Curious Mind

Web2.0 age !!!!!!!!!

2007-07-26T20:55:00.000-07:00

About Venture Capital

2007-07-26T02:32:00.000-07:00

Ben Holmes of Index Ventures's presentation on “Everything you need to know about Venture Capital- worth viewing.

JOB culture in India

2007-07-21T22:10:00.000-07:00

I find an interesting comment while reading this post on Texas start-up blog.This comment not only reflect poor "job " oriented attitude of Indina graduates but also tells us how it affects entrepreneurial ecosystem of India.

Comment goes like this:

" I started a small outsourced projects development business in early 2005 but it got burst after 9 months of operation because it’s really hard to find developers who code in open source .. if you make a visit to Tata, Infosys, Wipro and others you’ll find that these giants work on Microsoft, IBM based product lines .. not open source products. Most of the developers working in these companies don’t even know what PHP is .. RubyonRails (such a hype) but if you catch someone from infosys and ask them what it is .. ummm .. “No idea”.

The basic job culture in India is just to get a job after graduation and work for some big company. Entrepreneurship doesn’t exist in IT here (I don’t deny that only people who can’t get a damn good job in IT giants OR are totally focused on their own ideas and stuff .. they start their own small business). My parents have been always bullying me to get a job .. I am 27+ and successfully provide independent consulting (one man show and earning good living) but still in my parents eyes I am not settled because I don’t work for some big IT giant.

Even if you see Silicon Valley in CA you’ll see thousands of technopreneur there (small to big) .. in India you see only big .. and these big ones have their backbone in Silicon Valley, CA. Only giants such as Infosys, Tata, Wipro others have their own standing.

Anyways, let’s come back to topic .. a lot of businesses fail in India because of

1. Power cuts (don’t even know how long electricity will be off for)

2. Lack of good locations to setup a business (the one that exist are either too expensive to rent a space OR rent a space in local market which is always noisy and doesn’t even give a feel that you work something different than the local grocers).

3. Lack of people resources (small company can’t afford to pay like giants .. thus parents don’t allow their kids to work for smaller companies).

4. There is a stupid mentality that smaller companies working on open source products are just bunch of idiots trying to run them. Even today morning I had a talk with my dad .. and he was just pushing on one point that smaller companies never tend to exist in the market.

"

Well I already discussed location issue in my previous posts.What I find most worrying is the "job attitude" of Indian graduates.Its not very difficult to understand why they make such decisions..Curriculum are outdated and discourage creativity and initiative leading to a system dependent graduate, college and faculty hardly provide career counselling and are more focus on improving " placement record" of college, risk averse parents put pressure to take a job in MNC no matter what is the quality of that job is,peers joining MNC create an very unmotivating environment for a graduate to join start-up.

But I guess they miss the bigger picture.They forget that we are living in different times compare to our parents and siblings.With world getting smaller and smaller everyday, India growing at 9 % growth rate,and reforms and opening of other sector give unique and unparalleled opportunity for this generation graduates.This is time to focus on careers rather then looking for jobs.

Bootstrap in Bangalore: A must read blog

2007-07-19T10:12:00.000-07:00

I come across this interesting and very very practical blog today.Author of this blog Saurabh Chandra, an enterpreneur who has recently bootstrapped his company Neevtech in Bangalore.

I like every single post in this blog. I like the detail in which he explain the process of bootstraping a start-up in stepwise manner.He took great effort to explain every aspect of starting a company in India.I was looking for such eleborate understanding of starting a company in India.I am sure every aspiring enterprenuer will find somthing to learn from his blog.

Thanks to Saurabh Chandra for writing such a useful blog.

Tandem Entrepreneurs: the Indian Y-combinator?

2007-07-13T23:29:00.000-07:00

Y Combinator’s funding methodology of investing a small amount of money across a wide array of young entrepreneurs has inspired Sunil Bhargava to start tandementrepreneurs.

Fantastic Idea.There philosophy is very simple which goes like this:

"We invest our sweat and usually less than $1MM in a startup over a period of 2 years working in tandem with the founders. We are much more like Y-combinator than Sequoia. We don’t consider ourselves a VC like Sequoia because we work so closely with founders and view more modest exits as a success. We love Y-Combinator’s approach, but they just help a company get out of the gates. We engage for a much longer period and happen to invest more time and money in each business."

Low investment,low exits model very well suits present day business model of internet start-ups.Incubation Team is small but is with good credentials.I like there site (epecially the drwaings). It is very cool,original and express the idea very well.

But either intentionally or un-intentionlly they forget to mention market they are trying to address.Right now they are california based incubators so obvious markets seems to be US's bay area.Its not clear weather they would be interested to be "INDIAN YCOMBINATOR" or not.

To me there is desperate need for such program for Indian market.Lot many indian entreprenuer seek capital,advice and connection that such program can provide.

Branding

2007-07-12T02:36:00.001-07:00

Word of Mouth Marketing

2007-07-12T00:50:00.000-07:00

2007-07-12T00:45:00.000-07:00

Mobile Monday Delhi holding its 3rd Meet

2007-05-05T03:42:00.000-07:00

Mobile Monday is a open community of mobile professionals and enthusiasts. It is a forum to network, share knowledge and discuss developments in the mobile world.Founded in Helsinki (Finland) in 2000, it has more than 25 chapters worldwide.

Its objectives are to

a)Promote local mobile industry, entrepreneurs and technologies
b)Facilitate networking, cooperation, partnerships and business development
c)Foster cooperation among individuals, academia and industry
d)Educate public about mobility through events, online presence and media partnerships

Mobile Monday's Delhi Chapter aims to bring together mobile enthusiasts, developers, technologists, business folks, entrepreneurs, VCs under a common forum. The chapter would channelize efforts to develop an active mobile community that can network and share information

Mobile Monday's Delhi Chapter is organising its third meet on 26th May at Abobe Noida.

Mobile Monday is for you if you are a

1)Mobile Developer (Application/Middleware/System/Hardware) or Enthusiast (Gamer/Power User/User in general and want a feature implemented)
2)Mobile Service Provider or Content Provider or Content Aggregator
3)Venture Capitalist, Technocrat, Entrepreneur
4)If ou are regular reader of this blog :)

For more info visit http://momodelhi.pbwiki.com/MoMo3

Indian SNs loosing ground

2007-05-02T22:01:00.000-07:00

Green:fropper Blue=minglebox Black=goyaar Red=yaari

First let me confess that I don't know about any free tool other then alexa to measure the progress of of web 2.0 sites.Consequently I had excepted Alexa with all its flaws :).

Now as we can see from above graph most of the sites are loosing ground.I know its too early to declare anything ,for most of the SN sites are less then year old.But still there is noticable consistency in fall ,specially in case of fropper. Other 4-5 sites that like DesiMartini, Pihook, Snehah, Humsabka, Jhoom are almost dead.Only SN site that seems stable other then orkut is minglebox which is most evolving among all SN sites.

Some of my observations (as a user ):

Poor design or UI
Many of them are very heavy sites with lots of graphics.If site is not using AJAX browsing will be slow and hence boring.Since we don't enjoy the real broadband ,India focused SN must be design their sites accordingly.

Lack of visibility
Many fail to invest time, energy and money in PR and marketing. As a rule if you are new but not first or biggest player in a market you must define ,differentiate and make yourself visible.Viral marketing is ideal but in a crowded market branding required more then just viral marketing.

Monetising too early
Many of them started monetising before gathering a minimum base users.I guess lots of creativity is needed in designing a site with lots of add that will not irritate users.Even the some better known and growing SNs like hi5 failed in this area. Google is better player when comes to monetising its sites without irritatinig its users.

No Localisation
Although most of the sites claim to be Indian there is hardly any Indianess in there site.I was expecting MTV like cultural makover of myspace into indian myspaces.Indian langauges support could have add personal touch.So much could be done to personalise a SN.Since indian sites dont have supporting web community to give addon to their sites like layouts they have to do all the innovation which is a challenge. Without locatlisation every indian SN have to compete at global level.

I am suprised with thse slow learning of most of players.If you are loosing users there must be some valid reason.They have access to user data that can be very weel expoited to enhance user experience every time he login to site.Lot more innovation is required from site designers.

Presently SNs are success becoz they give presence on web to its user.But they must evelove to add more value and find define a worthy purpose for its users.

Does social networking phenomenon is over in India?

2007-04-23T21:34:00.000-07:00

When I joined orkut in july last year I had no idea I am joining a new internet revolution better known as web 2.0.I was surprised to see everyone I know was there on orkut. They spent hours on orkut scraping everything to share and searching their lost school and college mates. All of them got own identity on web.

After one year it seems the whole magic of social networking is fadding. There is tangible fall i user activities on these sites. People scrap only on festivals and special occasions.No more search or lost friends.Gals ,earlier excited with attention these sites got them, are frustrated with unsolicited friendship requests.Boys are unhappy with no response from gals.Charm of meeting the special one is gone. Some of them feel that social netwoking thing is not for "grown -ups". In fact many of them find this whole thing a total time waste.The only utlity sites served is geting them "presence on web".But they are now questioning the value of this presence on web.

So, does the social networking phenomenon is over?Is it over locally or globally?

I wonder how mypace,friendster,facebook are growing with million of users and where this will end eventully.

High-Performance Entrepreneurship

2007-04-23T05:06:00.000-07:00

One person in IT industry I admire and respect vey much is Subroto Bagchi. He is the chief operating officer of Mindtree Consulting which he stared with his 10 colleagues in 1999. I was avid reader of his essays in Times of India.

In following interview he shared his views on various topics he covered in his book The High-Performance Entrepreneur: Golden Rules for Success in Today's World.

What I like most is how succantly he defined "High-Performance Entrepreneur".

"Anybody can set up a "mom and pop shop" and become an entrepreneur. You have the multitude of small- and medium-sized organizations which come and go. High-performance entrepreneurship, on the other hand, sets itself apart by a multiple of things. One is the size of the ambition. The second is the sustainability. So, high-performance companies, high-performance entrepreneurships, are ones that will build unusual value for a long time, for a large number of stakeholders. And fundamentally, they differ from any other entrepreneurship in terms of size of the ambition and how much of a long view of time they are taking."

For any aspiring indian entrepreneur interveiw is good read.

Location location location :Part 2

2007-04-17T02:39:00.000-07:00

On of the decision all entreprenuers have to take is find right location for start-up their venture.In USA most of the technology start-ups are clustered in California or Silicon Valley.In India we have most start-ups coming from Delhi or Banglore.

I just wondering what effect does location have on success or failure of start-ups?

In following essay by Paul Graham , he opinioned that one of the start-up mistake is bad location. He elborate why some location have more start-ups then other as

"that's where the experts are. Standards are higher; people are more sympathetic to what you're doing; the kind of people you want to hire want to live there; supporting industries are there; the people you run into in chance meetings are in the same business"

But I don't think any entreprenuer took all this into account while selecting location for his start-up.In most case choosing right location may not be high priority decision.

Most ventures from are located where their founders resides.What possibility we have that a guy eager to start software company will relocate to Bangalore just to start a bussiness.

At best what a entrepreneur tend do is to get started from a location enough for his or her venture.

Right location for start-up

2007-04-17T01:16:00.000-07:00

My MNC company is located in Noida and I am staying at North campus ,23 km from Noida.Yesterday I left my office at 10.00 pm and reached home at 11.15 pm. Everyday I spend 2 hour or so in commutation. Time used in travelling is not only unproductive but also make me unproductive for extended period of time.Luckily my company have Flexi-time policy and provide as prompt transport facility.

I could stay in Noida but cost of living is too high for the quality fo life it offers me.Frequent and long power cuts,unreliable and unadequate public transport ,and constant sense of insecurity make Noida a undesirable place for me.In summers weather in this part of India is unbearbly cruel.Life becomes really difficult if you have to live without power and water.

All major cities in India face similar problem of traffice jams,long hour power-cuts and poor public transport system.These problem coupled with high rate of real state makes metros not the best locations for a start-up venture.

So question is does delhi in particular and Metros are right places to jum start a venture? Do they have right support system for start-ups?

A start-up want lots of local talent,good living standard, low cost of living,working public transport system, continues and reliable power supply,and comfortable weather.Not many cities in india provide all but definetly they can and will be developed in coming years to give most of these facilities.With rise of tier 1 cities I think this is time to move from metros.

So which city in next bangalore in India?

New Blog for growing start-ups

2007-04-16T23:30:00.000-07:00

Edited by Carleen Hawen Found+Read, GigaOm’s newest blog, will be a must-subscribe to resource for all budding entrepreneurs. It is intenteded to be platform where experts come on and share their experiences in building companies. Malik says he is starting this becasue he’s gone through growing pains building his own business over the last year, and realized that most of the hurdles he had to jump weren’t new, just new to him. He’s hoping Found+Read can become a resource for others to get advice as they grow their companies. This just launched last night, so content will be light for a while until it builds up

Start-Ups to Watch

2007-03-30T03:35:00.000-07:00

This weeks edition of Business-today listed start-ups to watch .In this article they listed following then companies.

24X7 LEARNING SOLUTIONSVirtual University
NAME OF COMPANY: 24x7 Learning Solutions
YEAR OF FOUNDING: 2001
FOUNDERS: Karthik K.S. & Anil Chikkara
AREA OF OPERATION: E-learning
FUNDING: KITVEN and Anil Garg; to raise $10 million over two years
REVENUE: $3 million
SIZE OF TARGET MARKET: Globally $28 billion; In India, Rs 350 crore
KEY COMPETITORS: IBM, Sum Total, Gurukul Online, NIIT, Aptech and Blue Apple

NAME OF COMPANY: Adventity
YEAR OF FOUNDING: July 2003; Commenced operations in January 2004
FOUNDERS: Kumar Subramanian, Ulhas Deshpande, Niket Patankar, Jagdish Iyer and Vivek Arora
AREA OF OPERATION: BPO/ KPO
FUNDING: Undisclosed 'steel and plastics' group in India ($10.5 million), Norwest Venture Partners ($20 million)REVENUE: Roughly $25 million
SIZE OF TARGET MARKET: $17 billion (just the KPO bit)
KEY COMPETITORS: Amba Research and B2K Corporation

NAME OF COMPANY: Drishtee Development & Communication Limited
YEAR OF FOUNDING: 2000
FOUNDERS: Satyan Mishra, Nitin Gachhayat and Shailesh Thakur
AREA OF OPERATION: Provides ICT (information, communication & technology) services to rural India
FUNDING: Acumen holds a 25 per cent stake for which they paid $1 millionREVENUE: Rs 3.87 crore for 2005-06
SIZE OF TARGET MARKET: Currently caters to 300,000 customers. Target market is whole of rural India, which is 650 million people
KEY COMPETITORS: ITC's e-choupal

NAME OF COMPANY: Guruji.com
YEAR OF FOUNDING: 2006
FOUNDERS: Anurag Dod and Gaurav Mishra
AREA OF OPERATION: SearchFUNDING: $7 million, Sequoia
REVENUE: N.A.
SIZE OF TARGET MARKET: $20 million*
KEY COMPETITORS: 123India.com, Justdial.com, Khoj.com*Current search market for search queries originating from India

NAME OF COMPANY: JiGrahak
YEAR OF FOUNDING: 2003
FOUNDER: Sourabh Jain
AREA OF OPERATION: M-commerce
FUNDING: $ 2.2 million, Hellion Ventures
REVENUE: N.A.
SIZE OF TARGET MARKET: N.A.
KEY COMPETITORS: Paymate, mChek

NAME OF COMPANY: Asia Cryo-Cell
YEAR OF FOUNDING: June 2004
FOUNDER: S. Abhaya Kumar
AREA OF OPERATION: Private Banking of cord blood; research and therapy applications using cord blood
FUNDING: Rs 20 crore, largely by Abhaya Kumar; remainder from investors like P.S. Pai and other individuals
REVENUE: Rs 15 crore
SIZE OF TARGET MARKET: N.A.
KEY COMPETITORS: Reliance Life Sciences; Karnataka Cryogenic; Cord Life

NAME OF COMPANY: Nautanki.TV
YEAR OF FOUNDING: November 2006
FOUNDERS: Sunil Nair, Vikram Prabhu and Herumb Khot
AREA OF OPERATION: Online TV channel
FUNDING: Rs 1.5 crore from founders and two investment bankers in their personal capacity
REVENUE: Advertising revenue approximately Rs 12 crore by March 2008 ( first full-year operation)
SIZE OF TARGET MARKET: Internet advertising market in India to be Rs 750 crore by 2009-10 (source: PwC)
KEY COMPETITORS: None yet

NAME OF COMPANY: Onyomo
YEAR OF FOUNDING: January 2006
FOUNDER: Shailesh Mehta
AREA OF OPERATION: Person to Application (P2A) segment of mobile value-added services, including SMS sent by end users for contests and for seeking other information
FUNDING: Shailesh Mehta and IIT Delhi (in talks with VC and PE investors for large funding) REVENUE: Won't reveal before the commercial launch
SIZE OF TARGET MARKET: Rs 428 crore for 2006 (source: IAMAI)
KEY COMPETITORS: Ziva Software, Bangalore

NAME OF COMPANY: Seventymm
YEAR OF FOUNDING: 2005-commercial operations started in March 2006
FOUNDER: Raghav Kher
AREA OF OPERATION: Organised movie rental-part of the home video segment
FUNDING: Initial funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson ($2 million) and second round led by Matrix Partners India ($7 million)
REVENUE: N.A.
SIZE OF TARGET MARKET: Home video market Rs 2,100 crore by 2009-10 (Ficci-PwC 2006 report)
KEY COMPETITORS: Mad House and Clickflix

NAME OF COMPANY: UFO MoviezY
EAR OF FOUNDING: 2005
FOUNDERS: Raaja Kanwar and Sanjay Gaikwad
AREA OF OPERATION: Digital cinema
FUNDING: Initial funding of Rs 100 crore from Apollo Group and second round of Rs 100 crore from private equity firm 3i
REVENUE: First full-year operations 2007-08-Rs 100 crore
SIZE OF TARGET MARKET: Rs 10,000 crore by 2009-10
KEY COMPETITORS: Only player in the market

There are some surprises. There are some unknown or lesser known names while some better known start-up like Makemytrip, TravelGuru,Zoho etc are missing.

I

Entrepreneurial Proverbs

2007-03-29T02:12:00.000-07:00

Internet is such a wonderful thing!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Every day you find some "food for thought", something that stimulate our mind .Today I got these pears of wisdom by Marc Hedlund.

I am going to take printout of it and paste it on my walls.

Starting

It's good to be king -- being an entrepreneur is the best job I've had. Every day your job is new and different; you constantly have to push yourself in new directions. You no longer have to say, "Well, I'm just an engineer, but..." -- you have a great excuse to take an interest in everything. Working in an environment you shaped to your own beliefs about how a company should be run is incredible (and humbling!). And of course there are sometimes financial rewards, although it's still a great job regardless.

Losing sucks -- shutting down a company is unbelievably difficult. It affects your home life, your health, your job prospects, your financial stability. Professional investors are grown-ups, but it's still extremely disheartening to lose the money people invested based on belief in you. If your backers include friends or family, it's extremely difficult to have to tell them the company is closing and their money is gone. Most entrepreneurs fail several times before succeeding, too, so losing is both terrible and nearly inevitable. Fight as hard as you can against it.

Building to flip is building to flop -- this is taken from Jason Fried, and he's right. People who start out with only one goal, to sell to a big portal, will find their options are too limited. Plan as many paths to success as possible for your company, and always have a Plan B when acquisition (or whatever path you choose first) doesn't work.

Prudence becomes procrastination -- it's great to research your market and talk to potential buyers about your ideas. It's terrible to let an excess of this become a impediment to getting started. Too much prudence edges away from research and into procrastination.

Momentum builds on itself -- just start. Do whatever you can. Draw a user interface. Write a spec. Make something, anything, that people can see and touch and try. A prototype is worth ten thousand words. Once you start moving, you will find that people start to carry you along.

Jump when you are more excited than afraid -- lack of fear is irrational, and too much fear is debilitating. Make the jump into your business when you have considered the fear, and come out more excited than afraid.

The Idea

Pay attention to the idea that won't leave you alone -- this is taken from Paul Hawken's Growing a Business. Sometimes an idea catches hold of you and you find you can't put it down. Pay attention to that! Just start working on it. Can't get yourself to do anything on it? Move on. Find yourself waking up out of bed to write down new ideas about it? That's a good one to choose.

If you keep your secrets from the market, the market will keep its secrets from you -- entrepreneurs too often worry about keeping their brilliant secrets locked away; we should all worry much more about springing a surprise on a disinterested market (anyone remember the Segway?). To quote Howard Aiken: "Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats."

Immediate yes is immediate no -- does everyone immediately tell you your idea is great? Run away from it. If the idea is that obvious, the market will be filled with competitors, and you'll find yourself scrambling. One good test: when the New York Times Magazine puts out its annual "Year in Ideas" issue, is your idea in it? Then don't do it. You're already too late.

Build what you know -- this is the most basic advice of idea generation: scratch an itch you have yourself. To make a great company, stop and ensure that your need is broadly felt, and that your solution is broadly applicable -- not everyone spends their life in front of a computer, remember.

Give people what they need, not what they say they need -- interviews are tricky. People will swear up and down that they would buy a product you describe if only it were available, and then fail to do so as soon as it is. Likewise, in conversation an idea can sound terrible, but in actualization the idea can become a compelling product. You have to sherlock out the truth of the interest people express, and "yes/no" questions are usually less useful than "how much" or "how bad" questions.

Your ideas will get better the more you know about business -- engineers hate to hear this, but you can generalize up quite far from here: the more you know about everything, the better all of your ideas will get! If you want to start a business and your strength is in development, learning about pricing, sales, marketing, finance, and yes, even HR, all of it will make your product ideas stronger and better.

People

Three is fine; two, divine -- having too many co-founders makes decisions hard to reach; if you're on your own, you have to bear all of the stress and worry about the success of the company. In my judgment, three people can do well together, but having two founders is best.

Work only with people you like and believe in -- I once heard Eric Schmidt say something along the lines of, "The older I get, the more I think all that matters is working with people you like." If you're smart and talented, you're probably going to like a lot of smart and talented people. Working with people you like is so much more fun, and often more productive, than fighting against someone who may be smart and talented but just isn't a great fit for you.

Work with people who like and believe in you, just naturally -- maybe you are very persuasive, and can talk people into working with you against their better instincts. Especially for co-founders and early employees, don't try that hard. Find the people that naturally want to work with you, and nudge them into the roles where you need them. You'll have more fun and get more done.

Great things are made by people who share a passion, not by those who have been talked into one -- a corollary of the last; you can spark a passion in someone, but you can't do it without some fuel to catch. Better to wait, and find the person who is already inclined to believe in your cause. You may talk someone into co-founding a company with you, but will they stick with it through ups and downs if they had to be persuaded that hard?

Product

Cool ideas are useless without great needs -- this is the classic engineers' entrepreneurial mistake (or at least I'd like to think so, since I've made it). Techies love tech, and a new technology can produce a lot of companies that don't really meet a need. Better to start with the need, and then see how what you know can produce a better answer to that need. (Marketers tend to have the opposite problem: real, pressing needs with completely unworkable solutions.)

Build the simplest thing possible -- engineers have the hardest time with this, with not overdesigning for the need they're addressing. Make the simplest possible product that makes a significant dent in that need, and you'll do far better than you would addressing two or three needs at once. Simplicity leads to clarity in everything you do.

Solve problems, not potential problems -- you can waste a lot of money implementing solutions for problems you don't have yet, and may never have. Work on the biggest, most pressing problems today, and put aside everything else.

Test everything with real people -- it's unbelievable how helpful this is. Go find civilians, real people who use computers because they have to and not because they love to. Find them in Starbucks, or at the library, or in a college computer lab. Give them $20 for 20 minutes, and you'll be paid back a hundred times over.

Money

Start with nothing, and have nothing for as long as possible -- small budgets give big focus (probably another line I'm stealing from Jason Fried: it sounds like something he'd say...) Don't go out and raise a ton of money right away. Instead, give yourself just enough to get going, and use the limits that imposes to motivate yourself.

The best investor pitches are plainspoken and entertaining (not in that order) -- think about what this implies. A plainspoken pitch is the surface of a very solid business. If you have to fudge and lie to get investors interested, why is that? If you're running a great business, it is not hard at all to lure investors into it; the worse your business, the bigger (and more odious) your fundraising task is. Entertaining implies a fun person to work with, and VCs like working with people they like as much as the rest of us do. If you don't bring the funny, bring the person who brings the funny.

Never let on that you're keeping a secret -- telling an investor "I don't want to talk about that" is terrible. It's the natural converse of being plainspoken. It's good to be aware, though, that some potential investors will listen to you and then share your information with your direct comptitors, and not always because they're invested in those comptetitors. Knowing that, you have to keep some secrets -- but be as diplomatic about that as possible. Respond to the idea behind the question, without giving away more than you feel comfortable discussing. Learn to steer the conversation in the way you want it to go. And then give up more information as you become more comfortable with the potential investor.

No means maybe and yes means maybe -- you should never take a "no" from someone you want to work with. Accept the no, ask for feedback, and then just keep sending them updates on how much butt you're kicking in the market. During one company, three of the five term sheets I collected came from VC firms that told me "no" originally. Conversely, though, the only money in the bank is actual money actually in the bank. Everything else is just a possibility, and you have to treat it as such. Don't stop fundraising until you have a firm commitment for the funding you need, and don't accept halfway promises like, "We'll fund you if another firm comes in." Keep on driving until the wire transfer is complete.

For investors, the product is nothing -- the classic engineer's VC pitch has ten slides about the product and two about the academic achievements of the founders. That's a terrible pitch. One slide should be about the product, while the rest cover the market, competitors, financials, funding history, and the relevant experience of the team. The product matters far less to most investors than the reactions of customers, the properties of the market, and the credibility of the team. Obsess about the product on your own time; present your business in all of its parts.

The best way to get investment is not to need it* -- if you have a running business with real customers and you're paying all your bills, you are much more likely to get a funding round than if you need the round in order to survive or succeed. The pitch that goes, "We could accelerate our growth with more money" is much more compelling than, "I need your money or our doors will close."

I'm sure other people have their own rules of thumb; what are yours?

Entrepreneurial Thoughts

2007-03-28T22:51:00.000-07:00

Here are some of entrepreneurial thoughts by Joe Ollivier, First Capital Development.

It has to be a business that gives you an emotional high.

Avoid any business that is labor or inventory intensive.

Have independent market research done on the feasibility of your idea, then do test markets.

Don't think someone is waiting to steal your idea, it's paranoia.

Don't get started on a real business until you have someone (wife, husband, family member) who will listen to your dreams, sympathize with your failures and applaud your successes.

Never involve yourself in any service or product that requires a consumer attitude change.

Don't invest on home run schemes - invest in what you like and know.

Find a lifelong mentor as soon as possible. Have him continually play devil's advocate.

Have an exit point or harvest plan to cash out of each business you start.

Do a self awareness training. You are not your business, your background or your personal financial statement.

Pick a charity (other than a religious one) or a charitable activity where you have nothing to gain, and work at it every year.

Do some charitable acts each year in secret.

Keep a notepad next to your bed at night - some of your best thoughts will come during the night.

Get a week-at-a-glance planner. Each weekend make our a 3x5 notecard of activities you want to accomplish.

You don't need to keep 51% to control your company.

Find an aggressive banker and CPA, send them referrals and Christmas presents.

Be willing to take major risks, but be aware of risk versus reward. Don't ever even think about taking out Bankruptcy.

Have someone else do all your serious negotiating for you.

Have the attitude that everything that happens to you in your life is your own personal responsibility; you are never a victim.

Remember that you will learn much more from your mistakes and failures than your successes.

Trust everyone, but be aware that most people shade the facts and lie part of the time.

Live in the nicest, most expensive house you can. It will alter your view of yourself and the way others view you.

Remember that with each successful venture there was a time when the entrepreneur wished he was not involved.

Expect to be sued - it's normal - have the attitude that it's the person who's suing that has the problem.

Never sue unless there is real estate that can be attached.

Expect to become wealthy - do a financial statement on yourself each quarter.

Realize that money is power and can be used for great good.

Being an Entrepreneur means more than buying yourself a job. You need a salary to live, a return on your investment and a monetary reward for your risk.

In every entrepreneurial activity you enter make sure it's: 1. Fun and Interesting, 2. You are going to learn something, and 3. You add value.

Realize that business is really just a monetary game, and the things that mean the most -your character, your family, your own values, and your beliefs- are unaffected regardless of the outcome.

Red Herring 100 Asia

2007-03-27T09:15:00.000-07:00

To celebrate the most innovative technology companies in the Asia Pacific region at Red Herring conducting Red Herring 100 Asia, August 29-31 in Hong Kong, China. Now in its third successful year, this high-profile event honors 100 cutting edge private technology companies from China, India, Japan, Singapore, Korea, Australia and Vietnam. Red Herring 100 Asia brings together an elite roster of entrepreneurial and global venture investment firms to showcase excellence in innovation.Asia’s top 100 startups from 2007 will be spotlighted, and many of their CEOs will share winning strategies in special keynote presentations. This event is a premier opportunity to exchange information and ideas, delve deeper into key topics, and network with peers and viable business partners

So if you think your compnay is working on some cutting edge technology and you want to talk about your technology and compnay I guess its a great plateform.

Apply here:http://www.herringevents.com/asia07/index.html

All the best!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Web 2.0 Business Models

2007-03-23T05:44:00.000-07:00

This is a comment from Michael Eisenberg blog sixkidsandafulltimejob.blogspot.com. I am very much impressed with the bravity of the comment. he is spot on.

"I am just back from a "cool web 2.0" IDB event (see http://www.ibdnetwork.com/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=156) Many companies presented, and the most common question from the panelists was "what is your business model". The ubiquitous response was "premium services and advertising" (PS&A). The audience did not buy this - at some point, when yet another cool web 2.0 entrepreneur responded PS&A, many in the audience actually laughed out. Smart crowd, I guess. You need substantial volume on your site in order to derive significant revenue from advertising. Most of these web 2.0 are one feature built around cool technologies – hard to believe they will drive enough traffic to support a substantial business. Premium services are even trickier – you must find an add-on service which is at least as useful as your basic free service. Plaxo, LinkedIn and the like did not figure that one out for years – and may never figure this out."

And for this comment i find another interesting comment there:
Right now, the internet market is a mess - full of customers who have no money and companies that do little but swallow the industry status quo (make everything free); hook, line and sinker. That said, the picture is more complicated and it may be the nature of the internet market it self that stops people building proper (as in, old fashioned) businesses.

Really, what we've just gotta see a proper fragmentation in the supply side of the market. We've gotta see companies sell premium quality services at premium prices - rather than having a homogeneous market of suppliers who commoditize each other.

A proper market has to be layered, as delimited by pricing different strategies between discount, at market and premium suppliers.

Of course, it wouldn't hurt if the majority of consumer internet weren't pennyless college kids (not that there is anything with that).

Now, on the contrary, trying to move away from marketing free software may be more of a problem that first seems. Basically, why on Earth should I try to build a real business (i.e. sell something) if in 12 months, what ever I am selling is gonna be technologically obsolete....

I think who ever imagines that any internet startup existing today will survive for even the next 5 years must be kidding them selves. After all, this is the software business and innovation around here happens a lot faster than I can restructure my product line.So what do I do if I just don't have the time to grow organically, charge through the roof and build sales teams etc....?Well...that's what happens, I take the next best option, do a bit of gambling and spell it out and clear that my business model is rolling dice in the hope of capital gains.

I know, sounds crazy....but is it really?

How to Build a Web 2.0 Technology Startup

2007-03-22T23:49:00.000-07:00

I find this pithy artical on net. Its quite relevent and to the point.

The recent wave of Web 2.0 technology products is an indicator of today’s entrepreneurial vitality. Log onto Techcrunch, and you’ll likely see new several startups forming every day. Yet, there’s one continual theme you notice in every Web 2.0 startup: most technology startups haven’t opened their doors for the public.

Worse, grand opening announcements won’t come until several months later–if even that.
The problem with starting late? It delays those Web 2.0 startup companies from laying firm foundations for their companies. No, not their products, but the intangibles: professional connections, public inquiries, media relations, and whatnot. Most importantly, it stalls cultivating relationships with initial customers.

What should you do if you’re starting a Web 2.0 technology startup? If you’re planning on building an actual business, and not just selling out a product, here’s what we recommend:

Seek passion first. Profits, second.

Stop what you’re doing (or what you plan to do). Are you passionate about it? Do you live and breathe the idea, as if you were born to do it? It’s not just an opportunity, is it? The biggest crime we see entrepreneurs make involves jumping from opportunity to opportunity, thinking the next great idea exists in a specific industry. Then they fall prey to what we see as the entrepreneurial trap: they jump shark to the next “great” opportunity. Who can blame them? Sophomoric business books flaunt market opportunity.

Here’s two reasons why that’s total BS: First, what if a “greater” opportunity comes up afterward? You know it’ll happen. Will you jump shark? Probably.

Second: jumping from the next “great opportunity” will never augment your strengths. You’ll continually go to and fro, never finding a clear sense of direction, never building on top of the foundation you’ve pieced together. Instead, you’ll be like a bungling contractor — having good skills in various areas, but never seeking greatness.

Greatness lies not in finding and profiting from a great opportunity. Greatness lies in continually, repeatedly, and consistently enhancing your strenghts.

Michael Jordan wouldn’t be the most envious athlete if he had jumped over to Boxing in the 70s, Roller Derby in the 80s, Indy Racing in the 90s, and Poker in the 2000s. You shouldn’t jump at the next great opportunity as well.

Instead do this: Where does your passion lie? After living a good number of decades on this planet, a passion of some sort is already ingrained in you. Cultivate it.
Once you seek your passion, you’ll find new and greater opportunities popping up. Paradox indeed. Harvard’s Amar Bhide contends about successful startups: “once they are in the flow of business, opportunities often turn up that they would not have seen had they waited for the big idea.”

If you’re not passionate about what you do, you’re in the wrong line of business.
First, find your passion. Then, start building.

Start early. Get something out.

Once you find your passion, do something that relates to it that can give you good and steady cash flow.
Forget business plans. Forget finding the “perfect” idea. Instead, see cashflow as the king of your new Web 2.0 company. It’s your startup’s blood, and only source for survival. Most startups forget this. They believe they’ll wait until their final product comes to fruition, and then reap rewards.

The brutal facts? It’s far less than 5% likely that the product will achieve what the founder envisioned. Most startup businesses that succeeded, as a Harvard study indicates, didn’t leave all their eggs in one basket. Instead, they experimented with smaller projects. Once those succeeded, they exploited the momentum by building higher-cost products. The important cashflow, of course, kept them afloat.

Harvard’s Amar Bhide: “Get operational quickly. Bootstrappers don’t mind starting with a copycat idea targeted to a small market. Often that approach works well. Imitation saves the costs of market research, and the start-up entering a small market is unlikely to face competition from large, established companies.”

Forget being perfect.

You will fail. That’s okay. As you’re starting your Web 2.0 Startup, know this: Perfection kills progression. Failures fuel creativity; that is, of course, you don’t give up. Learn to fail. Failing is good. It drives you to understand where possibilities and opportunities exist.
For every major success you see, the media forgot to report the one thousand failures from the same person. While other Web 2.0 entrepreneurs are fearing failures and quitting because of it, you’re not. You see failures as a natural part of building a startup. You see failures as something others don’t: a driver to that next successful product.

Experiment!

If you forget perfection, you’ll open your doors to experimentation — the secret sauce for the most innovative companies. In the business world, you’ll learn that you can’t plan for anything. A million-dollar idea (in your mind, anyway) could very well bomb.

Media reports hailed the Segway as the next great thing. It was supposed to transform roads. It didn’t. It sucked, and venture capitalists no doubt regret their blunders. On the flipside, an invention appearing out of the blue might — just — net you a million dollars. Think eBay, Yahoo, Google, etc. etc.. The point? Ideas aren’t formed from thoughtful analysis. It’s formed from experimenting, and trying different things.

Learn to use the law of probability to help you.
Say one product has a 10% success rate. Then, getting one success out of two experimental products is 32% (i.e. 10% * 10%). Five experiments? 63%. The more you experiment, the greater your chance for success.

Forget product features. Seek purposeful innovation.

Having fun experimenting with all the new Web 2.0 features? Stop! Forget tagging, curvy corners, AJAX and all the other BS just for the sake having them. Just because others are doing it. Just because they say it’s essential for Web 2.0. Just because.
Technology products are built for humans. If you want to build the next great Web 2.0 product, ignore what people are doing on TechCrunch. Instead, spend your time understanding the human brain. Know people’s motivations. Understand their desires.
Abraham Maslow. That’s a start.Once you understand humans, you’ll understand precisely what Web 2.0 features you’ll need for your intended product.You will not see the next great technology company as the most innovative user of Ruby on Rails. Instead, the next great Web 2.0 Technology Startup will understand and cultivate human desires.

Cultivate early customers.

A Web 2.0 Technology Startup without a blog is a startup without a compass. Like Magellan, you’ll need a direction to steer your company. A blog helps you cultivate your first customer relationships, gives you important feedback on product wants/not-wants, and quickens the product development process.
Sure, you can get by without a blog. But, understand that every company needs its early adopters. We’ve found blogs to be the best way of doing that.

Have fun.

Yeah, all too-good-to-be-true success stories tell you to have fun. And, we’re not arguing with that sentiment. We feel entrepreneurs have the most exciting and adventurous career paths. It should also be the most enjoyable.

Please, have fun!

One final thought: In one hundred years, you won’t take your Web 2.0 startup money with you. Start leaving an imprint, a legacy that continually affects and consistently improves the lives of your surrounding communities.
And, world.
Word to your mother.

What to look for in an Internet investment

2007-03-22T21:48:00.000-07:00

Nisan Gabbay of startup-reviews listed leading indicators for potential success in consumer internet start-up . Its gives us a very fresh and convincing prespective.

Product that fits the needs of an underserved niche

Conceptually this is pretty easy to understand, so I’m probably not providing an earth-shaking insight here. However, a company that has truly unearthed a market need that isn’t being met by other services and delivers upon that need with the right feature set and value proposition represents the best opportunity for an Internet start-up today. I think that the venture community tends to underestimate the potential of niches to transform themselves into the mainstream plays, which explains why companies like eHarmony, Newegg, Zappos, and Betfair were not backed by top tier VC firms until after they had proven their success.

Strong ability to leverage natural search as the primary means of user acquisition

I think this is probably the most under recognized opportunity area for Internet entrepreneurs and investors today. It is no secret that search engines, and Google in particular, have become the gateway to the Internet. Search query volumes continue to grow at a fantastic clip, and as such offer one of the best ways to acquire users at no cost. It is particularly appealing to start-ups, because search neutralizes the need for brand recognition.

Any company that can demonstrate an ability to achieve high natural search rankings for a high volume of search terms stands a good chance to become a success on some level. Recent examples here include Yelp and Digg, both of whom owe a great part of their success to natural search. In the case of Digg it was inbound linking from tech bloggers and for Yelp the production of a massive amount of searchable, local user-generated content that did not exist before.

Service that empowers people to make a living

Every Internet service needs power users, and I would argue that the best type of power users are those that have a vested personal financial interest in the success of that Internet service. There is probably no better example of this than eBay and the legion of people who earn either a full or partial salary from their eBay activities. iStockphoto is another good example, enabling semi-professional photographers access to the stock photography market, and some supplemental income for themselves. An emerging example is uShip, a company that is transforming the freight services market by leveling the playing field for sole proprietors.

Free (or near free) alternative for a previously high cost service

Again, not an amazing insight, but one that has been time tested on the Internet and hence I feel is worth re-iterating. Really this is just another way of framing the value proposition. Some good examples of this include Greenfield Online, the pioneer in online market research, Craigslist as a free alternative to classifieds, and iStockphoto for near-free expensive stock photography.

True viral distribution potential

A viral Internet service is one where each new user must involve friends to derive personal value from the service. This is best exhibited by communication and hyper-social services. Telling a friend is not an option; it is a necessity in order for the user to derive value from the service. Although it is easy to incorporate viral feature sets into any Internet service, actually getting users to utilize these features is quite hard unless they recognize the value they personally and immediately will receive by involving friends. Thus, while many Internet start-ups will claim to rely on viral marketing, only a select few will actually qualify as truly viral services.

Ability to jumpstart user acquisition through distribution partnerships

Having a distribution channel to jumpstart user acquisition isn’t a requirement, but it does increase the likelihood of success. Skype was able to acquire its first 500,000 users by being bundled with Kazaa. MySpace migrated users over from a dating service (CupidJunction) and made heavy use of database marketing. Bebo marketed to the install base of its established, sister property BirthdayAlarm.com. Even Digg launched via a TV show that reached 100,000+ of its target users (tech enthusiasts). As a counterpoint, successful services like Flickr, Craigslist, Piczo, RockYou, Xfire, and countless others did not benefit from proprietary distribution.

Story that lends itself to mainstream PR

Although many will claim the death of mainstream PR in Web 2.0, I would claim that it is still a key ingredient to achieving scale and mainstream adoption. Thus, companies that have the potential to be good PR stories after achieving some initial success, have a much greater likelihood of being break-away successes. The truth is, some services are sexy and make for good stories, whereas others do not. Companies like Hotornot and Craigslist made for great stories, and thus received massive amounts of press attention. More recent examples include MySpace, YouTube, and Zillow. Mainstream PR cannot provide the spark, but it can fuel the fire in a big way

Capital requirements of web2.0 start-ups

2007-03-22T06:25:00.000-07:00

Here is VC's prespective on web2 start-up cost.

http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2006/12/web_20_is_a_gif.html

A Brief History of Hard Work, Adjusted for Risk

2007-03-22T00:58:00.000-07:00

Seth Gobin wrote this intersting article on "hardwork" and its meaning in new economy.I find it quite amusing find it a good read.

Your great-grandfather knew what it meant to work hard. He hauled hay all day long, making sure that the cows got fed. In Fast Food Nation (Houghton Mifflin, 2001), Eric Schlosser writes about a worker who ruptured his vertebrae, wrecked his hands, burned his lungs, and was eventually hit by a train as part of his 15-year career at a slaughterhouse. Now that's hard work.

The meaning of hard work in a manual economy is clear. Without the leverage of machines and organizations, working hard meant producing more. Producing more, of course, was the best way to feed your family.

Those days are long gone. Most of us don't use our bodies as a replacement for a machine -- unless we're paying for the privilege and getting a workout at the gym. These days, 35% of the American workforce sits at a desk. Yes, we sit there a lot of hours, but the only heavy lifting that we're likely to do is restricted to putting a new water bottle on the cooler. So do you still think that you work hard?

You could argue, "Hey, I work weekends and pull all-nighters. I start early and stay late. I'm always on, always connected with a BlackBerry. The FedEx guy knows which hotel to visit when I'm on vacation." Sorry. Even if you're a workaholic, you're not working very hard at all.
Sure, you're working long, but "long" and "hard" are now two different things. In the old days, we could measure how much grain someone harvested or how many pieces of steel he made. Hard work meant more work. But the past doesn't lead to the future. The future is not about time at all. The future is about work that's really and truly hard, not time-consuming. It's about the kind of work that requires us to push ourselves, not just punch the clock. Hard work is where our job security, our financial profit, and our future joy lie.

It's hard work to make difficult emotional decisions, such as quitting a job and setting out on your own. It's hard work to invent a new system, service, or process that's remarkable. It's hard work to tell your boss that he's being intellectually and emotionally lazy. It's easier to stand by and watch the company fade into oblivion. It's hard work to tell senior management to abandon something that it has been doing for a long time in favor of a new and apparently risky alternative. It's hard work to make good decisions with less than all of the data.

Today, working hard is about taking apparent risk. Not a crazy risk like betting the entire company on an untested product. No, an apparent risk: something that the competition (and your coworkers) believe is unsafe but that you realize is far more conservative than sticking with the status quo.

Richard Branson doesn't work more hours than you do. Neither does Steve Ballmer or Carly Fiorina. Robyn Waters, the woman who revolutionized what Target sells -- and helped the company trounce Kmart -- probably worked fewer hours than you do in an average week.
None of the people who are racking up amazing success stories and creating cool stuff are doing it just by working more hours than you are. And I hate to say it, but they're not smarter than you either. They're succeeding by doing hard work.

As the economy plods along, many of us are choosing to take the easy way out. We're going to work for the Man, letting him do the hard work while we work the long hours. We're going back to the future, to a definition of work that embraces the grindstone.

Some people (a precious few, so far) are realizing that this temporary recession is the best opportunity that they've ever had. They're working harder than ever -- mentally -- and taking all sorts of emotional and personal risks that are bound to pay off.

Hard work is about risk. It begins when you deal with the things that you'd rather not deal with: fear of failure, fear of standing out, fear of rejection. Hard work is about training yourself to leap over this barrier, tunnel under that barrier, drive through the other barrier. And, after you've done that, to do it again the next day.

The big insight: The riskier your (smart) coworker's hard work appears to be, the safer it really is. It's the people having difficult conversations, inventing remarkable products, and pushing the envelope (and, perhaps, still going home at 5 PM) who are building a recession-proof future for themselves.
So tomorrow, when you go to work, really sweat. Your time is worth the effort.

Seths godin's The realistic entrepreneur's guide to venture capital

2007-03-21T22:19:00.000-07:00

Optimism is a key to success, but it doesn't necessarily work so well when it comes to VC. Because this is a cottage industry with thousands of players, all with different objectives, it's very easy to keep knocking on doors, just waiting to find the right match. It's also easy to spend a year or more adjusting your business to what each VC asks for ("bring me the broomstick of the wicked witch!" while you could have been out there building a real organization.)
Here are a bunch of conditions that you ought to take seriously before you invest the time and the energy to track down outside money for your great idea:

1. Investors like to invest in categories they've already invested in. If your business is so new that it's never been tested before, or is in a category VCs hate, think twice.

2. Investors want you to sell out. As soon as possible. For as much as possible. They have no desire to own part of your company forever.

3. Investors want to invest in a project that's tested. If you can't make it work in the 'small', why do you think it'll work when it's big?

4.Being a little better than the market leader is worthless.

5.Investors don't want you to use their money to cover your losses. They want you to build an asset (a patent, an audience, channel relationships) that's actually worth something.

6.Investors want someone to run your company who has successfully run a company before.

7.Investors want to be able to come to one of your board meetings and still make it home in time for dinner.

8.VCs like curves more than they like cliffs.

9.There are actually very very few business problems that can be solved with money.

10.You will probably have to replace many of your employees if you raise money from someone.
11.VCs understand that being the best in the world (#1) is the place with the biggest rewards, so it's unlikely they will settle for any performance (even a profitable one) that puts you in second or third place.

12.VCs are very smart and very connected, but they're smart enough to know that their connections and their insights can't fix a broken business.

13.Investors are very focused on the company, not you. They're not interested in having you take out your original investment or paying you a large salary as profits go up.

14.Business plans are bogus. The act of writing one is critical, but no one is going to read more than three pages of what you write before they make a decision.

15.The companies that VCs most want to invest in are the companies that don't need their investment to survive.

Ten Rules for Web Startups

2007-03-21T02:09:00.000-07:00

A few friends and colleagues have linked to Evan William's Ten Rules for Web Startups.Its a good read

#1: Be Narrow

Focus on the smallest possible problem you could solve that would potentially be useful. Most companies start out trying to do too many things, which makes life difficult and turns you into a me-too. Focusing on a small niche has so many advantages: With much less work, you can be the best at what you do. Small things, like a microscopic world, almost always turn out to be bigger than you think when you zoom in. You can much more easily position and market yourself when more focused. And when it comes to partnering, or being acquired, there's less chance for conflict. This is all so logical and, yet, there's a resistance to focusing. I think it comes from a fear of being trivial. Just remember: If you get to be #1 in your category, but your category is too small, then you can broaden your scope—and you can do so with leverage.

#2: Be Different

Ideas are in the air. There are lots of people thinking about—and probably working on—the same thing you are. And one of them is Google. Deal with it. How? First of all, realize that no sufficiently interesting space will be limited to one player. In a sense, competition actually is good—especially to legitimize new markets. Second, see #1—the specialist will almost always kick the generalist's ass. Third, consider doing something that's not so cutting edge. Many highly successful companies—the aforementioned big G being one—have thrived by taking on areas that everyone thought were done and redoing them right. Also? Get a good, non-generic name. Easier said than done, granted. But the most common mistake in naming is trying to be too descriptive, which leads to lots of hard-to-distinguish names. How many blogging companies have "blog" in their name, RSS companies "feed," or podcasting companies "pod" or "cast"? Rarely are they the ones that stand out.

#3: Be Casual

We're moving into what I call the era of the "Casual Web" (and casual content creation). This is much bigger than the hobbyist web or the professional web. Why? Because people have lives. And now, people with lives also have broadband. If you want to hit the really big home runs, create services that fit in with—and, indeed, help—people's everyday lives without requiring lots of commitment or identity change. Flickr enables personal publishing among millions of folks who would never consider themselves personal publishers—they're just sharing pictures with friends and family, a casual activity. Casual games are huge. Skype enables casual conversations.

#4: Be Picky

Another perennial business rule, and it applies to everything you do: features, employees, investors, partners, press opportunities. Startups are often too eager to accept people or ideas into their world. You can almost always afford to wait if something doesn't feel just right, and false negatives are usually better than false positives. One of Google's biggest strengths—and sources of frustration for outsiders—was their willingness to say no to opportunities, easy money, potential employees, and deals.

#5: Be User-Centric

User experience is everything. It always has been, but it's still undervalued and under-invested in. If you don't know user-centered design, study it. Hire people who know it. Obsess over it. Live and breathe it. Get your whole company on board. Better to iterate a hundred times to get the right feature right than to add a hundred more. The point of Ajax is that it can make a site more responsive, not that it's sexy. Tags can make things easier to find and classify, but maybe not in your application. The point of an API is so developers can add value for users, not to impress the geeks. Don't get sidetracked by technologies or the blog-worthiness of your next feature. Always focus on the user and all will be well.

#6: Be Self-Centered

Great products almost always come from someone scratching their own itch. Create something you want to exist in the world. Be a user of your own product. Hire people who are users of your product. Make it better based on your own desires. (But don't trick yourself into thinking you are your user, when it comes to usability.) Another aspect of this is to not get seduced into doing deals with big companies at the expense or your users or at the expense of making your product better. When you're small and they're big, it's hard to say no, but see #4

7: Be Greedy

It's always good to have options. One of the best ways to do that is to have income. While it's true that traffic is now again actually worth something, the give-everything-away-and-make-it-up-on-volume strategy stamps an expiration date on your company's ass. In other words, design something to charge for into your product and start taking money within 6 months (and do it with PayPal). Done right, charging money can actually accelerate growth, not impede it, because then you have something to fuel marketing costs with. More importantly, having money coming in the door puts you in a much more powerful position when it comes to your next round of funding or acquisition talks. In fact, consider whether you need to have a free version at all. The TypePad approach—taking the high-end position in the market—makes for a great business model in the right market. Less support. Less scalability concerns. Less abuse. And much higher margins.

#8: Be Tiny

It's standard web startup wisdom by now that with the substantially lower costs to starting something on the web, the difficulty of IPOs, and the willingness of the big guys to shell out for small teams doing innovative stuff, the most likely end game if you're successful is acquisition. Acquisitions are much easier if they're small. And small acquisitions are possible if valuations are kept low from the get go. And keeping valuations low is possible because it doesn't cost much to start something anymore (especially if you keep the scope narrow). Besides the obvious techniques, one way to do this is to use turnkey services to lower your overhead—Administaff, ServerBeach, web apps, maybe even Elance.

#9: Be Agile

You know that old saw about a plane flying from California to Hawaii being off course 99% of the time—but constantly correcting? The same is true of successful startups—except they may start out heading toward Alaska. Many dot-com bubble companies that died could have eventually been successful had they been able to adjust and change their plans instead of running as fast as they could until they burned out, based on their initial assumptions. Pyra was started to build a project-management app, not Blogger. Flickr's company was building a game. Ebay was going to sell auction software. Initial assumptions are almost always wrong. That's why the waterfall approach to building software is obsolete in favor agile techniques. The same philosophy should be applied to building a company.

#10: Be Balanced

What is a startup without bleary-eyed, junk-food-fueled, balls-to-the-wall days and sleepless, caffeine-fueled, relationship-stressing nights? Answer?: A lot more enjoyable place to work. Yes, high levels of commitment are crucial. And yes, crunch times come and sometimes require an inordinate, painful, apologies-to-the-SO amount of work. But it can't be all the time. Nature requires balance for health—as do the bodies and minds who work for you and, without which, your company will be worthless. There is no better way to maintain balance and lower your stress that I've found than David Allen's GTD process. Learn it. Live it. Make it a part of your company, and you'll have a secret weapon.

#11 (bonus!): Be WaryOvergeneralized lists of business "rules" are not to be taken too literally. There are exceptions to everything.

The World's Top Web Markets

2007-03-14T04:35:00.000-07:00

Comscore has a new ranking of countries by Internet usage. If I were the CEO of a Web company planning to expand worldwide, I'd hit these countries in this order:

Top Countries by Internet Penetration (Unique Visitors)

Jan-07 Percentage (000) Change
Worldwide 746,934 10%
United States 153,447 2%
China 86,757 20%
Japan 53,670 4%
Germany 32,192 3%
UK 30,072 1%
South Korea 26,350 8%
France 24,560 4%
India 21,107 33%
Canada 20,392 11%
Italy 18,106 13%

Figures for India looks quite interesting and encouraging for any aspiring internet entreprenuer. With present PC penetration and usage pattern these figure will improveamny a times as cost of PC has come to a all time low of 10k. With all indian telecome operator promising for a better broadband future we will witness a revolution in India cyberspace.

* Excludes traffic from public computers such as Internet cafes and access from mobile phones or PDAs
The next five countries catching up fast are, in order, Brazil, Spain, Russia, the Netherlands and Mexico, with the non-European countries growing the fastest.

Yahoo's "Peanut Butter"

2007-02-14T22:02:00.000-08:00

This critical, internal Yahoo memo was being forwarded all over the place allegedly Brad Garlinghouse, a Yahoo senior V.P.

Here it is

Three and half years ago, I enthusiastically joined Yahoo! The magnitude of the opportunity was only matched by the magnitude of the assets. And an amazing team has been responsible for rebuilding Yahoo!It has been a profound experience. I am fortunate to have been a part of dramatic change for the Company. And our successes speak for themselves. More users than ever, more engaging than ever and more profitable than ever!I proudly bleed purple and, yellow everyday! And like so many people here, I love this company

But all is not well. Last Thursday's NY Times article was a blessing in the disguise of a painful public flogging. While it lacked accurate details, its conclusions rang true, and thus was a much needed wake up call. But also a call to action. A clear statement with which I, and far too many Yahoo's, agreed. And thankfully a reminder. A reminder that the measure of any person is not in how many times he or she falls down - but rather the spirit and resolve used to get back up. The same is now true of our Company.

It's time for us to get back up.

I believe we must embrace our problems and challenges and that we must take decisive action. We have the opportunity - in fact the invitation - to send a strong, clear and powerful message to our shareholders and Wall Street, to our advertisers and our partners, to our employees (both current and future), and to our users. They are all begging for a signal that we recognize and understand our problems, and that we are charting a course for fundamental change, Our current course and speed simply will not get us there. Short-term band-aids will not get us there.It's time for us to get back up and seize this invitation.I imagine there's much discussion amongst the Company's senior most leadership around the challenges we face. At the risk of being redundant, I wanted to share my take on our current situation and offer a recommended path forward, an attempt to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem.

Recognizing Our Problems

We lack a focused, cohesive vision for our company. We want to do everything and be everything -- to everyone. We've known this for years, talk about it incessantly, but do nothing to fundamentally address it. We are scared to be left out. We are reactive instead of charting an unwavering course. We are separated into silos that far too frequently don't talk to each other. And when we do talk, it isn't to collaborate on a clearly focused strategy, but rather to argue and fight about ownership, strategies and tactics.

Our inclination and proclivity to repeatedly hire leaders from outside the company results in disparate visions of what winning looks like -- rather than a leadership team rallying around a single cohesive strategy.

I've heard our strategy described as spreading peanut butter across the myriad opportunities that continue to evolve in the online world. The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular.

I hate peanut butter. We all should.

We lack clarity of ownership and accountability. The most painful manifestation of this is the massive redundancy that exists throughout the organization. We now operate in an organizational structure -- admittedly created with the best of intentions -- that has become overly bureaucratic. For far too many employees, there is another person with dramatically similar and overlapping responsibilities. This slows us down and burdens the company with unnecessary costs.

Equally problematic, at what point in the organization does someone really OWN the success of their product or service or feature? Product, marketing, engineering, corporate strategy, financial operations... there are so many people in charge (or believe that they are in charge) that it's not clear if anyone is in charge. This forces decisions to be pushed up - rather than down. It forces decisions by committee or consensus and discourages the innovators from breaking the mold... thinking outside the box.

There's a reason why a centerfielder and a left fielder have clear areas of ownership. Pursuing die same ball repeatedly results in either collisions or dropped balls. Knowing that someone else is pursuing the ball and hoping to avoid that collision - we have become timid in our pursuit. Again, the ball drops.

We lack decisiveness. Combine a lack of focus with unclear ownership, and the result is that decisions are either not made or are made when it is already too late. Without a clear and focused vision, and without complete clarity of ownership, we lack a macro perspective to guide our decisions and visibility into who should make those decisions. We are repeatedly stymied by challenging and hairy decisions. We are held hostage by our analysis paralysis.

We end up with competing (or redundant) initiatives and synergistic opportunities living in the different silos of our company.
• YME vs. Musicmatch
• Flickr vs. Photos
• YMG video vs. Search video
• Deli.cio.us vs. myweb
• Messenger and plug-ins vs. Sidebar and widgets
• Social media vs. 360 and Groups
• Front page vs. YMG
• Global strategy from BU'vs. Global strategy from Int'l

We have lost our passion to win. Far too many employees are "phoning" it in, lacking the passion and commitment to be a part of the solution. We sit idly by while -- at all levels -- employees are enabled to "hang around". Where is the accountability? Moreover, our compensation systems don't align to our overall success. Weak performers that have been around for years are rewarded. And many of our top performers aren't adequately recognized for their efforts.

As a result, the employees that we really need to stay (leaders, risk-takers, innovators, passionate) become discouraged and leave. Unfortunately many who opt to stay are not the ones who will lead us through the dramatic change that is needed.
Solving our Problems

We have awesome assets. Nearly every media and communications company is painfully jealous of our position. We have the largest audience, they are highly engaged and our brand is synonymous with the Internet.

If we get back up, embrace dramatic change, we will win.

I don't pretend there is only one path forward available to us. However, at a minimum, I want to be pad of the solution and thus have outlined a plan here that I believe can work. It is my strong belief that we need to act very quickly or risk going further down a slippery slope, The plan here is not perfect; it is, however, FAR better than no action at all.There are three pillars to my plan:1. Focus the vision.2. Restore accountability and clarity of ownership.3. Execute a radical reorganization.

1. Focus the vision

a) We need to boldly and definitively declare what we are and what we are not.

b) We need to exit (sell?) non core businesses and eliminate duplicative projects and businesses.

My belief is that the smoothly spread peanut butter needs to turn into a deliberately sculpted strategy -- that is narrowly focused.

We can't simply ask each BU to figure out what they should stop doing. The result will continue to be a non-cohesive strategy. The direction needs to come decisively from the top. We need to place our bets and not second guess. If we believe Media will maximize our ROI -- then let's not be bashful about reducing our investment in other areas. We need to make the tough decisions, articulate them and stick with them -- acknowledging that some people (users / partners / employees) will not like it. Change is hard.

2. Restore accountability and clarity of ownership

a) Existing business owners must be held accountable for where we find ourselves today -- heads must roll,

b) We must thoughtfully create senior roles that have holistic accountability for a particular line of business (a variant of a GM structure that will work with Yahoo!'s new focus)

c) We must redesign our performance and incentive systems.

I believe there are too many BU leaders who have gotten away with unacceptable results and worse -- unacceptable leadership. Too often they (we!) are the worst offenders of the problems outlined here. We must signal to both the employees and to our shareholders that we will hold these leaders (ourselves) accountable and implement change.

By building around a strong and unequivocal GM structure, we will not only empower those leaders, we will eliminate significant overhead throughout our multi-headed matrix. It must be very clear to everyone in the organization who is empowered to make a decision and ownership must be transparent. With that empowerment comes increased accountability -- leaders make decisions, the rest of the company supports those decisions, and the leaders ultimately live/die by the results of those decisions.

My view is that far too often our compensation and rewards are just spreading more peanut butter. We need to be much more aggressive about performance based compensation. This will only help accelerate our ability to weed out our lowest performers and better reward our hungry, motivated and productive employees.

3. Execute a radical reorganization

a) The current business unit structure must go away.

b) We must dramatically decentralize and eliminate as much of the matrix as possible.

c) We must reduce our headcount by 15-20%.

I emphatically believe we simply must eliminate the redundancies we have created and the first step in doing this is by restructuring our organization. We can be more efficient with fewer people and we can get more done, more quickly. We need to return more decision making to a new set of business units and their leadership. But we can't achieve this with baby step changes, We need to fundamentally rethink how we organize to win.

Independent of specific proposals of what this reorganization should look like, two key principles must be represented:

Blow up the matrix. Empower a new generation and model of General Managers to be true general managers. Product, marketing, user experience & design, engineering, business development & operations all report into a small number of focused General Managers. Leave no doubt as to where accountability lies.

Kill the redundancies. Align a set of new BU's so that they are not competing against each other. Search focuses on search. Social media aligns with community and communications. No competing owners for Video, Photos, etc. And Front Page becomes Switzerland. This will be a delicate exercise -- decentralization can create inefficiencies, but I believe we can find the right balance.

I love Yahoo! I'm proud to admit that I bleed purple and yellow. I'm proud to admit that I shaved a Y in the back of my head.

My motivation for this memo is the adamant belief that, as before, we have a tremendous opportunity ahead. I don't pretend that I have the only available answers, but we need to get the discussion going; change is needed and it is needed soon.

We can be a stronger and faster company - a company with a clearer vision and clearer ownership and clearer accountability.We may have fallen down, but the race is a marathon and not a sprint. I don't pretend that this will be easy. It will take courage, conviction, insight and tremendous commitment. I very much look forward to the challenge.
So let's get back up.
Catch the balls.
And stop eating peanut butter.

Starting a company in India

2006-12-19T23:10:00.000-08:00

Doing Business As An Indian Company

As an alternative to doing business in India, you may want to conduct business as an Indian company through a joint venture or a wholly owned subsidiary. The difference between the two is that in a joint venture, a foreign company partners with an Indian entity. In an owned subsidiary on the other hand, the foreign company fully owns equity in another Indian company. For most industry sectors, especially in the IT field, the foreign company is not required to obtain prior approval from the Secretariat of Industrial Approvals in India and the Foreign Investment Promotion Board. Moreover, to encourage units in the IT sector, numerous government schemes exist, such as: Domestic Tariff Areas, Special Economic Zones, Free Trade Zones, Export Processing Zones, 100 percent EOUs, and Software Technology Parks (STPs). In particular, STPs enjoy the following special benefits:
(a) automatic clearance and approval to operate as a subsidiary,
(b) income tax holidays,
(c) customs duty exemptions on imports,
(d) excise duty exemptions and sales tax reimbursement on indigenous procurement,
(e) high-speed data communication links for software exports, (f) no separate export/import licenses,
(g) Green Card for priority treatment in government clearances and services.

The Specifics Of Incorporating

In India in order to incorporate a company in India, the first step is to file an application with the Registrar of Companies. Six proposed names of the subsidiary company must be provided in an order of preference. The Registrar of Companies wants the company’s name to contain at least one word indicative of the nature of the company’s business. For instance, an IT company should include words such as “software” or “technology” and the names should end either in “Private Limited” or “Public Limited.” If the first few words of the proposed name of the Indian company are those of the parent foreign company, a “No Objection” letter on the letterhead of the parent foreign company allowing the use of the name by the Indian subsidiary expedites the name registration process. Pursuant to the Indian Companies Act, 1956, a minimum of two shareholders is required to incorporate an Indian company. Further, during the incorporation process, the names, addresses, dates of birth, father’s name, nationality, and notarized copies of passports of the proposed directors of the Indian subsidiary must also be provided.Next, the Indian law requires a Memorandum and Articles of Association to be undertaken by the Indian subsidiary. A power of attorney may be required from the parent company by which an agent is appointed. The power of attorney must be notarized and authenticated by the Indian Embassy in the foreign company’s original country.

During the Indian subsidiary’s first board of directors’ meeting, the company must have the following items on its agenda:
(a) adoption of appointment of First Directors named as such in the Articles of Association;
(b) adoption of the registered Memorandum and Articles of Association;
(c) taking on record the Certificate of Incorporation of the company;
(d) taking on record the Registered Office of the company;
(e) approval of the financial year;
(f) appointment of First Auditors within one month of the date of incorporation of the company;
(g) approval of Common Seal of the company;
(h) approval of preliminary and pre-incorporation expenses; (i) allotment of shares and issuance of share certificates to the subscribers;
(j) authorizing a Director to represent the company in general and in taking the necessary steps to register it with various government authorities.

Subsequent to the first board meeting, the following steps must be taken:
(a) opening a company bank account;
(b) obtaining the statutory registers, attendance registers and minute books for the meetings;
(c) preparation of the common seal;
(d) printing share certificates;
(e) obtaining a Permanent Account Number (“PAN”);
(f) obtaining Tax Deduction Account Number (“TAN”);
(g) obtaining Importer-Exporter Code (“IEC”) Number;
(h) obtaining registration under various labor statutes including the Shops and Establishments Act and Provident Funds Act; (i) registration and enrollment with the Professions Tax authority; and (j) registration under Central and Sales Tax Act.The authorized share capital of the proposed Indian subsidiary depends on the words contained in the company’s name. For instance, the authorized share capital of Rs. 50 million ($1 million) is allotted for the use of word “Corporation” in the company name. The authorized share capital of Rs. 10 million ($216,000.00) is for the use of words “International,” “Globe,” “Universal,” “Continental,” or “Asia,” as the first word in the company name. Therefore, words such as those mentioned above are allowed as names only if the authorized share capital of the company totals certain specified amounts.The registration fees payable to the Registrar of Companies at the time of new company’s registration depend on the intended authorized share capital of the company. A private limited company must have a minimum authorized and paid share capital of Rs. 100,000.00. The registration fees generally range from approximately Rs. 4,800.00 ($100.00) to Rs. 98,000.00 ($2,250.00); however, registration fees can go up to Rs. 25 million depending upon the authorized capital.In conclusion, when setting up a business in India, careful attention should be given to the industry in which your company will operate. Additionally, a thorough understanding of the Indian regulations is essential to a successful establishment of your business.1[1] Both foreign companies in India as well as Indian companies are subject to Indian Companies Act, 1956. 2[2] STPs are located in Noida, Navi Mumbai, Pune, Gandhinagar, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Chennai, Bhubaneshwar, Jaipur, Mohali, and Thiruvanathapuram.

Starting Business in the New India

2006-12-19T23:03:00.000-08:00

The sleeping elephant has woken up. Or is it another Asian tiger. Call it what you may, but the truth is that India is on the move. Since economic liberalization began in 1991, India has been clocking an 8 percent GDP growth year after year, foreign direct investments are hitting $10 billion annually, and the stock market has tripled in the last three years. The 300 million strong middle class, with new money in their pockets are continuing to fuel the economic engine.

http://www.siliconindia.com/magazine/fullstory.php/PNH721713089

Thinking small: Entrepreneurship in India

2006-12-13T03:57:00.000-08:00

Despite all the fuss about offshoring to Bangalore, Amar Bhidé claims it can’t transform India’s economy. Here, he explains the reforms needed to spur business growth and put India on the fast track.http://www0.gsb.columbia.edu/ideasatwork/magazinefeature?&right3.uni=avb24&top.title=Thinking+small%3A+Entrepreneurship+in+India&main.id=594824&right2.id=594824&right3.view=whoswho.minifaculty&main.view=articles.detail&right3.ctrl=whoswhomgr.list&right2.ctrl=contentmgr.detail&top.pagetitle=&right2.view=articles.related&main.region=main&main.ctrl=contentmgr.detail&top.showsendarticle=yes

India and China are the only real Brics in the wall

2006-12-05T03:31:00.000-08:00

Few concepts have gained more currency among business people and politicians in recent years than the idea of the Brics – the giant, emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China, whose weight and influence is supposedly changing economic and political realities. Grouping the four, however, obscures a simple fact: while the rise of China and India represents a real shift in the power balance, Russia and Brazil are marginal economies propped up by high commodity prices. This difference has profound implications.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2147c02e-82e9-11db-a38a-0000779e2340,dwp_uuid=9c33700c-4c86-11da-89df-0000779e2340.html

Why India will overtake China

2006-11-22T04:40:00.000-08:00

Since past few years India vs China discussion is going everywhere .Media, investers,politicians all are equally inetersted to present there case either in favour or in against India. Although India is a late starter in this race for Asian domination it has potentail to be tough sports against China if not a winner.

It will be too early to declare who will win this marathon but it is clear that China's hard infrastructure will help her to be on the top of the things for coming years.

India need speed and more importantly descipline to make sure it meat the expectations of its people. Constant comparision with China will put pressure on government to act, industry to include China in their strategy.

Next few year will provide India opportunity and challenge to conferm its postion in world affairs.

http://money.cnn.com/2006/08/30/magazines/fortune/IndiavsChina_pluggedin.fortune/index.htm

Is India becoming an engine for global growth?

2006-10-03T07:24:00.000-07:00

A very thought provoking article on Indian economy.Looking answer for the question --Is India has reached a satge where it can be consider as world growth engine, most of the economist from IMF find difficult to say a convincing yes.

Why?

India is still a closed economy.Our trade policy still protect local bussiness from competion and triff are almost double then other emerging economies in the region.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4269858.stm

Starting a Business in India

2006-10-03T07:10:00.000-07:00

Here is a interesting article about procedures involved in starting bussiness in India.Surprisingly the number of dyas it take to start in India is 35.....more than a month.And I beleive all estimates given here are very conservative. It may take longer if you decide to be not to bribe any one :) , not to involve local expert and try to be nice :)...

http://www.doingbusiness.org/ExploreTopics/StartingBusiness

If I am not wrong aroung two year back the number of days used to be around 70! !!!!!!!!!!.
Yap ,there is significant improvement but lot more can be done. With india drowing attention from all over world it would be best in the ineterst of India to reduce and streamline this whole process into a one week process.

Investing in India: conference

2006-09-26T07:33:00.000-07:00

INVESTING IN INDIA
Venture Capital & Private Equity For One Of The Fastest Growing HighTech Hubs In The World
October 10, 2006 ● The Fairmont, San Francisco, CA
With India’s 15-year-old reforms process taking effect, India is one of the fastest growing economies and now the prime target for the VC & PE community. Aided by a growing domestic market and a projected 8-plus percent GDP growth rate, India’s stock markets are booming like never before making them one of the best performing in the world. The investment climate, business productivity and technology growth are substantial. This now offers VCs and private equity firms the best promises of returns. With a continued climb in venture capital & PE investments and with the rising number of US investments as a backdrop, IBF is proud to present its second annual Investing in India Conference.
Hear from top investors in India who will share strategies on:

The India Story: Is it Prime Time Yet for India and can the market handle a dramatic increase in PE fund inflows
Industry Assessment: Which industries are the most attractive in India from an investment perspective and why?
Risk Management: other than financial considerations, what are the key components of performing due diligence in the Indian markets
Evaluating Early Stage Investment Candidates In India
Private Equity Opportunities in India
Infrastructure and Real Estate Funds for India
Going Direct vs. Afíliate or Sponsored fund for VCs
India 2.0: The Innovation Source
Assessing Top Quality Management In India
LP Perspective on India
How To Exit: Understanding Liquidity And The M&A Landscape
Tales from the trenches from CEOs
Audience profile:
This conference will unite those involved and interested in investing in technologies and companies based in India. Attendees include: venture capitalists, private equity investors & firms, corporate investors, angel investors, and emerging growth companies in India, incubators, CEOs and CFOs of established companies, institutional investors and investment bankers, to provide an annual gathering to exchange ideas, facilitate information, and foster business contacts.

http://www.ibfconferences.com/ibf/

SUN'S new CEO on Bangalore, blog, business and battles

2006-07-26T06:24:00.000-07:00

NEW DELHI: When Jonathan Schwartz took reins of Silicon Valley-based network computing major Sun Microsystems as its new president and CEO from co-founder and current chairman Scott McNealy three months ago in April, few gave him a chance to be able to revive the ailing server and network solutions major.

But the pony-tailed blogger CEO has begun in right earnest with Sun beginning to cut losses, the first time in nearly two years. In an exclusive marathon interview with Neeraj Saxena, his first with Indian media, Schwartz spoke about the growth in Indian operations (worth Rs 1,100 crore as per current market estimates); opportunities in India including the potential in Bollywood and Indian cricket; Bangalore's infrastructure bottlenecks and how he plans to institutionalize virtual offices and home working as an answer. Read on.

Q: India is your second biggest R&D centre after the US. What is India's chance to see an increased investment from Sun, or become its No.1 R&D destination?

Jonathan: Unlike many companies in the world that look at R&D in terms of how much it costs them, our business is not very sensitive to the wage rates. It is far more sensitive to productivity and leadership. I am much less sensitive to how much it cost me to deliver an operating system (OS) and much more to how soon I can deliver it and how great it will be when delivered.

Thus, for any engineering site around the world to attract more of Sun's R&D dollars is to deliver great products on time, or ahead of schedule. India Engineering Centre (Sun's R&D centre in Bangalore) under the leadership of Vijay Anand has done a fantastic job in ensuring that India maintains its prominence as a key R&D destination for us.

For it to become our largest R&D centre is not something I pay that much attention to. I'm more focused on how to work across disparate time zones to get the best product to market fastest possible. We don't staff up or down by mulling 'should we do this in India, do we do this in China, do we do this in the US'. It's much more like where do we have the leadership skills, where do we have the technical skills, and where is the market emerging.

The MD of Indian operations Bhaskar Pramanik has been doing a fantastic job of growing Sun's business. That growth is causing us to think how to invest more in Bhaskar and Vijay, because we're more likely to invest in a great leader than we will in getting better wage rates.

Q: How do you rank your Indian leadership versus the leadership in your other markets? If you indeed have so much faith in it, what took Sun so long to turn India its 16th GEM? How central is this hidden GEM really to your global growth vis-a-vis Greater China?

Jonathan: I believe we were just implicitly criticized for being late to discover that India was a good market! There's a tremendous amount of respect for both Bhaskar and Vijay's delivery records. That's why India has been made what we refer to as a geographically established market (GEM) and you obviously know well about our internal management model.

But India is still a relatively small business for us, quite unlike for Accenture, IBM, or even TCS and Infosys, who all run service delivery businesses. These companies want to employ more people simply to do the work done by others, for less money. In fact, I would like to caution those in decision-making positions in India: Your country may be so attractive today that IBM is hiring 50,000 people. But you just got to make sure that companies that are today looking to take advantage of the cheap labour pool don't discover China, Vietnam , Cambodia or Namibia having cheaper labour tomorrow and then simply shift those 40,000 jobs elsewhere!

What Sun tends to do is build R&D, skill-sets and intellectual property which is far more durable. The skills that we gradually build will be much more valuable to Sun, as also to the Indian economy. What took us so long is the fact that we weren't outsourcing world's data centres to India. We have been focused on product development and serving Indian businesses. India or any other country is not central to our future, innovation is! So long as Vijay and Bhaskar produce innovation, we're going to continue investing here by all means.

Q: Then it must be time to relook your investments in India because even though India is your second fastest-growing GEM and in spite of seven fold growth in seven years, you have invested just $150 million in the country so far? Surely your best managers, product development and customers being here, there ought to have been more investment ...

Jonathan: We invest in growth, period. And that growth has to be profitable in the long run. We're certainly looking at the maturing of the Indian market opportunity, to provide us with the kind of indicators that we need to increase our investment here.

Right now, Indian economy is growing mostly along the outsourcing opportunity, a business we are not in. People look at Sun and IBM side by side and say – 'IBM is hiring 50,000 people in India, why aren't you'? Well that's because IBM is hiring for a very different purpose. They're hiring to lower the cost of their operation and that's not what we do. So in one word: Are we going to grow in India? Absolutely!

Q: Who is your best Indian (executive) trump card 24 years after Vinod Khosla co-founded the company, specially now that a 22-year veteran like Jay Puri is also no longer at the helm of your mission-critical APAC region?

Jonathan: My mother is half-Indian, so I think that would be me. Second on the list is Anil Gadre, who is the company's chief marketing officer. Through the ranks of the organization, there's a lot of Indian representation in Sun Microsystems.

Q: Will Sun's recent success in high performance computing (HPC) and entry in the list of Top 10 supercomputers make you look more favourably towards India's needs for supercomputers? Would Sun look at partnering Indian agencies in joint pilots, for instance, to study the impact made by weather, environmental pollution, soil quality or tectonic movement on Taj Mahal?

Jonathan: Frankly, we have not been involved in HPC space in the past three-four years because we didn't have high performance infrastructure. Now that we do, we just claimed a set of largest HPC computing installations in the world. We've also been investing heavily in the software and hardware to enable a large-scale grid, both as a service we have called www.network.com, as well as through our own infrastructure to go with the type of network companies are going to be investing their money in building their own grid. So without going into specifics, I can say we see the market growing. We certainly see our innovations, both the Solaris OS platform as well as the next generation infrastructure, being relevant to marketplaces like India.

But you touched upon a very interesting thing: Looking at the Taj and trying to understand whether its tectonic shifts upon the impact of the weather or some of the environmental issues. Those actually are issues that are beginning to not only affect the demand for what we build, but a lot of companies want to understand the environmental impact of what they're doing. We also see that as creating differentiation for us in the data centre space because companies are now focusing on infrastructure that is power-efficient, space-efficient, and efficient in terms of the personnel needed to run it. Many businesses around the world are trying to understand the environmental impact of their infrastructures. The market opportunity for Sun in terms of supplying to those who want to use HPC is shaping up our R&D orientation.

Q: India has new, but significant, needs for HPC in areas like meteorological simulation and visualization; oceanography; monsoon tracking; defence; space research, and even life sciences. Any plans to have a partner for the HPC programme in India?

Jonathan: The trading symbol for Sun Microsystems is SUNW. That stands for Stanford University Network Workstation. The history of the company spawns from academic environment. And if you look at the evolution of computing, what happens in academia ultimately rolls out to leading enterprises. What happens in leading enterprises further rolls out to mainstream. So when we look at segments like HPC, the first institutions we look to are academic institutions because they tend to be on the very bleeding edge of innovation. So we are going to work strongly... In fact, we'll be doubling our commitment to the academic environment over the next 12 months to intercept a lot of that bleeding edge thinking.

We're working across India with a variety of academic institutions as well and hope to establish the kind of collaborative research partnerships that will allow us to understand where the market is heading. We will help them progress in understanding the next frontiers of everything, from protein modeling to reservoir simulations to crowd behaviour. All of that requires the kind of computing innovation that Sun can almost uniquely apply.

Q: So you do see India as a good potential market for HPC?

Jonathan: Absolutely yes! Indian government is very committed to education, and you have a society that cares deeply about education as a route to economic betterment. That investment, familial as well as the government investment, is pushing a lot of Indians into taking up hard sciences, engineering, mathematics, computational physics, into the kinds of areas that lead to not only usage of computing infrastructure, but also leads to the creation of intellectual property that can be exported across the world. We're going to work in collaboration with academic institutions that understand the value of technology and the value of partnering with the private sector.

In fact, I was just talking to the head of our academic collaborative computing effort a couple of weeks ago about this. Our belief is that India is very well-prepared right now, partially due to the success of the system integrators in India, and because so many folks want to work for these SIs. These are very prestigious, very high-profile companies. A lot of the work that's being done in computing in the academic environment is going to be shared in the commercial environment, and a lot of that's going to be HPC work.

this answer is absolute beaty:>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Q: Would you look at Bangaloring Sun's product innovation as also your internal processes as part of a long-term strategy? How do you see India on its outsourcing merits or strengths?

Jonathan: Let me talk about Sun processes first. If there's a process that I can cost-reduce, and the process is price-sensitive, then I don't want that process to be done by Sun. If I can find someone in the world who can do it more cheaply than me, then I don't need to do that. Our core competence is innovation; technology; understanding markets, and being able to deliver innovation to satisfy market opportunity.

So how do I look at moving processes to India? I don't. Frankly, if we were to look at moving any processes to India, I'd look at how we're going to exit those processes and find an Indian company, say a partner like Wipro, Infosys, TCS or Satyam, who can do the same with world-class expertise. Those companies are better at cost-reducing business processes than anyone else in the world. So it has become their core competence and unique intellectual property.

Our intellectual property is going to be the Solaris OS, the next generation of power-based storage, the next generation of energy-efficient (hyper) processors. That's where I want to focus our time and effort.

Q: That means irrespective of when, but you would be keen on third party outsourcing to India?

Jonathan: There's no doubt about it. By the way, we're looking at that today, and we're continuing to look to our business partners such as those four I mentioned, and who, arguably are the best in the world. And again, what's extraordinary to me is watching the Indian progress on to the network. What started as a discussion around wage rates has instead become a discussion centred around profit! What originally looked to be a movement to hire a bunch of people cheaply, has instead become highly billed world-class competence in build intellectual property in core areas that can be exported to the rest of the world. So that can be a much more sustainable economic model.

By the way, these partner companies are also becoming large customers of ours. All of the businesses that we see growing in India are growing not because they're doing others' job around the world, but because they're exporting their intellectual property outwards.

That's one of the most interesting discussions I have had with a new customer from a company that owns the franchise to Indian cricket. They were telling me about the statistics involved: the number of people, the amount of wealth involved in watching cricket, not only by Indians in India, but by Indian across the world. I was dumbfounded because one of our largest customers in the US is called mlb.com (Major League Baseball.com) and the Indian company had a business plan with vast multiples of the mlb.com business plan since the market opportunity is just too expansive.

There are more people watching Indian cricket than there are people living in the whole of US. Fantastic! So that's the need... that's a great market opportunity that we can satisfy with our Indian business partners. Outsourcing functions is just not our priority.

BANGALORE:
Q: How do you rank Bangalore as the sole Indian location for Sun and most tech companies in the wake of infrastructure bottlenecks and political changes?

Jonathan: There isn't a region in the world where I am satisfied that it is convenient enough, low-cost enough, or efficient enough. The traffic is horrendous in the Bay Area and San Francisco where I live. It is probably not as bad as Bangalore, but not far off. The problem is whenever we find talented people anywhere in the world, we aren't the only ones to discover. Same is the case with Austin , Texas; Prague in Czechoslovakia to St. Petersburg in Russia to Sao Paolo in Brazil .

But the good news is that the infrastructure is improving to a point that most of our employees can work from home. So the question for me isn't so much - Is Bangalore a good site? The question for us really is - Does the Indian government take education seriously enough? Does it take network connectivity seriously enough because those two things combined means that there will be talent that can get access to the network and work for Sun.

When I look five years from now, I don't expect our employees to have offices. I don't think any of our employees like having offices. They like having really fast computing infrastructure and great bandwidth. That's the kind of infrastructure that I care about because the most environmentally responsible commute is the commute that you can avoid. I'd like to keep our employees off the road, I'd like to keep our service professionals off the road and allow the sales people to visit customers in the ways they need to, but rely on the network to do the job that's otherwise done by an automobile, or an airplane.

Q: Any thoughts on the market opportunity in animation and special effects for Bollywood studios?

Jonathan: I look at Bollywood and Indian cricket like any other media opportunity. There's no question that cricket or Bollywood's main audiences are not going to be in stadiums and movie theatres in times to come. They are going to be on the handsets, set-top-boxes, back-seats of the cabs driving through downtown Bangalore! Since we have been working in partnership with the media companies in the US and Europe, we will be able to help create the type of content that consumers will want. Not just on their PC, but on their handsets, on the devices they use to connect with the network. Sun has actually very heavily invested in the media marketplace, partially because it creates such a demand for network infrastructure, but also because it is key to what consumers want.

To understand where the market is headed, just go hang out with the average 18-year-old - whether on the streets of Mumbai or San Francisco – you'll get a sense of where the computing environment is headed.

I had a nephew staying with me recently and I was running him through my normal tests to understand what teenagers think. I gave him three choices – a new Motorola Slvr phone, an iPod, or the fastest desktop computer. He chose the phone and the iPod! Kids of that generation are all set to use the mobile computing devices. When I asked him what he wanted to do with the iPod or phone, he said he wanted to watch movies and listen to music. So, if you want to understand the future of the network in India, you should probably go and hang out with the producers at Bollywood, because consumers will find Bollywood. I'm not sure they'll find Sun. But Sun's objective is to go find the folks that are trying to find consumers and go serve them. Given how appealing and how attractive Bollywood has been for India, the producers will drive a lot of demand for consumers who want to see their content, no matter where they are.

Q: Are you engaged with any of the Indian production studios for the supply of high-end servers for movie production?

Jonathan: Sun is focused on banking and financial services; telecom and the government sectors which have been our traditional customers. But next generation media and entertainment companies such as those producing Bollywood or cricket content will drive a tremendous amount of new infrastructure on the network. We will have to engage them.

Q: How would you rate the Indian Java developer community? How does Sun plan to turn them into revenue generators?

Jonathan: Look across the world for the most vibrant and dynamic Java developer marketplace and India would be right at the top as the fastest growing, as well as one of the most innovative communities out there. That's partially because the Indian SIs are doing so much hiring, but also because there has been a tremendous upsurge in the demand for programming knowledge across the world. So the investment that we've made in NetBeans has really begun to bear fruit for seeing a very significant majority of the new community members, in both OpenSolaris and in the NetBeans community coming from Asia, and from India specifically.

Again, the best way that we can grow that adoption is to work with that community, to create better innovations and help folks get their jobs done more efficiently. As I said revenues for Sun is a lagging indicator of the adoption of our core developer platforms, whether it is Solaris or NetBeans. So I would love to encourage the Indian Java developers or the Solaris developers to engage and communicate, not specifically with Sun, but with others in the community to help define where we go next. The Java or the Solaris platforms are products of community initiative. The more folks participate in those communities, the more control they can take over where that platform heads next. So the No. 1 imperative for Sun is to have a globally compatible platform, but the No.2 imperative is to make sure that platform can evolve and serve mobile devices, set-top-boxes, medical instruments, automobile dashboards. That happens due to the innovation of community members. Again, there are a lot of developers in India that have the skill and wherewithal. I will continue to encourage and engage them in the NetBeans and OpenSolaris community, to keep driving the platform forward.

Q: When would Sun be back to profitability and how much pressure are you under to take quick-fix measures?

Jonathan: I'm under no pressure to do anything other than work with the long-term best interests of Sun stockholders. On profitability, I've stated that we're targeting 4% operating margin in Q4 this year and 10% operating margin in subsequent years. As we look at driving towards more predictable earnings and profitability, we're going to focus on the innovations that have created Sun to be a $13 billion company. We're not going to focus on the actions that in the short term may in fact lower the operating expenses of the company, while simultaneously giving us unacceptable competitive positioning.

Other companies may be disinvesting in their OS. Hewlett-Packard just introduced its exciting new Blade platform and was thrilled to tell the market that Sun's Solaris ran on those machines. They were probably less excited to point out that HP's own operating system UX couldn't run on them. That's the kind of innovation and competitive advantage we have got by sticking to investing in the core R&D. So, I'm really enjoying the new markets opened to Sun since we've allowed Solaris to run on x64 platforms. We're seeing tremendous adoption in IBM Blade Center and the new HP Blade servers. It is us versus Microsoft in those environments. We really don't see HP UX or IBM AIX, because they don't run there. That in itself is an advantage.

Q: But some critics are already accusing Sun, under your leadership, of being slow to change and not wanting to move away from UNIX just yet. How do you react to these accusations and could you elucidate the basic cornerstones of your revival strategy, including the review of Sun's future spending?

Jonathan: Anybody who is accusing us of being slow to respond has perhaps missed the fact that within my first 45 days, we announced a restructuring plan to re-shape the core economics of the company, having reviewed every inch of the organisation from top to bottom. We've been in business for 20+ years and we've looked at leading indicators and lagging indicators. It's hard to understand that revenues at Sun is a lagging indicator of developer adoption.

Developer adoption is the world's best leading indicator. So I'm more focused on whether TCS, Infosys, Wipro and Satyam use NetBeans to build applications for the market that we can then satisfy with Sun's infrastructure! I'm as focused on developer adoption as I am on revenue generation.

The last quarter, we grew revenue, we gained share in our core market. The toughest market in the world for us is the US and we gained significant share in the US. Our growth margins are up and we've made absolutely tremendous strides. We've improved the operating economics of the company, reduced operating expenditure by over $1 billion, besides a radical reduction in the real estate facilities expenses, to enable a more profitable business going forward.

So I'm under no pressure to take the kind of quickfixes that Mark Hurd did in HP by cutting their OS. I'm going to focus instead on creating innovation that we think will play out in the next 5-10 years. Again, I'm not worried about market opportunity for Sun. There's demand in India, just as much as there's demand across the rest of the world.

The Indian economy and its participants understand that the network is a vehicle to new growth, new opportunity and new wealth. So long as that continues to be a part of the assumption basis across the world, it means Sun's going to always see a demand for what it builds. I want to stay focused on getting Sun in front of that demand.

Frankly, I'm in the mode of thinking we only have 17,000 people in our field organization. I wish we had 1,17,000 people because a 100% of companies in the world are going to buy the technologies that Sun builds. The issue for us is will they buy it from us, or from one of our competitors.

Q: Of approximately 5,000 jobs that Sun is going to cut this year, how many could be from India and which areas?

Jonathan: We haven't rolled out the global impact and frankly we're still working through that. We're going to focus on identifying programmes that we want to continue investing in: our core software assets and core systems assets. Where that happens in the world is somewhat of an after-effect. We're not targeting geographies where we will increase or decrease investment, we're targeting product areas and profit-derived programmes.

Q: Your reaction to Red Hat's criticism of your not open sourcing of Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and how do you visualize Java to brew in the coming years?

Jonathan: At our largest JavaOne conference ever in San Francisco this June, we had tens of thousands of people in the audience as well as hundreds of thousands online. What was really amazing this time around was that it really seemed like a truly representative world audience. You could walk through the audience and hear 50 different languages being spoken. I loved that! That to me was a really interesting crowd. So, I'm thrilled with the progress that we are making.

We are obviously moving on the path to open source Java and we continue to see the Java community process being absolutely instrumental in driving demand in the marketplace. But we are also thrilled to death that Red Hat has elected to leave behind their obviously misinformed rhetoric of the past, which it built around the openness of the Java community process because Red Hat has just joined the Java community process itself through its acquisition of middleware provider Jboss. We are thrilled that it now understands how to really work with the community.

I'm sure Red Hat is going to be welcomed with open arms by the rest of the Java community to work collaboratively and will continue to define the platform. Unlike what has happened with Red Hat in the Linux marketplace where it really became somewhat the sole provider and is now in the process of factoring that to be a Red Hat product, Java continues to deliver value universally to all members, whether it is the Indian systems integrators, or the systems companies, or the software companies, or the service companies and we're just continuing to grow exponentially. We welcome Red Hat's contributions with open arms and we're glad to see that they are putting their rhetoric behind them and really recognizing the integrity of the Java community.

Q: Coming back to the mobile devices. How much inroads has Qualcomm's BREW made into the Java bastion?

Jonathan: We don't actually see that much BREW as we see Java across the world, whether it is on Reliance handsets, or throughout the US with Cingular, or Vodafone, NTT DoCoMo or China Mobile. This year, we are on the path to about a billion mobile devices running on J2ME. With Blue Ray obviously now set to come on consumer DVDs, Java is going to be in the living room. We don't really see BREW making any headway there at all.

With the next-generation OCAP (OpenCable Application Platform) standards, we see Java showing up on set-top-boxes, in telematics, we're beginning to see it show up on automobile dashboards, on cameras, on cell phones, on consumer electronics, on medical devices... So I see a tremendous and growing platform for Java. I think Brew was a phenomenon two years back, but we haven't really seen a lot of momentum around it since then.

Q: The Network may well be on the road to becoming. The Computer indeed with powerful mobile devices coming to fore, but the PC hasn't quite vanished in thin air. It seems to be reinventing and co-existing & one gets to hear less and less about a passionate Scott McNealy dream called `thin client computing'. Your views.

Jonathan: If you really look around the world carefully, users are increasingly utilizing tools other than a PC to connect to the network. A PC is an expensive method of connection. Phones, PDAs, wireless devices offer a more affordable, convenient, and power-efficient method. The PC will serve a purpose, but I believe the use of other mobile devices will drive network growth globally - especially in emerging economies. Leveraging the network to deliver services across multiple devices is the future. Companies not focused on this area will miss the wave of innovation that will provide new opportunities for economic growth and participation.

Q: Media has often devoted way too much attention to the Microsoft-Google battles, perhaps missing out on the emerging larger picture. Is your vision of the tech world bi-polar, or a multi-polar one?

Jonathan: There are many great companies delivering innovative solutions, with start-ups developing new technologies everyday. The bigger picture is that we are in `The Participation Age' and only those that focus on providing new methods of connecting, collaborating and sharing will thrive.

Q: How has your own cozy friendship with Microsoft panned out in the past 18 months? Do you think Microsoft succumbed to the customers' pressure to come onboard Sun-led Open Document Forum (ODF) and endorse its view of an inter-operable, open source document standard?

Jonathan: We continue to partner and compete with Microsoft. Ultimately it comes down to customer choice. Some customers use technologies from both companies and it is our duty to enable the interoperability they need to
run their business.

The goal of ODF is to ensure access to documents, regardless of what format they were originally created in. Imagine not being able to access business plans, government documents or financial records, or on a personal level, photos or family correspondence because the format they were originally created in is now outdated. ODF removes that obstacle and allows for interoperability between formats to assure access in the future.

Microsoft has just announced that it will offer software, free under an open source license, that allows its Office users to view and create documents in the Open Document Format. This is an important first step and we look forward to taking a closer look at their prototype. ODF is the office document file format with the broadest vendor support, with more than 220 members of the ODF Alliance.

Q: Since you were closely involved with development of Solaris 10, what critical / fundamental impact do you see on the future versions of Solaris since it was made Open Source? It has already picked a lot of traction, but what's next?

Jonathan: The open sourcing of Solaris has been a tremendous success. We have recently passed the one year mark and in that year OpenSolaris has grown to more than 14,000 members, with 29 user groups around the world, 40 communities and 27 active projects.

Solaris 10 has exceeded 5 million registered license shipments which is more than what its competitors have shipped collectively in the last 18 months, and more than all current Solaris OS versions combined. The market adoption is driving customer demand and I expect that to continue. Solaris 10 is the most advanced and secure OS on the planet and we are committed to its ongoing development. Solaris will continue to be the strategic center of our systems business and will remain an integral component in our open source strategy.

Q: You are an avid blogger, a rarity amidst top CEOs. When did you start blogging and did you envisage using it as a corporate tool right since the beginning?

Jonathan: While I am currently one of only two Fortune 500 CEOs with a blog, in 10 years I expect most of us will communicate directly with our customers, employees and the larger community through blogs. The Internet has revolutionized the way people collaborate and share information and blogging provides a vehicle to communicate with anyone, anytime, anywhere in the world. This effectively enables participation in communities you wish to cultivate, including employees, partners, the next generation of technology developers and leaders, customers, potential customers, to name but a few.

Blogging allows me to directly share my thoughts on a global scale and reach people I normally would not. Through my blog, I am able to maintain a dialogue and discuss everything from business and operational priorities to technology developments to company culture. And I am not the only one, there are thousands of Sun employees, including members of senior management such as Greg Papadopoulos, CTO and EVP, and James Gosling, father of Java technology, whose blogs not only share their perspectives, but also provide insight into Sun's unique, innovative culture.

China is a non-event`

2006-07-26T04:20:00.000-07:00

He’s considered one of the world’s greatest futurists. In 1982, John Naisbitt wrote Megatrends, which spent two years on The New York Times bestsellers list and was translated into 57 languages. It’s still in print, as are Naisbitt’s other bestsellers Reinventing the Corporation and Global Paradox.

here are some extracts of his interview with Business standard :

Business models are undergoing a change. What is the business model of the future?

What it does is to draw on talent. In a way, pharma companies are also evolving. As their pipelines for new drugs are drying up, they acquire tiny innovative companies, because their in-house R&D teams are not producing enough innovation for this kind of growth. So it serves as a new model. You go where the talent is.

When things are bright, are there also any shades of grey for business

One of the things I say is, “be an opportunity seeker and not a problem solver”.
Opportunity seekers are the ones who will change the world. They look for openings and possibilities. Problem-solvers necessarily deal with yesterday.

You have spoken about companies being in the centre of economic activity....

Investments are shifting from nation states to economic domains. The question is not whether China will beat India. The question is whether a Chinese company in that sector will beat an Indian company from the same sector.

The competition is between people and companies. Countries don’t create economies. Entrepreneurs create economies. The government’s role is to create a nourishing environment for its companies, just like it’s a company’s role to create a nourishing environment for its employees. Then, entrepreneurs will see openings and the opportunity seekers will create employment opportunities.

Is the lack of political involvement amongst the youth a threat to economic growth?”

2006-07-11T02:37:00.000-07:00

On July 1, 2006 ISB was host to four eminent personalities from the world of journalism for a round table discussion on “Is the lack of political involvement amongst the youth a threat to economic growth?”

The panel also consisted of two speakers from the Class of 2007 – Disha Rustogi and Ali Potia. The discussion raised some thought provoking ideas and led to a series of very interesting debates on campus. The Media Club at ISB did a phenomenal job of executing the event! For more details, check out: http://www.isb.edu/campussbuzz1/RoundTable2006.html

Nanotechnology at IIT Mumbai

2006-07-04T02:34:00.000-07:00

Good news for techies . IIT mumbai started Nanotechnology group.This center of exellence will
train 25 Phds. so get ready to shrink the world..........

This is a joint project between the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IITB) and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) to create Centres of Excellence in Nanoelectronics.
These centres will undertake state-of-the-art research in nanoelectronics, train manpower in this emerging area, interact with industry, research laboratories and government departments, and create facilities which will be used by nanoelectronics researchers all over the country.
Though both the centres will have some areas in common, by and large the team at IITB will focus more on the devices and circuits aspects of nanoelectronics and the team at IISc will focus more on the materials aspects of nanoelectronic devices..
Through a separate "Indian Nanoelectronics Users Program (INUP)", these Nanoelectronics centres will be made accessible to external users including other academic institutions, research labs, and industries.

internet companies 2.0

2006-07-04T00:21:00.000-07:00

Its a well understood fact that internet will be the futer flatform for develpment. With web 2.0 providing the edge , internet startups are coming up with fresh enerygy and simple yet powerfull ideas.

Out of all 25 mention in this list I like simply hired for its innovative solution to a much in demand "jobs " to people all over world. I got this idea long back but I didnt tried harder then these peoples.

The Next Net 25
A new Web revolution is picking up steam, and the next Google or Microsoft could emerge from the companies that are in the vanguard.

http://money.cnn.com/2006/02/23/smbusiness/business2_nextnet_intro/index.htm

(See the list and gallery: The Next Net 25)

Micro-multinationals : Globalisation at its best

2006-07-03T23:48:00.000-07:00

This article is quite unique in the sense it answers many of my questions futre orginanisation structure. With the world srinking every day and competion squizzining best out of enterprenuers Micro-multinational provide new form of orginasation anad a fresh challenge to enterpenuers .

How startups go global
Think multinationals have to be big? Think again. Scrappy, savvy small companies are operating worldwide in the battle for technology, talent, and customers.

http://money.cnn.com/2006/06/28/magazines/business2/startupsgoglobal.biz2/index.htm

2006-06-29T03:02:00.000-07:00

Summer Training and Internship in India

Submitted by tarundua on Sun, 08/07/2005 - 17:58. Linux

The Engineering and Professional graduate programs in India include Summer Training with the following objectives* Correlate courses of study with the way industry or potential workplace operates its business or work using technology.* Work on implementing what has been learnt in school, especially true for Computer Science under-graduates.The engineering and professional courses including MCA, B.Tech, B.E., BCA amongst others at any given time have an estimated half a million under-graduates needing internship in fields of Computer Science, Electrical and Electronics, Mechanical, Civil, Bio-Informatics disciplines every year. The students for professional programs are required as a part of the courses to undergo a 8 week or 6 month training.For a long time after independence(India) the lack of industrialization meant that many of these young professionals had to go without proper training during internship period earmarked in the under-graduate programs. The world moves from industrial age to intellectual property based wealth generation structures i.e. factories replaced by call-centers and technology companies viz. chip design, software and bio-informatics.

Tools for generating this wealth in the form of software, [patents] and documented processes is available easily in the hands of people hithertho on the wrong side of longitudes and time-zones or urban-rural divides.In today's world the interns or trainees, the future professionals need to re-orient the traditional approach to searching for a training or internship.

The traditional approach being defined as :-1

. Look for name brands and try and get a Training Certificate.

2. Put your dad-mom 's, uncle's and aunt's social network to work and land an internship. This normally gets you a certificate and usually not much as else as someone is merely obliging your relatives.

3. Your seniors sometimes can help place interns in the companies they work for, this generally works if you happen to belong to elite institutes like IITs, IIITs and NITs.

4. Your institutes placement cell:- Unless you need a 6-month training placement, the companies normally don't bother offering training through placement cell. Again works better if yours is an elite institute.

5. Paid training to learn a new technology or a knowledge upgrade at an educational institution of repute like NITs which organise training programs for their students and accept outside students to work at their labs. This type of a training is a useful upgrade to theoretical knowledge but actually counts as "back to classroom" rather than an internship.

6. Training under a Full Professor/Researcher: a rarity in the stream of Computer Science, most of them went to the industry to earn their megabucks or went to US to pursue further research.T

he best that this approach gets you is:-After starting to look for summer training 2-3 months before you need to start it and finally reach a good enough company or workplace just in time or delayed by a week or two. Having reached a name brand or the coveted big corp, most interns end up doing menial chores no one else wants to do.The interns are either ignored or given totally useless jobs like inventorizing the IT equipment, making a survey of problems faced by home-owners in a factory owned residential area for its workers, making spreadsheets etc under the ruse that they are not qualified to handle a real job of programming or its equivalent in other areas of work.

original source:http://tarundua.net

Product development

2006-06-29T02:57:00.000-07:00

Product Development

Buying startups also solves another problem afflicting big companies: they can't do product development. Big companies are good at extracting the value from existing products, but bad at creating new ones.Why? It's worth studying this phenomenon in detail, because this is the raison d'etre of startups.To start with, most big companies have some kind of turf to protect, and this tends to warp their development decisions.

For example, Web-based applications are hot now, but within Microsoft there must be a lot of ambivalence about them, because the very idea of Web-based software threatens the desktop. So any Web-based application that Microsoft ends up with, will probably, like Hotmail, be something developed outside the company.Another reason big companies are bad at developing new products is that the kind of people who do that tend not to have much power in big companies (unless they happen to be the CEO). Disruptive technologies are developed by disruptive people.

And they either don't work for the big company, or have been outmaneuvered by yes-men and have comparatively little influence.Big companies also lose because they usually only build one of each thing. When you only have one Web browser, you can't do anything really risky with it. If ten different startups design ten different Web browsers and you take the best, you'll probably get something better.The more general version of this problem is that there are too many new ideas for companies to explore them all. There might be 500 startups right now who think they're making something Microsoft might buy. Even Microsoft probably couldn't manage 500 development projects in-house.Big companies also don't pay people the right way.

People developing a new product at a big company get paid roughly the same whether it succeeds or fails. People at a startup expect to get rich if the product succeeds, and get nothing if it fails. [2] So naturally the people at the startup work a lot harder.The mere bigness of big companies is an obstacle.

In startups, developers are often forced to talk directly to users, whether they want to or not, because there is no one else to do sales and support. It's painful doing sales, but you learn much more from trying to sell people something than reading what they said in focus groups.And then of course, big companies are bad at product development because they're bad at everything.

Everything happens slower in big companies than small ones, and product development is something that has to happen fast, because you have to go through a lot of iterations to get something good.

more intersted the must read: http://paulgraham.com/hiring.html

MBA mania!!!! NOt good for india. Best for me.

2006-06-28T22:02:00.000-07:00

Soon after doing engineering almost all of my friends and classmate faced the delliema : what next? . Most of them found themslef unfit for industry by training and look for either an addon course or training or somthing more advance like M.tech.

But first and formost thing that every engineering graduate think of is to join his peers .the "doing a M.B.A." community. this phenomeneon is quit coomon among student from leser known private engieering collge in lesser developed cities .

I find some reasons for such heard mentality. To start with almost 70% have no idea what they want to be, or ther true petential . Atmoshere in college let them enjoy those youthfull days in their individual comfort zone . After degree real world help them to come out their comfort zone andforced them in fight for survival. They start looking for otions and they come to one coomon ground .MBA.

Conclusion :
1. MBA student in india are result of mismanagment on part of student, eduaction system, and collge administartion.

2.Technical education is private college fail to equip student with skills required by industry.

3. College admistration fail to guide and mentor student. Placement departments fail to intect with industry and commnucate with student regarding development in industry.

4.Top managment institute biggest assets are students and not therir training or MBA degree. Student comming to these institute give most toughest exam of the world.

5. Technology and sciences in India require special treament to maintain equlibrium. Thre should be bussiness for MBA graduate to run. these bussineses required skilled competent people who will be managed by MBAs. How can a MBA commensuate incompetence of peoples joining idustry .

Outsource Indian eduaction system

2006-06-25T21:53:00.000-07:00

This is a well thoughout essay on indian education system by Pratap Bhanu. I am totally agree with Pratap that Indian education is one thing that require reforms and disinvestment.

Soon after cost advantage factor will loss its charm I find very few reasons why MNC will invest in India . More over we are loosing intellectual capital to MNC who will provide solution develped by our people in steep prices.

Moreover MNC will always be able to attract best minds from India. I left reasons to readers why an IITor IIM graduate like to join bluest of of the blue MNC then to try to make an Indian MNC.

And this is how our to top institutions fail to deliver. Engineers from lesser known colleges are joining BPOs as they are unfit by education to develop solutions.

Of many solution available one of them would be allowing private entities to paticipate in education . Education should to treated as free market where government will play the role of catylist and facilitator.

Education require funds and only market like treatment can bring money into the system for labs and facultys.We have to make education filed as attractive & lucrative as IT or MBA.then only we will be able to create mind wo will succeed as MBA or It engineers.
..

Outsourcing Indian Education

In addition to the state investing heavily in increasing access to higher education, globalization also requires the state to respect the autonomy of institutions so that institutions have the flexibility to do what it takes to retain talent in a globalized world and, above all, respond quickly to growing demand.

http://www.outlookindia.com

yet another personality test

2006-06-22T07:24:00.000-07:00

You ARe A ISTP by Myers Briggs

What makes an ISTP tick?

The Dominant function is the judging one of Thinking. Characteristics associated with this function include:

Likes making decisions on the basis of logic, using objective considerations
Is concerned with truth, principles and justice
Is analytical and critical, tending to see the flaws in situations
Takes an objective approach

The judging Thinking function is introverted. That is, Thinking is used primarily to govern the inner world of thoughts and emotions.

The ISTP will therefore:

spend time thinking analytically, organising thoughts on a logical basis

develop an understanding of the principles involved in a situation

spontaneously feel critical of a person or situation, but not necessarily express that criticism
be inwardly decisive, but not communicate those decisions to others

think mostly about impersonal issues, focusing more on concepts, truths and systems rather than individuals' feelings

The Thinking function is primarily supported by extraverted Sensing perception. That is, Sensing perception is used primarily to manage the outer world of actions and spoken words. This will modify the way that the Thinking is directed, by:

focusing the (inner world) Thinking on understanding practical or mechanical problems
perceiving appropriate facts to support the logical analysis
The classic temperament of an ISTP is Dionesian, or Sanguine, for whom freedom is a basic driving force - seeking to enjoy the present.
Contributions to the team of an ISTP

In a team environment, the ISTP can contribute by:
being a source of information, or an 'expert' in some subjects
using analytical skills to produce practical solutions to difficult problems
encouraging the team to think, and then act
having a cool head in a crisis
applying relevant and realistic logical arguments
encouraging the team to realistically assess the situation

The potential ways in which an ISTP can irritate others include:
focusing too much on the current task at the expense of longer term or interpersonal issues
not seeing the wood for the trees
not completing a task before moving on to the next one
not communicating his/her understanding of the situation
taking shortcuts
seeming to flit from one thing to another

Personal Growth

As with all types, the ISTP can achieve personal growth by developing all functions that are not fully developed, through actions such as:
taking time to consider the impact of the ISTP's approach and ideas on people's feelings
expressing appreciation towards others
consulting others, to engender ownership of the solution
learning to acknowledge and develop the ISTP's own emotions and personal values
developing a long term personal strategy
developing personal relationships for their own sake

Recognising Stress
As stress increases, 'learned behaviour' tends to give way to the natural style, so the ISTP will behave more according to type when under greater stress. For example, in a crisis, the ISTP might:
withdraw from people, to think through possible solutions
use tried and trusted solutions to short-term problems
criticise others efforts and ignore their feelings
sort out detailed points that could perhaps wait
Under extreme stress, fatigue or illness, the ISTP's shadow may appear - a negative form of ENFJ. Example characteristics are:
displaying intense feelings towards others, or insisting on things being done without any logical basis
being very sensitive to criticism
having a gloomy view of the future
attributing unrealistic negative meaning to others actions or statements
The shadow is part of the unconscious that is often visible to others, onto whom the shadow is projected. The ISTP may therefore readily see these faults in others without recognising it in him/her self.

My personality test

2006-06-22T06:51:00.000-07:00

You haven't answered one question. The reliability of results has decreased. Would you like to answer this question then click 'Back' button on your browser. Answer this question and press 'Score It' button again.

Your Type is INTP
Introverted 95%
Intuitive 38%
Thinking 1%
Perceiving 33%

INTP type description by D.Keirsey
Of the four aspects of strategic analysis and definition, it is the structural engineering role -- architechtonics -- that reaches the highest development in these Rationals, and it is for this reason they are aptly called the "Architects." Their major interest is in figuring out structure, build, configuration -- the spatiality of things.
As the engineering capabilities the Architects increase so does their desire to let others know about whatever has come of their engineering efforts. So they tend to take up an informative role in their social exchanges. On the other hand they have less and less desire, if they ever had any, to direct the activities of others. Only when forced to by circumstance do they allow themselves to take charge of activities, and they exit the role as soon as they can without injuring the enterprise.
The Architects' distant goal is always to rearrange the environment somehow, to shape, to construct, to devise, whether it be buildings, institutions, enterprises, or theories. They look upon the world -- natural and civil -- as little more than raw material to be reshaped according to their design, as a formless stone for their hammer and chisel. Ayn Rand, master of the Rational character, describes this characteristic in the architect Howard Roark, her protagonist in The Fountainhead:
He was looking at the granite. He did not laugh as his eyes stopped in awareness of the earth around him. His face was like a law of nature-a thing one could not question, alter or implore. It had high cheekbones over gaunt, hollow cheeks; gray eyes, cold and steady; a contemptuous mouth, shut tight, the mouth of an executioner or a saint. He looked at the granite. To be cut, he thought, and made into walls. He looked at a tree. To be split and made into rafters. He looked at a streak of rust on the stone and thought of iron ore under the ground. To be melted and to emerge as girders against the sky. These rocks, he thought, are here for me; waiting for the drill, the dynamite and my voice; waiting to be split, ripped, pounded, reborn, waiting for the shape my hands will give to them. [The Fountainhead, pp 15-16]
Many regard this attitude as arrogant, and Architects are likely, especially in their later years, after finding out that most others are faking an understanding of the laws of nature, to think of themselves as the prime movers who must pit themselves against nature and society in an endless struggle to define ends clearly and adopt whatever means that promise success. If this is arrogance, then at least it is not vanity, and without question it has driven the design engineers to take the lead in molding the structure of civilization.

Albert Einstein as the iconic Rational is an Architect

INTP type description by J. Butt
Introverted iNtuitive Thinking Perceiving by Joe Butt
Profile: INTPRevision: 3.0Date of Revision: 27 Feb 2005
INTPs are pensive, analytical folks. They may venture so deeply into thought as to seem detached, and often actually are oblivious to the world around them.
Precise about their descriptions, INTPs will often correct others (or be sorely tempted to) if the shade of meaning is a bit off. While annoying to the less concise, this fine discrimination ability gives INTPs so inclined a natural advantage as, for example, grammarians and linguists.
INTPs are relatively easy-going and amenable to most anything until their principles are violated, about which they may become outspoken and inflexible. They prefer to return, however, to a reserved albeit benign ambiance, not wishing to make spectacles of themselves.
A major concern for INTPs is the haunting sense of impending failure. They spend considerable time second-guessing themselves. The open-endedness (from Perceiving) conjoined with the need for competence (NT) is expressed in a sense that one's conclusion may well be met by an equally plausible alternative solution, and that, after all, one may very well have overlooked some critical bit of data. An INTP arguing a point may very well be trying to convince himself as much as his opposition. In this way INTPs are markedly different from INTJs, who are much more confident in their competence and willing to act on their convictions.
Mathematics is a system where many INTPs love to play, similarly languages, computer systems--potentially any complex system. INTPs thrive on systems. Understanding, exploring, mastering, and manipulating systems can overtake the INTP's conscious thought. This fascination for logical wholes and their inner workings is often expressed in a detachment from the environment, a concentration where time is forgotten and extraneous stimuli are held at bay. Accomplishing a task or goal with this knowledge is secondary.
INTPs and Logic -- One of the tipoffs that a person is an INTP is her obsession with logical correctness. Errors are not often due to poor logic -- apparent faux pas in reasoning are usually a result of overlooking details or of incorrect context.
Games NTs seem to especially enjoy include Risk, Bridge, Stratego, Chess, Go, and word games of all sorts. (I have an ENTP friend that loves Boggle and its variations. We've been known to sit in public places and pick a word off a menu or mayonnaise jar to see who can make the most words from its letters on a napkin in two minutes.) The INTP mailing list has enjoyed a round of Metaphore, virtual volleyball, and a few 'finish the series' brain teasers.
INTPs in the main are not clannish. The INTP mailing list, with a readership now in triple figures, was in its incipience fraught with all the difficulties of the Panama canal: we had trouble deciding on:
1) whether or not there should be such a group,
2) exactly what such a group should be called, and
3) which of us would have to take the responsibility for organization and maintenance of the aforesaid group/club/whatever.
A Functional Analysis -- by Joe Butt
Introverted Thinking
Introverted Thinking strives to extract the essence of the Idea from various externals that express it. In the extreme, this conceptual essence wants no form or substance to verify its reality. Knowing the Truth is enough for INTPs; the knowledge that this truth can (or could) be demonstrated is sufficient to satisfy the knower. "Cogito, ergo sum" expresses this prime directive quite succinctly.
In seasons of low energy level, or moments of single-minded concentration, the INTP is aloof and detached in a way that might even offend more relational or extraverted individuals.
Extraverted iNtuition
Intuition softens and socializes Thinking, fleshing out the brittle bones of truths formed in the dominant inner world. That which is is not negotiable; yet actual application diffuses knowledge to the extent that knowledge needs qualification and context to be of any consequence in this foreign world of substance.
If Thinking can desist, the INTP is free to brainstorm, calling up the perceptions of the unconscious (i.e., intuition) which are mirrored in patterns in the realm of matter, time and space. These perceptions, in the form of theories or hunches, must ultimately defer to the inner principles, or at least they must not negate them.
Intuition unchained gives birth to play. INTPs enjoy games, formal or impromptu, which coax analogies, patterns and theories from the unseen into spontaneous expression in a way that defies their own comprehension.
Introverted Sensing
Sensing is of a subjective, inner nature similar to that of the SJs. It supplies awareness of the forms of senses rather than the raw, analogic stimuli. Facts and figures seek to be cleaned up for comparison with an ever growing range of previously experienced input. Sensing assists intuition in sorting out and arranging information into the building blocks for Thinking's elaborate systems.
The internalizing nature of the INTP's Sensing function leaves a relative absence of environmental awareness (i.e., Extraverted Sensing), except when the environment is the current focus. Consciousness of such conditions is at best a sometime thing.
Extraverted Feeling
Feeling tends to be all or none. When present, the INTP's concern for others is intense, albeit naive. In a crisis, this feeling judgement is often silenced by the emergence of Thinking, who rushes in to avert chaos and destruction. In the absence of a clear principle, however, INTPs have been known to defer judgement and to allow decisions about interpersonal matters to be left hanging lest someone be offended or somehow injured. INTPs are at risk of being swept away by the shadow in the form of their own strong emotional impulses.

Famous INTPs:

Socrates
Rene Descartes
Blaise Pascal
Sir Isaac Newton

U.S. Presidents:
James Madison
John Quincy Adams
John Tyler
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Gerald Ford
William Harvey (pioneer in human physiology)
C. G. Jung, (Freudian defector, author of Psychological Types, etc.)
William James
Albert Einstein
Tom Foley (Speaker of the House--U.S. House of Representatives)Henri ManciniBob NewhartJeff Bingaman, U.S. Senator (D.--NM)Rick Moranis (Honey, I Shrunk The Kids)Midori Ito (ice skater, Olympic silver medalist)Tiger Woods

90/10 programming principal

2006-06-12T22:27:00.000-07:00

On a newsgroup recently someone said: "Half of all programmers are below average." I responded that that was not necessarily true. Certainly half are below the median, but it is remotely possible that only one programmer is above average. (I'll leave you to decide who I was thinking of.)

I said this flippantly, but I was partially serious. It seems to me that 90% of the code that gets written in the world is written by 10% of the programmers. The other 90% of the programmers write the remaining 10% of the code (and the 10% then fix it.)

OK, this is snobbery. I know it. And maybe my numbers are a little skewed. Perhaps it's not 90/10. Perhaps it's 80/20 or even 70/30. But it sure isn't 50/50!

I once consulted for a company that had 50 developers working on a simple GUI. This GUI was a flat panel touch screen upon which several dozen dialog boxes could be made to appear. These 50 developers worked on this project for five years or more. That's 25 man-decades, 2.5 man-centuries! COME ON! Three guys could have done this in three months! My buddies and I used to joke that they had one developer per pixel and that each developer wrote the code for his pixel.

OK, so the manager was empire building. Some managers measure their worth by the number of people they manage rather by how much they can get done with how little. Still, I find this problem is not isolated. It seems to me that a large fraction (perhaps a majority) of all software projects are overstaffed by a huge factor.

I wonder if we'd get a lot more done in this industry if 90% of us quit.

programmers productivity

2006-06-12T22:19:00.000-07:00

It's Not About Lines of Code
By Charles Connell

Everyone wants programmers to be productive. Managers of programmers want maximum productivity -- it gets the work done faster and makes the managers look good. All other things being equal, programmers like being productive. They can get home earlier, reduce stress during the workday, and feel better about their finished products. Programming productivity is even in each country's national interest, since it advances the country's position in the worldwide software industry.

Unfortunately, the standard definitions of software productivity are incorrect. They miss the essence of software development. This article examines some of the usual definitions for programmer productivity, shows why they are wrong, and then proposes an alternate definition that accurately captures what programming is really about.

Lines of code per day -- This is the classic definition of software productivity for individual programmers. Unfortunately, as other authors have noted as well, the definition makes little sense. Imagine a programmer named Fred Fastfinger who writes 5000 lines of code, on average, each workday. Now assume Fred's code is of such poor quality that, for each day of work he does, someone else must spend five days debugging the code. Is Fred highly productive? Certainly not. What we want is many lines of good code.

Lines of correct code per day -- This definition adjusts for the problem of a programmer producing lousy code. In the above example, using the new definition, Fred's productivity becomes 833 lines/day (5000 lines, divided by one person-day to write the code plus five person-days to fix it). But even this definition is lacking. Suppose Fred cleans up his act and begins to produce 1000 lines of correct code per day by himself. Imagine his code is completely bug-free, but contains no comments at all. Is Fred productive now? Probably not. The code may be correct based on the current specification, but we know software requirements always change. The next programmer to take over Fred's code will find it impenetrable, and possibly will be forced to rewrite the code in order to add any new features. (Even Fred will likely find his code opaque in a few months.)

Lines of correct, well-documented code per day -- This definition gets closer to what we want, but something still is missing. Imagine both Fred and another programmer, Danny Designer, are given similar assignments. Fred now writes comments and he completes his program by writing 1000 lines of well-documented, correct code per day for five days. Danny also completes his assignment in five days, but he writes only 500 lines of code per day (all correct and well-documented). Who was more productive? Probably Danny. His code is shorter and simpler, and simplicity is almost always better in engineering. Danny's code probably will be easier to extend and modify, and likely will have a longer lifespan, because of its compactness.

Lines of clean, simple, correct, well-documented code per day -- This is a pretty good definition of productivity, and one many experienced, savvy technical managers would accept. There is still something about this definition though that misses what software engineers ultimately are trying to do. Imagine Fred, Danny, and a third programmer, Ingrid Insightful, are given similar assignments. Fred and Danny head right to their desks and begin writing good code. Something about the assignment bothers Ingrid however, so she decides to go outside for a walk. After a lap around the park, she buys a decaf mochaccino, sips a little, and lies down under a tree. Soon she falls asleep. A half-hour later, Ingrid wakes up with a start and realizes what bothers her about the programming assignment: this new feature is suspiciously like an existing feature. She strolls back to her desk, nods to Fred and Danny, and looks over the code base. Sure enough, the new feature she was asked to create is actually a generalization of another special-case feature.

Ingrid opens up the source code for the existing feature and begins deleting large sections of it. Before long, she has generalized the existing feature so it is simpler, more intuitive, and includes the new capabilities she was asked to add. In the process, she has reduced the code base by 2000 lines. Around 3:00, Ingrid says goodbye to Fred and Danny, and heads to her health club to work off the mochaccino.

Who was more productive on this day? Certainly Ingrid. Fred and Danny are not even finished creating their features yet. Ingrid's feature works completely, she has simplified the entire program, and the user interface is improved by reducing the apparent feature count. But note Ingrid's productivity included writing negative 2000 lines of code and spending little time in the office. While this example may seem fanciful, it is actually quite realistic. Getting away from a problem sometimes is a good way to solve it. And programmers who understand the big picture make smarter decisions, because they are able to reuse code and combine features effectively.

Ability to solve customer problems quickly -- This is the true definition of programmer productivity, and is what Ingrid accomplished in the example. I use the term customer very loosely. The customer may be a group of users in the same organization, a fighter pilot whose aircraft depends on the software, the world at large (for open source programmers), or yourself when writing a software tool. What software engineering really is about is solving problems for the people who will use the software. Any other definition of programmer productivity misses the mark.

This definition raises a difficult question though: If a programmer can be highly productive by writing a negative amount of code, how do we measure productivity for software engineers? There is no easy answer to this question, but the answer surely is not a rigid formula related to lines of code, bug counts, or face time in the office. Each of these measures has some value for some purposes, but managers should not lose site of what software engineers are doing. They are creating machines to solve human problems.

About the Author

Charles Connell is president of CHC-3 Consulting, teaches software engineering to corporate and university audiences, and writes frequently on computer topics.

Reservation for all

2006-06-12T22:14:00.000-07:00

I think we should have job reservations in all the fields. I completely support the PM and all the politicians for promoting this. Let's start the reservation with our cricket team. We should have 10 percent reservation for Muslims. 30 percent for OBC, SC/ST like that. Cricket rules should be modified accordingly. The boundary circle should be reduced for an SC/ST player. The four hit by an OBC player should be considered as a six and a six hit by a OBC player should be counted as 8 runs. An OBC player scoring 60 runs should be declared as a century. We should influence ICC and make rules so that the pace bowlers like Shoaib Akhtar should not bowl fast balls to our OBC player. Bowlers should bowl maximum speed of 80 kilometer per hour to an OBC player. Any delivery above this speed should be made illegal. Also we should have reservation in Olympics. In the 100 meters race, an OBC player should be given a gold medal if he runs 80 meters. There can be reservation in Government jobs also. Let's recruit SC/ST and OBC pilots for aircrafts which are carrying the ministers and politicians (that can really help the country.. ) Ensure that only SC/ST and OBC doctors do the operations for the ministers and other politicians. (Another way of saving the country..) Let's be creative and think of ways and means to guide INDIA forward. Let's show the world that INDIA is a GREAT country. Let's be proud of being an INDIAN. May the good breed of politicians like ARJUN SINGH long live...

michel dell speech

2006-04-27T21:52:00.000-07:00

It’s an honor for me to be here. I know that many of you, both graduates and parents, have been waiting for this day for many years. I’m very proud to have my parents with me today, who have also been waiting for many years. Mom and Dad … I have some bad news for you. I may be on the stage, but I’m still not going home with a degree.

Though I left UT prior to the achievement that you’re all celebrating, this school has been a big part of my life in many ways: as a source of guidance and counsel for a young start-up company, as a constant resource of talent and support for a growing and established business, and as the foundation for a dream that this community has helped to build. I feel a tremendous connection with this university, and that’s why I’m so honored to be with you this evening.

I’d like to share my remarks tonight in memory of Dr. George Kozmetsky—a longtime friend of Dell, the University of Texas, and the Austin community. George was a visionary leader who recognized the potential in people and helped fuel their success with his wisdom and counsel. I was fortunate to be one of those people.

Over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to travel a less-traditional path. But I’ve managed to cover a fair amount of territory. There may be some lessons that I’ve learned that could help you in some small measure on your road ahead.

As you stand here tonight, you are at the starting point of a wonderful journey. But it’s a journey that can only begin with your decision to embark. We are a nation of accomplishment, and this ceremony is a great testament to that. But the unspoken requirement of a commencement is that you now must commence. There are countless contributions and achievements that never occurred, all due to a failure to begin.
Early in the history of Dell, we recognized that our path to greater success led us out of Austin, out of Texas, and even out of this country. So as a three-year-old company, with just 150 employees, we opened our first international operation in the UK … to great skepticism. The only true believers were the Dell team … and of course, our customers. Since then we’ve expanded to serve customers around the world. But it all started with that first decision to embark.

And now you’ve accomplished something great and honorable and important here at UT, and it’s time for you to move on to what’s next. But you must not let anything deter you from taking those first steps. You have an abundance of opportunities before you—but don’t spend so much time trying to choose the perfect opportunity, that you miss the right opportunity. Recognize that there will be failures, and acknowledge that there will be obstacles. But you will learn from your mistakes and the mistakes of others, for there is very little learning in success.

Fourteen years ago, Dell had the opportunity to learn two big lessons … the hard way. One lesson was from a failure to manage our inventory properly, and the other was from a failure to listen to our customers when it came to developing new products. But we followed the advice that Dr. Kozmetsky gave me, and we fixed our problems as fast as we found them. Today, we set the standard for managing inventory and listening and responding to customers, and we owe those strengths to a willingness to try, and to fail, and to learn.

With the understanding that you will face tough times and amazing experiences, you must also commit to the adventure. Just have faith in the skills and the knowledge you’ve been blessed with and go. Because regrets are born of paths never taken.

Then, as you start your journey, the first thing you should do is throw away that store-bought map and begin to draw your own. When Dell got started, it didn’t come with a manual on how to become number 1 in the world. We had to figure that out every step of the way. And with each new product and new market, the industry “experts” said we’d fail. Just a few short years ago, we announced plans to build powerful computers at the center of the Internet (“servers” for those of you from the engineering school.) Through the chorus of naysayers, we emerged as a world leader in servers, and we continue to gain momentum. And as always, we did it our way, with customers—not the experts—in mind.

You too have an advantage that you’re not encumbered by years of conventional thinking. You have a new and fresh perspective with which to view the world. Your time at this great university has helped sharpen your sense of discovery, and there is no better catalyst for success than curiosity.

It’s through curiosity and looking at opportunities in new ways that we’ve always mapped our path at Dell. Of course, we didn’t invent the concept of selling directly to customers, and we didn’t invent the personal computer … and we certainly didn’t invent the Internet. But there’s always an opportunity to make a difference. There is always the chance to refine something, to eliminate unnecessary steps, or to look at something in a new light. You can stand on the shoulders of the giants who came before and see a little further. And sometimes there’s an opportunity to achieve a major breakthrough with a completely new idea that re-defines the subject.

But whether it’s evolution or revolution, there’s always a better way to build a computer, or map a genome, or liberate a country, or take a basketball team to the Final Four. Just work to understand the world around you. Read books. Read websites. Read other people. Circle the pitfalls and highlight the opportunities. Then build a vision of how it could all be better and work like hell to make it happen.
We are fortunate to live in a country that accepts and even encourages experimentation and new ideas. America’s greatness is based on the fundamental belief that our greatest individual contributions are achieved along the course we chart for ourselves.

As you walk the path you’ve chosen, remember that the road ahead is paved with relationships. I’ve enjoyed some great fortune, but none of it would have happened without the people who shared their wisdom, the hard work of the Dell team worldwide, and the love and support of my family and friends. Remember … there’s no such thing as a self-made success.

As Dell has grown over the years, many critics have asked me when I would finally step aside and let others run things. But the truth is, other people have been helping run things at Dell for a long time. The greatest mistake you can make is thinking you can do it all by yourself.

My most important role at Dell is growing and developing a strong team … and I give all of myself in that effort. I learned very early to surround myself with talented people who challenge convention, offer new ideas, and relentlessly drive for improvement. And to let those people thrive.

Try never to be the smartest person in the room. And if you are, I suggest you invite smarter people … or find a different room. In professional circles it’s called networking. In organizations it’s called team building. And in life it’s called family, friends, and community. We are all gifts to each other, and my own growth as a leader has shown me again and again that the most rewarding experiences come from my relationships.

And even as you keep traveling the road ahead, you must always remember where you came from. Each of us carries the dust and dreams of the places that helped shape us, and all of us can count our blessings that our path has taken us through Texas.

There’s no other place that so purely preserved a centuries-old heritage of hard work, self reliance, and initiative like Texas. There’s no other place whose sons and daughters have so consistently set the standard—from government, business, and music, to sports, education, and technology—like Texas. And there’s no other place that can stir such jealousy in New Yorkers, such disdain in Californians, and such contempt in the French—yet hold their utmost respect—like the Lone Star State.

The spirit of Texas is the purest concentration of the American spirit. Texas is to this country, what America is to the world. And there is no greater embodiment of that spirit than The University of Texas at Austin. During your travels, remember where you came from, and do right by Texas.

Finally, many times along the way you’re going to ask why. Why am I on this path? What is it all about? You’ll ask yourself those questions in 10 years and in 20 years as often as you’re asking them now. Well … I have an answer for you. It’s all about winning. That’s right, winning.

But I’m not talking about the most points, or toys, or market share. (Though I certainly like market share.) I’m talking about winning in a contest with your own potential. I’m talking about believing in yourself enough to become the best accountant, engineer, or teacher you can possibly be. I’m talking about never measuring your success based on the success of others – because you just might set the bar too low.
I was fortunate to find my passion early in life. I started as a UT biology major and soon realized that all of those stacks of computer parts in my room were trying to tell me something. (And my roommate had a few things to say as well.) So 19 years ago, when I was 19 years old, I started Dell in that dorm room right over there. And despite juggling my classes and a computer company … I just knew there had to be something easier than organic chemistry!

But many people find their passion later in life, and others never find it at all. And for some, their greatest passion is the search itself. But whether you’ve found your calling, or if you’re still searching, passion should be the fire that drives your life’s work.

The key is to listen to your heart and let it carry you in the direction of your dreams. I’ve learned that it’s possible to set your sights high and achieve your dreams and do it with integrity, character, and love. And each day that you’re moving toward your dreams without compromising who you are, you’re winning. Look around you. At a school this size, with an international reputation for greatness, you might think of yourself as just a number. However, I recommend that you choose the number 1.

I’ve talked today about a journey, one that each of us travels. Often we travel together, as all of you have during your time at UT. But in the end, it’s your journey. Your path to travel and your responsibilities along the way. You are free to choose, and you are free to succeed. It just takes hard work and a dream. Most who finally leave this great university never imagine that they’re going to change the world. Yet every one of you will. How you change the world, is all up to you to decide.

I wish you all a great adventure on the road ahead.

Thank you.

things leadres do

2006-04-26T03:14:00.000-07:00

Things Leaders Do

GE's Jeff Immelt on the 10 keys to great leadership.

From: Issue 81 April 2004 Page 96 By: Fast Company

When GE's CEO Jeff Immelt teaches up-and-coming leaders at the company's famed management-development center, he runs through a checklist of what he calls "Things Leaders Do." In an interview with Fast Company, Immelt reveals his own leadership checklist.

1. Personal Responsibility."Enron and 9/11 marked the end of an era of individual freedom and the beginning of personal responsibility. You lead today by building teams and placing others first. It's not about you."

2. Simplify Constantly. "I always use Jack [Welch] as my example here. Every leader needs to clearly explain the top three things the organization is working on. If you can't, then you're not leading well."

3. Understand Breadth, Depth, and Context."The most important thing I've learned since becoming CEO is context. It's how your company fits in with the world and how you respond to it."

4. The importance of alignment and time management."There is no real magic to being a good leader. But at the end of every week, you have to spend your time around the things that are really important: setting priorities, measuring outcomes, and rewarding them."

5. Leaders learn constantly and also have to learn how to teach. "A leader's primary role is to teach. People who work with you don't have to agree with you, but they have to feel you're willing to share what you've learned."

6. Stay true to your own style."Leadership is an intense journey into yourself. You can use your own style to get anything done. It's about being self-aware. Every morning, I look in the mirror and say, 'I could have done three things better yesterday.' "

7. Manage by setting boundaries with freedom in the middle."The boundaries are commitment, passion, trust, and teamwork. Within those guidelines, there's plenty of freedom. But no one can cross those four boundaries."

8. Stay disciplined and detailed."Good leaders are never afraid to intervene personally on things that are important. Michael Dell can tell you how many computers were shipped from Singapore yesterday."

9. Leave a few things unsaid."I may know an answer, but I'll often let the team find its own way. Sometimes, being an active listener is much more effective than ending a meeting with me enumerating 17 actions."

10. Like people."Today, it's employment at will. Nobody's here who doesn't want to be here. So it's critical to understand people, to always be fair, and to want the best in them. And when it doesn't work, they need to know it's not personal."

Reason to start a comapny

2006-04-24T21:57:00.000-07:00

Three Good Reasons to Start Your Own Company

Don't start your own company because you want to be your own boss. There are three ways in which a company can make more profit than an investment in a Vanguard S&P 500 index fund:

You know how to do something that nobody else can do (the typical MIT tech spinoff approach)

You have a lower cost of capital than anyone else (the "my dad was really rich" approach taken by Bill Gates and others)

You have a better understanding of one kind of customer than anyone else.

The problem with Way #1, knowing how to do something that nobody else knows how to do, is that there is no proven market for whatever it is you are doing. Maybe nobody has bothered to learn how to do this because it isn't necessary to do. A lot of things that look great in the lab and in a scientist's or engineer's head don't look good to a customer for reasons that may be impossible to predict.

Having rich parents is great. In fact, it is the best and surest way to get rich in these United States. Unfortunately, having a low cost of capital is no guarantee of success because, as society has become ridiculously rich, capital has become very cheap. Your competitors can probably get a home equity loan at 6 percent on their McMansions. How much cheaper can your cost of capital possibly be?

The most reliable source of supranormal profits is superior knowledge of one kind of customer (Way #3). Ideally this will be the kind of customer that larger companies are overlooking. The founders of SAP, for example, were employees of IBM Germany for many years and got exposed to the accounting challenges of large manufacturers. When they quit IBM, they were among the best situated programmers in the world to build an accounting system for manufacturing companies. It is not because these guys were the world's best programmers that SAP is today bringing in $10 billion per year in revenue and has a market capitalization of $60 billion. It is because these guys were the best programmers who understood the problems of their customers.

If you don't understand customers, consider taking a customer-facing job (think "sales engineer" or "product manager" rather than "cubicle-dwelling system internals programmer") at a company that already has the kind of customers you think constitute an attractive market. Once you've figured out what the customers needs, quit and start your own company.

Venture Capital and the Successful Company = High RiskIf you have an idea, two guys, and a PC, venture capital is great. You start with nothing but your energy and creativity. The venture capitalist adds money. If the company succeeds, you all get rich. If the company fails, you are back to having nothing (except for the venture capitalist, of course, who pockets two percent of the total fund he raised from limited partners every year, even if he never invests any of the money or if all of his investment choices prove worthless; at a $500 million fund that lasts 5 years, this amounts to $50 million in fees merely for showing up to work).
Unfortunately, most venture capitalists don't like to take risks. They don't know how to evaluate products, technologies, people, or markets. So they don't want to fund a company until it has significant revenue. I.e., they only want to fund a company that is already worth a lot.

Suppose that you own the kind of company that is attractive to venture capitalists. You have $10 million in revenue, of which $1.5 million is profit. You could simply move $1.5 million into your personal checking account every year, but instead have chosen to reinvest the profits in your growing business. You are feeling a little tight on capital and worry that if one of your competitors, flush with venture capital or money from a public stock offering, gets intelligent and efficient, you could be snuffed out. But you aren't that worried because you own an enterprise that is probably worth at least $10-20 million. You are a multi-millionaire!
Suppose that you decide to take venture capital. The VCs value your company at $25 million right now and put in $10 million for a minority share. Buried somewhere deep in the notebooks of legal documents that closed your deal will be something about "participation rights" for the preferred shareholders (the VCs). Basically it says that if the company is ever sold, the first $10 million goes to the preferred shareholders (them) and then the rest of the sale price is divided up among preferred and common shareholders (you) according to percentage of ownership. Some VCs get a little more aggressive on their participation rights and add a 10 percent annual interest. So if the company sells five years later they'd be guaranteed the first $15 million or so.

Now imagine that the strong economy that enabled you to grow to $10 million in revenue on your small initial investment begins to falter. Customers are deferring purchases. Perhaps the whole market segment is shrinking and becoming unattractive to investors. Your revenue is down to $5 million per year. Profits are down. Your entire enterprise is only worth about $5 million now (1X revenue isn't uncommon for a private company in a boring market).

If you had not taken venture capital, you are still a rich person. You own something worth $5 million. It was better a few years ago, when you owned something worth $10-20 million, but you can still afford a Robinson R44 helicopter and to hang out at the local airport with radiologists and gynecologists.

If you had taken venture capital, however, your commmon shares are now worthless. It is very unlikely that your company will ever be worth more than the $10 million that was invested by the preferreds and therefore all that you will ever get out of this company is your salary. You are a wage slave even if you don't realize it yet.

How can you cut down your risk? One obvious approach is to steer clear of venture capital and grow your company a little more slowly. Anything more than 25 percent annual growth tends to be chaotic. A less obvious approach is to insist that the venture capitalists buy some of your common shares at the time of the investment. There are a lot of venture capitalists and not too many good companies. If your company is attractive, you can probably find a firm that will agree to put $10 million into the company and, say, $3 million into your pocket. Then if the enterprise stumbles and ends up being sold for, say, $9 million, you won't feel like a total idiot.

Everyone on the Board should have held Profit-and-Loss ResponsibilityThe typical white collar worker gets the job by having the right credentials and connections and then gets ahead by pleasing his or her boss. This worker might have a fancy education, a fancy suit, a smooth demeanor, and a political sophistication, but know nothing about making a profit or pleasing customers. The shareholders want profits, but the employee wants a raise and a promotion, things that can be most easily obtained by sucking up to the boss. It is very difficult to refocus one of these middle managers to think about customers and profits instead. Once the employee psychology sets in, it seems to be more or less permanent.

For your Board of Directors you need folks who are actual business people. A business person is one who has held profit-and-loss responsibility ("P&L" on their resume). P&L responsibility means that the person was in a position to determine the total profit earned by a company or a division and received compensation based on that profit, not based on what his or her manager thought.

Better someone who was the manager of a McDonald's restaurant or a roadside shop in Hyderabad than an impressive former management consultant or middle manager from a big company. The Board makes important decisions and the directors need to have an intuitive feeling for what is going to make the customers happy and get them to keep coming back and paying. Membership on the Board should be limited to those who have founded companies, run companies, or held P&L responsibility in a division of a larger company.

Don't be in a Rush to Hire Top ManagersIf you're reading this, you're probably an expert technologist of some sort and perhaps you're the CEO of your new enterprise. The most obvious step would seem to be to hire someone else to be CEO, someone with more business experience. Unfortunately, at this early stage of your company you're not likely to attract any good managers. You might have a good idea. You might have a good technology. You might have a good group of engineers. You do not have a good business. A good business has customers, revenue, and profits. The best managers are attracted to good businesses. Ask yourself "If someone were any good as a manager, why would he want to manage my company, which has almost no resources to deploy, when he could instead manage a division of General Electric?"
It is always easy to hire more of the kind of stars that you already have. A company that revolves around great salespeople and has a few on board already will find it easy to hire more great salespeople. A company that revolves around Stanford-educated superstar engineers will find it easy to hire more Stanford-educated superstar engineers. Just because the smartest guy you knew from grad school wants to work with you at your new company, don't be deceived into thinking that a competent manager will find your enterprise attractive. Business people will approach you wanting to get involved. Mostly these will be older guys who were discarded by their Fortune 500 employers and maybe some young guys who couldn't get jobs at GE.

Larry and Sergei had to run Google, the fastest growing company in the history of the world, themselves for about three years before it was successful enough to attract a competent CEO. Bill Gates ran Microsoft for more than twenty years before his successor, Steve Ballmer, who had worked at Microsoft nearly the entire time, was adequately trained to take over the reins.

For an organization with tremendous institutional history and stability, bringing in an outsider at the top might be the only way to effect some needed change. That's why you sometimes see the Fortune 500 bringing in outsiders and the American people often vote for an outside CEO to head up the Federal Government. An organization that has been recently and rapidly assembled, however, is very fragile and bringing in an outside CEO is tremendously risky. Much better to copy Bill Gates and bring in a COO then promote him or her to CEO when the individual has learned enough about the organization and vice versa.
Be wary whenever interviewing someone who isn't like you. You probably don't know how to evaluate them. They probably aren't very good, otherwise they wouldn't be interested in your tiny little enterprise. Use your network of Board members and top business executives to evaluate management candidates rather than relying on your own judgement and enthusiasm.

Reason to start a comapny

2006-04-24T21:56:00.000-07:00

lesson form open source revolution

2006-04-24T21:35:00.000-07:00

Lately companies have been paying more attention to open source. Ten years ago there seemed a real danger Microsoft would extend its monopoly to servers. It seems safe to say now that open source has prevented that. A recent survey found 52% of companies are replacing Windows servers with Linux servers. [1]More significant, I think, is which 52% they are. At this point, anyone proposing to run Windows on servers should be prepared to explain what they know about servers that Google, Yahoo, and Amazon don't.But the biggest thing business has to learn from open source is not about Linux or Firefox, but about the forces that produced them. Ultimately these will affect a lot more than what software you use.We may be able to get a fix on these underlying forces by triangulating from open source and blogging. As you've probably noticed, they have a lot in common.Like open source, blogging is something people do themselves, for free, because they enjoy it. Like open source hackers, bloggers compete with people working for money, and often win. The method of ensuring quality is also the same: Darwinian. Companies ensure quality through rules to prevent employees from screwing up. But you don't need that when the audience can communicate with one another. People just produce whatever they want; the good stuff spreads, and the bad gets ignored. And in both cases, feedback from the audience improves the best work.Another thing blogging and open source have in common is the Web. People have always been willing to do great work for free, but before the Web it was harder to reach an audience or collaborate on projects.AmateursI think the most important of the new principles business has to learn is that people work a lot harder on stuff they like. Well, that's news to no one. So how can I claim business has to learn it? When I say business doesn't know this, I mean the structure of business doesn't reflect it.Business still reflects an older model, exemplified by the French word for working: travailler. It has an English cousin, travail, and what it means is torture. [2]This turns out not to be the last word on work, however. As societies get richer, they learn something about work that's a lot like what they learn about diet. We know now that the healthiest diet is the one our peasant ancestors were forced to eat because they were poor. Like rich food, idleness only seems desirable when you don't get enough of it. I think we were designed to work, just as we were designed to eat a certain amount of fiber, and we feel bad if we don't.There's a name for people who work for the love of it: amateurs. The word now has such bad connotations that we forget its etymology, though it's staring us in the face. "Amateur" was originally rather a complimentary word. But the thing to be in the twentieth century was professional, which amateurs, by definition, are not.That's why the business world was so surprised by one lesson from open source: that people working for love often surpass those working for money. Users don't switch from Explorer to Firefox because they want to hack the source. They switch because it's a better browser.It's not that Microsoft isn't trying. They know controlling the browser is one of the keys to retaining their monopoly. The problem is the same they face in operating systems: they can't pay people enough to build something better than a group of inspired hackers will build for free.I suspect professionalism was always overrated-- not just in the literal sense of working for money, but also connotations like formality and detachment. Inconceivable as it would have seemed in, say, 1970, I think professionalism was largely a fashion, driven by conditions that happened to exist in the twentieth century.One of the most powerful of those was the existence of "channels." Revealingly, the same term was used for both products and information: there were distribution channels, and TV and radio channels.It was the narrowness of such channels that made professionals seem so superior to amateurs. There were only a few jobs as professional journalists, for example, so competition ensured the average journalist was fairly good. Whereas anyone can express opinions about current events in a bar. And so the average person expressing his opinions in a bar sounds like an idiot compared to a journalist writing about the subject.On the Web, the barrier for publishing your ideas is even lower. You don't have to buy a drink, and they even let kids in. Millions of people are publishing online, and the average level of what they're writing, as you might expect, is not very good. This has led some in the media to conclude that blogs don't present much of a threat-- that blogs are just a fad.Actually, the fad is the word "blog," at least the way the print media now use it. What they mean by "blogger" is not someone who publishes in a weblog format, but anyone who publishes online. That's going to become a problem as the Web becomes the default medium for publication. So I'd like to suggest an alternative word for someone who publishes online. How about "writer?"Those in the print media who dismiss the writing online because of its low average quality are missing an important point: no one reads the average blog. In the old world of channels, it meant something to talk about average quality, because that's what you were getting whether you liked it or not. But now you can read any writer you want. So the average quality of writing online isn't what the print media are competing against. They're competing against the best writing online. And, like Microsoft, they're losing.I know that from my own experience as a reader. Though most print publications are online, I probably read two or three articles on individual people's sites for every one I read on the site of a newspaper or magazine.And when I read, say, New York Times stories, I never reach them through the Times front page. Most I find through aggregators like Google News or Slashdot or Delicious. Aggregators show how much better you can do than the channel. The New York Times front page is a list of articles written by people who work for the New York Times. Delicious is a list of articles that are interesting. And it's only now that you can see the two side by side that you notice how little overlap there is.Most articles in the print media are boring. For example, the president notices that a majority of voters now think invading Iraq was a mistake, so he makes an address to the nation to drum up support. Where is the man bites dog in that? I didn't hear the speech, but I could probably tell you exactly what he said. A speech like that is, in the most literal sense, not news: there is nothing new in it. [3]Nor is there anything new, except the names and places, in most "news" about things going wrong. A child is abducted; there's a tornado; a ferry sinks; someone gets bitten by a shark; a small plane crashes. And what do you learn about the world from these stories? Absolutely nothing. They're outlying data points; what makes them gripping also makes them irrelevant.As in software, when professionals produce such crap, it's not surprising if amateurs can do better. Live by the channel, die by the channel: if you depend on an oligopoly, you sink into bad habits that are hard to overcome when you suddenly get competition. [4]WorkplacesAnother thing blogs and open source software have in common is that they're often made by people working at home. That may not seem surprising. But it should be. It's the architectural equivalent of a home-made aircraft shooting down an F-18. Companies spend millions to build office buildings for a single purpose: to be a place to work. And yet people working in their own homes, which aren't even designed to be workplaces, end up being more productive.This proves something a lot of us have suspected. The average office is a miserable place to get work done. And a lot of what makes offices bad are the very qualities we associate with professionalism. The sterility of offices is supposed to suggest efficiency. But suggesting efficiency is a different thing from actually being efficient.The atmosphere of the average workplace is to productivity what flames painted on the side of a car are to speed. And it's not just the way offices look that's bleak. The way people act is just as bad.Things are different in a startup. Often as not a startup begins in an apartment. Instead of matching beige cubicles they have an assortment of furniture they bought used. They work odd hours, wearing the most casual of clothing. They look at whatever they want online without worrying whether it's "work safe." The cheery, bland language of the office is replaced by wicked humor. And you know what? The company at this stage is probably the most productive it's ever going to be.Maybe it's not a coincidence. Maybe some aspects of professionalism are actually a net lose.To me the most demoralizing aspect of the traditional office is that you're supposed to be there at certain times. There are usually a few people in a company who really have to, but the reason most employees work fixed hours is that the company can't measure their productivity.The basic idea behind office hours is that if you can't make people work, you can at least prevent them from having fun. If employees have to be in the building a certain number of hours a day, and are forbidden to do non-work things while there, then they must be working. In theory. In practice they spend a lot of their time in a no-man's land, where they're neither working nor having fun.If you could measure how much work people did, many companies wouldn't need any fixed workday. You could just say: this is what you have to do. Do it whenever you like, wherever you like. If your work requires you to talk to other people in the company, then you may need to be here a certain amount. Otherwise we don't care.That may seem utopian, but it's what we told people who came to work for our company. There were no fixed office hours. I never showed up before 11 in the morning. But we weren't saying this to be benevolent. We were saying: if you work here we expect you to get a lot done. Don't try to fool us just by being here a lot.The problem with the facetime model is not just that it's demoralizing, but that the people pretending to work interrupt the ones actually working. I'm convinced the facetime model is the main reason large organizations have so many meetings. Per capita, large organizations accomplish very little. And yet all those people have to be on site at least eight hours a day. When so much time goes in one end and so little achievement comes out the other, something has to give. And meetings are the main mechanism for taking up the slack.For one year I worked at a regular nine to five job, and I remember well the strange, cozy feeling that comes over one during meetings. I was very aware, because of the novelty, that I was being paid for programming. It seemed just amazing, as if there was a machine on my desk that spat out a dollar bill every two minutes no matter what I did. Even while I was in the bathroom! But because the imaginary machine was always running, I felt I always ought to be working. And so meetings felt wonderfully relaxing. They counted as work, just like programming, but they were so much easier. All you had to do was sit and look attentive.Meetings are like an opiate with a network effect. So is email, on a smaller scale. And in addition to the direct cost in time, there's the cost in fragmentation-- breaking people's day up into bits too small to be useful.You can see how dependent you've become on something by removing it suddenly. So for big companies I propose the following experiment. Set aside one day where meetings are forbidden-- where everyone has to sit at their desk all day and work without interruption on things they can do without talking to anyone else. Some amount of communication is necessary in most jobs, but I'm sure many employees could find eight hours worth of stuff they could do by themselves. You could call it "Work Day."The other problem with pretend work is that it often looks better than real work. When I'm writing or hacking I spend as much time just thinking as I do actually typing. Half the time I'm sitting drinking a cup of tea, or walking around the neighborhood. This is a critical phase-- this is where ideas come from-- and yet I'd feel guilty doing this in most offices, with everyone else looking busy.It's hard to see how bad some practice is till you have something to compare it to. And that's one reason open source, and even blogging in some cases, are so important. They show us what real work looks like.We're funding eight new startups at the moment. A friend asked what they were doing for office space, and seemed surprised when I said we expected them to work out of whatever apartments they found to live in. But we didn't propose that to save money. We did it because we want their software to be good. Working in crappy informal spaces is one of the things startups do right without realizing it. As soon as you get into an office, work and life start to drift apart.That is one of the key tenets of professionalism. Work and life are supposed to be separate. But that part, I'm convinced, is a mistake.Bottom-UpThe third big lesson we can learn from open source and blogging is that ideas can bubble up from the bottom, instead of flowing down from the top. Open source and blogging both work bottom-up: people make what they want, and the best stuff prevails.Does this sound familiar? It's the principle of a market economy. Ironically, though open source and blogs are done for free, those worlds resemble market economies, while most companies, for all their talk about the value of free markets, are run internally like communist states.There are two forces that together steer design: ideas about what to do next, and the enforcement of quality. In the channel era, both flowed down from the top. For example, newspaper editors assigned stories to reporters, then edited what they wrote.Open source and blogging show us things don't have to work that way. Ideas and even the enforcement of quality can flow bottom-up. And in both cases the results are not merely acceptable, but better. For example, open source software is more reliable precisely because it's open source; anyone can find mistakes.The same happens with writing. As we got close to publication, I found I was very worried about the essays in Hackers & Painters that hadn't been online. Once an essay has had a couple thousand page views I feel reasonably confident about it. But these had had literally orders of magnitude less scrutiny. It felt like releasing software without testing it.That's what all publishing used to be like. If you got ten people to read a manuscript, you were lucky. But I'd become so used to publishing online that the old method now seemed alarmingly unreliable, like navigating by dead reckoning once you'd gotten used to a GPS.The other thing I like about publishing online is that you can write what you want and publish when you want. Earlier this year I wrote something that seemed suitable for a magazine, so I sent it to an editor I know. As I was waiting to hear back, I found to my surprise that I was hoping they'd reject it. Then I could put it online right away. If they accepted it, it wouldn't be read by anyone for months, and in the meantime I'd have to fight word-by-word to save it from being mangled by some twenty five year old copy editor. [5]Many employees would like to build great things for the companies they work for, but more often than not management won't let them. How many of us have heard stories of employees going to management and saying, please let us build this thing to make money for you-- and the company saying no? The most famous example is probably Steve Wozniak, who originally wanted to build microcomputers for his then-employer, HP. And they turned him down. On the blunderometer, this episode ranks with IBM accepting a non-exclusive license for DOS. But I think this happens all the time. We just don't hear about it usually, because to prove yourself right you have to quit and start your own company, like Wozniak did.StartupsSo these, I think, are the three big lessons open source and blogging have to teach business: (1) that people work harder on stuff they like, (2) that the standard office environment is very unproductive, and (3) that bottom-up often works better than top-down.I can imagine managers at this point saying: what is this guy talking about? What good does it do me to know that my programmers would be more productive working at home on their own projects? I need their asses in here working on version 3.2 of our software, or we're never going to make the release date.And it's true, the benefit that specific manager could derive from the forces I've described is near zero. When I say business can learn from open source, I don't mean any specific business can. I mean business can learn about new conditions the same way a gene pool does. I'm not claiming companies can get smarter, just that dumb ones will die.So what will business look like when it has assimilated the lessons of open source and blogging? I think the big obstacle preventing us from seeing the future of business is the assumption that people working for you have to be employees. But think about what's going on underneath: the company has some money, and they pay it to the employee in the hope that he'll make something worth more than they paid him. Well, there are other ways to arrange that relationship. Instead of paying the guy money as a salary, why not give it to him as investment? Then instead of coming to your office to work on your projects, he can work wherever he wants on projects of his own.Because few of us know any alternative, we have no idea how much better we could do than the traditional employer-employee relationship. Such customs evolve with glacial slowness. Our employer-employee relationship still retains a big chunk of master-servant DNA. [6]I dislike being on either end of it. I'll work my ass off for a customer, but I resent being told what to do by a boss. And being a boss is also horribly frustrating; half the time it's easier just to do stuff yourself than to get someone else to do it for you. I'd rather do almost anything than give or receive a performance review.On top of its unpromising origins, employment has accumulated a lot of cruft over the years. The list of what you can't ask in job interviews is now so long that for convenience I assume it's infinite. Within the office you now have to walk on eggshells lest anyone say or do something that makes the company prey to a lawsuit. And God help you if you fire anyone.Nothing shows more clearly that employment is not an ordinary economic relationship than companies being sued for firing people. In any purely economic relationship you're free to do what you want. If you want to stop buying steel pipe from one supplier and start buying it from another, you don't have to explain why. No one can accuse you of unjustly switching pipe suppliers. Justice implies some kind of paternal obligation that isn't there in transactions between equals.Most of the legal restrictions on employers are intended to protect employees. But you can't have action without an equal and opposite reaction. You can't expect employers to have some kind of paternal responsibility toward employees without putting employees in the position of children. And that seems a bad road to go down.Next time you're in a moderately large city, drop by the main post office and watch the body language of the people working there. They have the same sullen resentment as children made to do something they don't want to. Their union has exacted pay increases and work restrictions that would have been the envy of previous generations of postal workers, and yet they don't seem any happier for it. It's demoralizing to be on the receiving end of a paternalistic relationship, no matter how cozy the terms. Just ask any teenager.I see the disadvantages of the employer-employee relationship because I've been on both sides of a better one: the investor-founder relationship. I wouldn't claim it's painless. When I was running a startup, the thought of our investors used to keep me up at night. And now that I'm an investor, the thought of our startups keeps me up at night. All the pain of whatever problem you're trying to solve is still there. But the pain hurts less when it isn't mixed with resentment.I had the misfortune to participate in what amounted to a controlled experiment to prove that. After Yahoo bought our startup I went to work for them. I was doing exactly the same work, except with bosses. And to my horror I started acting like a child. The situation pushed buttons I'd forgotten I had.The big advantage of investment over employment, as the examples of open source and blogging suggest, is that people working on projects of their own are enormously more productive. And a startup is a project of one's own in two senses, both of them important: it's creatively one's own, and also economically ones's own.Google is a rare example of a big company in tune with the forces I've described. They've tried hard to make their offices less sterile than the usual cube farm. They give employees who do great work large grants of stock to simulate the rewards of a startup. They even let hackers spend 20% of their time on their own projects.Why not let people spend 100% of their time on their own projects, and instead of trying to approximate the value of what they create, give them the actual market value? Impossible? That is in fact what venture capitalists do.So am I claiming that no one is going to be an employee anymore-- that everyone should go and start a startup? Of course not. But more people could do it than do it now. At the moment, even the smartest students leave school thinking they have to get a job. Actually what they need to do is make something valuable. A job is one way to do that, but the more ambitious ones will ordinarily be better off taking money from an investor than an employer.Hackers tend to think business is for MBAs. But business administration is not what you're doing in a startup. What you're doing is business creation. And the first phase of that is mostly product creation-- that is, hacking. That's the hard part. It's a lot harder to create something people love than to take something people love and figure out how to make money from it.Another thing that keeps people away from starting startups is the risk. Someone with kids and a mortgage should think twice before doing it. But most young hackers have neither.And as the example of open source and blogging suggests, you'll enjoy it more, even if you fail. You'll be working on your own thing, instead of going to some office and doing what you're told. There may be more pain in your own company, but it won't hurt as much.That may be the greatest effect, in the long run, of the forces underlying open source and blogging: finally ditching the old paternalistic employer-employee relationship, and replacing it with a purely economic one, between equals.

how to startup

2006-04-24T21:22:00.000-07:00

(This essay is derived from a talk at the Harvard Computer Society.

You need three things to create a successful startup:

to start with good people
to make something customers actually want,
and to spend as little money as possible.

Most startups that fail do it because they fail at one of these. A startup that does all three will probably succeed.And that's kind of exciting, when you think about it, because all three are doable. Hard, but doable. And since a startup that succeeds ordinarily makes its founders rich, that implies getting rich is doable too. Hard, but doable.If there is one message I'd like to get across about startups, that's it. There is no magically difficult step that requires brilliance to solve.

The Idea
In particular, you don't need a brilliant idea to start a startup around. The way a startup makes money is to offer people better technology than they have now. But what people have now is often so bad that it doesn't take brilliance to do better.Google's plan, for example, was simply to create a search site that didn't suck. They had three new ideas: index more of the Web, use links to rank search results, and have clean, simple web pages with unintrusive keyword-based ads. Above all, they were determined to make a site that was good to use. No doubt there are great technical tricks within Google, but the overall plan was straightforward. And while they probably have bigger ambitions now, this alone brings them a billion dollars a year. [1]There are plenty of other areas that are just as backward as search was before Google. I can think of several heuristics for generating ideas for startups, but most reduce to this: look at something people are trying to do, and figure out how to do it in a way that doesn't suck.For example, dating sites currently suck far worse than search did before Google. They all use the same simple-minded model. They seem to have approached the problem by thinking about how to do database matches instead of how dating works in the real world. An undergrad could build something better as a class project. And yet there's a lot of money at stake. Online dating is a valuable business now, and it might be worth a hundred times as much if it worked.An idea for a startup, however, is only a beginning. A lot of would-be startup founders think the key to the whole process is the initial idea, and from that point all you have to do is execute. Venture capitalists know better. If you go to VC firms with a brilliant idea that you'll tell them about if they sign a nondisclosure agreement, most will tell you to get lost. That shows how much a mere idea is worth. The market price is less than the inconvenience of signing an NDA.Another sign of how little the initial idea is worth is the number of startups that change their plan en route. Microsoft's original plan was to make money selling programming languages, of all things. Their current business model didn't occur to them until IBM dropped it in their lap five years later.Ideas for startups are worth something, certainly, but the trouble is, they're not transferrable. They're not something you could hand to someone else to execute. Their value is mainly as starting points: as questions for the people who had them to continue thinking about.What matters is not ideas, but the people who have them. Good people can fix bad ideas, but good ideas can't save bad people.

People

What do I mean by good people? One of the best tricks I learned during our startup was a rule for deciding who to hire. Could you describe the person as an animal? It might be hard to translate that into another language, but I think everyone in the US knows what it means. It means someone who takes their work a little too seriously; someone who does what they do so well that they pass right through professional and cross over into obsessive.What it means specifically depends on the job: a salesperson who just won't take no for an answer; a hacker who will stay up till 4:00 AM rather than go to bed leaving code with a bug in it; a PR person who will cold-call New York Times reporters on their cell phones; a graphic designer who feels physical pain when something is two millimeters out of place.Almost everyone who worked for us was an animal at what they did. The woman in charge of sales was so tenacious that I used to feel sorry for potential customers on the phone with her. You could sense them squirming on the hook, but you knew there would be no rest for them till they'd signed up.If you think about people you know, you'll find the animal test is easy to apply. Call the person's image to mind and imagine the sentence "so-and-so is an animal." If you laugh, they're not. You don't need or perhaps even want this quality in big companies, but you need it in a startup.For programmers we had three additional tests. Was the person genuinely smart? If so, could they actually get things done? And finally, since a few good hackers have unbearable personalities, could we stand to have them around?That last test filters out surprisingly few people. We could bear any amount of nerdiness if someone was truly smart. What we couldn't stand were people with a lot of attitude. But most of those weren't truly smart, so our third test was largely a restatement of the first.When nerds are unbearable it's usually because they're trying too hard to seem smart. But the smarter they are, the less pressure they feel to act smart. So as a rule you can recognize genuinely smart people by their ability to say things like "I don't know," "Maybe you're right," and "I don't understand x well enough."This technique doesn't always work, because people can be influenced by their environment. In the MIT CS department, there seems to be a tradition of acting like a brusque know-it-all. I'm told it derives ultimately from Marvin Minsky, in the same way the classic airline pilot manner is said to derive from Chuck Yeager. Even genuinely smart people start to act this way there, so you have to make allowances.It helped us to have Robert Morris, who is one of the readiest to say "I don't know" of anyone I've met. (At least, he was before he became a professor at MIT.) No one dared put on attitude around Robert, because he was obviously smarter than they were and yet had zero attitude himself.Like most startups, ours began with a group of friends, and it was through personal contacts that we got most of the people we hired. This is a crucial difference between startups and big companies. Being friends with someone for even a couple days will tell you more than companies could ever learn in interviews. [2]It's no coincidence that startups start around universities, because that's where smart people meet. It's not what people learn in classes at MIT and Stanford that has made technology companies spring up around them. They could sing campfire songs in the classes so long as admissions worked the same.If you start a startup, there's a good chance it will be with people you know from college or grad school. So in theory you ought to try to make friends with as many smart people as you can in school, right? Well, no. Don't make a conscious effort to schmooze; that doesn't work well with hackers.What you should do in college is work on your own projects. Hackers should do this even if they don't plan to start startups, because it's the only real way to learn how to program. In some cases you may collaborate with other students, and this is the best way to get to know good hackers. The project may even grow into a startup. But once again, I wouldn't aim too directly at either target. Don't force things; just work on stuff you like with people you like.Ideally you want between two and four founders. It would be hard to start with just one. One person would find the moral weight of starting a company hard to bear. Even Bill Gates, who seems to be able to bear a good deal of moral weight, had to have a co-founder. But you don't want so many founders that the company starts to look like a group photo. Partly because you don't need a lot of people at first, but mainly because the more founders you have, the worse disagreements you'll have. When there are just two or three founders, you know you have to resolve disputes immediately or perish. If there are seven or eight, disagreements can linger and harden into factions. You don't want mere voting; you need unanimity.In a technology startup, which most startups are, the founders should include technical people. During the Internet Bubble there were a number of startups founded by business people who then went looking for hackers to create their product for them. This doesn't work well. Business people are bad at deciding what to do with technology, because they don't know what the options are, or which kinds of problems are hard and which are easy. And when business people try to hire hackers, they can't tell which ones are good. Even other hackers have a hard time doing that. For business people it's roulette.Do the founders of a startup have to include business people? That depends. We thought so when we started ours, and we asked several people who were said to know about this mysterious thing called "business" if they would be the president. But they all said no, so I had to do it myself. And what I discovered was that business was no great mystery. It's not something like physics or medicine that requires extensive study. You just try to get people to pay you for stuff.I think the reason I made such a mystery of business was that I was disgusted by the idea of doing it. I wanted to work in the pure, intellectual world of software, not deal with customers' mundane problems. People who don't want to get dragged into some kind of work often develop a protective incompetence at it. Paul Erdos was particularly good at this. By seeming unable even to cut a grapefruit in half (let alone go to the store and buy one), he forced other people to do such things for him, leaving all his time free for math. Erdos was an extreme case, but most husbands use the same trick to some degree.Once I was forced to discard my protective incompetence, I found that business was neither so hard nor so boring as I feared. There are esoteric areas of business that are quite hard, like tax law or the pricing of derivatives, but you don't need to know about those in a startup. All you need to know about business to run a startup are commonsense things people knew before there were business schools, or even universities.If you work your way down the Forbes 400 making an x next to the name of each person with an MBA, you'll learn something important about business school. You don't even hit an MBA till number 22, Phil Knight, the CEO of Nike. There are only four MBAs in the top 50. What you notice in the Forbes 400 are a lot of people with technical backgrounds. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, Jeff Bezos, Gordon Moore. The rulers of the technology business tend to come from technology, not business. So if you want to invest two years in something that will help you succeed in business, the evidence suggests you'd do better to learn how to hack than get an MBA. [3]There is one reason you might want to include business people in a startup, though: because you have to have at least one person willing and able to focus on what customers want. Some believe only business people can do this-- that hackers can implement software, but not design it. That's nonsense. There's nothing about knowing how to program that prevents hackers from understanding users, or about not knowing how to program that magically enables business people to understand them.If you can't understand users, however, you should either learn how or find a co-founder who can. That is the single most important issue for technology startups, and the rock that sinks more of them than anything else.

What Customers Want

It's not just startups that have to worry about this. I think most businesses that fail do it because they don't give customers what they want. Look at restaurants. A large percentage fail, about a quarter in the first year. But can you think of one restaurant that had really good food and went out of business?Restaurants with great food seem to prosper no matter what. A restaurant with great food can be expensive, crowded, noisy, dingy, out of the way, and even have bad service, and people will keep coming. It's true that a restaurant with mediocre food can sometimes attract customers through gimmicks. But that approach is very risky. It's more straightforward just to make the food good.It's the same with technology. You hear all kinds of reasons why startups fail. But can you think of one that had a massively popular product and still failed?In nearly every failed startup, the real problem was that customers didn't want the product. For most, the cause of death is listed as "ran out of funding," but that's only the immediate cause. Why couldn't they get more funding? Probably because the product was a dog, or never seemed likely to be done, or both.When I was trying to think of the things every startup needed to do, I almost included a fourth: get a version 1 out as soon as you can. But I decided not to, because that's implicit in making something customers want. The only way to make something customers want is to get a prototype in front of them and refine it based on their reactions.The other approach is what I call the "Hail Mary" strategy. You make elaborate plans for a product, hire a team of engineers to develop it (people who do this tend to use the term "engineer" for hackers), and then find after a year that you've spent two million dollars to develop something no one wants. This was not uncommon during the Bubble, especially in companies run by business types, who thought of software development as something terrifying that therefore had to be carefully planned.We never even considered that approach. As a Lisp hacker, I come from the tradition of rapid prototyping. I would not claim (at least, not here) that this is the right way to write every program, but it's certainly the right way to write software for a startup. In a startup, your initial plans are almost certain to be wrong in some way, and your first priority should be to figure out where. The only way to do that is to try implementing them.Like most startups, we changed our plan on the fly. At first we expected our customers to be Web consultants. But it turned out they didn't like us, because our software was easy to use and we hosted the site. It would be too easy for clients to fire them. We also thought we'd be able to sign up a lot of catalog companies, because selling online was a natural extension of their existing business. But in 1996 that was a hard sell. The middle managers we talked to at catalog companies saw the Web not as an opportunity, but as something that meant more work for them.We did get a few of the more adventurous catalog companies. Among them was Frederick's of Hollywood, which gave us valuable experience dealing with heavy loads on our servers. But most of our users were small, individual merchants who saw the Web as an opportunity to build a business. Some had retail stores, but many only existed online. And so we changed direction to focus on these users. Instead of concentrating on the features Web consultants and catalog companies would want, we worked to make the software easy to use.I learned something valuable from that. It's worth trying very, very hard to make technology easy to use. Hackers are so used to computers that they have no idea how horrifying software seems to normal people. Stephen Hawking's editor told him that every equation he included in his book would cut sales in half. When you work on making technology easier to use, you're riding that curve up instead of down. A 10% improvement in ease of use doesn't just increase your sales 10%. It's more likely to double your sales.How do you figure out what customers want? Watch them. One of the best places to do this was at trade shows. Trade shows didn't pay as a way of getting new customers, but they were worth it as market research. We didn't just give canned presentations at trade shows. We used to show people how to build real, working stores. Which meant we got to watch as they used our software, and talk to them about what they needed.No matter what kind of startup you start, it will probably be a stretch for you, the founders, to understand what users want. The only kind of software you can build without studying users is the sort for which you are the typical user. But this is just the kind that tends to be open source: operating systems, programming languages, editors, and so on. So if you're developing technology for money, you're probably not going to be developing it for people like you. Indeed, you can use this as a way to generate ideas for startups: what do people who are not like you want from technology?When most people think of startups, they think of companies like Apple or Google. Everyone knows these, because they're big consumer brands. But for every startup like that, there are twenty more that operate in niche markets or live quietly down in the infrastructure. So if you start a successful startup, odds are you'll start one of those.Another way to say that is, if you try to start the kind of startup that has to be a big consumer brand, the odds against succeeding are steeper. The best odds are in niche markets. Since startups make money by offering people something better than they had before, the best opportunities are where things suck most. And it would be hard to find a place where things suck more than in corporate IT departments. You would not believe the amount of money companies spend on software, and the crap they get in return. This imbalance equals opportunity.If you want ideas for startups, one of the most valuable things you could do is find a middle-sized non-technology company and spend a couple weeks just watching what they do with computers. Most good hackers have no more idea of the horrors perpetrated in these places than rich Americans do of what goes on in Brazilian slums.Start by writing software for smaller companies, because it's easier to sell to them. It's worth so much to sell stuff to big companies that the people selling them the crap they currently use spend a lot of time and money to do it. And while you can outhack Oracle with one frontal lobe tied behind your back, you can't outsell an Oracle salesman. So if you want to win through better technology, aim at smaller customers. [4]They're the more strategically valuable part of the market anyway. In technology, the low end always eats the high end. It's easier to make an inexpensive product more powerful than to make a powerful product cheaper. So the products that start as cheap, simple options tend to gradually grow more powerful till, like water rising in a room, they squash the "high-end" products against the ceiling. Sun did this to mainframes, and Intel is doing it to Sun. Microsoft Word did it to desktop publishing software like Interleaf and Framemaker. Mass-market digital cameras are doing it to the expensive models made for professionals. Avid did it to the manufacturers of specialized video editing systems, and now Apple is doing it to Avid. Henry Ford did it to the car makers that preceded him. If you build the simple, inexpensive option, you'll not only find it easier to sell at first, but you'll also be in the best position to conquer the rest of the market.It's very dangerous to let anyone fly under you. If you have the cheapest, easiest product, you'll own the low end. And if you don't, you're in the crosshairs of whoever does.Raising MoneyTo make all this happen, you're going to need money. Some startups have been self-funding-- Microsoft for example-- but most aren't. I think it's wise to take money from investors. To be self-funding, you have to start as a consulting company, and it's hard to switch from that to a product company.Financially, a startup is like a pass/fail course. The way to get rich from a startup is to maximize the company's chances of succeeding, not to maximize the amount of stock you retain. So if you can trade stock for something that improves your odds, it's probably a smart move.To most hackers, getting investors seems like a terrifying and mysterious process. Actually it's merely tedious. I'll try to give an outline of how it works.The first thing you'll need is a few tens of thousands of dollars to pay your expenses while you develop a prototype. This is called seed capital. Because so little money is involved, raising seed capital is comparatively easy-- at least in the sense of getting a quick yes or no.Usually you get seed money from individual rich people called "angels." Often they're people who themselves got rich from technology. At the seed stage, investors don't expect you to have an elaborate business plan. Most know that they're supposed to decide quickly. It's not unusual to get a check within a week based on a half-page agreement.We started Viaweb with $10,000 of seed money from our friend Julian. But he gave us a lot more than money. He's a former CEO and also a corporate lawyer, so he gave us a lot of valuable advice about business, and also did all the legal work of getting us set up as a company. Plus he introduced us to one of the two angel investors who supplied our next round of funding.Some angels, especially those with technology backgrounds, may be satisfied with a demo and a verbal description of what you plan to do. But many will want a copy of your business plan, if only to remind themselves what they invested in.Our angels asked for one, and looking back, I'm amazed how much worry it caused me. "Business plan" has that word "business" in it, so I figured it had to be something I'd have to read a book about business plans to write. Well, it doesn't. At this stage, all most investors expect is a brief description of what you plan to do and how you're going to make money from it, and the resumes of the founders. If you just sit down and write out what you've been saying to one another, that should be fine. It shouldn't take more than a couple hours, and you'll probably find that writing it all down gives you more ideas about what to do.For the angel to have someone to make the check out to, you're going to have to have some kind of company. Merely incorporating yourselves isn't hard. The problem is, for the company to exist, you have to decide who the founders are, and how much stock they each have. If there are two founders with the same qualifications who are both equally committed to the business, that's easy. But if you have a number of people who are expected to contribute in varying degrees, arranging the proportions of stock can be hard. And once you've done it, it tends to be set in stone.I have no tricks for dealing with this problem. All I can say is, try hard to do it right. I do have a rule of thumb for recognizing when you have, though. When everyone feels they're getting a slightly bad deal, that they're doing more than they should for the amount of stock they have, the stock is optimally apportioned.There is more to setting up a company than incorporating it, of course: insurance, business license, unemployment compensation, various things with the IRS. I'm not even sure what the list is, because we, ah, skipped all that. When we got real funding near the end of 1996, we hired a great CFO, who fixed everything retroactively. It turns out that no one comes and arrests you if you don't do everything you're supposed to when starting a company. And a good thing too, or a lot of startups would never get started. [5]It can be dangerous to delay turning yourself into a company, because one or more of the founders might decide to split off and start another company doing the same thing. This does happen. So when you set up the company, as well as as apportioning the stock, you should get all the founders to sign something agreeing that everyone's ideas belong to this company, and that this company is going to be everyone's only job.[If this were a movie, ominous music would begin here.]While you're at it, you should ask what else they've signed. One of the worst things that can happen to a startup is to run into intellectual property problems. We did, and it came closer to killing us than any competitor ever did.As we were in the middle of getting bought, we discovered that one of our people had, early on, been bound by an agreement that said all his ideas belonged to the giant company that was paying for him to go to grad school. In theory, that could have meant someone else owned big chunks of our software. So the acquisition came to a screeching halt while we tried to sort this out. The problem was, since we'd been about to be acquired, we'd allowed ourselves to run low on cash. Now we needed to raise more to keep going. But it's hard to raise money with an IP cloud over your head, because investors can't judge how serious it is.Our existing investors, knowing that we needed money and had nowhere else to get it, at this point attempted certain gambits which I will not describe in detail, except to remind readers that the word "angel" is a metaphor. The founders thereupon proposed to walk away from the company, after giving the investors a brief tutorial on how to administer the servers themselves. And while this was happening, the acquirers used the delay as an excuse to welch on the deal.Miraculously it all turned out ok. The investors backed down; we did another round of funding at a reasonable valuation; the giant company finally gave us a piece of paper saying they didn't own our software; and six months later we were bought by Yahoo for much more than the earlier acquirer had agreed to pay. So we were happy in the end, though the experience probably took several years off my life.Don't do what we did. Before you consummate a startup, ask everyone about their previous IP history.Once you've got a company set up, it may seem presumptuous to go knocking on the doors of rich people and asking them to invest tens of thousands of dollars in something that is really just a bunch of guys with some ideas. But when you look at it from the rich people's point of view, the picture is more encouraging. Most rich people are looking for good investments. If you really think you have a chance of succeeding, you're doing them a favor by letting them invest. Mixed with any annoyance they might feel about being approached will be the thought: are these guys the next Google?Usually angels are financially equivalent to founders. They get the same kind of stock and get diluted the same amount in future rounds. How much stock should they get? That depends on how ambitious you feel. When you offer x percent of your company for y dollars, you're implicitly claiming a certain value for the whole company. Venture investments are usually described in terms of that number. If you give an investor new shares equal to 5% of those already outstanding in return for $100,000, then you've done the deal at a pre-money valuation of $2 million.How do you decide what the value of the company should be? There is no rational way. At this stage the company is just a bet. I didn't realize that when we were raising money. Julian thought we ought to value the company at several million dollars. I thought it was preposterous to claim that a couple thousand lines of code, which was all we had at the time, were worth several million dollars. Eventually we settled on one millon, because Julian said no one would invest in a company with a valuation any lower. [6]What I didn't grasp at the time was that the valuation wasn't just the value of the code we'd written so far. It was also the value of our ideas, which turned out to be right, and of all the future work we'd do, which turned out to be a lot.The next round of funding is the one in which you might deal with actual venture capital firms. But don't wait till you've burned through your last round of funding to start approaching them. VCs are slow to make up their minds. They can take months. You don't want to be running out of money while you're trying to negotiate with them.Getting money from an actual VC firm is a bigger deal than getting money from angels. The amounts of money involved are larger, millions usually. So the deals take longer, dilute you more, and impose more onerous conditions.Sometimes the VCs want to install a new CEO of their own choosing. Usually the claim is that you need someone mature and experienced, with a business background. Maybe in some cases this is true. And yet Bill Gates was young and inexperienced and had no business background, and he seems to have done ok. Steve Jobs got booted out of his own company by someone mature and experienced, with a business background, who then proceeded to ruin the company. So I think people who are mature and experienced, with a business background, may be overrated. We used to call these guys "newscasters," because they had neat hair and spoke in deep, confident voices, and generally didn't know much more than they read on the teleprompter.We talked to a number of VCs, but eventually we ended up financing our startup entirely with angel money. The main reason was that we feared a brand-name VC firm would stick us with a newscaster as part of the deal. That might have been ok if he was content to limit himself to talking to the press, but what if he wanted to have a say in running the company? That would have led to disaster, because our software was so complex. We were a company whose whole m.o. was to win through better technology. The strategic decisions were mostly decisions about technology, and we didn't need any help with those.This was also one reason we didn't go public. Back in 1998 our CFO tried to talk me into it. In those days you could go public as a dogfood portal, so as a company with a real product and real revenues, we might have done well. But I feared it would have meant taking on a newscaster-- someone who, as they say, "can talk Wall Street's language."I'm happy to see Google is bucking that trend. They didn't talk Wall Street's language when they did their IPO, and Wall Street didn't buy. And now Wall Street is collectively kicking itself. They'll pay attention next time. Wall Street learns new languages fast when money is involved.You have more leverage negotiating with VCs than you realize. The reason is other VCs. I know a number of VCs now, and when you talk to them you realize that it's a seller's market. Even now there is too much money chasing too few good deals.VCs form a pyramid. At the top are famous ones like Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins, but beneath those are a huge number you've never heard of. What they all have in common is that a dollar from them is worth one dollar. Most VCs will tell you that they don't just provide money, but connections and advice. If you're talking to Vinod Khosla or John Doerr or Mike Moritz, this is true. But such advice and connections can come very expensive. And as you go down the food chain the VCs get rapidly dumber. A few steps down from the top you're basically talking to bankers who've picked up a few new vocabulary words from reading Wired. (Does your product use XML?) So I'd advise you to be skeptical about claims of experience and connections. Basically, a VC is a source of money. I'd be inclined to go with whoever offered the most money the soonest with the least strings attached.You may wonder how much to tell VCs. And you should, because some of them may one day be funding your competitors. I think the best plan is not to be overtly secretive, but not to tell them everything either. After all, as most VCs say, they're more interested in the people than the ideas. The main reason they want to talk about your idea is to judge you, not the idea. So as long as you seem like you know what you're doing, you can probably keep a few things back from them. [7]Talk to as many VCs as you can, even if you don't want their money, because a) they may be on the board of someone who will buy you, and b) if you seem impressive, they'll be discouraged from investing in your competitors. The most efficient way to reach VCs, especially if you only want them to know about you and don't want their money, is at the conferences that are occasionally organized for startups to present to them.Not Spending ItWhen and if you get an infusion of real money from investors, what should you do with it? Not spend it, that's what. In nearly every startup that fails, the proximate cause is running out of money. Usually there is something deeper wrong. But even a proximate cause of death is worth trying hard to avoid.During the Bubble many startups tried to "get big fast." Ideally this meant getting a lot of customers fast. But it was easy for the meaning to slide over into hiring a lot of people fast.Of the two versions, the one where you get a lot of customers fast is of course preferable. But even that may be overrated. The idea is to get there first and get all the users, leaving none for competitors. But I think in most businesses the advantages of being first to market are not so overwhelmingly great. Google is again a case in point. When they appeared it seemed as if search was a mature market, dominated by big players who'd spent millions to build their brands: Yahoo, Lycos, Excite, Infoseek, Altavista, Inktomi. Surely 1998 was a little late to arrive at the party.But as the founders of Google knew, brand is worth next to nothing in the search business. You can come along at any point and make something better, and users will gradually seep over to you. As if to emphasize the point, Google never did any advertising. They're like dealers; they sell the stuff, but they know better than to use it themselves.The competitors Google buried would have done better to spend those millions improving their software. Future startups should learn from that mistake. Unless you're in a market where products are as undifferentiated as cigarettes or vodka or laundry detergent, spending a lot on brand advertising is a sign of breakage. And few if any Web businesses are so undifferentiated. The dating sites are running big ad campaigns right now, which is all the more evidence they're ripe for the picking. (Fee, fie, fo, fum, I smell a company run by marketing guys.)We were compelled by circumstances to grow slowly, and in retrospect it was a good thing. The founders all learned to do every job in the company. As well as writing software, I had to do sales and customer support. At sales I was not very good. I was persistent, but I didn't have the smoothness of a good salesman. My message to potential customers was: you'd be stupid not to sell online, and if you sell online you'd be stupid to use anyone else's software. Both statements were true, but that's not the way to convince people.I was great at customer support though. Imagine talking to a customer support person who not only knew everything about the product, but would apologize abjectly if there was a bug, and then fix it immediately, while you were on the phone with them. Customers loved us. And we loved them, because when you're growing slow by word of mouth, your first batch of users are the ones who were smart enough to find you by themselves. There is nothing more valuable, in the early stages of a startup, than smart users. If you listen to them, they'll tell you exactly how to make a winning product. And not only will they give you this advice for free, they'll pay you.We officially launched in early 1996. By the end of that year we had about 70 users. Since this was the era of "get big fast," I worried about how small and obscure we were. But in fact we were doing exactly the right thing. Once you get big (in users or employees) it gets hard to change your product. That year was effectively a laboratory for improving our software. By the end of it, we were so far ahead of our competitors that they never had a hope of catching up. And since all the hackers had spent many hours talking to users, we understood online commerce way better than anyone else.That's the key to success as a startup. There is nothing more important than understanding your business. You might think that anyone in a business must, ex officio, understand it. Far from it. Google's secret weapon was simply that they understood search. I was working for Yahoo when Google appeared, and Yahoo didn't understand search. I know because I once tried to convince the powers that be that we had to make search better, and I got in reply what was then the party line about it: that Yahoo was no longer a mere "search engine." Search was now only a small percentage of our page views, less than one month's growth, and now that we were established as a "media company," or "portal," or whatever we were, search could safely be allowed to wither and drop off, like an umbilical cord.Well, a small fraction of page views they may be, but they are an important fraction, because they are the page views that Web sessions start with. I think Yahoo gets that now.Google understands a few other things most Web companies still don't. The most important is that you should put users before advertisers, even though the advertisers are paying and users aren't. One of my favorite bumper stickers reads "if the people lead, the leaders will follow." Paraphrased for the Web, this becomes "get all the users, and the advertisers will follow." More generally, design your product to please users first, and then think about how to make money from it. If you don't put users first, you leave a gap for competitors who do.To make something users love, you have to understand them. And the bigger you are, the harder that is. So I say "get big slow." The slower you burn through your funding, the more time you have to learn.The other reason to spend money slowly is to encourage a culture of cheapness. That's something Yahoo did understand. David Filo's title was "Chief Yahoo," but he was proud that his unofficial title was "Cheap Yahoo." Soon after we arrived at Yahoo, we got an email from Filo, who had been crawling around our directory hierarchy, asking if it was really necessary to store so much of our data on expensive RAID drives. I was impressed by that. Yahoo's market cap then was already in the billions, and they were still worrying about wasting a few gigs of disk space.When you get a couple million dollars from a VC firm, you tend to feel rich. It's important to realize you're not. A rich company is one with large revenues. This money isn't revenue. It's money investors have given you in the hope you'll be able to generate revenues. So despite those millions in the bank, you're still poor.For most startups the model should be grad student, not law firm. Aim for cool and cheap, not expensive and impressive. For us the test of whether a startup understood this was whether they had Aeron chairs. The Aeron came out during the Bubble and was very popular with startups. Especially the type, all too common then, that was like a bunch of kids playing house with money supplied by VCs. We had office chairs so cheap that the arms all fell off. This was slightly embarrassing at the time, but in retrospect the grad-studenty atmosphere of our office was another of those things we did right without knowing it.Our offices were in a wooden triple-decker in Harvard Square. It had been an apartment until about the 1970s, and there was still a claw-footed bathtub in the bathroom. It must once have been inhabited by someone fairly eccentric, because a lot of the chinks in the walls were stuffed with aluminum foil, as if to protect against cosmic rays. When eminent visitors came to see us, we were a bit sheepish about the low production values. But in fact that place was the perfect space for a startup. We felt like our role was to be impudent underdogs instead of corporate stuffed shirts, and that is exactly the spirit you want.An apartment is also the right kind of place for developing software. Cube farms suck for that, as you've probably discovered if you've tried it. Ever notice how much easier it is to hack at home than at work? So why not make work more like home?When you're looking for space for a startup, don't feel that it has to look professional. Professional means doing good work, not elevators and glass walls. I'd advise most startups to avoid corporate space at first and just rent an apartment. You want to live at the office in a startup, so why not have a place designed to be lived in as your office?Besides being cheaper and better to work in, apartments tend to be in better locations than office buildings. And for a startup location is very important. The key to productivity is for people to come back to work after dinner. Those hours after the phone stops ringing are by far the best for getting work done. Great things happen when a group of employees go out to dinner together, talk over ideas, and then come back to their offices to implement them. So you want to be in a place where there are a lot of restaurants around, not some dreary office park that's a wasteland after 6:00 PM. Once a company shifts over into the model where everyone drives home to the suburbs for dinner, however late, you've lost something extraordinarily valuable. God help you if you actually start in that mode.If I were going to start a startup today, there are only three places I'd consider doing it: on the Red Line near Central, Harvard, or Davis Squares (Kendall is too sterile); in Palo Alto on University or California Aves; and in Berkeley immediately north or south of campus. These are the only places I know that have the right kind of vibe.The most important way to not spend money is by not hiring people. I may be an extremist, but I think hiring people is the worst thing a company can do. To start with, people are a recurring expense, which is the worst kind. They also tend to cause you to grow out of your space, and perhaps even move to the sort of uncool office building that will make your software worse. But worst of all, they slow you down: instead of sticking your head in someone's office and checking out an idea with them, eight people have to have a meeting about it. So the fewer people you can hire, the better.During the Bubble a lot of startups had the opposite policy. They wanted to get "staffed up" as soon as possible, as if you couldn't get anything done unless there was someone with the corresponding job title. That's big company thinking. Don't hire people to fill the gaps in some a priori org chart. The only reason to hire someone is to do something you'd like to do but can't.If hiring unnecessary people is expensive and slows you down, why do nearly all companies do it? I think the main reason is that people like the idea of having a lot of people working for them. This weakness often extends right up to the CEO. If you ever end up running a company, you'll find the most common question people ask is how many employees you have. This is their way of weighing you. It's not just random people who ask this; even reporters do. And they're going to be a lot more impressed if the answer is a thousand than if it's ten.This is ridiculous, really. If two companies have the same revenues, it's the one with fewer employees that's more impressive. When people used to ask me how many people our startup had, and I answered "twenty," I could see them thinking that we didn't count for much. I used to want to add "but our main competitor, whose ass we regularly kick, has a hundred and forty, so can we have credit for the larger of the two numbers?"As with office space, the number of your employees is a choice between seeming impressive, and being impressive. Any of you who were nerds in high school know about this choice. Keep doing it when you start a company.Should You?But should you start a company? Are you the right sort of person to do it? If you are, is it worth it?More people are the right sort of person to start a startup than realize it. That's the main reason I wrote this. There could be ten times more startups than there are, and that would probably be a good thing.I was, I now realize, exactly the right sort of person to start a startup. But the idea terrified me at first. I was forced into it because I was a Lisp hacker. The company I'd been consulting for seemed to be running into trouble, and there were not a lot of other companies using Lisp. Since I couldn't bear the thought of programming in another language (this was 1995, remember, when "another language" meant C++) the only option seemed to be to start a new company using Lisp.I realize this sounds far-fetched, but if you're a Lisp hacker you'll know what I mean. And if the idea of starting a startup frightened me so much that I only did it out of necessity, there must be a lot of people who would be good at it but who are too intimidated to try.So who should start a startup? Someone who is a good hacker, between about 23 and 38, and who wants to solve the money problem in one shot instead of getting paid gradually over a conventional working life.I can't say precisely what a good hacker is. At a first rate university this might include the top half of computer science majors. Though of course you don't have to be a CS major to be a hacker; I was a philosophy major in college.It's hard to tell whether you're a good hacker, especially when you're young. Fortunately the process of starting startups tends to select them automatically. What drives people to start startups is (or should be) looking at existing technology and thinking, don't these guys realize they should be doing x, y, and z? And that's also a sign that one is a good hacker.I put the lower bound at 23 not because there's something that doesn't happen to your brain till then, but because you need to see what it's like in an existing business before you try running your own. The business doesn't have to be a startup. I spent a year working for a software company to pay off my college loans. It was the worst year of my adult life, but I learned, without realizing it at the time, a lot of valuable lessons about the software business. In this case they were mostly negative lessons: don't have a lot of meetings; don't have chunks of code that multiple people own; don't have a sales guy running the company; don't make a high-end product; don't let your code get too big; don't leave finding bugs to QA people; don't go too long between releases; don't isolate developers from users; don't move from Cambridge to Route 128; and so on. [8] But negative lessons are just as valuable as positive ones. Perhaps even more valuable: it's hard to repeat a brilliant performance, but it's straightforward to avoid errors. [9]The other reason it's hard to start a company before 23 is that people won't take you seriously. VCs won't trust you, and will try to reduce you to a mascot as a condition of funding. Customers will worry you're going to flake out and leave them stranded. Even you yourself, unless you're very unusual, will feel your age to some degree; you'll find it awkward to be the boss of someone much older than you, and if you're 21, hiring only people younger rather limits your options.Some people could probably start a company at 18 if they wanted to. Bill Gates was 19 when he and Paul Allen started Microsoft. (Paul Allen was 22, though, and that probably made a difference.) So if you're thinking, I don't care what he says, I'm going to start a company now, you may be the sort of person who could get away with it.The other cutoff, 38, has a lot more play in it. One reason I put it there is that I don't think many people have the physical stamina much past that age. I used to work till 2:00 or 3:00 AM every night, seven days a week. I don't know if I could do that now.Also, startups are a big risk financially. If you try something that blows up and leaves you broke at 26, big deal; a lot of 26 year olds are broke. By 38 you can't take so many risks-- especially if you have kids.My final test may be the most restrictive. Do you actually want to start a startup? What it amounts to, economically, is compressing your working life into the smallest possible space. Instead of working at an ordinary rate for 40 years, you work like hell for four. And maybe end up with nothing-- though in that case it probably won't take four years.During this time you'll do little but work, because when you're not working, your competitors will be. My only leisure activities were running, which I needed to do to keep working anyway, and about fifteen minutes of reading a night. I had a girlfriend for a total of two months during that three year period. Every couple weeks I would take a few hours off to visit a used bookshop or go to a friend's house for dinner. I went to visit my family twice. Otherwise I just worked.Working was often fun, because the people I worked with were some of my best friends. Sometimes it was even technically interesting. But only about 10% of the time. The best I can say for the other 90% is that some of it is funnier in hindsight than it seemed then. Like the time the power went off in Cambridge for about six hours, and we made the mistake of trying to start a gasoline powered generator inside our offices. I won't try that again.I don't think the amount of bullshit you have to deal with in a startup is more than you'd endure in an ordinary working life. It's probably less, in fact; it just seems like a lot because it's compressed into a short period. So mainly what a startup buys you is time. That's the way to think about it if you're trying to decide whether to start one. If you're the sort of person who would like to solve the money problem once and for all instead of working for a salary for 40 years, then a startup makes sense.For a lot of people the conflict is between startups and graduate school. Grad students are just the age, and just the sort of people, to start software startups. You may worry that if you do you'll blow your chances of an academic career. But it's possible to be part of a startup and stay in grad school, especially at first. Two of our three original hackers were in grad school the whole time, and both got their degrees. There are few sources of energy so powerful as a procrastinating grad student.If you do have to leave grad school, in the worst case it won't be for too long. If a startup fails, it will probably fail quickly enough that you can return to academic life. And if it succeeds, you may find you no longer have such a burning desire to be an assistant professor.If you want to do it, do it. Starting a startup is not the great mystery it seems from outside. It's not something you have to know about "business" to do. Build something users love, and spend less than you make. How hard is that?Notes[1] Google's revenues are about two billion a year, but half comes from ads on other sites.[2] One advantage startups have over established companies is that there are no discrimination laws about starting businesses. For example, I would be reluctant to start a startup with a woman who had small children, or was likely to have them soon. But you're not allowed to ask prospective employees if they plan to have kids soon. Believe it or not, under current US law, you're not even allowed to discriminate on the basis of intelligence. Whereas when you're starting a company, you can discriminate on any basis you want about who you start it with.[3] Learning to hack is a lot cheaper than business school, because you can do it mostly on your own. For the price of a Linux box, a copy of K&R, and a few hours of advice from your neighbor's fifteen year old son, you'll be well on your way.[4] Corollary: Avoid starting a startup to sell things to the biggest company of all, the government. Yes, there are lots of opportunities to sell them technology. But let someone else start those startups.[5] A friend who started a company in Germany told me they do care about the paperwork there, and that there's more of it. Which helps explain why there are not more startups in Germany.[6] At the seed stage our valuation was in principle $100,000, because Julian got 10% of the company. But this is a very misleading number, because the money was the least important of the things Julian gave us.[7] The same goes for companies that seem to want to acquire you. There will be a few that are only pretending to in order to pick your brains. But you can never tell for sure which these are, so the best approach is to seem entirely open, but to fail to mention a few critical technical secrets.[8] I was as bad an employee as this place was a company. I apologize to anyone who had to work with me there.[9] You could probably write a book about how to succeed in business by doing everything in exactly the opposite way from the DMV.

The GNU Project : starting of silent revolution

2006-04-24T21:01:00.000-07:00

Richard Stallman explains why he started The Gnu Project. Put yourself in his shoes for a moment

The GNU Project : starting of silent revolution

2006-04-24T21:00:00.000-07:00

Richard Stallman explains why he started The Gnu Project. Put yourself in his shoes for a moment