Entrepreneurship

Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer is redefining the future of tech careers: #startups #entrepreneurs

20 Comments

I think of careers as a set of 3 phases of 12-15 years each. From 21 to 36 you are in the rapid learning phase, from 36 to 51 you are directing and from 51 to 66 you are guiding. These are broad brushstrokes. I am going to focus on the first “trimester” of your career in this post.

Why 12-15 years? Generally speaking, it takes most people 2 years to get a handle on anything meaningful (build a network, understand how things work), then two years to master it, and a year to start being in “the zone”. Boredom hits usually at the end of the “zone” when the juices just dont flow doing the same thing for 5 years. I am going to call this 5 year period as “doing a (one) job”.

Then most people tweak their role or go for a dramatic change in their “job” after 5 years. During the younger years most people I know are eager to learn, discover and grow their knowledge. So, they go through 3 sets of 5 year periods or “jobs”.

For most people the age of 35 (or in other cases 40) typically becomes a “mid-life crisis” point. 15 years of working can do this to anyone. That’s when a “career” change is explored.

I get about 5-7 emails and requests for calls / discussions with mid-career executives each week who want to brainstorm and get my thoughts on their career.

After the obligatory, landscape review, many realize there are few options for those who have achieved a lot by 35 – they are VP’s, Directors, Managing directors and suddenly they realize it is going to be one long haul after this.

Most folks fall into 3 buckets at this point.

1. Some decide they like “mentoring” younger people and continue to find a challenge to help others within their company grow and thrive. These folks have made enough money but not enough to leave the luxuries that their position offers.

2. Others decide they need a hobby (or want to follow their “true passion”) that will keep them occupied because work tends to be on cruise control. Many take up teaching as a side profession since they believe they have learned enough to share.

3. Still others want to venture out on their own. Having heard about entrepreneurship and always having a “bug” to startup, they usually come to seek my help on the choices and get some advice on their idea.

This is when the fun part starts.

When I present the stark reality of entrepreneurship (it is very hard, they will likely fail, though they will enjoy the ride and to build something awesome will take them over 5 years), there are 2 reactions.

The first person had not thought about it in this context and ends up understanding that they are not ready to take the risk and goes back to one of the two previous options before. They will usually say “I always wanted to start, but I kept pushing it out, since I was getting promotions, got married, had kids, school, mortgage, etc. Now it looks like it is too late”.

The second person realizes this, and understands that it is “now or never”.  The overwhelming dissatisfaction with their job pushes them to leave their high-paying, easy job to the unpredictable world of entrepreneurship. They end up taking a LOT more risk later in their career, which they can ill afford it, than when they are younger.

If you are an Indian or have many Indian friends, you will know a term that parents use (typically after they graduate) – “Settle down”.

I absolutely loathe that term.

“Settle down”.

What does that even mean? Actually I know what that means, but I guess I detest it so much, that when folks mention it, I get upset and “forget” the meaning.

Settling down is for ground coffee. You ask hyperactive kids, who have had a candy binge to, “settle down”.

Settle down to a 21-30 year old strikes me as the worst advice you can give.

[Side note: To my american friends, settle down means, get a steady job, buy a house, get married, have kids immediately, buy a car and go for Art of Living classes – all within the span of 10 years].

Why would anyone wish that on their children?

Here is what I think will happen in the next few decades.

Thanks to rapid “softwareization of work”, most people wont get a simple “middle class job” which pays well enough to “get married, buy a house and a car and have kids” all within 10 years.

Instead I think parents will have to start telling their college grads to take risks early. Jump into entrepreneurship right after college.

Why?

Simple.  Most roles at large companies will start to resemble small entrepreneurial team roles. We are already starting to see that in larger software companies and I think the pioneer of that model is –

Yahoo!

Yes, Yahoo!

That’s the future of careers and hiring. Check out their buying binge since Ms, Mayer has been the CEO.

I am positive that the impact Marissa Mayer will have is more on careers, hiring and the future of entrepreneurship than on advertising technology which is Yahoo’s business,

To all the CEO’s sitting on piles of cash and need to hire awesome teams – here is the playbook.

[Ed. That they have not produced any meaningful new products at Yahoo is not lost on me. Give them time. Innovation is never linear.]

So what does this have to do with careers?

Most parents for the next 10 years are better off telling their kids to start a company, be an entrepreneur and get acquired by someone like Yahoo. Here’s why:

Option 1: Be awesome at school, take on a $30K -$50K student loan when you graduate, then get a job – at Yahoo! – to get paid $60K / year as a starting salary.

Option 2: Start a company. If you succeed, sell it to a Yahoo-like company for $ Millions. If you fail, get acqui-hired by someone like Yahoo for $hundreds of thousands. If you fail miserably, get hired for at least 25% more than your peers who took option 1 straight out of school. Voila! You are ahead anyway.

Either way, option 2 is worth the risk.

Tell your kids to be an entrepreneur.

Settling down is for old geezers. By that time – the risk is clearly not worth it.

India, Learning

A most poignant story of why the world is round and not flat

11 Comments

This story made me cry. Not tears of sorrow, but tears of goodness. There is a lot of that in this world.

I want to tell this story, because I want more people to know about the way the world works and why you have to pay it forward. I have asked all 3 of the folks who are part of this story to see if I could share their real names and organizations. Have not heard back yet.

A few years ago, a young man, about 21-22 years of age, from the not-so-upscale, Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco, wanted to do something. Not anything in particular, but something. Inspired by a story he read online about the lack of education resources for the poorest of the poor, in India, he thought about making a trip here to find out how he could help.

His sister (older, married) and family were understandably apprehensive. India is not the most comfortable place for a young person. Still, they supported his trip to India to “find out what’s going on”.

Upon his arrival, the young man met lots of people, hung out at the not-so-desirable parts of Delhi and learned first-hand, about the children of migrant workers, day laborers & the underemployed and their inability to have a basic education. Knowing how poorly staffed government school were, these parents chose to have their kids with them during the day. Most of the kids ended up “helping” the parents at work.

He decided to start a low-cost school to educate them.

Think about that. A low-cost school in Delhi taught and run by a young man from San Francisco.

Fast-forward a couple of years, the school’s running, growing, albeit slowly and our young man matures into a school administrator, and runs his non-profit in India, making few trips to San Francisco during holidays and life moments. During this time, our young man, has grown a staff of 12, trained a few local teachers and helped make a difference in over 200 children’s lives.

One of the teachers, a rather exceptional young woman herself, after a year and a half of being at the school, leaves after she’s married and our protagonist does not end up keeping in touch with her after that.

Last year, his sister’s daughter was diagnosed with Autism.

Autism is a disorder of neural development characterized by impaired social interaction and verbal and non-verbal communication, and by restricted, repetitive or stereotyped.

Autistic kids are expensive to educate in the US. They need a personal trainer, coach and therapist (or one of them) to help grow the child’s confidence.

Our young man’s sister was unable to afford the resources to put her daughter in therapy, but US laws for learning disabilities (I dont know the details, but have been told this) ensure that if your child has a disability and wants help to learn, a good amount of money will be provided to help the child do so.

Unable to afford a therapist, she apparently put an ad on craigslist seeking help. She gets no response for weeks. Our protagonist meets her and the family on one of his trips to San Francisco and posts his anguish on a social networking site.

After 3 days, the young woman he helped, become a teacher in Delhi, calls him (after 3+ years of not being in touch at all) in San Francisco. She offers to meet him for coffee and suggests she could find a way to help. She also just “wanted to catch up” and explain the mysterious lack of communication.

Turns out this young woman, married wrong, went through a divorce and was picking up the pieces. She had a job to keep food on the table, but that was it.

She offered to tutor and be the child’s therapist – for free. She has been doing that for 6 months now.

So there you have it. A young man, from San Francisco, making a difference in Delhi. And a young woman from Delhi, making a difference in San Francisco.

I met the young man at an entrepreneur event a few weeks ago and then upon his insistence, met the woman in San Francisco a few weeks ago as well.

They are both normal, young, 23-25 year old kids. They are though, a lot wiser and more awesome than I will ever be.

The world is round. It is not flat, Mr. Friedman. What goes around, comes around, twice as much and twice as fast.

Among the Indian elite (and I am as much a part of of the elite), the world remains full of opportunities thanks to “globalization”. The rest of the world depends on these two and other such young minds to uplift us.

The world is round, Mr. Friedman. It is round.

Entrepreneurship, India

The never ending debate about quality vs. quantity among #startups

15 Comments

Yesterday we had a debate at the Microsoft Ventures Accelerator Demo day about whether the ecosystem needed to provide more support for existing startups or get more new entrepreneurs into the fold.

On one hand there was Sharad Sharma of iSpirt who made a very cogent analysis of where engineering education is in India currently (vs. 5 years ago). His point was in 5 years we have increased the # of engineering graduates by 10-fold and that has resulted in many disillusioned parents and students, who have paid lots of money to engineering colleges to get a degree, but find that there are not as many jobs as they thought there would be. This has resulted in social unrest in a couple of states. There is even a state considering a student loan waiver (similar to farm loan waivers in India).

His analogy was: if we get too many early stage entrepreneurs and not enough capital to help them or policy related changes to support them, there will be too many failures and a backlash against entrepreneurship.

His suggestion is to help support our existing entrepreneurs with the intent to make them successful.

Ravi Gururaj and I, on the other side, were of the opinion that we should focus on quantity given the maturity of our ecosystem. India is a largely nascent technology startup community and what works in Israel, China or US does not work here given where we are.

That does not mean we dont support our existing entrepreneurs, but a call to focus only on existing entrepreneurs does not help our cause. The best is we can do both, but if we had to prioritize one, I’d advocate quantity right now over quality. When the ecosystem gets large enough (we will know when it is too large based on lagging indicators, not leading), then the focus on quality alone *might* help.

I am going to outline my case for why this is the better approach based on data that I currently have. I’d love to have you debate this with us. I dont speak for Ravi, so please review the below as my opinion alone.

To set context, there are over 60K (30K product) tech companies that get started in the US annually. The comparable number in Israel is about 400 and India is about 500 (Over a 1000 ideas and entities get started every year in India, but a large number end up not becoming companies).

Of these in the US over 30K (About 3K get VS funding) get some form of funding, about 50% of starts in Israel and 25% starts in India get some money (friends and family, angels, VC’s, etc.)

The bottom line is that we are a very nascent ecosystem. There is largely insufficient data to make meaningful predictions on our successful startups yet.

The second set of data points (read the larger Kauffman foundation report later) are on shutdowns and “failures”.  If you classify success as an exit (which is bizarre, but humor me for a bit) then 97% of startups fail. If you broaden success to those companies that are profitable / operating then 75% of tech startups fail and if you further broaden the definition to those that have not “shutdown” then that means over 61% of startups fail.

Note that these are all US numbers and we dont have significant, meaningful or valuable information for India, but we can largely assume that the failure rates are similar if not worse.

So we are a very nascent startup nation and we have lots of failures.

That would lead many to advocate that you should focus on creating winners. Like there’s a formula for that.

Here’s the thing – there’s NO formula for a startups “success”, except great founders, solving a large problem, which has large market and of course – LUCK.

I dont understand why people dont give a great importance to luck as a significant aspect of any startup’s success. Maybe it is in our psyche to discount the intangible. Anyway, that’s a whole another discussion.

Anyone that claims we can “engineer startups to win” has not realized that it is impossible to pick the winners. Even the best “pickers” average 30% or less “winners”.

So the best you can do is really to get more people to believe in the “religion” and thus turn into more converts.

As a nation we still have many folks who are not entrepreneurs directly who influence our entrepreneurs. We need them to believers as well.

The “get a safe job” instead of a risky startup parent of an engineering grad needs to be converted.

The “I wont let you marry my son /daughter” because you dont really have a “job” father-in-law needs to be converted.

The “I need to maintain our lifestyle so lets buy a imported car instead of your Alto, so dont give up your (ed: dead-end boring) job to start a company” husband needs to be converted. P.S. This is a true story of a women entrepreneur whose husband said these exact words. Sad really.

The argument that they will see many failures and hence will be disillusioned is going to be invalid, since there are few other options.

Let me segue to Sharad’s argument and the comparison to engineering education for a bit.

To those parents who, after asking their kids to get an engineering degree, are now finding them without a job, I ask “What was your option”? Arts? Law? Commerce? Medicine?

While they are all equally good options, none of them are guaranteeing your children a “job” either. And the jobs they deliver are likely going to pay a lot less.

In fact going through an engineering education at a “not-top-tier” college is probably as good for children as going through a top arts college in India.

Why?

Simple. Even the arts are being “scienced”.

Back to our regular programming.

So the 3 main arguments I make for continuing to focus on quantity are:

1. Our ecosystem is too nascent and we have too few data points to focus on quality alone.

Why? Do a lot of experiments, figure out which ones work, rinse, repeat, hope for the best. We cant be Steve Jobs and assume we know a winner when we see one. We are better at being a Jeff Bezos and trying a lot of things, willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time and finally making a few dents.

2. You cannot guarantee quality.

Why? We dont know how to pick winners. We dont know which startups will succeed and which will fail. So, it is best to support all, and the winners will rise to the top.

3. We need more converts to the religion and the failure rate should not be a deterrent.

Why? The options are not many. If you are graduating now and expect to get a “job” at a large tech company, the chances are getting slimmer and the likelihood of you liking your job in a few years are slim.

That’s my argument. Your turn.

Other

The coming 20+ year disruption in Higher Education

15 Comments

This is a post on the problems & solutions in higher education from someone clearly not qualified to make those observations. The only information I have is the 79 pitches from entrepreneurs large and small who are all trying to disrupt Higher Education from around the world. Besides that over 500+ articles, blog posts & discussions with several professors at the top colleges in the world.

The Higher Education market is largely a US dominated one. With over 4500 private, public and semi-public colleges and universities, this market is over $475 Billion. Over 9% of US GDP and close to $1.3 Trillion (pdf) is spent on education overall. While there is more spent on K-12 education, the higher ed market has more spend per student.

Most of the money spent by students in on tuition. Over 57% of the higher ed spend is on tuition. This goes towards educators, libraries, textbooks, facilities, etc.

The average 4 year college cost is reaching $30K+ per year for private colleges. Given that over 70% of US students end up with over $30K in debt after college, this clearly unsustainable.

With the advent of MOOC (Massive Online Open Courses) I personally believe it is only a matter of time before many of the 4500 colleges shut down. I personally think 50% of colleges in the US will close down in 10+ years. Similar for Indian colleges – over 50% of colleges in India will shut down in 20 years.

Most private colleges make money from endowments, grants, and then from tuition – in that order. Most of the moneyed institutions have “rich” students who then become alumni and donate to the college, many of the smaller colleges dont.

The average private college takes 2000+ students and charges about $30K per student. Lets say that is $60 Million per year.

Now imagine that the private college wants to take 20,000 students (online) instead. [They could also take 100,000 students, since nothing is going to stop them from doing that]. All things being equal and factoring in inflation, and the cost to run the university being largely the same, they would be able to charge $3K per student per year and still do well.

It is not a dream. It is going to happen. In 10-20 years, or likely sooner, but it is going to happen.

Would you rather get a degree from MIT and be taught by the top professor at MIT or a local college professor who may not have the level of depth and knowledge about the subject as the MIT professor?

You can do this from Saudi Arabia, Australia and India. That’s because even the folks in Newton, Mass, who live <100 Miles from MIT will be doing the same.

Most learning is going online. In a massive way. Higher education is as well.

Now, I understand the concerns.

A) The Internet do not replace the interaction you get in a face-to-face setting.

B) How can you build relationships with your students and network with them – which is the biggest value of a college 10 years hence? and

C) Online learning is still largely unproven.

All that will get itself sorted out with other offerings to supplement the MOOC.

In the future you will have interactions (office hours) remotely managed by professors.

In the future you will learn from your peers together as much as you will from the professor – which will build the relationships.

In the future you will have more teaching aids and tools to help you sort, identify and collate your learning better than textbooks.

That future is less than 10 years away.

I am going to shift gears and now try to talk to future parents.

What should you do? What are the things you can do to make sure your kids are going to be successful? This is primarily if your kids are between 0-10 years old.

First and (I cannot understate this) let your kids find their way.

If you can make the investment, buy them a tablet and let them learn stuff using the machine.

If you can get them to follow structure courses online (for older kids), I’d recommend Khan academy and other sites like those.

We dont have Television at home, but I am not convinced that’s the right approach for everyone. If you can get rid of the television, do it. I’d highly recommend it.

Kids will play more games than use the tablet for useful stuff initially but that novelty wears off in a few years. The % of core gamers and those that are addicted to gaming is still small. I am not saying ignore it, but be less worried about that than no exposure to games at all.

I dont think most parents will give up the school environment all together, since they need the kids to be “someplace” other than home when they head to work, but I would focus a lot less on grades at school.

In fact, grades will become irrelevant in 15 years, increasingly replaced by “show me what you did” instead of “how did you learn”. Why?

If you are MIT or Stanford and you want 20K students to take your course, you are likely to get less picky a decade from now. 

[Side note: Similar to startups these days, when being evaluated by investors, the focus is on product & traction, not on idea, grades tell me how you studied, not what you learnt].

The goal of these colleges will go away from “exclusivity for some” to “knowledge for all” very soon. That’s the direction they are all heading. Will MIT as an institution or the lecture halls go away? – not likely. They will be the purview of the few rich kids who can spend $100K per year to be housed in 5 star luxury comforts. For the rest of us, a computer and an internet connection will suffice.

This next paragraph is going to unsettle a few folks, but hear my argument.

Focus on spending money *now* to help your kids, than saving money for the future. Most parents I know end up trying to save for education – by putting money in 529 plans, education savings plans and the like. I would use as much money you plan to save for the future into their education right now. Give them any edge they can get now and you will end up spending 1/3rd of what you originally planned for later.

That’s because the cost of higher education is going to drop dramatically for most students.

So who will hurt from these disruptions?

1. University deans, college presidents and the endowment chairs, who make over $1 Million per year.

2. Smaller unknown colleges who will see their enrollments drop dramatically and will likely have to shut down.

3. 529 plan administrators.

For the rest of us, quality higher education is going to be highly accessible.

Other

The “design” problem among Indian startups

63 Comments

This is going to be a very long post on design and startups in India and in particular the questions we have about design as a important discipline in India.

Speak to any investor and mentor / advisor in India and you will constantly hear the refrain “Indian companies need to get better at design” or “We dont design our applications very well and that’s the reason we dont have world-beating companies”.

Speak to an entrepreneur in India and they will state that “getting designers in India is very hard” and “hiring a design firm in India is very expensive”.

Over the last 1.5 years, we have been trying to solve the “design” problem for startups at the Microsoft accelerator and met with limited to no success.

The first part is to frame the “problem” correctly. Let us focus on the stages a startup goes through and look for opportunities and the needs for a designer. Then we will try to outline the solutions we offered and why (I think) they failed.

We’d love some advice on where we are going wrong and what we can do to solve this problem first for us in a small scale and then largely for the community in general.

In the very early stages the entrepreneur has an “idea” and they want to solve a problem. At this stage, they end up “napkin-ing” a solution and then trying to find ways to build a solution. Most entrepreneurs in India already believe they have a solution, so they do think they would be best at “designing” a solution as well. So the designers role is largely relegated to “give me some good color options” or “make me a kick-ass logo”, or “build a sexy website”. Most of this work is either done by friends or colleagues who moonlight and help the entrepreneur by offering a design.

In most hackathons  (over the last year I have judged and attended over 30 of them), the designer is the only role that is very hard to find in teams. You will get 20+ hack teams and only 4 designers. The teams that have convinced the designers that their idea will “win” the hackathon have designers. The rest of the teams end up largely having engineers perform “minimal” design.

The next stage is when the company is beyond the wireframe stage and actually building an application – mobile or web. At this stage, most folks would like to “hire” a designer, but complain that design talent at $8000 – $10,000 per year (4L to 6L INR) is too expensive. The entrepreneur believes the role of the designer at this stage is to take the “wireframes” they have designed and put together psd files, do a few revisions and then create the HTML and CSS files. Most entrepreneurs use inexpensive agencies or freelance consultants at this stage since they can’t afford to hire a full time designer. They also believe that hiring a full time designer is not something they can afford, since once the design is “complete”, they dont think there’s any work left for the designer. They’d rather hire a developer full time to keep adding features.

The stage beyond this is when they get some customer feedback and actually have users who are working with their application. This results in feedback that entrepreneurs are surprised with – things like – “It is not easy to use your application” or “I dont think the application is very nicely designed”. The other indirect way they get this feedback is when they tell me “I am not able to charge a premium for my product even though it has the same features as a US clone because my customers know that my app is designed in India”. At this point they do take design somewhat seriously and try to hire a designer. If they have gotten to this stage it is very likely that they have some funding so they can afford the designer who charges $10K per year we mentioned before.

Finally when a company is growing and scaling, new products, new features and new capabilities force them to think about design more seriously and they do end up hiring a design team – think of companies like Zomato, Cleartrip etc.

That is the background of the problem we encountered, which we have tried to solve in different ways.

Version 1 of our solution was to hire a seasoned design firm to do a 2 day (shortened from 5 days) workshop on design for entrepreneurs. While very well received initially, most entrepreneurs felt they liked the content, but they needed a person to implement the learning from the workshop. In other words – do it for me, don’t just tell me.

Our version 2 of the solution was to offer a design mentor for each of our startups who would spend 1/2 day or 4 hours each month helping the company with design. These mentors were seasoned practitioners at other companies who took time to help startups. The feedback we received after 3 months was there was too much “advice – gyan in India” and too little “action”. The entrepreneurs felt that the design mentors were able to point out issues that needed fixing but they were not willing (or more likely did not have time, since they were in a full time role already) actually implement the changes. Given that most entrepreneur teams did not have a full time design person on staff, the “advice” was useful and obvious, but they could not be implemented.

Version 3 of the solution was to hire a full time design staff of 4 resources (including a project manager) who will work with the companies to help them with the user experience, design and development of their application. These resources were available to all our companies, and they could very easily sign up to use these services, by just speaking to the project manager and outlining their design requirements, which could be as small as a new logo to as involved as a new website design or as complicated as redesigning a new application user experience.

After 4 months we abandoned the program, for 3 reasons. First, the resource utilization was less than 25% by our startups. Second, the design firm came to the conclusion that requirements from several teams were too vague and simple and third, many companies did not value the design team enough to give them quick turnaround (i.e they took 4 weeks to respond to the designer) on their design which they requested in the first place be done “in a week”.

Now we are back to the drawing board. While the high level problem “Indian startups need design help” gets visceral reactions including furious head-nodding and shaking of the head from investors, entrepreneurs and others, we still dont know what the solution to this problem is.

If you are an Indian entrepreneur who is in one of these stages, I’d love some advice and comments on what would be the ideal way to help you solve the “design” problem.

Or just let me know if I am barking up the wrong tree and let me know if there’s really no problem.

Afterword:

This post touched a nerve with over 20+ comments in the first hour of posting. There are a few clarifications to make. The design firm we used was excellent, because the same team is used by our accelerator at Israel and they LOVE working with the team. Second, I am looking for some suggestions on what do you think we should do to help, instead of just comments like “Founders should do design”. They don’t help us understand what we should do to help our founders.

Entrepreneurship, Learning

The pretender and the contender wear the same clothes

8 Comments

In the last year I have talked to over 800 entrepreneurs. About 200+ were discussions over 15 minutes. That roughly equates to about 1/2 my work time. This time was split between listening and learning from them and the rest was spent sharing some “gyaan“. For what it was worth, most of them were very nice to me and politely nodded when I dispensed my 2 minutes of “framework advice”.

What I have learned is that it is very hard to give an answer that’s cogent, well thought out and precise. In an era where there are enough advisors, mentors and other folks giving lots of advice, there’s a cottage industry sprung up around trying to “help” entrepreneurs and “grow” the ecosystem.

Here’s the challenge for us as entrepreneurs. The pretender and the contender both wear the same clothes, speak the same language and likely use the same words. We have to discern who’s who.

So what’s the framework to use to determine who you should listen to and who you should ignore?

There are enough folks suggesting that peer learning is the way to go. After all, what better than someone “like you” who has just been through the same path before. The pros of peer learning are usually – practical advice, “here’s what I did and it worked for me” and knowledge dished out without airs and graces. The cons are lack of context, the inability to give you a framework to think and providing answers to questions that you might never encounter.

There are other folks suggesting that “successful entrepreneurs” should provide you with the right advice. Meaning, folks who have seen relative measure of success and would be likely able to share more refined nuances of their journey. The pros are well thought out arguments, balanced perspective on what works and does not. The cons are that success comes over a long period of time. The things that worked a few years ago are rarely going to work as effectively.

Still others say the best advice is from “failed” entrepreneurs. They can possibly tell you everything you should not do, but not all the things you most likely should do. The pros are that you get to really understand that the rose colored glasses that are worn tend to be tinted anyway. The cons? – What should you do? Opposite of all the things the failed entrepreneur did?

At the end of the day it will become obvious that to have some modicum of success, you will have to blaze your own trail. Else someone who has done the “exact” same thing that you did, will likely “clean up” before him, leaving nothing but crumbs for others to “feast” on.

The only way to know who the pretender is and who the player is to watch them in action.

Which is why I highly recommend that you work with the advisor and mentor for a few weeks or a month before you actually bring them on board. For the first month, if they truly believe in what you are doing, they would offer their time for free, then you can overcompensate them for their work post that effort.

Entrepreneurship

Are Indian entrepreneurs “thin skinned” or misunderstood?

9 Comments

There are so many great tech entrepreneurs of Indian origin in the valley who have been successful over the last 2 decades. A last count indicated over 40% of all startups in Silicon valley were either started by or had an Indian cofounder.

This has led to several of them (entrepreneurs from the valley) and a few “industry observers” commenting and comparing the startup ecosystem in India to that in the valley. Most are not encouraging. From the outside looking in it is relatively easy to say “There are too many clueless people running incubators” – actual quote from a self-proclaimed Silicon Valley expert, or “Focus on local opportunities, not on global ones” – actual quote from a Tech Crunch article.

In both cases, many entrepreneurs in some closed Facebook groups that I am a part of, were all up in arms about these broad generalizations. The articles themselves were focused on many aspects of entrepreneurship as well in India, and the quote alone, taken out of context would be construed as a “passing mention”. Nonetheless many entrepreneurs took umbrage and the conversations denigrated into an abyss.

Back to my question about Indian entrepreneurs. Are we just thin skinned or misunderstood?

First, our startup ecosystem is fairly nascent. Comparing it to the valley is not doing either location any good. Both investors and entrepreneurs complain about each other constantly in both locations, though. Many investors claim entrepreneurs lack the depth, knowledge of the markets and understanding of what it takes to build a great business. Many entrepreneurs claim investors are risk-averse, predatory and bean counters without the expertise to build a business.

They are both are right, but both are wrong as well.

Market dynamics and conditions in India force both of them to play hands they are dealt with and I think so far we have done well. Comparing a teenager (Indian startup ecosystem) to a mature adult (Silicon Valley) does not make any sense though.

Second, I do believe that we can be more appreciative of each others positions and show a lot more empathy for our investors and founders. I am not suggesting a group therapy session, but knowledge and understanding of the constrained markets India has and the small exits that we generate does not help investors is important. Neither does expectation of Silicon valley type exits or “traction” help entrepreneurs.

Can we all get a little more thick skinned as well? – possibly. For most parts if you read a “self-professed expert”, such as myself or others, claiming to understand the nuances of the ecosystem, which you believe are incorrect, be direct and point it out, with a cogent argument explaining your point of view, instead of vitriolic comment spewing or worse – name calling without context.

Marketing

Guest post: How I Used Setback as a Setup for (PR) Success

1 Comment

Ever hear that saying…

“when life gives you lemons, make lemonade?”

Now, what happens if the lemons you get are covered in poop and smell like rotten milk, AND you ran out of sugar?

What then? Drink muddy, bitter lemonade that smells like durian?

Exactly. Believe it or not, it might turn up better than you imagined.

2011 was a really crappy year

  • I started a pet website that wasn’t doing so hot. I already pivoted a couple of times, and they all tanked.

  • I was down to my last few dollars in term of my bootstrap fund

  • I broke up with my ex a couple of months ago.

If shit is how you describe how you feel when you’re down, down I was straight doo-doo.

Now to make things worse, i lost my dog. A bunch of people came into my house to fix a broken door without calling me. My dog spooked and he ran for his life.

As a bachelor living by himself in a loft with his own dog and with his family thousands of miles away on the other side of the country, this was like losing a child.

I mean.. a grown man, crying alone in the dark.. drinking two buck chuck, lamenting over his lost dog.

If you never lost a dog before, you’ll never know the feeling.  Especially for me because my dog was the one real “family” that I had (in California), cared for, and loved.

I read somewhere that if you lose a dog and don’t recover it in the next 24 hours, your chances of finding it are pretty slim..as in, never.

The odds were against me.

  1. I didn’t have family who’d help me look during the day (when he’s visible). I had to ask friends for their time after they get out of work.. which by then, was too late.

  2. My dog didn’t have a pet tag on because his collar was being washed, which means no one can ID him even if they found him.

  3. My dog is completely black, which means he’s quite hard to see at night.. especially for car drivers

Of course, as an entrepreneur, i was used to fighting the odds and hoping for miracles.

So in span of first 40 hours of losing my dog, I was superman. I managed to

  1. call every vet, animal shelter, pet businesses in 3 mile radius

  2. (with help from my ex and a friend) posted 250+ flyers, dropped off 150+ posters in people’s mailboxes

  3. place ads on every possible place you can possibly think of, including Facebook ads and Google display ad network ads.

…all this on no sleep.

I even tried hashed up a simple auto dialer software using Twilio and a database I bought off the web, and called everyone in 4-5 zip codes.

Yes, I was on a mission.

I must’ve had 2-3 leads every couple of hours with my ads and with my auto dialer, but they all turned up to be all junk leads.

Until.. I got a phone call from a lady nearby. She told me that she saw my flyer at a nearby park in Willow Glen (San Jose, CA).

At this point, I wasn’t even sure if my dog was still alive. So many false leads, and people were telling me different things as far as where they thought he was heading. On top of that, he probably hasn’t eaten or drank anything. Maybe worse.. he got hit by a car or got attacked by a big dog.. and he died.

Funny how your mind plays all these crazy movies in your head when you’re in dire need.

But I told myself I can feel depressed any time i want. Let’s see if this lead takes me anywhere.

And in fact, IT WAS MY dog that they found…thanks to this awesome couple:

If you don’t know who he is, he’s a NHL San Jose Sharks team player Joe Pavelski.

At the time, I didn’t even know who he was or what he did.

All I noticed was his insanely big house in the middle of Willow Glen (a very posh neighborhood).

So I casually asked him what he did… and he replied “oh i play hockey.”

My initial thought: “What? there’s a hockey team in San Jose? NO WAY. When was this?”

<insert clown music here>

Yes, he was a celebrity. But at the time, I didn’t really think much of it

I just was so grateful that he found my dog that i just wanted to kiss the man.

(But I settled for just a picture with him.)

When my dog and I were reunited back home, I gave him a bath and fed him two HUGE bowls of his favorite dog food. After that, both of us hibernated for 14 hours.

Seize the Moment

When I woke up, I started wondering how I can use this story for my pet website.

Of course, I could’ve just posted this and shared with my Facebook fans and email subscribers at the time.. but I felt I could’ve gotten more of a BANG, so to speak.

So? I decided to email journalists, hoping that it would get covered… and it DID.

If you Google “joe pavelski dog”, the story got covered on NBC sports, CSN Bay area, and BUNCH of other sports sites that have page rank 5+.

Then voila.. i had a HUGE surge of traffic to my site, and because of that surge,

  • my email list increased by factor of 95%

  • i had 50+ backlinks to my funny pet picture website PawshPal

  • i had all these new men Facebook fans for PawshPal (99.9% prior to that were women)

If this were a link bait tactic, it sure as hell worked well.

So did it save the PawshPal business? Nope. It didn’t.

The people that opted in were more interested in Joe and/or sports.. and opted out.. and all those backlinks didn’t help much at all in terms new traffic. Indeed, not all traffic is good traffic.

But I learned a WHOLE lot about PR.

Key Lesson in PR

1) “Rub Off” Popularity

If you are not famous, you can “get” famous just by being next to them.

This is the basis for celebrity endorsement ads.

People seeing your product or service next to a celebrity gives (instant trust.

2) Don’t fight, instead praise

There are SEO and marketing “gurus” that claim that you should pick fights with journalists and bloggers to get some attention.

If not, spam them in the comment section.

Ugh.. here’s a better way.

Instead of fighting popular people, praise them and their fans will praise you.

Negativity can only get so far. On top of that, news is inundated with bad news.

Why join them? Try being positive for once. (Heck, try meditating.)

3) Promote yourself.

Your efforts don’t mean diddly squat if no one knows

Fundamentals of marketing – no matter how great you (or your product) is, if no one knows about it, you might as well have never done it.

Stop staring at the screen.

Start connecting. Start sharing. Start teaching. Start giving.

Then the world will give back.

4) Copywriting matters

If you do any marketing whatsoever, you know about copywriting.

Copywriting is about selling with words, conveying who you are, what you do, and why they should read your stuff.

Copywriting is probably THE most important skill for any marketer these days.

If my copywriting sucked, I doubt anyone would’ve read my story, including the journalists.

Without an interesting email subject line, the email would’ve never gotten read.

Without an interesting email body, the link would’ve never gotten clicked.

Without an interesting story, the journalists would’ve never linked back.

Without the journalists linking back, I would not be here telling you this story.

5) When things are bad, there’s usually a reason.

Like Steve Jobs said, you can connect the dots only looking backward, never forward.

If something bad happens, as long as you don’t stay down and depressed, you can use that story as a way to set yourself back up for something great like all great entrepreneurs do.

You just won’t know unless you fail, dust yourself, get back up, and try something different.

But don’t forget step #1 – dust yourself off and get back up.

Without step #1, there is no step #2.

Most importantly…

If all your marketing fails, “accidentally” lose and find your dog at a celebrity’s house.

Take your dog to your nearest celebrity’s house.

Call him and ask him if he’s seen your dog.

Of course, your dog is magically there.. then you cry.. give him a big hug.. take lots of pictures.. and send them to the press.

And voila! Free PR!

<insert evil laughter here>

Hell, my dog teaches me about business everyday.

===============================-=======================

0

TaeWoo Kim is an entrepreneur, a growth hacker, a speaker, and a blogger. You can follow him on Twitter (@TaeWooKim), Google+, and on his blog FreshSuperCool.com.

NPC

Building great outcomes in #payments only at #NPC2013 – Braintree acquired for $800 Million

1 Comment

Not every day do you get news of an $800 Million acquisition in technology especially for a 6 year-old company, but Braintree just got acquired by PayPal for that ginormous amount.

What’s that got to do with NASSCOM product conclave you ask?

Well if you want to know how the payments landscape is changing dramatically with the advent of Square, Recurring payments startups, NFC, Bitcoin and the innovation in India, there’s only ONE place to be this winter. (So register for #NPC2013 already)

The payments track at NASSCOM product conclave features some of the smartest minds who can help you make sense of this large, growing and dramatically changing space.

Payments is a very interesting space because there are inherent barriers for external companies thanks to regulation. This is a space that’s closely watched by RBI, the banks and politicians themselves.

There have been multiple versions and attempts at solving the payments problem in India. We are bringing together the top experts in the payments space – the innovators, the investors, the disrupters and the incumbents to give you a birds-eye view followed by a kickass opportunity view as well.

If you are looking to innovate in this space, these key movers and shakers are the people you want to network with and they are going to be in Bangalore on Oct 29th and 30th at the Taj Vivanta.

This session is not all talk either.

We have terrific demos from JusPay, CitrusPay, ZaakPay,Ezetap, Oxigen, Khosla Labs and many more.

The top customers and enablers of payments, many of who turned payments into a differentiation – Ashish of BookMyShow, Mekin Maheshwariof Flipkart/PayZippy, Subba from Cleartrip, Loney Antony from Prizm Payments,Sunil Kulkarni of Oxigen and others – will share their approaches and strategies to tackle this problem as well.

Additionally with Aadhaar becoming a big part of the national payments infrastructure, hear directly from the UIDteam on how the platform is creating disruptive opportunities.

This track is being curated by the two top entrepreneurs in the space – Sanjay Swamy (investor at Angel Prime and ex CEO of mChek) and Puneet Agarwal (ex-Google – mobile NFC and payments).

If there’s anyone you need to know in this space, it is highly likely they will be here.

Come join us – because if you can’t collect the money, your business is just a hobby!

NPC

The Global Startup Quiz at NASSCOM Product Conclave #NPC2013 #fun #unique

Most tech conferences offer you a plethora of speakers and peers to learn from. That’s par for the course. Many also offer practitioners who will guide you on the ways of the world – like the “blind leading the blind” Matthew 15:13-14. Others offer immense networking opportunities – cofounder dating, angel investor connections. Its matchmaking at its fastest. If marriages are made in heaven, cofounder dating assumes that heaven was made in a day.

How many promise you a fun time?

I mean a time that you will remember because you laughed so hard or when your pulse raced.

I mean, really, there’s no rule that says that you cant have fun once you join a startup.

Lets have fun. Big time.

Let me take you back a few years. Remember your days at school or college when you had a knack to remember the most mundane of things and store them in your head? Ahh! Those were the days my friend. Trivia seemed to find all the space in my head, but those damm chemistry equations never did.

Our volunteer team at NPC this year is an eclectic mix of folks who seem to think “fun is their birthright”.

So they are bringing you the Global Startup Quiz at NASSCOM Product Conclave this year.

You can form teams of 2-3 of your peers and participate in your knowledge of startup trivia.

The winner gets automatic funding** from Shekhar Kirani from Accel (who’s coming to NPC this year BTW)

** some restrictions apply, void where prohibited. subject to approval. conditions apply, fine print applies. do not operate after consuming alcohol. Plastic bag (part of the quiz) is not a toy. Keep away from adults – children only. Blah Blah Blah. Are you still reading this? go register for NPC

Yeah right! You wish.

You think you know your startup trivia?

Who said “Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life, or do you want to change the world?” – dude that was not Steve Jobs. Wrong!

Make a team and match your skills with the best in NassQuiz, a one hour quiz on technology products worldwide.

  • Questions on world tech biz (not just software)
  • Written prelims before the 1 hour event
  • Audience participation included – winners get spot T-Shirts or goodies
  • Audio, photo/video questions as well

So if you want to win the bragging rights as the startup trivia quiz Czar – you gotta be at NPC this year. Register now.

The personal blog of Mukund Mohan