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India’s Need For Entrepreneurs and the MindSet

In 1991, the second Independence of India took place – there was an opening up of the economy that led, in its own tortuous Indian way, to the opening up of the minds of a section of the population. The educated middle class that had till then either left the country for greener pastures or taken up jobs in the government or with the few MNCs operating then started looking around at opportunities that were being created in India. Entrepreneurship still seemed like something only two sections of society ventured into – those with family wealth or traditional business backgrounds or those without any other option namely, the roadside food shop, the barber and the small store owner. Very few consciously chose entrepreneurship as an option. Then, towards the end of that decade, a remarkable thing began to happen. Young educated middle class Indians suddenly started taking an interest in India: a host of environmental factors played a catalytic role in this phenomenon: the rise of Indian entrepreneurship in the US, the emergence of 1st generation educated middle class Indian entrepreneurs, the creation of aspirations in a increasingly mobile workforce and the media, increased availability of capital and the like. India started getting noticed in the West and India’s arrival on the global stage started getting reported in breathless hyperbole. However, all this euphoric talk about India’s growth and success hid the fact that crony socialism had quietly given way to crony capitalism which was as insidious. Governance and policy making took not just the last rows in the stadium that was cheering “India’s arrival” but were not even in the stadium! The penny naturally dropped on the India story.

Today, we’re confronted by the stark realities of India that the breathless comparisons with China and other countries had somehow managed to paper over. The hubris is slowly and painfully giving away to the realization that the parties celebrating India as a super power had begun too soon. And that there was, quite simply, an enormous amount of work to be done.

In 2012, as India enters its 66th year, our first prime minister’s rousing speech “Tryst with Destiny” is yet again worth reading. Are we anywhere close to redeeming the pledge made, has the new star of hope provided succour and whether hope still springs in the hearts and minds of all of us? While very impressive strides have been made in many areas, especially given the desperate condition at the start of our country’s birth, it is important that we keep in mind the fact that 15% of the world lives in India and over 68%  ie about 700million of our people live on less than US$2 a day. Over 17 million people are born (equivalent to the population of The Netherlands), an estimated 40million are unemployed, over 500,000 students graduate each year from various colleges and over  12 million join the workforce each year . The investment required to educate, train, and deploy these large numbers into gainful jobs is in the tens of thousands of crores. And remember, these millions of jobs have to be yet created! Now imagine the public healthcare, water and sanitation, education, travel, housing, electricity, entertainment, banking and financial services that need to be provided to these huge numbers assuming there’re jobs that lead to incomes being generated leading to consumption and investment. Imagine a scenario where tens of millions of young energetic citizens become disillusioned job seekers – the social upheaval possibilities are terribly explosive even to contemplate, particularly in our country.

For far too long, we have been plagued by poverty – of ideas, of ideology and of course economically. Misplaced socialistic policies in the early years of India ensured that poverty was distributed while cronyism ensured that a few made unconscionable amounts of money and enjoyed the trappings of power.

Jobs are created by entrepreneurs. Governments are facilitators and regulators to make sure that everyone’s playing fairly and by the rules that have been created to facilitate the creation of jobs. Wealth is then created by entrepreneurial actions. Only when wealth is created, can there be investments in creating the support infrastructure and services necessary for India to seriously consider redeeming its pledge. And a crucial pre-requisite for this is the need for an entrepreneurial mindset.

Change in every society, in every age, in every sphere of human endeavor has come about because some people, a minority, decided to put their entrepreneurial mindsets to work. And they were able to put their entrepreneurial mindsets to work because they were incredibly passionate about what they believed in. This minority is the entrepreneurial community. And while the term “entrepreneur” is generally used in the context of business and startups, it is important to realize that the entrepreneurial mindset has been, is and will be on display all around us.

Anyone with an entrepreneurial mindset dreams big, is interested in solving problems, seizes opportunities, is unafraid to experiment with new ways of doing things in order to achieve the dream, demonstrates leadership in creating new resources while marshalling existing resources, energizes people to work collectively to executing the dream, is conscious of the need to be fair, is respectful of the laws of the land, realizes the need to act with speed, engages and responds to feedback with a recalibrated approach, is unapologetic about effecting positive change by challenging a prevailing status quo and works incredibly hard. Possibilities of effecting change and making a difference to oneself and to others as against complaining about constraints (“I have no resources, I don’t know too many people, don’t have the knowledge or experience”) is what distinguishes those with the entrepreneurial mindset from the others. They spend positive energy in figuring out ways to create, seek and aggregate resources (team members, finances, networks) to make the possibilities come true. They are not afraid of failure but instead as Vinod Khosla says, “My willingness to fail gives me the ability to succeed”. In other words, keep shooting multiple arrows at the target.

What is it that drove Andrew Wiles for 30 long frustrating and difficult years to solve Fermat’s Last Theorem – ever since he first came face to face with it at the age of 10 – that had confounded mathematicians for over 350 years? What is it that makes a Reinhold Messner, the greatest mountaineer of all time, climb mountains on every continent, losing several of his fingers and toes and putting himself through extreme life threatening hardships such as climbing Mount Everest without oxygen? Surely, it wasn’t the money! What is it that made a significantly deaf, unschooled child grow up to become Thomas Edison, one of the most prolific inventors of all time with over a 1000 patents? Well before IPL, the stuffy establishment of cricket was changed forever in 1978 when Kerry Packer an Australian media baron challenged status quo by signing up 51 of the world’s top cricketers and introduced limited overs cricket under flood lights, with fielding restrictions, with coloured clothing, cheer leaders and the like. How come no one else thought of this before Packer? Would there have been a Nano if not for a Ratan Tata daring to think of a $2000 car for the middle class Indian?

The mightiest empire the world has ever known was shaken to its very foundations by the incredible demonstration of the entrepreneurial mindset by Mahatma Gandhi. For example, he had this to say about Swaraj “we must have a proper picture of what we want before we can have something approaching it”. Landing in India in 1915 as a 46 year old without any real understanding of India and without any mass following, but shaped by his South African experiences on the need for social justice, driven only by a set of passionate beliefs about the need for freedom for India, developed his concept of Satyagraha and energised people through his own unique blend of non-violent politics, lifestyle and use of symbols like the Dandi March.

We all have heard of Amul. It is India’s largest branded impact making organization Amul today impacts over 3 million milk producers and generates over $2 billion in revenues. It is world’s largest vegetarian cheese brand, India’s largest food brand and the largest pouched milk brand. It would be hard to imagine that an Amul could have been created without the entrepreneurial mindset and leadership of Dr Verghese Kurien, who led Amul as it innovated across the value chain. Amul incidentally was founded in 1946 before India’s independence!

From the few less than obvious examples cited above, it is clear that the manifestations of an entrepreneurial mindset are visible across very many areas of human endeavor.  As we contemplate an India that can  redeem its tryst with destiny, where jobs create economic security for hundreds of millions, we absolutely cannot ignore the seemingly intractable problems that confront us all as citizens. I have long believed that change in India will gain irreversible momentum when the generation born after 1991 enters the work-force. This is the generation that is confident, knowledgeable, technology savvy, is aware, well traveled and is impatient. Fortunately, India is the home to the largest number of such people anywhere in the world.

Resolving these problems requires the energizing of the entrepreneurial mindset that’s latent in each of us. Each of us can make a difference if only we dare to think differently. Changes in the way things are done in government, in politics, in society, in business, in education, healthcare are all eminently possible through entrepreneurial thinking with job creation and facilitation as the important outcome.

Here, therefore, is a question for us to ponder over:

Is it possible for us to imagine that each of us, in our lifetimes, creates – either directly or indirectly – a 100 jobs? Are there not 100,000 people – educated, experienced, entrepreneurial and energetic – who can each take up this challenge? Ten million jobs can be created by this group, indirectly benefiting 50 million.

If it is possible, it is do-able!

The Brihadaranyaka Upanishada has this to say:

“You are what your deep, driving desire is. As your desire, so is your will. As your will is, so is your deed. As your deed is, so is your destiny.”

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M&A is critical for the Product Startup ecosystem in India

Small $20-30m M&A transactions are the lifeblood of Silicon Valley. Over 400 such transactions happened last year. Israeli companies accounted for over 20% of these transactions. India had only a couple of transactions to speak of. This has to change of Indian has to become a Product Nation. 

iSPIRT is focusing on this issue through its soon-to-be-announced M&A Connect Program. The M&A Connect Program team – led by Jay Pullur and Sanjay Shah – was in Silicon Valley last week for listening meetings with various stakeholders. As a part of this exercise they hosted a long brainstorming session with more than a dozen M&A heads of serial acquirers ranging from Facebook to Vmware.

One other listening meeting was with about 20 Indian product entrepreneurs camped in the Valley. I was privileged to attend this meeting. It was a delightful 3.5 hours discussion. There were three set of issues that were discussed. One set of issues related to improving discovery of Indian startups. It turns out that addressing this is not as simple as doing a SV delegation or getting TechCrunch coverage. More than that is needed. The second set of issues related to the regulatory friction of doing small M&A deals in India. The third set of issues were about improving the readiness and preparedness of product entrepreneurs.

There was active participation by all the attendees. These included:

  • Indus Kaitan,Bitzer Mobile
  • Suresh Sambandam,OrangeScape
  • Manjunath M Gowda, i7 Networks
  • Asif Ali, Reduce Data
  • Vamshi Mokshagund, Credii
  • Rohit Nadhani, Cloud Magic
  • Madhur Khandelwal, ShoppingWish –
  • Kumar Rangarajan & Satyam Kundula, LittleEye Labs
  • Deobrat Singh, Gazemetrix
  • Rajan Arora, SchoolAdmissions
  • Bharath Mundiapudi, Orzota
  • Annkur P Agarwal, PriceBaba
  • Srikanth N, Arktan
  • Jay Pullur and Vijay Sundaram, Pramati (they hosted the meeting) 

 

I was most impressed by the dedication and passion of the iSPIRT team driving this effort. Their selfless commitment to making a difference was heartwarming. I could sense that most of us attendees felt the same way. The self-help community that iSPIRT is creating is truly inclusive and impactful. 

If you are product startup interested in exploring a possible M&A exit in the future do watch for more details about the M&A Connect Program. Try and become part of this. Given what I heard in the meeting, I’m sure that this new Program be game changing for the ecosystem.  

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Marketplace Metrics: The Three Success Factors

Marketplaces are difficult businesses to run. Like all multi-sided platform businesses, they suffer from the classic chicken and egg problem: the technology has no value unless buyers and sellers are present and you can’t get the buyers on board unless you have sellers and you can’t bring in sellers without having buyers. Hence, building a marketplace is a lot like building two separate companies simultaneously, each dependent on the other.

There are three factors that determine success for a marketplace business:

LIQUIDITY OR CRITICAL MASS

The lifeline of a marketplace (and any platform business for that matter) is liquidity. Liquidity is a state where there are a minimum number of producers and consumers on the marketplace and there is a high expectation of transactions taking place. This is similar to the critical mass of users that is needed on a social network for users to find value in the network. Critical mass is a state where there is enough volume of supply and demand, for transactions to start sparking.

The first and most important metric to watch out for is the percentage of listings that lead to transactions within a certain time period. This serves as a proxy for the efficiency of the marketplace. Merely increasing the number of buyer and seller sign-ups doesn’t serve a purpose unless this metric starts rising. The time period would depend on the category. AirBnB listings would find transactions sooner than listings on a buy-and-sell  real estate marketplace. This could also depend on ticket sizes within the same category. Fiverr and oDesk are both services marketplaces but the turnover on Fiverr is most likely higher, owing to the much smaller ticket sizes.

To get to liquidity, the marketplace also needs to solve the chicken and egg problem and get both buyers and sellers on board. Marketplaces leverage a variety of tactics for circumventing this problem including building single user utility, stealing traction and piggybacking other platforms.

MATCHING: CURATION OF PRODUCTS/SERVICE

Users visit a marketplace with a highly transactional intent and want to find what they’re looking for at the earliest. In this aspect, transaction businesses are remarkably different from engagement businesses. A user visiting AirBnB or Yelp has a specific intent in mind. Hence, the quality of the search algorithm and the intuitiveness of the navigation are critical to delivering value. In contrast, a user visiting Pinterest often wants to spend some time and consume content on the platform. Hence, the infinite scroll!

The efficiency of discovery and matching is critical to a marketplace’s success. Percentage of searches that lead to listing profile visits within the first page of results is one such metric. When listings are served instead, as a feed, the clickthrough per session can serve as a proxy as well. The best metric to track matching efficiency varies with the business model of the marketplace as well as the category.

TRUST: CURATION OF PARTICIPANTS

Building trust is central to marketplaces where transactions carry risk. AirBnB is an example of a player in a high-risk category, that succeeded because of its ability to curate its participants. AirBnB allows hosts and travelers to review each other and has one of the highest review rates among marketplaces. It also takes additional measures to build trust, including having photographers certify a host’s listing.

This was one of the factors that helped AirBnB challenge CraigsListbecause CraigsList never built a strong curation system for participants.

Focus on the trust metric is very important to move from appealing to an early adopter audience to appealing to a mainstream audience. While early adopters use new marketplaces because of the novelty, opening up to a larger market requires the trust and reputation management systems to be alive and kicking.

WHAT’S NOT AS IMPORTANT:

User interface and design are less important with transactional businesses as compared to engagement businesses.

On a marketplace, the ability to search and transact/interact should be as intuitive as possible. Beyond that, the look-and-feel and design are purely hygiene factors. Unlike social networks, marketplaces are transactional and users typically don’t have long visit lengths engaging with the product. Hence, UI is not as important a criterion as the other three mentioned above.

In summary, if you’re building a marketplace:

1. Focus on liquidity, not just user growth

2. At critical mass and beyond, closely track matching efficiency

3. When moving from an early adopter to a mainstream audience, ensure that the trust systems are in place and functioning well.

This article was first featured on Sangeet’s blog, Platform Thinking (http://platformed.info). Platform Thinking has been ranked among the top blogs for startups, globally, by the Harvard Business School Centre for Entrepreneurship

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Indian Product Industry: How Far We’ve Come And How Much More To Go

These are exciting times for us in the Indian software products industry. The air is pregnant with cautious, yet very strong optimism that some truly great product companies will emerge out of India in the coming years. There is a significant shift in the mindset of Indian entrepreneurs, with a focus now on building great products and not just good enough products. A talent pool of  highly qualified and experienced professionals who have worked with MNCs across various functions and roles is now available. The support system has also gotten stronger with more angel investors, accelerators and incubators, focused events and meetups with founders, entrepreneurs and experienced professionals coming together, sharing their knowledge and helping each other. Entrepreneurs now have more exposure to the Valley and other innovation hotbeds and international markets by virtue of their interaction and participation with accelerators, investors and entrepreneurs outside of India. More importantly, we already have examples of successful Indian product companies that have built products for the world and are now well-established names in their businesses.

I’ve stated this earlier as well, that it is my firm belief that the software product industry will lift India out of its poverty. While I strongly believe we’re firmly on track to make the prediction come true, I would also like to strike a note of caution. Having been in the industry for close to 25 years new wearing multiple hats and seen it evolve, there are some observations I would like to share with the readers.

Rome wasn’t built in a day. It’s probably the most cliched phrase, but I think it makes sense repeating the cliche once more in the current context. As entrepreneurs and investors, it is indeed important that we celebrate key wins and milestones like funding, new hires, entry into new markets etc. However, we also need look at the larger, long time picture and focus on what is needed to build a meaningfully successful company, a company that creates value for all the stakeholders – founders, employees, investors and most importantly the customers. And it is that part, of envisaging the larger picture and actually painting it, which is a true test of one’s faith in their core beliefs, their endurance and perseverance.

It is said that dramatic changes happen in a dog’s lifetime. Dogs usually live between 10-15 years on an average, and if they were to follow technology they’d be witnesses to some incredible and eventful happenings. Ten years maybe doesn’t seem like too long a time for us humans, but I were to borrow from the tagline of a very popular coffee chain, a lot can happen in ten years! Rewind ten years to this day, and this is what we would be looking at. Facebook, Groupon, Zynga did not exist. Google’s AdSense & LinkedIn were just about to be launched. On the mobile side, Nokia was the largest vendor of mobile phones and Samsung hadn’t introduced mobiles phones in India yet. Seeds of iOS and Android had probably just been sown in the minds of their creators. In the fast-paced world we live in, it’s very easy to miss how much can happen in what now seems like a short period of ten years. But if you take a step back and notice each of the happenings, you’ll realise how impactful and significant these changes are.

The observations and insights from the points mentioned above hold a lot of meaning for us in the Indian software product industry. While it’s very natural and fair to expect things to move quicker, people to be smarter, government and regulators be more friendly, investors be less risk-averse and so on, but it is also important to remember that magic doesn’t happen overnight. However, small wins and milestones added up over time will see your product and your company achieve something significant over time. Moreover, as an entrepreneur, you’ll need to believe in non-linear growth and that there’ll always be a point from where your growth will take off and go the hockey stick way. Remember, that Angry Birds was Rovio’s 52nd game and they were almost bankrupt at the time they released Angry Birds. What if they had given up after their 50th game? Of course I believe in overnight success, and the only overnight success is getting a good night’s sleep! For all other kinds of overnight success, there are miles to go before one sleeps!

I’m reminded of a tagline that Timex watches had for a long time. (A Timex watch)…takes a licking, but keeps on ticking. That’s some inspiration for us entrepreneurs there! I’ll leave you with some vintage Timex commercials. Hope you enjoy them.

http://vintagetimex.homestead.com/farmer.jpg


YouTube Video – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_fKppH8B0g

Happy Building,

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Where does India Stand on Innovation?

How does India stack up on innovation compared to other countries? Are we getting more innovative over time? These are questions I have been grappling with since I started studying innovation more than two decades ago.

In recent times, the growing importance of innovation to economic growth and prosperity has induced many efforts to measure innovation at the national level. In my book From Jugaad to Innovation: The Challenge for India (Utpreraka Foundation, 2010) [FJ2SI], I cited studies like the UNCTAD Innovation Capability Index, Georgia Tech’s High Tech Indicators and the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Innovation Study to show that India is a laggard as far as innovation performance is concerned.

As I noted in FJ2SI, each of these studies emphasized a different set of variables. The UNCTAD approach was based on human capabilities, and therefore focused on human development indicators. The Georgia Tech approach used high tech exports as a proxy for innovation sophistication. And the EIU used patents as its primary measure.

A few years ago, INSEAD and the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) launched a joint effort to develop a more comprehensive innovation index. In a short time, this index has gained credibility with policy-makers. The latest report of this Global Innovation Index (GII) came out last June.

India’s Position

India ranked in the middle of GII 2012 with a rank of 64 out of 141 countries. India’s rank remained virtually unchanged from 2011 to 2012. Apart from the GII itself, the GII methodology involves the computation of three other indices – an innovation output index, an innovation input index, and an innovation efficiency index. India was ranked 40, 96, and 2 respectively on these three measures in 2012.

The innovation input index rests on five pillars: institutions, human capital and research, infrastructure, market sophistication, and business sophistication. The innovation output index consists of knowledge and technology outputs and creative outputs. The innovation efficiency index is based on the ratio of innovation output to innovation input.

To get a clearer sense of where India stands, it is useful to compare India with China, as I did in FJ2SI. China does much better on the GII with a 2012 rank of 34. It was ranked 19, 55 and 1 respectively on innovation output, input, and efficiency.

China outclassed India on 3 of the 5 input pillars – human capital & research, infrastructure, and business sophistication – with a rank difference of 40-50 places. I am not surprised by the huge gap on the first two, but I am certainly intrigued by the huge difference in business sophistication (I’ll come back to this shortly). China was marginally ahead of India on the other two input parameters – institutions and market sophistication.

On the output side, China ranked 5 globally on knowledge and technology outputs while India came in at #47. The only measure on which India did better than China was on the output measure of creative outputs.

Digging Deeper

Looking at the raw scores that underlie the ranks, I found a few interesting contrasts:

• China does much better than India on institutional factors like ease of resolving insolvency and ease of paying taxes;
• The biggest differences between India and China are on the education-related indices of reading skills (a real shocker – India scores 4.41 against 100 for China; but the ASER reports have been showing this for years), and pupil-teacher ratio;
• China’s score on Gross expenditure on R&D is twice that of India;
• China’s score on ISO 14001 environmental certificates is about 7 times that of India (I need to dig into the significance of this number, but I guess the trend is clear enough);
• China’s higher score on business sophistication comes from the proportion of firms offering formal training to their employees (16% for India vs. 85% for China), R&D performed by businesses (34% for India vs. 72% for China), and high-tech imports (this is, I suppose, more reflective of China’s position in high technology manufacturing vis-à-vis India);

India’s bright spots (vis-à-vis China) are:

• Press freedom (not a surprise!);
• Efficiency of energy use;
• Ease of getting credit, and ease of protecting investors;
• Services exports (again, hardly a surprise)

What Needs to be done

The GII underlines something we already know – India’s biggest failure as an independent nation is in the arena of literacy and basic education. No other country with which we compare ourselves has such a poor record on this basic pre-requisite of a modern country. While government initiatives like the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan and the Right to Education Act have belatedly acknowledged this failure, I don’t see a sense of urgency in addressing this problem. This has serious implications not only for innovation but for the very existence and progress of India itself.

While we often rationalize Indian firms not embracing an R&D culture by arguing that perhaps it’s not a business imperative, the fact that Indian firms are laggards on environmental certification as well as training suggests that we are simply not investing enough in the long term future of our enterprises. This is a sobering thought as we contemplate the future of Indian business and the Indian economy, and should be an important subject for reflection by India’s leading industry associations.

Some Concluding Remarks on Innovation Indices

One problem with innovation indices such as the GII is apparent from the above observations: they are constructed on the base of very generic parameters. The variables that are used to measure the GII (like the ease of setting up a business or the ease of paying taxes) seem no different from those used to measure competitiveness or the business environment. At the same time, the GII omits relevant measures such as the level of protection for intellectual property in a particular country.

In an effort to use “objective measures,” these indices appear to be measuring phenomena that are somewhat removed from innovation per se. Instead, the simple OECD model that I adapted for use in FJ2SI seems much more relevant to measuring the environment for innovation, and the resultant innovation output.

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The Other E-commerce Guys

“Fifty years ago the nice housewife still prided herself on knowing the right place for everything. There was a little man in a back street who imported just the coffee she wanted, another who blended tea to perfection, a third who could smoke a ham as a ham should be smoked. All have vanished now; and the housewife betakes herself to the stores.” – Clive Bell, English Critic and Writer, in Civilization 

Bell, one of the finest art critics, wrote this in the 1920s . Though he did not use the word consumerism anywhere—probably it had not been coined by then—Bell’s words exactly describes what we today call mindless consumerism. 

Now, just try to gauge how much more we have progressd on that path in these 90 odd years since Bell wrote this? Instead of the local stores, now the housewife “betake herself” to the superstores, large format retailers, where she even gets discounts if she buys more and is spoilt for choice of brands. And she is happy! Or so she shows. 

Of course, it is not just the housewife. It is all of us. 

But how many of us can say honestly that we don’t crave for something that we have grown up with and something that we do not get anywhere in the superstores? Remember the banana cake that the bakery next to your house in Kollam made so perfectly? Or the auromatic curry powder that the man in the street behind your housing colony in Berhampur sold from his home?  

We know the superstores, despite their 20 plus brands in offering, can never match that. Yet, we cannot do anything about it. We are too busy in our everyday lives to do anything beyond craving. 

But a few passionate individuals are doing something about it. Realizing that many of us would love to, as Clive Bell puts it elsewhere, “get what we like rather than like what we get”, they are trying to ensure that they deliver those products to us. And they have turned to something that we are only too familiar with us: e-commrce. 

E-commerce? Hasn’t it taken us a little farther in that path of consumerism, offering heavy discounts on big brands—foreign fashion brands we may not have heard of six months back but now do not leave a single chance to boast about them after we bought them with 70% discount? 

Yes, it has, if we define e-commerce narrowly as one business segment, characterized by big funding ($900 million, according to Juxt research), big acquisitions, and bigger discounts. Not if we define e-commerce as a way of doing business. The basic value proposition of e-commerce—removing the constraints of space and time from shopping—is a powerful one and is here to stay. 

These new generation e-commerce companies are not about big money and scalability; they are about a passion. I am so gung-ho about them not because they are different or innovative, but because they bring us things for which many of us have long craved for. They are about reaching out to people with a taste, without having to worry about huge capital investments. They are about—and this is my reason for writing this piece—making people look beyond the malls and superstores to appreciate something made/procured with care and love—almost a movement against the mindless consumerism that all of us are becoming slave to. 

Here are a few such efforts. The list is neither a work of research by Juxt (or anyone else) nor have they been selected by any business parameters. But if you are dying for some criteria, you can take this: they are fairly focused. And as many of you would be quick to point out—are not really scalable.

Blue Tokai Coffee (http://www.bluetokaicoffee.com)

According to the promoters, they started  Blue Tokai Coffee, “figuring that there were many others like us who would enjoy a good cup of freshly roasted coffee”. “The coffee we roast is the coffee we like to drink.” they say. 

Choko la (http://www.chokola.in)

This initiative is from Vasudha Munjal from the family of Munjals, promoters of the Hero Group.  A hybrid offline-online chocolate store, Choco la aspires to “create a chocolate culture in India”. The goal is lofty; the offerings are good. But unlike others such as Blue Tokai, it has good competition. It still has to create a good differentiation and some real buzz on social media. 

Darjeeling TeaXpress (http://www.darjeelingteaxpress.com)

With an aim “to reach as many customers, consumers and tea connoisseurs as we can all around the world”, Darjeeling TeaXpress is all about choicest tea. You can but based on type (green tea, black tea…), plantations, flush and speciality. You should see the varieties on offer to belive it.    

Goosebumps Pickles (http://www.goosebumpspickles.com)

Creating a pickle of your own choice of ingredients and that too made for you at home and it arrives straight at your home—raise your hands who does not get excited by this? And I can almost see no hands. The concept and the website have been appreciated by many. It even got a mention in the IAMAI awards. 

KashmirBox (http://www.kashmirbox.com)

Kashmir is many things to many people. But most of them having different political opinion about Kashmir agree when it comes to their appreciation of the food and clothes—be it chilis or saffron; pashmina shawls or bags. The site ofers authentic Kashmiri stuff which you can buy sitting at your own home. 

The list is neither comprehensive nor does it claim to be a roll call of honour in the category. They are presented here as illustrations of the bigger point. So, feel free to add your favorite mithai shop online  or online bakery to the list, if you think they are doing a good job. And if you cannot absolutely resist it, create business plans for them. And maybe, think of your own such dream venture.

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Users or Customers?

If you’ve been around the internet startup world for long enough, you’ve probably engaged in the user-customer debate at least once. Who’s the user? Who’s the customer? Who should we be focusing on?

I’m going to start off a series of posts talking about the basic elements of Platform Thinking and this being the first, I’d like to talk about the User-Customer debate since that lies at the very heart of how we think about the design of internet businesses.

If we put on the Platform Thinking lens, we essentially do away with the user-customer debate and replace it with a more fundamental view of how your business functions. Here’s how:

Most internet businesses can be viewed as a platform on which value is created and consumed. E.g. YouTube.com is a platform on which video up loaders create value and viewers consumer value. With that in mind, let’s move on…

Who’s the user? 

Quite simply, the user is anyone who uses the product. Now that doesn’t help us too much, so let’s break that down a little.

A user may perform one of two roles:

Producer: Someone who creates supply or responds to demand. If you think of YouTube, whenever a user adds a video, he’s acting in a Producer role, creating supply. A person answering a question on Quora is a producer, responding to demand. 

Consumer: Someone who creates demand or consumes supply. A video viewer is a consumer on Youtube. A question asked on Quora (as well as others viewing the question and answers) is playing a consumer role. 

Note that these are roles, not user segments. If you think of eBay, the sellers are the producers and the buyers are the consumers so we have two distinct segments. But on Twitter, every time you tweet, you are in a producer role, and if you start reading your tweet stream the next second, you’ve moved to consumer mode. 

Splitting the term ‘user’ into these two roles helps us understand the exact motivations and actions for the user while using the product.Understanding the motivations and actions helps us design tools that enable the users to perform these actions instead of loading the product with features. 

Most products have more than one producer or consumer role. E.g. On LinkedIn, professionals using LinkedIn are producers and consumers of interactions and status updates, thought leaders are privileged producers and recruiters are producers of job listings and consumers of relevant user profiles. 

This brings us to the third party in the debate… 

Who’s the customer? 

As in the offline world, the customer is someone who pays. The customer may not be part of the central demand-supply equation. The sole defining criterion for a customer is that the customer pays money to the business. 

The customer may be:

  1. The producer: e.g. Vimeo. Video up loaders can pay for premium features.
  2. The consumer: e.g. New York Times. Readers pay to access news
  3. Someone else: e.g. Facebook. The advertiser is the customer 

Again, multiple parties may be customers. On LinkedIn, we have users (who play both consumer and producer roles) as customers as well as advertisers and recruiters. 

To summarize:

  1. Every internet business has three distinct types of roles: Producer, Consumer and Customer
  2. There may be multiple roles of each type on every business
  3. Producers create supply or respond to demand
  4. Consumers create demand or consume supply
  5. Customers pay  

A few quick examples:  

Zappos.com

Producer: Zappos.com itself is the producer; sourcing shoes and creating supply.

Consumer: Users browsing and buying on the storefront.

Customer: The segment of consumers actually buying shoes.

AirBnB

Producer: Hosts, Review Writers

Consumer: Travelers, Review Readers

Customer: Technically, the hosts are the customers since they forgo a cut of the transaction and share it with AirBnB 

Yelp

Producer: Yelp (creates listings), Review Writers

Consumer: Consumers in the city, Review Readers

Customer: Merchants that advertise 

The New York Times

Producer: The New York Times

Consumer: Readers

Customer: Readers, Advertisers 

I’d love to hear your thoughts. This is the first in a series of posts where I intend to share the essential tenets of Platform Thinking and how to use it to design internet businesses. Feel free to leave your thoughts below.

Note: This article was first featured on Sangeet’s blog, Platform Thinking (http://platformed.info). Platform Thinking has been ranked among the top blogs for startups, globally, by the Harvard Business School Centre for Entrepreneurship.

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Indian SMB market at 48.8 million units growing at a CAGR of 4.53%

Our recently launched study titled, ‘Indian SMB Sector 2013’ captures some interesting facts and figures on the burgeoning SMB segment in India. The study reveals that with a total base of 48.8 million SMBs, India is expected to emerge as the largest SMB country globally.

The SMB sector in India is growing at an exceptional rate and has the potential to be one of the primary drivers of the Indian economy. Today, 1.5 million SMBs export their products or services outside India which is a sign of the sector’s rapid evolution. The sector is expected to be the largest employment generator in the country and today represents the true entrepreneurial spirit of the Indian business community.

The study also highlights that the Indian SMB space today is largely dominated by micro scale businesses which account for 95% of the SMB landscape. This is followed by small scale businesses contributing 4.8%, and the rest 0.2% by medium scale businesses. Out of the 48.8 million SMBs around 55% are located in urban areas whereas rural regions account for the rest 45 %.

SMBs in India have gained strategic importance from both corporations and the government. The recently announced tax incentive for growing SMBs in the Union Budget is one such example. Such initiatives have helped SMBs enhance their competitiveness in the global markets. Globalization in trade is further driving SMBs to improve their efficiency of conducting business.

The study also states that around 82% of all SMBs are situated in 10 states in India. These 10 states, also account for 2/3rd of the mobile and internet subscribers in the country. Additionally, Manufacturing is the single largest vertical at pan India level followed by Repairs & Maintenance, and Services vertical. Greater employee mobility, increased competition and expansion in terms of office locations have further pushed SMBs in India to generate more employment. The study indicates that the Indian SMB sector provides employment to approx. 81.16 million people in India, growing at a CAGR of 5.29%, while the fixed investment has been consistently increasing over the years at 11.48%.

The following are some of the key findings of the study:

  • India is a hub of 48.8 million SMBs providing employment to 81.16 million individuals
  • Micro enterprises account for 95% of total SMBs, small & medium put together hold the remaining 5% share
  • 1.5 million Indian SMBs export their products or services globally
  • 55% of SMBs are located out of urban cities whereas 45% are situated in rural areas
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Cloud Services and Mobile Apps

In addition to vendors of traditional on-premise products that are shipped or downloaded via web, a different generation of providers is fast emerging. They are leveraging new technologies and business models, often interchangeably referred to as cloud services, Web 2.0 or SaaS (Software as a Service). (Not all SaaS products are truly cloud based but the differences are not relevant for this discussion.)

SaaS considerably simplifies application deployment and upgrade challenges. Software is hosted at one site (vendor’s own or through a provider). This reduces development cost since the deployment environment is controlled. There is no distribution expense, though deployment charges can become considerable to support a large base of users.

The SaaS model is important for India. Making geography irrelevant, it enables anywhere, anytime apps and services for a fl at world. Indian Web 2.0ventures can now reach out to the world market without the huge cost of sales that enterprise software companies have to bear. They can compete directly against global players.

Cloud services adoption will depend on resolution of a few major concerns. One is security of personal and corporate data in the cloud. Secondly, guaranteed near 100% uptime will be critical for mainstream enterprise apps to move to the cloud. Reliable access will be a big factor in India for a few years, despite the phenomenal growth in broadband connectivity. Uptime has been an issue even in US, with large players like Google and eBay facing major outages in their online services.

The most widely used cloud service is web-based e-mail such as Google’s  Gmail. The standard bearer for commercial SaaS apps is Salesforce.com, which crossed $1 billion in revenue in 2009 in just ten years. It provides web-based Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution for sales, service, marketing and call center operations.

With over 1.5 billion people going online, SaaS offerings will only proliferate. Amazon.com, which started with selling books over the web to consumers, is now a full-service online merchandise store. Examples in India include IndianRailways.com (train bookings), MakeMyTrip.com (travel services), naukri.com (job related portal) and shaadi.com (matrimonial related).

Similar to cloud services, software apps on mobile phones are becoming more common, driven by the explosive growth in usage. In 2009, cell phone ownership had reached 3.5 billion worldwide and over 400 million in India. Cell phone growth is highest in India, with 10+ million being added each month, cutting across income barriers. The Indian mobile market is unusual in its extensive usage of texting (SMS) and multiplicity of languages. With its ubiquity, mobility and low cost, it is the ideal delivery platform for simple apps (and supporting middleware).

Though SaaS and mobile app vendors often look like a services rather than software firm, they are included in the book because software is the foundation and key differentiator for their business.

There is another reason. With its late liberalization, India largely skipped making huge investments in an entire generation of technology (land lines, minicomputers and even standalone software apps). This proved to be a boon in disguise, and led to rapid adoption of latest advances like broadband and mobile by a booming market. In similar fashion, consumers and businesses may take to this new breed of software products. Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) especially benefi t from SaaS by not having to invest upfront in IT infrastructure (servers, software licenses) and buying subscriptions only as required. Similarly, the hand-held is rapidly morphing into a highly integrated device, and is poised to become the key accessory for humans to interface with their environment. The vast majority of Indians will skip the PC and directly use an integrated
device at work and home.

Since the Indian psyche is different, entrepreneurs can build unconventional solutions that refl ect local reality for domestic users. The intersection of new technologies and India’s growth economy has opened a window of opportunity for new firms to leapfrog past existing players with exciting new products.

Reprinted from From Entrepreneurs to Leaders by permission of Tata McGraw-Hill Education Private Limited.

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Some Takeaways from the First iSPIRT Playbook Roundtable on Positioning & Messaging for Products

“99% Practice, 1% Theory”. This was the ground rule laid down for the session by the workshop facilitator Shankar Maruwada at the beginning. Sounds very much like the tagline of a popular softdrink brand that’s No Bakwaas! No wonder it came from someone who has loads of experience in the FMCG space, built and sold an analytics company and has more recently given life to what is arguably India’s biggest consumer brand, Aadhar.

Shankar sharing insights at the iSPIRT Playbook RoundTable

The theory lasted just a couple of minutes with Shankar telling a simple, yet a compelling story of how the Indian flag evokes a strong feeling even though it is nothing but a geometrical shape consisting of rectangles and a circle! The point that a compelling visual and a strong emotional connect can touch a strong chord was driven home very clearly. Over the course of the next 3 hours, Shankar orchestrated a highly engaging and interactive session with the participating companies, making them think hard and think deeper to help them think in the right direction. What also helped immensely was that Shankar had gone through the profiles of each of the participating companies and knew the challenges each of them were facing.

The participants were involved in exercises that helped them think beyond the regular product features and benefits. Emphasis was placed on understanding and communicating the whys of the product rather than the hows and on ways of building an emotional connect with the customers that will resonate strongly with them.

The participants were made to think through the different stages of the communication to customers.  For each step, two companies shared their thought process in detail with other participants sharing their inputs for the two companies. The participants found it very helpful to pick the brain of other entrepreneurs and learn from other entrepreneurs. A couple of participating companies probably found their one-line message or the keyword that signifies their product offering by the end of this workshop!

Shankar sharing insights at the iSPIRT Playbook RoundTable

Here are some of the key takeaways from the workshop, based on the stage and the audience to which one is communicating to:

Idea

  • What’s the grand idea that can resonate with everyone? This is beyond the product features, pricing and has a much higher connect. E.g. Education with the reach of television, your own personal secretary..
  • If possible, use connections, metaphors and analogies for better impact. E.g. YouTube of…., Google of…..

Setup

  • What will make your customers sit up and take notice? This is something related to their business that they wouldn’t have thought of or know about and you instigate that thought through your messaging. This should make them care for your product offerings and be interested in exploring more and have them say, let’s talk! E.g. Did you know that you can now teach a million students right from your classroom? Did you know that 30% of devices in your corporate network go undetected and potential sources of malware that can disrupt your network?

Benefits

  • What is it that the customers can actually put to use? What are the tangible benefits that the customers can derive out of your offering? E.g. Deliver courses over low bandwidth and hence reach out to a large number of students even in remote locations, create attractive charts and graphs to derive meaningful and actionable insights out of your data, carry out quick experiments for merchandizing on your e-commerce website with very little involvement from your engineering team

Features

  • These are the features and functionalities built into the product. These would explain how the product works. E.g. Various roles built in for access control and permissions, different interfaces and interactions for different user types, alerts, reports and notifications. 

As you’d observe, the how part becomes more prominent as you move from the Idea stage to the Features stage and the why part becomes more prominent as you move in the reverse direction. Depending on the whom you’re speaking to in the scheme of things at the customer’s end, you can focus on the appropriate stage and communicate accordingly.

iSPIRT Playbook RoundTable

It is said that well begun is half done. Considering that this was the first such roundtable, the response from the product startup community was very encouraging and the participating startups found it to be very relevant and effective. The engagement with the participants will continue even beyond the workshop. The startups will be in regular touch with each other, share their inputs and the learnings derived from the workshop and update on the progress.

Here are some books that Shankar recommended:

There are more such Playbook Roundtables planned in the coming days across various locations and hope the product startup community will make the best use of those and benefit from them.

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Financial Inclusion in India – Challenges & Opportunities

What is Financial Inclusion? Financial inclusion is the delivery of financial services & products to sections of disadvantaged and low income segments of society, at an affordable cost in a fair and transparent manner by regulated mainstream institutional players. The term “financial inclusion” has gained importance since the early 2000s, and is a result of findings about financial exclusion and its direct correlation to poverty.

Where are we today?
It is estimated, that about 2.5 billion people or about half of the global population do not have access to any kind of formal banking services. In India, only 55% of the population have deposit accounts. Less than 20% of Indian population has life insurance coverage and only 10% have an access to any other kind of insurance coverage. The number of credit cards has hovered around 20-25 Million mark for last 4 years.

Reserve Bank of India’s vision for 2020 is to open nearly 600 million new customers’ accounts and service them through a variety of channels. Some of the steps taken by RBI to fuel inclusive growth are:

      1. Setup of business correspondents (BCs):In January 2006, RBI permitted banks to engage business facilitators (BFs) and BCs as intermediaries for providing financial and banking services. The BC model allows banks to provide doorstep delivery of services, especially cash in-cash out transactions, thus addressing the last-mile problem. With effect from September 2010, for-profit companies have also been allowed to be engaged as BCs.
      2. Adoption of Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT): Banks have been advised to implement EBT by leveraging Aadhaar & BCs to transfer social benefits electronically to the bank account of the beneficiary and deliver government benefits directly without a middle-man, thus reducing dependence on cash and lowering transaction costs.
      3. Relaxation on know-your-customer (KYC) norms: KYC requirements for opening bank accounts were relaxed for small accounts in August 2005, thereby simplifying procedures by stipulating that introduction by an account holder who has been subjected to the full KYC drill would suffice for opening such accounts.
      4. Simplified branch authorization: RBI permitted domestic commercial banks to freely open branches in smaller towns & cities with a population of less than 50,000 with general permission
      5. Opening of branches in rural areas: To further step up the opening of branches in rural areas banks have been mandated in the recent monetary policy to allocate at least 25% of the total number of branches to be opened during a year in rural areas.

It is worthy to note that Mangalam, a small town in Coimbatore district in Tamil Nadu, with a population of under 10,000 in 2001 became the first village in India where all households were provided banking facilities by the end of 2005.

Challenges

Some of the policy changes to improve financial inclusion were hurriedly executed without setting up appropriate regulatory oversight or consumer education. Aggressive micro credit policies that were introduced to enhance financial inclusion resulted in consumers becoming quickly over-indebted to the point of committing suicide. There were large scale suicide cases reported. We also witnessed repayment rates for Micro-lending organizations collapse after politicians in one of the country’s largest states called on borrowers to stop paying back their loans, threatening the existence of the entire 4 billion a year Indian micro credit industry. Industry is still trying to recover from that setback.

It was also felt after a decade of efforts in this space that financial inclusion isn’t possible without financial education. We have seen even in mature & literate economies like the US, there are several social issues that arise from easy availability of credit. At the hind side this should have been anticipated but wasn’t. RBI launched National Strategy for Financial Education on July 16, 2012 with a vision to build “A financially aware and empowered India” with the following goals:

  • Create awareness and educate consumers on access to financial services, availability of various types of products and their features.
  • Change attitudes to translate knowledge into behavior.
  • Make consumers understand their rights and responsibilities as clients of financial services.

Opportunities

Given the focus government has on improving financial inclusion, this sector offers massive potential to entrepreneurs. Analysts put the initial estimates at over USD 2 Billion or 11,000 crore within the next 3 years alone. Let’s briefly look at the kind of opportunities that exist.

If you look at the graphics above opportunities primarily lie around interaction between various service providers and BCs. Few opportunities that are hot today include:

    • Developing Next generation payment systems – Financial inclusivity deals with high volume but small ticket transactions. Existing payment gateways are too expensive and not built grounds-up to deal with the complexity & nature of this business. Therefore there is an acute need for a new payment gateway that is low cost and based on either Aadhaar or biometrics.
    • Mobile technology could be leveraged in various ways as there are over 700 Million people in India who have mobile phones. Today mobiles can do almost everything, from biometrics to even IRIS & document scanning. There are limitless applications one can think of. 
    • Financial Applications – Various financial applications be it in insurance, in capital markets or banking could be developed to be able to reach out to the rural masses. All these applications must be able to support Aadhaar, Biometrics & be able to work thru Business Correspondents.
    • Services – Setting up efficient BCs & training them to be able to conduct multiple businesses in another massive area of opportunity.

Very interesting times like these call for innovation & out of the box thinking. Wear your thinking hats, there is never going to be a better time.

 

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What should you expect from an accelerator?

I have written previously about how to evaluate accelerators and choosing the right accelerator since there are so many of them these days and also about what the goal of an accelerator is.

I wanted to share somethings that entrepreneurs should expect from an accelerator from a perspective of a startup founder. I think the best thing that has happened is that so many accelerators have opened in the last few years. Similar to eCommerce companies in 2010-11, I expect many to close or shut down within the next 2-3 years.

There are 3 top things an entrepreneur needs according to me:

1. Access to customers: Whether it is beta customers for feedback, early adopters for providing traction (paying customers) or larger customer for growth, startups thrive on customers. Depending on the stage of your company, if an accelerator does not help you get customers, they are not doing their job. That’s the first lens I would adopt to judge accelerators. If you have access to customers, you can practically write your own destiny. If all the accelerator does is provide advice on getting customers but does not provide introductions to customers, or have customers be ready to adopt and review your platform, you are not going to get much traction or be “accelerated”.

2. Access to talent: In India, for startups, good development talent is hard to get , marketing & sales talent is harder and design talent is extremely challenging to get on board. If your accelerator does not help you with talent sourcing or provide talent in house to help you tide these critical areas when you need them most, you should run away. I have heard the notion that the graduates of the accelerator will help you, but entrepreneurs helping other entrepreneurs by providing time  is not very sustainable. Most of the very successful startups and their executives are extremely busy. While a sense of pay-it-forward does exist, its just not sustainable is what I have found. There’s no substitute for dedicated people to help you with development issues, help you with User experience and design (mockups, wireframes, HTML/CSS development and information architecture) or marketing talent to roll up their sleeves and run campaigns.

3. Access to capital for growth: While I am personally not a big fan of funding as a metric for accelerators to gauge their success, capital is nonetheless needed to grow and thrive, especially in India, where most founders are not serial, successful entrepreneurs or those that come from a “rich family”. So look for an accelerator that provides you an extensive and wide set of investors from seed to early stage and from venture to growth. If all the accelerator does is “showcase you in front of several investors” but does not actively nudge investors to help take a closer look at your company, I dont think they are doing their job.

There are several other things that matter which include a support system of the existing entrepreneur network from their previous batches, access to meetings internationally that possibly help get some global exposure, and a great space to work from, besides other things. However if you dont have access to customers, talent and capital, there’s no value in joining an accelerator.

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Why does India struggle to develop its own complex high technology products like fighter aircraft?

Dr Raghuram Rajan, Chief Economic Adviser to the MoF, GoI, was the chief guest at the IIMB convocation this year. I had the privilege of meeting him briefly before the convocation started. We talked about jugaad, Indian industry’s innovation capabilities, and which companies stand out on the innovation dimension.

One question that Dr. Rajan asked was something that I have thought about often: why do we struggle in our large projects that involve the development of complex products like tanks or fighter aircraft? And why are we able to do relatively better in areas like space and missiles?While I gave an immediate response to his questions, these are important enough questions to merit a more elaborate response.

1. Overly-exacting Specifications
The starting challenge for creating defence products from India is the product specifications. One common criticism of our armed forces is that their specs are usually a combination of the best performance on each parameter offered by different vendors. Often, a product with such a combination of characteristics is either unavailable anywhere, or if it exists, is exorbitantly expensive.

There seems to be some truth in this criticism. Consider this example: according to press reports, in the now “under the scanner” Westland deal, there was only one helicopter globally available that met the specs set by the Indian Air Force. Much of the current debate is about who “diluted” the specs to “allow” the Westland chopper to be considered!

2. Lack of Clarity regarding what Local Development means
Designing a product locally does not mean that all components and sub-assemblies have to be made locally. In fact, one of the key decisions to be made is what will be done locally and what will be sourced from elsewhere.

Take the example of Embraer, the Brazilian aircraft company. Embraer retains ownership of design and system integration, but collaborates with other companies as diverse as Hitachi and GE for important sub-systems. Yet, Embraer aircraft are still regarded as Brazilian planes! Their big supplier partners share some of the investment and development risk with Embraer.

Contrast this with the development of the LCA. Much is made of the fact that India has not been able to develop its own engine for the LCA. But most aircraft companies don’t design or make engines themselves!

Most defence products require higher grade components with “MIL” certification. For many components, it’s cheaper to import from existing suppliers than design and manufacture them in India to MIL standards.

A related issue is the definition of the objective of the development project itself. Whenever I have spoken to people involved with the LCA project, they have proudly drawn attention to the number of new technological capabilities ranging from composite materials to advanced avionics that were developed in India as a result of the project. So, even though the LCA itself may not have been inducted into the Air Force so far, India has undoubtedly gained from the LCA project. Of course, this is limited consolation as the country has not got the aircraft we needed for the defence of the country!

3. Lack of Technological competence in Advanced Technologies
Complex products require advanced competence in diverse areas. Often, India does not have companies or institutions that have the required level of competence in each of these areas. Even when available, such skills may be relatively shallow and limited in scope. When the skills exist in the academic or research institutions, they may not be application-oriented.

LCA project head Dr Kota Harinarayana gave some interesting insights into this challenge when I spoke to him some years ago. When the LCA project started in the mid-1980s, we faced serious handicaps in composite materials, avionics and a host of other technologies. Dr. Kota Harinarayana who headed the Aeronautical Development Agency (ADA) that was created for the LCA project realized that it would not be possible to create all the needed expertise within ADA or HAL. He therefore visited all the leading engineering schools in the country, made an assessment of the expertise available, and created a large collaborative platform to rope in this expertise. Very soon he realized that these individual faculty members lacked either the managerial expertise or the interest to manage complex research projects. So, ADA had to work with the professors to break down the problems into more manageable pieces, each of which could be tackled as a Ph.D. or M. Tech. project. ADA funded the creation of physical infrastructure wherever necessary and did the overall programme management and coordination. So, there is a great deal of managerial effort that has to go into working with academic research partners who might have the required technical expertise.

4. Inadequate Number & Frequency of Experimentation and Testing cycles
While complex products are today largely designed on the computer (the Boeing 777, for example, was designed predominantly based on simulation through CAD/CAE), some amount of physical prototyping and testing is always required. Rapid testing, using low cost mock-ups and prototypes, wherever possible, is critical to completing the project quickly. But, design of complex systems in India is undermined by inadequate resources for experimentation and testing. This results in overly long development cycles.

I don’t have hard evidence, but I am sure the CAG’s notion of wasted and infructuous expenditure also hampers adequate experimentation. In 8 Steps to Innovation, we wrote about “failure fallacy” – the purpose of experimentation is testing assumptions and learning, not success and failure! Given our administrative rules and audit procedures (the infamous “Infructuous expenditure” that is the subject of criticism of successive CAG reports!), it appears that our system can easily fall prey to this failure fallacy.

5. Design/Development & Production Gap
After independence, India adopted the Soviet model of separation of design and development from production. As a result, we have a huge network of government owned and operated research and development laboratories and facilities, and a separate network of production units/factories (like the ordnance factories in the case of defence).

The separation between R&D and manufacturing has worked to our disadvantage in multiple sectors. Take the case of telecom, where the Centre for Development of Telematics (CDOT) set up in the 1980s created contemporary digital exchanges that were well suited to the hot and dusty conditions of India and the then prevalent high number of “Busy Hour Calling Attempts.” But as I documented in From Jugaad to Systematic Innovation: The Challenge for India, the separation of the technology provider from the manufacturers (a set of licensees who themselves had limited technological capabilities) meant that CDOT was one step removed from the marketplace and that the licensees never invested in creating their own technological capabilities. As a result, over time, the CDOT technology failed to keep pace with the needs of the market and lost out to products imported from global telecom giants.

The separation of R&D from production is particularly detrimental to the commercialization of new technologically-intensive products. The designers tend to be relatively insensitive to concerns of manufacturability or support, and hence the product can prove difficult to manufacture in large volumes, or at a reasonable cost. The manufacturers have inadequate understanding of the know-how and know-why, and in the process of trying to make manufacturing easier or more streamlined make changes in the product or process that make it deviate from the required specifications.

Commercialization of complex technologies needs close working between R&D, engineering and production, and this becomes more difficult if this involves crossing organizational boundaries. There are major challenges even within the same organization – the success of Samsung in the memory chip industry, for example, is often attributed to the co-location of these three functions as this makes communication and problem-solving much easier.

6. Lack of Tacit Knowledge
Besides, successful productionization or commercialization of products involves the generation and retention of a large amount of tacit knowledge. I am reminded of an experience that was narrated to me by the Chairman of Samtel Color, Mr. Satish Kaura, many years ago. Samtel entered the Colour Picture Tube market in the early 1980s when colour TV was first introduced to India. Samtel sourced its technology from a leading Japanese company. However, they struggled to achieve the same level of productivity of CPTs as the company from whom they sourced the technology. However, a leading Korean company was able to master the technology from the same source. Ironically, Samtel had to hire consultants who were ex-employees of the same Korean company in order to get the tacit knowledge of how to improve the yield of the production line!

Successful product companies build huge internal repositories (both informal and formal) of such tacit knowledge. It is this knowledge that helps them avoid repeating the same mistakes or being able to move ahead rapidly when a project gets stuck. Building this knowledge requires going through multiple product development cycles and finding ways of capturing and building on such knowledge from one project to another. But, if one project takes 30 years, you have a problem! In complex product development like aircraft design, we have not gone through a complete project cycle even once. That is a major disadvantage we face.

Why have we done better in the Space Programme?
My hunch is that we have done better in the space programme because that is a vertically integrated programme, has much clearer strategic objectives, is managed more effectively, and because its not a volume-oriented programme – you don’t have to move to serial production, so many of the productionization and commercialization problems don’t exist.

What needs to be done to improve our ability to build complex engineered products?
This is a big question in itself and I will leave it to a future post!

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The Business of Accelerators

Accelerators are in the business of creating Startups – or atleast taking the first bet. Its a startup of startups; Which means, everything they talk about as risk, in venture capital nicely gets bundled up and will get put on the head of what is the accelerator.

Going back to the basics, Now depending on which accelerator you are involved with, there might be two or three key milestones that they would provide as value:

  • Spit Polish your Pitch in a matter of weeks and put you in front of a lot of Investors and hope one of you becomes a hit (Usually this model also involves accelerating a lot of companies in one go)
  • Have an Alumni or a Brand that can give you early traction, and mentors who can give you an overview (working with a startup to dig deep will take a few weeks usually)
  • The hands-on accelerators that will work with a handful of startups, but will dig deep, have a few dedicate personnel whose job would be to help you eliminate market risk (have a product, but there is no market) and also help with Go-To-Market strategy, setting up a board, advisory etc. Thats really a deep dive model and most accelerators wont touch that route with a ten foot pole – we at the Startup Centre, however love doing that kind of stuff.

 

Depending on what level of support you are getting, the duration of the programme will vary, but you get an idea. All of them, in someway will put some money in, quite honestly that would be the easiest (valuation of the company is the lowest and shares are cheaper comparatively – it makes sense to do it).

Thats the Pledge, if you can call it.

The Accelerator Model, no matter how sexy it may sound is a very very complicated and fragile model. It throws the firm in the side of the entrepreneur than the VC. The VC gets rather hefty (or sizeable) management fees of the funds they manage (usually 1-2% of what they manage divided over 7-10years) and the managed fund sizes are usually in the three digit millions, so that usually covers for operations. Accelerators on the other hand, even if they have a fund, owing to the nature of making small bets, the fund size would be small and the management fee, so to speak, usually covers the legality in managing the fund. Nothing more – Yes there is hefty legal fees involved in auditors, lawyers and stuff when you manage a fund.

And the accelerator has the cost of infrastructure (if its provided), the man power, operational costs, and travel where they go around meeting companies. All of this comes from a very very thin shoe string budget in most cases.

That’d be the turn.

Now, are they making a sacrifice and killing themselves over a cause. Not at all. But however, the upswing for an accelerator is in that small amounts of equity that they are taking in. If you are a banker by any chance and can do a little bit of excel sheet math, you will realize that the Approx 10%  that is taken (out of which usually 70 – 80% belongs to whoever brought in the capital also called LPs), is very small and if the venture goes through two rounds of funding or so, will quickly become a 1-2% play (which is the “carry” that the accelerator makes – sameway a VC fund makes money)

Which means, in order for the accelerator to say make a million in a company (and it usually takes about 3-4 years to think about any reasonable exit, in most cases way more) the company has to be valued, literally, at a billion. The chances of building a billion dollar company? Well, the US has 20 companies that are listed and 40 companies that are privately held, who are billion dollar companies in the last 20 years. close to 30,000 companies get funded in the US per year, so you can see the odds.

What you get is a fantastic community. You work shoulder to shoulder with entrepreneurs and pushing them to be their utmost best, because quite literally you make money only when they do. Some accelerators – if they are short termed, will go the mass model way (put 30 – 40 companies in a batch), raise the valuation by 1x or 2x and want to dump it on someone else and go to the next batch. They make less money, but over volume, they make more.

Not sure, if that is a model that is exciting for us, personally. I’d rather be associated with one or two companies that stand out, and perhaps stand the test of time – solving real problems.

Honestly though, if anyone were to ask me if starting an accelerator was a good Idea, its not. Its hard work, but if you love working with entrepreneurs, this is the best place to be. Its a lot of community building, lot of hard work, with not much money to hire talent – a lot of lonely hours, but along the way you also have the possibility of building a few amazing companies.

That’s the Prestige.

PS: Most wont make it.
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Entrepreneurship as an extra-curricular and hobby

Anatomy of an Idea

If today a survey in done in schools across India and students are asked some questions like,

  •         What are your favorite hobbies or pastime?
  •         What do you do after going back home from school?
  •         What do you do during holidays? 

You’ll get all sorts of answers but ‘Entrepreneurship’. Even worse, if the following question is also included,

Have you heard about the word “Entrepreneurship”?

I am guessing a depressingly low percentage would answer ‘yes’. That’s because the concept of ‘entrepreneurship being taught as a subject or an extra-curricular’ is non-existent in Indian schools. 

Schools play critical role in defining and determining a child’s way of thinking, perception about the world, mental and physical development and so forth. Schools shape children’s goals and aspirations. Children have an amazing ability to pick things up very quickly. The adoption of a concept is much easier in case of a child than an adult. We cannot expect India to produce a huge army of young home grown entrepreneurs when we don’t introduce this concept to them early on. It’s like expecting a country to have successful scientists or doctors without introducing science in schools. We benchmark Indian startup ecosystem against that of US based total annual VC funding, number of technology startups emanating, number of successful exits, etc., but forget that beneath all those facts and figures, there lays a very fundamental difference in the philosophy these two societies and, thus, their education systems have been built.  Success of America has a lot to do with their education system which promotes entrepreneurial and excogitative attitude. Indian education system, on the contrary, is more conservative and inclined towards rote learning. 

Trust me when I say that planting the idea of entrepreneurship in a child’s brain can do wonders!!

That’s because, it will ensure,

  •      Smarter kids (child’s development wont be restricted by bulky books)
  •      Better leadership qualities (entrepreneurship is all about leadership)
  •      Better problem solving and analytical thinking (child would explore innovative solutions as no   book would have written answers)
  •      Better sales/marketing skills (something which Indians are always criticized of!)
  •      Better programmers (I guess in many cases the next logical step after ideating something is learn programming)
  •      Increased employability of Indian engineers (Isn’t above mentioned skillset what every employer wants!)
  •      Better understanding and acceptance of entrepreneurship by parents and society at large, since schools would push the concept (again a major problem area, especially for young entrepreneurs)
  •      More experienced and more successful entrepreneurs (Serial entrepreneurs tend to succeed more than first timers)

In short, a win-win situation for entrepreneurs, employers and employees.            

Entrepreneurship may not be popular in Indian schools, but it is increasingly focused on by under graduate and graduate schools. Almost every good B-school has incubation cells and courses focused on entrepreneurship.  Also the companies hiring from B-Schools love to hire ex-entrepreneurs (not necessarily successful ones but also failed ones). That’s because in the fast changing times, it has become imperative for companies to innovate and evolve in order to stay relevant and flourish. In this context, entrepreneurs bring in a refreshing thinking and ‘challenging the status quo’ culture to the table. 

Today both schools and children are becoming more and more technology savvy. While Internet is within the reach of many, others are joining in. In that context, there is not much schools need to do, to ignite the spirit of entrepreneurship among students. All they need to do is realize its importance and try to build some very basic subject matter expertise of entrepreneurship in the form of a subject, extra-curricular, summer holiday project, workshops, etc.  Tying this to overall grade of the child would ensure parents’ buy in. The government and other stakeholders of startup ecosystem (investors, entrepreneurs, enablers, incubators, etc.) can also pitch in and organize competitions and events to promote the concept. Just as we have Science or Maths Olympiad, we can have similar Olympiad for business ideas as well. NEN is doing an amazing job in replicating this model in undergraduate schools across India. It is time that we move a step prior in the value chain and introduce entrepreneurship in secondary schools in some form. 

Think about this, the secondary education dropout ratio in schools in rural India is almost 50%. The major cause – as child reaches the employability age of 12-14 years, he is expected to add an extra shoulder to support household income. Mid-day meal, the driving factor behind sending child to school, becomes irrelevant. But if students are encouraged and supported (finance, mentorship, subject matter knowledge, etc.) to become entrepreneurs and thus, support his family by generating some monthly income, the school dropout rate can be brought down significantly. Needless to talk about the employment opportunities created! Here the definition of enterprise can be totally different – it may not be a technology focused one. A person procuring purified water from somewhere and selling it in villages is also an entrepreneur in one way.

P.S. : When thought about earnestly, this can be a billion $ idea !! J 

I sincerely hope in coming years we hear success stories like Yahoo acquiring Summly (a teen startup out of London) from India, in addition to a 12 years old cracking JEE or an Indian kid winning Spelling Bee.

This article first appeared on NextBigWhat