Category Archives: Personal

Insights into the anatomy of the Indian entrepreneur – Work-hobby and Work-life balance

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Friends at Scibler came to me the other day to tell me about their customer development efforts. This is by far the one team I have encountered with the highest IQ across the board and the commitment to learning about their customers *while* they develop their product. Their rigor, analysis, consistency and dedication to understanding their target customer, the relevant messaging and positioning before launch is unparalleled among Indian startups.

They found 3 personas of people who would be their customers – Work-work, Work-hobby and Work-life.

The Work-work persona is a rarity anywhere in the world, but more so in India. Among those who work for a big company or at a government agency, this person is an absolute “blue moon“. This kind of person loves their work. They live, breath, eat, sleep their work. From when they were kids they dreamed about doing something in the area of their work. I find few Indian entrepreneurs in this bucket as well, but they are as rare in India as they are in the US.

The Work-hobby persona is someone that does their “day job” to keep the lights on. This is a finance person who does accounting at a large company to earn 2,000,000 (20L or $40K) per year to maintain her EMI, drive a foreign import to work and send her kids to a “good school”. But the passion, desire and fun is Bharatanatyam. I actually know a person who does this exact same thing. She devotes her waking hours outside of work to Bharatanatyam. She’s also a realist and knows that it wont put the food on the table in India. So she continues to slave away at the large company, doing mindless work just so she can make enough money or save enough to pursue her hobby full time.

The Work-life persona is someone that has a job, but he has a life as well. Meaning, he enjoys food, friends, art, culture, movies, books, music, and a whole host of endless options that “living” gives you. He’s not committed to the one “hobby” or is not passionate about that “one thing”. He’s yet to find that one thing that matters to him the most. If you ask him about the one hobby, he’ll likely say “cricket”, “family”, “kids”, “shopping” or “sleeping”. He is not too particular about the type of work as long as it gives him enough money to “live”.

I often meet all 3 of these types of folks becoming entrepreneurs. I have been known to go on record stating that very few of the work-life or the work-hobby will actually succeed. In fact if they do, I’d consider that an exception. For an entrepreneur, work and their startup’s work in particular has to be the thing they breath, dream, eat and sleep.

As an entrepreneur if you are not doing something you like, have a passion for and enjoy, I’d highly recommend you dont do it. You will likely be in two minds at the first obstacle and trust me there are many obstacles for startup entrepreneurs in India.

The big difference between Indian entrepreneurs I meet and those I meet in the valley is that most work-hobby folks in the US end up making their hobby their work. So they also become work-work personas.

They can do this and succeed since there is a market for unique, new, interesting hobby “stuff” given how rich the nation is and how advanced their markets are.

In India the best you can do if you want to make your hobby a big part of your life is to make it  a “side bijiness“. I meet at least 20-30% of employees at a large or small company in India, having a side-bijiness.

The question I get asked by entrepreneurs a lot is what persona type should I hire?

I see most entrepreneurs looking to hire that elusive work-work persona. There are so many Indian entrepreneurs, who claim to have a culture that attracts the work-work persona, and those folks that are passionate employees. I hate to tell them they are being fooled and really if I talked to their employees, they’d tell me they’d rather start their own company, but dont have the risk profile to do so.

Here’s the real truth.

The work-work folks will not be working for you in India. They would rather be entrepreneurs themselves, since they live their work.

So the best you can do as an entrepreneurs is to hire a work-hobby or work-life persona. I’d highly recommend you dont get frustrated if they dont give you a 100%, because really their mind is elsewhere.

As long as they give you what they commit to, be happy, move on.

Above all be a force of good.

The fallacy of “funding” event as a key media story

Every one of my journalist friends asks me for “exclusive” stories, which I can understand. What I am very upset about is that their next request is for “exclusive funding stories”.

I had a reporter come by to talk today to me about our companies. He mentioned that his opinion was companies that were funded performed better than those that were not.

His primary reasoning was that those companies were  ”filtered” by investors and the “due diligence” was done, so they were “better” companies.

There are many times I would disagree but keep quite and move on. This time I did not.

 

<Rant>

This was one of those times when I felt the person was just plain misinformed, misguided and did not really look at any of the facts, but preferred to have anecdotal information color his opinion.

The mountains of evidence that proves his opinion incorrect was insufficient for this reporter  to change his fundamental position.

1) Funded companies have higher % of failures than unfunded companies.

2) Funding does not guarantee success but success guarantees funding.

3) The value that an investor provides towards “due diligence” is limited. If you take a look at venture returns over 90% of funds do not have any success in picking “winners”.

I am the first to admit that its extremely hard to get any kind of funding. Its harder in India, but does that mean companies funded in India are somehow “better” than those that are not funded? At best my argument is they have just about as much chance of success as any of the others.

What does a funding event really tell you about a company?

Its tells me that the company needs money and was able to get it.

Does it tell me that the company will succeed? No? Exhibit A is the eCommerce companies that many investors funded in 2010-11 in India.

Does it tell me that the company is targeting a large market? Possibly, but that’s true of the many other companies that did not get funded, but are chasing the same market.

Does it tell me that this company has potential – it has as much or as little as the others that are not funded.

In fact over 73% of publicly listed companies were not venture backed.

I would consider any reporter downright lazy if they left the “due diligence” only to investors alone, because investors overall (including me as an individual) are more wrong than right.

Why do I make a big issue of this with reporters as opposed to any other person?

1. They are supposed to be objective and fact based as opposed to have their opinions color their judgment.

2. They are supposed to question their assumptions and seek the truth not report fallacies.

3.  They wield an inordinate amount of power given the number of people that read their pieces.

I’d love a counter argument and understand why reporter love “funding stories”.

P.S. I also dont understand why people wont debate their positions. It tells me that they are not confident about any of their hypothesis or positions and would rather be ignorant and prefer to have misinformed opinions.

</Rant>

Why do founders split? 1. Differing visions

Over the last 4 months, I have heard of or at least 8 companies closing down because of “founder issues”. Overall this number of companies that I have been tracking personally where the company closed was 14. So relatively speaking the number of companies that closed because the founders split is larger than “lack of funding”. The only other reason I have heard have been lack of traction. These are companies in the valley and India BTW.

Why do we have so many companies which close because of founder issues?

I tried calling and talking to many of the founders separately to understand what the issues were and its not clear that there are the same that plague most “marriages”.

Most married couples split because of financial issues, compatibility issues or “cheating”.

With most founders, I cannot point to the 3 main causes yet, since I have limited data, but I can share what happened in some of these cases, based on my understanding of their situation. Sometimes, my understanding was colored by my impression of one of the founders, but I tried to remain objective about the situation.

Differing vision of where to take the company. This was cited by most of the founders.

“We  used to talk about where we wanted to take the product. We had a general direction and were fairly aligned. Then it started with a few features that we had different opinions on. In a matter of weeks we would constantly fight about every feature. The constant fighting drove our team mad and we decided to split”.

“We started with targeting large enterprise customers, since my co-founder had a few relationships there. We found that many had a long time frame to get us on board as a vendor. Then we decided to change our target to mid-sized companies. That changed the vision of our product and some key features, which the developers could not deliver on. I still thought we could focus on larger customers, but my co-founder did not and we decided to split”.

Many times, the vision of the company is considered very sacred by the founders. Which is a good thing. Alignment of vision is hugely important. I can also see how the vision changes at times, since the initial assumptions made, usually change as you go to market and meet customers.

Some founders are flexible about that change and are willing to be patient about finding that vision, whereas others want to stick to a vision they originally came up with.

If you are a solo founder and are looking for a co founder, it is hard to determine flexibility of your co-founder since most people seem reasonable and fairly flexible during the first few months. I tried to formulate a list of questions to ask – largely scenario based, such as what would happen if this were to occur, or how would you react if this happened?

Most times when I asked those questions of people I got fairly good answers which I consider are reasonable.

These questions did not help very much though, since as we talked about before, vision’s change and so do people’s impressions.

When you ask the objective question in a non threatening situation, it is easy to be collected, objective and composed.

That’s rarely the case when product shipments are behind, payroll is delayed and a customer contract is taking longer than anticipated.

What takeaway do I have from this main reason for founder’s splitting?

If you have not worked together for a “significant period” of time, its very difficult to find out if your co-founder is flexible to change.

So what do I now do as a result of this learning?

I prioritize teams where founders have not worked together for a significant period of time, much lower. If you have a co-founder you have met at a hackathon event, or a startup event, and have been working on your company for 4-6 months, then I would likely pass on your company.

Its not because I dont like your idea or product, its because of demand and supply. Right now, I get many more companies where co-founders have worked together for much longer and have recency of shared vision.

In the next post I will talk about another reason why founders split – performance and execution.

What are some ways to tackle the lack of time problem?

There are many things that I am unable to prioritize high or make time for anymore. One of those things is taking time to make serendipity happen. Just random, chance meetings. Those happen, only face-to-face.

I tried dialing back in 2012, only to fail miserably.

The problem is like most other folks, I am unable to say no.

That leaves me with very little time for things that are absolutely important and I end up shortchanging those the most.

The last year in particular I have worked – attended meetings, spoken at events and hosted events on 23 of my 52 Saturdays. 

I dont like that at all since it takes time away from me spending time with my kids and family.

I have a new project with my daughter for the last 2 weeks that we are working on which should take us 30+ weekends. My son’s cricket sessions need me to be there at least 1 day a week to catch up with the coach. Finally my youngest daughters need more time to just hang out with me. I have also committed to mentor 3 folks who I work with closely.

So I unfortunately have no time for new projects or mentoring new entrepreneurs at all. I apologize.

I love helping new entrepreneurs a lot. I enjoy my interactions. I cant make time.

So I am going to try and not be at any new startup events unless we have them at our office for this quarter. Let me see how that goes. I have one commitment to meet folks in Delhi on Feb 22nd.

I have a question:

Is it okay for me to ask folks to reduce the time they can meet me and talk about their product / company to just the time of the event? I wont be able to give a lot of time, even at the event, but that’s a choice I am making.

Is that being too selfish?

Trakdot Luggage Tracker – the best CES gadget

TrackDot

TrackDot

Phones, Televisions, Tablets and Watches were on display at the CES in Las Vegas, but one device which I have been tracking for a few months is TrackDot.

It is a little big, but totally awesome device that helps you track your checked-in baggage.

I rarely check in bags when I am travelling on business, but with 4 kids its hard for us to not check-in bags on vacations.

So far we have not yet lost our bags, but a couple of times my bags have arrived ” a day late” which is a major inconvenience during vacations.

TrackDot will track your baggage an let your smartphone know where your baggage is.

You put it in your bag and it sends a signal to your app on the phone so you can know exactly where it is.

It is in its version 1, so there are many limitations:

1. Its big. If fitbit can be made as small as it is, I guess TrackDot can be too. I am waiting for the next version to be smaller than my fitbit so I can conceal it in my bags.

2. It can only detect your luggage when its closer than 30 meters of your smartphone – that’s lame.

3. At $50 onetime fee, $9 one time setup and $12 annual fee, its a tad on the expensive side, for the value it provides.

4. It needs 2 AA batteries to operate. Also lame.

Ideally I’d like it to be small enough so it can be stitched into the bag / luggage. If it were offered at $25 one time purchase for the device and $10 per year for tracking upto 1 Km, that would be all we need.

Another feature I’d really like is to understand where it was last located. That will really help understand where it was possibly lost. And if it does have tracking send ability why not have it send  its location to a server where it could be located on my app on the phone.

Bag in Fargo, you in New York, but you’d still know it was in Fargo last!

My news diet & media consumption habits

Its very hard to not read or avoid any “other” news, especially disturbing ones. I have personally avoided reading physical newspapers for the last several years. My online Google news app is my sole news source and is customized to technology, business & science news with a few stories about sports. General news, entertainment news or politics are out. The only other reading I do is on my Google reader, which has largely developer and technology blog feeds. My general “surfing” the web is rather rare unless it appears on my Facebook or Twitter feeds.

Since we have not had a television for the last 5+ years, the only time I tend to watch television is when I walk into our office and the TV monitor near the security guard has something on. That lasts a total 10 seconds.

I do get a lot of criticism from friends about this topic. Being largely ignorant about general happenings, my conversations tend to be largely uni-dimensional. I loathe any conversations about politics, dislike talking about celebrities or movies and cant carry a sports conversation beyond 10 minutes.

I mention this because I got an message yesterday from someone who asked me to attend a meeting for a gun control bill or crimes against women (or for its support I dont remember). I ignored it. Then got another message from another friend. I “unsubscribed from that facebook message”. I am sure they think I am heartless or cruel or both.

Truth is I like living in my “fake world” of technology and entrepreneurship. Out here the issues are  superficial, like choosing between a Nokia Lumia phone and a HTC One X.

I also realize I cannot avoid the real world. So I limit my interactions with it or learning about topics such as guns. That’s my way of trying to paint a rosy picture of the world for myself. I know its probably not very healthy, but that’s the path I have chosen.