This is performance review time (at least in US) and I have been posting about my thoughts on these on my blog. One of the topics that I deal with regularly is the need to grow the engineers and managers reporting to me to the next level, in a way manage their career according to […]
Career/Talent Management for individuals
One of the thought process I have been going through ever since I posted my previous (and only) post in June ’07(giving back to society in the area of education) is the notion of career/talent management for individual careers in Indian companies. Particularly, the fact that if you look at the talent lifecycle of an […]
Partnerships between startups
Hi , I have been thinking a lot about using strategic partnerships to generate the early customer traction. I feel a lot of startups can save costs if they go for a strategic partnership with another startup. That way they can easily cash on their common customers and would be a win win situation for […]
Eko- Beyond the Inner Circle
Our use of restricted stock to get advisors/talent has worked very well. Plans at Eko are aggressively on track and we have had some exciting developments. We will be closing our early employee restricted stock offering by Jan 31, 2008. It is already closed for other categories such as advisors. We have also worked on […]
Harish Gandhi joins Canaan Partners
Happy to announce that Harish Gandhi has joined Canaan Partners’ India team. Prior to joining Canaan Partners, Harish headed the Value Added Services (VAS) Business and the New Product Development team at Bharti Airtel. In his product development role, Harish was responsible for working with a number of VAS product, service and content companies as […]
The Druvaa Story – II
[ I was planing a small musing and then saw a post from Sumeet, so thought of completing it. ] Almost two months back, Druvaa hit its lowest … and merely 1 month from our first few paid deployments we were holding heads in hands with no clue how to proceed further. Low on resources, […]
Domestic BPO market – next big opportunity?
Avendus has a report out on the domestic BPO sector. With the decline of the dollar and the expansion of the India domestic market in all spheres, could this be the next big opportunity? Historically, the outsourcing market in India has been export focused and most participants have been focusing their energies in building businesses […]
Inflection point for Mobile VAS?
ET had an interesting article a couple of days ago on declining SMS usage in India –http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Indians_dont_just_talk_less_… While the absolute number of SMS’s sent continue to grow (simply because Indian operators continue to add subs at a mind-boggling rate), the average SMS message per user fell significantly in the Sep. quarter relative to the June […]
VentureWoods India Venture Polls 2008
Results of VentureWoods 2008 India Venture Polls are out! Interesting findings: Activity is predicted to shift to areas that have been a “wait and watch” last year – mobile data services, ecommerce, online education, local language etc. It will be interesting to see if these remain at that stage or finally mature. A lot of […]
The dilemma of being an entrepreneur
I think entrepreneurship is a fashion nowadays rather than being a passion. And there are many blogs, which add air to the wanna-be-entrepreneur feeling. We see the success of the other entrepreneurs but fail to see their struggle and how hard they have learnt from their failures. What we see on the blogs is which […]
State of Innovation in India
Read Write Web has an interesting article on the state of innovation in India. I agree with most of what the author says in terms of transition over last ten years. Within the context of technology businesses, which is what the article focuses on, I am not sure of whether concept arbitrage theme (which is […]