Tag Archive for 'Technology'

Why India needs more tech software companies?

Published by Vikram on December 17, 2009 in Ecosystem, General and Ideas & Companies.
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We have seen lots and lots of startup companies coming up in our country since last few years. Companies ranging from matrimonial websites, job portals to even companies helping people sell their used online stuff. Now and then we keep getting portals which fall into larger categories of a specific list of online portals, some of which could be:-

  1. Matrimonial website
  2. Job portals
  3. Startup directory
  4. Web design companies
  5. Management systems like Hospital management system, School management system, College Management system etc
  6. Social communities and networking
  7. Online education support systems like preparing for IIT JEE, Medical entrance etc etc
  8.  Online T-Shirt selling portals

And the list goes to thousands of categories.

I ask a simple question to all our young entrepreneurs. With these kind of portal based companies ,who are your potential customers and what is your customer segmentation?

We could get following answers based on the business model of the company:-

  1. If they are directly selling the service to Indian customers then the money comes form the Indian masses
  2. If they are providing free information to the people through online portals then the money comes from advertising and that too only from those sources who are interested to put adds to a particular segment of visitors which would be mostly Indians

I do not want to discourage the attempts made by thousands of startups coming up from hundreds of universities from all over the country and even from people who are already well settled in a good job. My point is, you are doing so much to generate some money out of your business and that too comes from within your own country. Startups falling in similar categories are competing with each other for a segment of market which is  not growing at a sufficient rate to  support all of them for a sustainable and scalable business. The day is not far when you try to get an appointment with the IT head of a potential customer to show your product and you are waiting for your turn to come up may be next month. or later . The extreme example of these  are those start-ups claiming to provide business consulting or corporate profiling and having team members having low or almost no experience in these areas.

But, we should definitely appreciate the confidence our youngsters have and the ecosystem in our country which make theme start thinking about having their own business.

So, what is the problem and how to resolve it?

The problem is, that, we get too much exited about our  own ideas and start loving it so much that we are almost confident that this will turn into real business. I am talking about  most  of those ideas which strike us during the dinner last night and we just jump into making a venture out of it without doing sufficient survey about the market and the competition. And what happens when you jump into business with these kind of ideas?. Well, you start shifting your domain slowly and end up having a business with no goals or road map, but, to just to think about sustainance. In fact, i know about few companies which started with some great ideas and ended up providing web solutions to local market.

So, what we might agree upon till this stage is that:

  1. We need to start building products and solutions which have a larger market, the market itself should have possibility of getting bigger in future
  2. With bigger market segments there will be bigger competition (only if you are building an existing solution), but , the kind of competition you will face will be entirely different from the one you find in a limited market
  3. Building already existing solution in a small market will be a recipe for disaster in most of the cases with few exceptions
  4. You can beat competition in both markets (limited and global) with a unique product or value proposition, but the returns with a unique product will always be higher if you target global market.

In a nut shell, if you are planning to build a startup  from India , where the cost of building software based technologies are low as compared to western countries, you should look into following issues:-

  1. Do not try to build yet another startup trying to sell something which hundreds of startups are already doing
  2. Try to leverage the advantage of online business and sell something which can be distributed globally and should be useful not only to Indians but to the other countries as well
  3. Try to have major stream of your revenue from foreign exchange. Making good amount of money from domestic market is something you will always be doing

Everything said and explained, where do we see this model working?

Why don’t you find it yourself. Search for technology startup companies from India and you will get lot of insight into the discussion we had with this article. I am not denying the fact the common portal based companies have also been successful in past. But, we should also look into the fact that thousands of them are lying there today without doing anything significant and generating revenue through Google ad sense and many more will come up. What we need the most is start having an understanding of building unique technology startups from India which can sell worldwide. After all, this is what large number of foreign companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple, you tube, Symantec etc have done. When do we get to see our own Googles and Microsofts?

We Really Don’t Dream Big Enough.

Published by Vijay Anand on November 2, 2008 in Ecosystem and Musings.
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I grew up with a poster in my room saying “The size of your world is as big as your dreams”. It was always there when you woke up to remind you to think beyond the box. It still hangs there in my room at my parents place. It’s the thought that came into my mind when I was browsing through the net, listening to some of the folk’s interpretation of Entrepreneurship.

It seems  to me as if there are a couple of theories floating around these past few weeks.

a) Entrepreneurship is overrated. Entrepreneurship is romanticized, and the often tweeted and retweeted phrase seems to be “My son is without a job, ah! he is an entrepreneur”. Well, That’s probably pushing it far, and yep, perhaps we are breaking the elitism that was once associated with being an “entrepreneur”, but isn’t this what we wanted with all the publicizing that we did and urging one another to chase their dreams? I do see that this could dampen the ones that pride in elitism, but as far as things go, there will always be a gulf between those who can dream, ideate and implement, and those who just wear the badge and do nothing. And really, the more the merrier in this party.

b) There is also this other camp, that seems to think that, Entrepreneurship is too Web 2.0-ised. I can emphatize with this camp.  I dont think entrepreneurship in India is equated with a venture in the web 2.0 world, but most of us derive our first impression from the media that we consume and web 2.0 is essentially Media and new age consumption of those content. You get hit by it in the face over and over again, till you find something interesting. That doesn’t mean that there arent other sort of ventures going on out there. Manufacturing is still one of our strongest sectors and there are plenty of neat things cooking up in that camp. So for those of you freaking out with the thought of drowning in Web 2.0 Gyaan, take heed, there is a bigger world out there - you just need to step out more.
Continue reading ‘We Really Don’t Dream Big Enough.’

The Startup WorkForce : A Proposal to the Community.

Published by Vijay Anand on October 12, 2008 in Musings.
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This is a wonderful time to be starting up. You will come across very few people who will give comparisons to all the benefits they get working for big corporates. Its one such time. Hiring will be slightly easier, and retaining them will be even more easier.

Even in the midst of all that, it does seem that a lot of the Startup Companies are hardpressed for resources here in India. Here’s a solution.

A few of us have been talking about putting together a centre that trains people (as blank slated as freshers) on the common technologies that people use while building Web related products - the usual PHP, Python, AJAX, MySQL, etc etc and getting them upto speed on mashups, APIs, documentation, and moving forward. That is the level of skill that most of the startup community folks are looking for it seems. Or am I wrong here?

If I am right, then there is a simple way around it. Every chapter of OCC in the country is doing quite well. I heard from Santhosh that Pune is a 300 people group now (though I do suspect that the turn out ratio would be still less), but who knew Pune had 300 people who would be open to being part of a community right? And the same case has gone on with Bangalore, Kolkatta, Hyderabad, Chennai, Delhi, and even now and then with Mumbai.

Here’s the thought. What if in one of the OCCs a dozen of the startup companies, especially the folks who can code and code really well, commit that they will run a two month training program for people in these languages? It is going to take a bit of time and commitment, but there are a lot of resources already on the web, and with a couple of screencasts, and proper documentation, you could essentially also use it as training material for the next batch of people that you hire in your company later on.

What I am proposing is that a batch of technology entrepreneurs, each taking a week to cover different aspects of the course, could put their hands together to collaboratively solve an issue which is haunting a great many of them.

Continue reading ‘The Startup WorkForce : A Proposal to the Community.’

Neeru Khosla On Education and Doing a Startup

Published by Kamla Bhatt on June 9, 2008 in Interviews.
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Neeru Khosla ’s name might ring a bell for some people. She is married to the legendary venture capitalist Vinod Khosla. In all these years Neeru has remained firmly under the radar and took care of her family. But for the past couple of years Neeru has been diligently working away on a non-profit organization that runs more like a startup called CK-12. The organization is focussed on creating flexbooks or customized content in math and science for US highschool teachers and students. All you need is access to the Internet and a printer and anybody around the world can create and print these flexbooks. Neeru and her co-founder Murugan Pal have ambitious plans and are also working on creating a social networking site for teachers and students. CK-12’s offering will be unveiled later this year in August.

I met Neeru a couple of times this past month in her Palo Alto office to find out more about CK-12 and what prompted her to do this non-profit organization and what kind of help and feedback she got from her husband. Does Neeru have a better understanding of her husband’s work now that she is running a startup? How is she juggling home and her startup life? How is her husband pitching in to help her? You can listen to the interview where Neeru talks about CK-12, entrepreneurship and her husband.

Pradeep Khosla: The Entrepreneurial Dean of Carnegie Mellon University

Published by Kamla Bhatt on April 30, 2008 in Ideas & Companies and Interviews.
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How does Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), a renowned research US university foster research and a spirit of innovation among its students and faculty? How does CMU do tech transfer? What is unique about the US university system that helps in creating startups and companies?

Is there something that India can learn from the US University system? How can India establish a US style research institute and create an ecosystem for entrepreneurship? Can India learn to leverage research conducted at universities at an economic level? These are some of the questions that Pradeep Knosla, Dean of School of Enginering Carnegie Mellon University talks about in this audio interview.

As Pradeep points out there is no major Indian company that can trace its inception to university research. India has to figure out how to leverage the research money it spends to bring about economic development.

Pradeep is an entrepreneurial dean, who combines his passion of being in a university environment and also pursuing his entrepreneurial dreams. He helped found two companies, one of which succeeded and the other did not. In this candid interview Pradeep shares his thoughts on what he learned from the failure of their company, which was in the hot new space of virtualization and received seed funding from Silicon Valley’s Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers.

A New Kind of Incubation Model. Part III

Published by Vijay Anand on April 21, 2008 in Ecosystem and Musings.
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Ever since the journey with Proto.in started, about two years ago, I can safely say that I’ve sifted through atleast 300+ company profiles. I’ll hit you with the bad news first: Most of them are hopeless. They are half-baked solutions. They probably are great hobby projects and shouldn’t even allowed to be classified as a “startup” or a Product. Most of them lack business sense - to the point that if you did get a chance to see some of them, you might totally lose hope on the startup scene in India altogether.

Of course, the good news, is that the evolution is happening extremely rapidly. I am seeing lesser and lesser of the type of companies that I described above, and more holistic companies starting to appear. So what’s the issue? Not all is happy and merry yet.

Lately, I am seeing quite a bit of companies that seem to be addressing some very valid problems, and coming up with solutions that do make sense and would work. The only issue is that since most of them have a problem hiring, and a much bigger issue validating the concept and running the pilot that they end up building one piece of the puzzle and it takes them far too long to roll out the “solution”. The funny thing is that, mentally I can clearly see that there are different pieces of the same puzzle being put together by different groups. I simply can’t understand why they can’t collaborate and work together to target the problem.

So, yes, there are issues with this. First of all, since all of them are startups, and all being run by founders, there would be some issues with personality clashes as to how things are done. But lets face it. There are atleast seven players for every single component that is being made for the same problem out there. I think there are plenty of options of teams to choose from.

Before I do get blamed for pulling this out of thin air, here’s an example of something that works somewhere else. There is a Firm that I am aware of that operates out of an emerging nation. The way they work is that they fund certain entities to create knowledge and IP. Their IP could be as simple as a new recipe for a cake (quite seriously!). The firm identifies entrepreneurs in a location, and helps this entrepreneur create a franchisee location, and is given the know-how as to how to create these recipes and sell them. He is given just about six months of time when he is hand-held and guided on the art of running a businesses.

Six months later, the firm goes and finds an entrepreneur, exactly in the opposite side of the country and does the same thing. Follows up in another three months with another entrepreneur in another location, etc etc and repeats all above steps till they have five or six stable entrepreneurs who are running local units in different parts across the country. Then their only focus is to pump all their energy, and resources into these five units and watch with whom the entrepreneurial leadership kicks in. Once that is identified, they create a new entity, merge all these five units under it, place this “leader” as the manager, and take a stake out of this new entity.

The positive note for the firm in all this is that, they take equity out of a firm which has a high chance of success since its run by not one but five entrepreneurs who are well versed in the same business, understand local diversity, and have crossed the issue of scalability, and probably are leaders and hence will ensure that their local unit grows and thrives.

If you take that model and see how to apply a version of it in the context of India, and the technology space, I’d say that for most problems, the solution is broken and built by various companies - mostly small teams, two or three people. It would be interesting for a firm, or an incubator to pick a aching problem, and bring together startups who are building pieces of the puzzle. Come up with a formula (perhaps on revenue, team size, and product readiness) as metrics and figure out the percentage each company will hold, on a new entity that will be created and promoted as the solution to this problem.

Simple case in point: Ordering Food over the net. It is going to require a hotel network front, a logistics front, and perhaps a LBS, technology front. Hungry Bangalore + OrderMonger + Yulop is a solution to go with. You at least need these three bare minimum teams to come together if the Seamless web is the kind of end-result that they are aiming for. I am sure there are other alternatives and maybe other elements as well, that other companies can bring in.

Firms, since they do enjoy the same bird’s eye view that Proto.in enjoys can definitely put together this high level working arrangement, and someone will have to “architect” and manage these teams, atleast initially till their co-existence structure gets ironed out and they find their roles. But its certainly do-able.a

I strongly believe that this kind of lego-work will probably increase a few more holistic startups in the indian scene. If it does come together and work, it will probably one of the most high energy teams, since all the founders will be the guys who will be driving this, and there is no comparison to that - ever.

Related Posts:

A New Kind of Incubation Model. Part I

A New Kind of Incubation Model. Part II

Please leave your comments and what you think here