For all those of you missing me in action....

I'm leaving for a 2.5 month sojourn in India starting Saturday. Most of the time will be spent on work. This will be the first time I'm working from India since I've been to the US. Peak of summer might not be the best time to be in India, but I'll only know for sure only once I try it.

I will try to chronicle my experiences working in India as a temporary NRI returnee. Now, back to packing for the trip.....

Great New Service from Google Labs - Google Ride Finder

Just noticed this great new service from Google Labs - Google Ride Finder. You can find the taxis closest to your location using this. Its a good thing some taxi companies have GPS on their cabs. The number of cab companies Google has hooked up into seems limited, but its a start. I am impressed!

Investing in India Conference

There is an upcoming conference on investing in India - beyond BPO - but longer term investments such as real-estate, investment banking, VC financing etc. organized by the South Asia Business Group at the University of Chicago. IIT Midwest, is a marketing partner and people I know are organizing it. The speaker list seems pretty impressive. For more details, click here.

Sales cycles and startups

Today I attended the TiE Midwest sponsored 'Sales Cycles for Startups' presentation. A few tips I picked up:

* Don't rejoice on your first sale - rejoice only when you know that your customer is actually using your product
* Intellectual honesty helps - remember that people aren't always out to cheat you - its in their best interest to see that you remain in business if they put their skin in the game
* Never give your product off for free - ensure that your customers put their skin in the line = this also ensures that you get greater buy in and more people than just the folks you interact with agree to the utility of your product
* Entrepreneurs go to VCs in a moment of weakness - Interesting statement by Mohan Warrior
* Enterprises may be early adopters in their core area of business - Investment Bankers deal with information and therefore may invest in information tech. that gives them a competitive edge, while a manufacturing firm may be an early adopter in manufacturing tech but not necessarily IT
* Try to get a sponsor/champion for your product at your customer site
* KNOW your customers before you approach them with a solution. Don't force a solution on them unless you truly believe it will help them.
* Be ready to punt - in case you've tried selling to a customer for a long time or someone corners you into a negotiation that can make you go under - be ready to let go

Some more tips:
* You may want to give discounts to your customers in exchange for publicity such as a press release stating they use your product
* Get a recurring revenue stream from something simple - like a BPO operation - to feed your product development

Travelling and Managing...

Did some travelling last week to meet potential customers. Feedback was good. Work's been busy... more later.....

Don't discard those ridiculous ideas

MIT's Tech Review magazine has an interesting editorial on innovation and how the ideas that sound most ridiculous at first may not be so.

In 1998, I ate lunch with an entrepreneur at a vegetarian restaurant in San Francisco. The entrepreneur, an ascetic and a yogi with startling blue eyes, spooned a lone bowl of bean soup and told me, "Software is a living tree." He said he had invented a new kind of software called PowWow that "would allow people to run in tribes on the Internet." He boasted that Tribal Voice, his new venture, would be the physical manifestation of what Indian shamans call "the golden thread." I was nonplussed.

Yet Tribal Voice could not be immediately dismissed, because the entrepreneur was John McAfee, the founder of the antivirus company McAfee Associates, for some years the most profitable company on earth. In 1989, when McAfee Associates was starting up, its business seemed as ridiculous as Tribal Voice did in 1998. It gave away its most important program, VirusScan, and sold licenses and support to corporations. This idea had made John McAfee supremely rich.

Humor: Blogo, ergo sum (I blog, therefore I am)

I was browsing around and stumbled across this site - "Latin Phrases" - its got a whole list of Latin phrases for the sophist in us all, most notable being:

Cogito, ergo sum.
I think, therefore I am.

Sum, ergo edo.
I am, therefore I eat.

Cogito, ergo doleo.
I think, therefore I am depressed.

Cogito sumere potum alterum.
I think I’ll have another drink.

Qualem muleirculam!
What a bimbo!

Qualem blennum!
What a doofus!

According to the site - "Impress your friends and relatives, talk to them in Latin. Remember:
"quidquid latine dictum sit altum viditur" (anything said in Latin sounds profound)."

My blog, my photo-album, my bulletin board, me

Thanks to all my friends who wished me on becoming an uncle. This is the first piece of news that my friends actually found out through my blog before I talked to them individually. :-)

PSP: 'cause its so cool!

I had lunch with some friends (former collegues) on Sunday. Had some interesting discussions on our careers, tech trends, business in general. It was a meeting of techies - one of whom incidentally has turned to, as some of my friends may say, 'the dark side' and transformed into a management consultant, whose tech background comes in handy. It was fun to meet all of them together again after these couple of months.

Obviously as one would imagine, the conversation also included an analysis of the latest gadgetry - and in our case the PSP - play station portable. It found it funny that my friend bought a PSP - especially considering that he is no avid gamer. His excuse? - 'its just too cool not to buy!' I admit, the PSP is one of those devices, I would love to buy and keep in my collection, even if I never end up using it. The device simply blows my mind everytime I think about it. Technically, its almost flawless - industrial design, functionality (minus its lack of bluetooth) and of course the video and 3-D graphics rendering capability. This is truly a leap in mobile computing - considering its form factor and feature set. We've almost come to point where we take laptops and their increasingly functionality for granted. The PSP on the other hand, with its integrated WiFi and graphics rendering capability truly opened up my eyes to the potential of mobile multimedia. If they can somehow make the form factor a little sleeker and smaller, and incorporate a decent sized hard drive, Sony could integrate the Walkman MP3 player with the PSP to give the iPod a run for their money. I suppose the only things next would be a DVBH tuner and a GSM processor (from Sony Ericsson). It might seem like the Doom-ed (pun intended) Nokia n-Gage all over again, but this time, it would be executed by someone who's truly a leader in all the pieces..... hmm....

Happy Birthday, Jasim Haneef

My nephew Jasim Abjin Haneef was born on April 5th, 2005. Welcome to the family ! :-)

What is the most important resource in a tech startup?

Is it your timing? Market outlook? The money you have? Or your people?

If money were the only thing, the IBMs and Microsofts of the world would have being doing ALL the innovation and technology development. And timing, in my opinion is what you make for yourself. There are always opportunities out there and it is finding the right opportunities that create what is know as 'good timing'.

IMHO, and from my limited experience, the most important resource any startup, or any company for that matter, is their human resources. Everything else can be bought or made, but not this. In my opinion, startups especially, need to focus on developing their key differentiator - its people. Keep your people happy and motivated and you can get through any amount of trouble. Money is definitely critical, but what most investors - private or VCs look for in a company is not necessarily their business plan, or the technology, but instead, they invest in people. As long as the people can deliver, there will always be money out there to be had. But, have a demoralized team, and there can never be any hope.

Unfortunately from my experiences, I've realized that it takes a while to make some people realize that. And in most cases, it happens too late. I hope with greater management responsibility, I am able to learn from the mistakes of employers I've seen/heard of in the past and make a change in this line of thinking.