Among various benefits internet offers to its users, “Voice of the customer†is one of the most powerful tools. The notion “Customer is the King†is absolute reality in the internet age. Let me share a recent real life incident in which I personally experienced the power of being online. Last year I bought a […]
Sponsor a Business
Dear Friends, This is one of the better ventures I have come across, leveraging the power of community to empower entrepreneurs. Its a matchmaking project, connecting entrepreneurs who need loans with lenders who can offer loans. If an entrepreneurs needs Rs. 50,000 as loan, he can receive it from multiple lenders , maybe in smaller […]
Facebook: Really using the Social Graph
The number of Applications on Facebook has risen continuously since Facebook announced its Developer API in mid 2007. While there has been a slew of applications, it is very easy to see a clear trend. As much as 50% of the applications on Facebook are identity definition applications like Characteristics and Compare People, where people […]
Forbes Column: The Smartest Unknown Indian Entrepreneur
Here’s my latest Forbes Column: The Smartest Unknown Indian Entrepreneur. What is touching, is that the entrepreneur profiled here is also infinitely humble, embarrassed by this sort of attention from the media. In my private exchange with him, I have expressed my deepest respect, and the reason I want to feature this story repeatedly is […]
Team, Product or Market
It been a while. I just read a couple of posts on the relative importance of Team, Product and Market that motivated me to write. Here are the post. The first is from Marc Andreson (Netscape fame) and the second is in response to Marc by Paul Buchheit (Gmail fame). I think both are worth […]
Stock compensation in early stage start-ups: Shares or Stock options?
I have a question regarding compensation for key employees in early stage start-ups. From an employee and company standpoint which one is better? Shares or stock options? For example: Consider an early stage venture that has total share capital of say Rs.5Cr (50L shares at Rs.10 par value) post first round funding. They would like […]
How did you fund your startup?
In the US it is quite common for a startup to get its 1st round of funding from SBA (small business association) or an overdraft of $100K from the neighbourhood bank. After that if cash flows can support you should be able to get more credit from the bank. Then there are Mezzanine funds which […]
The Death of Indian Outsourcing
“Are you kidding? No way!†In 2008, the IT and IT enabled services (ITES / BPO) industries are supposed to be the major drivers of India’s economic growth. According to Nasscom, the two industries combined will employ 4 Million people, account for 7% of GDP, and 33% of foreign exchange inflow. Death of this industry […]
Is performance management an issue for startups?
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]