgive the lack of “nice to have” capabilities (during its early days, Twitter kept crashing daily)

The first point (metric) answers the question – What should I measure to know when I have achieved PMF?

The second point (features) answers – How can I tell?

The third point is the most important. To know about problems that are painful and large there’s one thing you need to learn:

Learn how to ask the right questions.

—–

Relevant links that I would highly recommend you read:

1. Jeff Bussgang on why early in the product cycle entrepreneurs should be hunch and not data driven.

2. Andrew Chen on “When” has a product-market fit been achieved?

3. Ash Maurya on the 3 stages of a startup and why problem-solution fit comes before product-market fit

4. Patrick’s perspectives on steps to product-market fit.

P.S. Thanks to my good friend Dorai who asked me to write about this.