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Why I’m doing what I’m doing!

I’m forever being asked a question by the people I meet during my travels, events, etc. I usually smile and avoid it. Or let someone embarrass me by talking about how important and selfless my work has been and is being. But I’ve never really tackled that question on my own. Perhaps I needed to think about it myself. A few days ago, when I was looking back at three years of Playbooks, the action-focussed Product Nation workshops that we conduct,  and of course other events, it got me thinking. It was probably time to face that question myself, and answer it, if not for other people, then at least for myself.

When we started iSPIRT, no real sense of a product community existed in India. People in several corners of our vast country were building great products and companies, but there was no attempt at coherence, no communication channel that existed that could make them way more than the sum of the parts. This was why we began the journey of iSPIRT; we wanted to build this community that would add real value to founders; we wanted to help the guy in the mud pit, or as Roosevelt called him, ‘the man in the arena daring greatly”’. And yet, we did not want to be facilitators of any sort. We wanted to be there with the entrepreneur through the long, hard road. We wanted to be the people he could always rely on. We wanted to go deeper.

And this thinking was what led us eventually to the entrepreneur who was in the stage Sharad Sharma termed ‘happy-confused’. This was the Sharad came up with for the entrepreneur who’s found his market, has figured out how to sell his product, but is now stalled at a stage when he doesn’t understand how to go further. In other words, the question of scale. Should he pursue scale? If so, how? It was this guy who needed help, and perhaps some direction, from the people who had already done it before.

So we began a series of programs and bootcamps that in hindsight, look and feel like a lot, but which at the time were just great fun to put together. I’ll give you a small brief on each of them; they have been some of the most interesting initiatives that i have got to work on in the last 3 years.

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The Playbooks

The Playbook RoundTables, started off with a conversation which had Vivek Subramanyam (Fintellix), Aneesh Reddy (Capillary), Ashish Gupta (Helion) and Sharad (the i of iSPIRT!). After a few brainstorming sessions, the format was decided: It would be a gathering of 12 like-minded product startups(curated) who are beyond the early stage. These RoundTable will be facilitated by an in-the-saddle entrepreneur (we called them iSPIRT Mavens) who is well accomplished on a particular topic/theme.  Shankar Maruwada (EkStep) opened the innings for us, and the participants were blown away by the way Shankar conducted the RT. A lot of the success of the Playbooks was because of that first session, which set the tone for them. Pallav Nadhani (FusionCharts) was one of the participants and he added lot of his insights in the RT. We were then joined by Aneesh Reddy, Sridhar Ranganathan, Samir Palnitkar, Amit Ranjan and Amit Somani who helped us with the early RTs. There was so much preparation that would go into the Playbooks – identifying the right audience, the seating, when should we take a break, how do we get the feedback, ensure it’s free of bias, how do we measure (NPS!) and improve upon it? Until today,  in every PlaybookRT, we’ve measured the NPS and continue to incorporate it into program decisions.

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The First Product Bootcamp #PNcamp

As the Playbook Roundtables became popular, we had the idea wanted to do something at a  slightly bigger scale and bring more product founders together. Just the idea caused us excitement enough to push ahead. We started off by calling it PNSummit and then the name changed to PNCamp. We had some of our best volunteers working on this one and Rajan (as always) drove us crazy with different types of organising calls (a war room, a morning huddle, an evening huddle, etc). We explored many formats for PNcamp and then conducted many RTs for different audiences (Discovery/Scale stage) to figure out the best way to do it. I think this was one of the best bootcamps I was part of. It took us such a lot of effort to put this together that we never attempted to do this again. I hope someone from Pune will take the lead and do this for us. We have a blueprint and with few volunteers, we can pull this together again!

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The people who make magic happen – Mavens, Volunteers & Friends

The Mavens have played an important role in making the magic happen for the Playbooks. Most of the mavens get naked (metaphorically) with the audience and share many of their hard-won experiences openly. It’s really great to see some of the rock-solid CEOs passionately help each other. I get many volunteers  who reach out to me and want to help me in putting together these roundtables, but the fact is very few of them can put in the effort into making such magic happen. From the outside it looks very simple, but it takes lot of effort in curating the event, inviting the right people and then closing the feedback. I’m grateful to the mavens, the volunteers and people like Rajan & Sharad who have always been supportive in making the magic happen again & again.

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Playbooks: New Formats

We slowed down on the Playbooks a bit after that, as I got busy with many other things in iSPIRT, including a policy push. We also tried a few experiments with some mavens, but none of the other formats came good. We maintained the rule of never inviting someone to do a Playbook without them having attended one. We have stayed away from getting some of the Gurus who want to just give gyaan. We are still happy to explore new formats which can help product founders. I recently stumbled upon the Product Tear Down session at SaaSx and I think if we can do this right, this can become a great platform for product founders who are looking for help.

SaaSx

On one of my visits to Chennai, I realised that some of the SaaS leaders are based out of the city and there is no platform for all of them to come together. After few conversations with Suresh Sambandam // KissFlow (the marketer), who at that time had just returned after attending SaaStr. He was blown away by the energy and kind of conversations that took place at the conference. We started putting something together; Suresh coined the name SaaSx and with help from leaders like Shekhar Kirani (Accel), Girish Mathrubootham (Freshdesk), Paras Chopra (Wingify), Avlesh Singh (WebEngage), we launched the first edition and it was a big hit. We reached out to folks and almost everyone wanted SaaSx to be held twice a year. We actually had kept it very light; it did not take more time for us to get it up. We always have been able to put up SaaSx in 3-4 weeks. The recent edition was amazing in terms of content and curation, and the networking that it created. It was good to catch up with lots of founders who always seem to appreciate me for events like this, though I’ve always believed that the real rockstars are the volunteers who pull this together.

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PNgrowth

This one was special. It happened over a long passionate conversation on Category Leadership with Pallav. We did several meetings, and calls with the Stanford/Duke & the iSPIRT Playbook team, and it took approximately 9 months for PNgrowth to take birth :). Rajan & I were nervous till the end, but I think the format and some of the conversations/talks by Shankar, Pallav, Sharad, Kunal, Nags, and Aneesh made all the difference. I think the best part for me was the bonding amongst the founders. We had around 186 founders who attended, many of them took back some great insights, learnings, some made great friends and I think we created a new platform. Hopefully, we can build on this and take it forward.

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Returning to that question

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment ~Ralph Waldo Emerson.

And so we return to the question I began this rather long post with. In a recent session with the founders, Pallav again asked me why I’m so passionate about the ecosystem and why I continue to all all this evangelising. And I couldn’t push it away anymore. It made me think question my own motivations, and I came up with something like an answer.

So here we go –

  • I think of myself as a connector, and since I have been in the ecosystem for a long time, I know many smart people who will benefit by being introduced to other smart people. I’m able to do that, and that makes me happy. I do this without expecting anything in return. There are a few other connectors in our ecosystem who selflessly do this, and they should be celebrated as well.
  • After evangelising the Product Eco-system for over 12 years, I really want some Indian product companies to go global, to become category leaders. We have had some success in the past, but I would love it if many more would rise from India, and we truly become a ProductNation. I consider myself lucky to be working with some of the smartest people in the ecosystem.
  • We have many founders who are believers in the Pay-It-Forward movement, but they want to find credible platforms to associate with. Fortunately, iSPIRT has become one of those platforms where they consider opening up and helping other product founders
  • I stay away from the limelight as it defocuses you. You tend to go after visibility and lose focus. Long time back i had heard this saying if you make a donation, don’t publicise it. Let it just be a donation. I don’t know if that is right or wrong, but that’s what I follow.
  • I love my work as I get to meet lot of people, make new friends and build deeper relationships with the existing ones.

I think that’s all there is to it. 🙂

How can you support the movement?

I get lot of emails, lots of calls and lot of people reach out to me at conferences saying that they would like to volunteer. Many times, people are not clear on what their strengths are and don’t even know how they can contribute. Volunteering is not easy. I would request people to read the iSPIRT website, see the kind of activities being done and think how would you like to contribute. Then write to us. If you don’t show the passion, it’s hard for us to make you part of this movement. But if you do, and become part of this movement, I’m sure you’ll enjoy every bit of this ride we are on – to make India a true Product Nation.

Thanks to Sairam for helping in editing this blog post. 

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CRM for startups: Opening the world of endless possibilities

Startups today have become a major driving force for the economies around the globe; they not only contribute to the GDP but also decrease the unemployment ratio of the country. Millennials everywhere are changing work dynamics and do not prefer to sit behind their desk, but to follow their dreams and take risks. Such shift has also being witnessed in India, a country with a majority young workforce that has seen successful start-ups such as Shopclues, Limeroad, OLA cabs, Zomato, and many more. With a lot of venture capitalists funding and backing startups, it is no surprise that a lot of people want to taste the entrepreneurship fruit.

Only last year over $ 3.84 billion was raised by startups in the third quarter. Such rising opportunities have also caught the eyes of many people, resulting in top minds leaving their corporate jobs and following their dreams. It wasn’t long before the Indian government saw this dynamic shift and became keen to bring these startups to unleash their full potential, increase employment opportunity and eventually enhance the economy of the country. It was truly remarkable seeing the government put their best foot forward with the launch of initiatives such as “Start-up India” and “Make in India” to encourage and promote start-ups in the country.

To add more to it, Hon’ble prime minister of India has worked hard to raise the foreign investment too, bringing in investors to venture into the countries brightest startups. If that is not enough, even top names such as Google have their reward set for the best start up plan from the country. And its outcome being a rapid surge in the number of start-ups increasing every year with the current statistics showing more than 4000 startups in the nation.

Startup India

With so much fuss over startup, an obvious question that pops up is what exactly makes a startup eligible to avail the benefits of the scheme? Which can be simply stated as one / few innovative minds putting up a unique business idea or development process in a form of a new business, aging below 5 years and a turnover not exceeding 25 crore rupees. The product should be innovative and commercial while adding value to the consumers. The said startup should be approved from the designated DIPP.

Benefits:

To sum up a startup under this ambitious scheme will enjoy;

  1. IT tax exemption for 3 years
  2. Easy availability of seed funding
  3. 80% return of patent fee
  4. Capital gain tax exemption and more

Since now there is a lot of focus on startups and even growing competition, the question arises: how can a startup keep itself ahead. The answer is simple: a business application platform to seamlessly integrate all processes and give greater control and visibility to the management.
CRM SoftwareCRM for Startups:

Now being compact in size, a startup can manage all the data and contacts on a spreadsheet easily in the start, however when the business grows, various process are incorporated as well as maintaining the clientele becomes a hectic chore and a proficient management of sales and customers becomes a priority. To add more burden to it, competitors keep multiplying every year, which makes retaining your customers as well as getting new ones even more tough. Thus, for efficacy and proficiency in business management, various start-ups opt in for smart business management suites like CRM.

But can CRM software solutions be helpful for startups?

Definitely yes, for a startup, building customers is among the top priorities and CRM software have their proficiency in managing and retaining customers with ease. However, its potential does not ends with it. A smart leader, who can mould out new ways of possibilities for the software, can take its usability to another level. Having said that, let us have a look at some of its cool features that have been proved helpful for the startups.

  1. Share information: When you have your teams working on different processes, sharing information amongst each other can be a tedious task and any missed data can cost you a valuable customer. Nevertheless, the CRM software can function as a platform wherein the team can share the information with ease and initiate further processes.
  1. Opportunity tracking: The saying goes as “Opportunity knocks only once” and CRM solution providers in India have made sure that you not only grab this opportunity but also nurture it until it starts giving you fruits of your hard work. Simply putting, CRM can help you find better leads and turn it into sales easily, which is something very crucial for any startup. Thus, with CRM, never miss any opportunity.
  1. Foresight: CRM for startups can generate precise sales reports on daily to yearly basis, this reports can give you a foresight of how much production is to be done and process marketing and sales strategies. It can also help you track team’s performance based on their areas of operation.
  1. Better and targeted marketing: CRM for startups can draw sales pipeline that can give information on how your marketing strategies is functioning, that can be filtered on location, products, etc. as well as analyse the requirements of the clients. Hence, it can aid you in evaluation of your marketing processes and target better prospects.
  1. Notification and reminders: CRM can automate all your notifications and reminders i.e.
  • Sending notification to your customers related to any updates, offers, packages, etc.
  • Sending reminders of upcoming deadline to submit data, pay bills, renewals, etc.
  • Email and SMS follow up to leads and prospects that can be designed with its inbuilt template designer.
  • It can also remind you for upcoming meeting, follow-ups, demo and implementation, etc.

The above-mentioned gestures can improve customer satisfaction with your start-up as well as bring in new customers. Hence, building up your start-up company in an efficient manner.

  1. Data storing: the modern day CRM software are provided with cloud server, which securely save all your data. For instance, for any mishap occurring in your company, the loss of data with others can be too much for a start-to bear. However, the data stored on the cloud are safe from any such mishaps; moreover, the encryption of your data can secure your data from online threats as well. In addition to it, these data can be made available on any device by multiple (and authorised) users irrespective of their location and time.
  1. Social Media: social media is a necessity for every company, no matter how big or small. The customers/ clients prefer following the company of their choice to get updates and stay connected to it. Moreover, social media can easily help you reach wide and better audience quickly in a cost effective manner, thus CRM software solutions like Social CRM now a days can be integrated to all your social accounts with ease, allowing you to track, monitor and stay connected to all your customers and prospects easily.
  1. Mobility: for a start-up, employing large number of employees can be taxing on their budget and you may be needed to multi task, which is not possible while sitting on a single workstation. The CRM software linked up with mobile apps and cloud servers can grant you the mobility to manage your sales and marketing process as well as manage customer complaints and feedbacks on the go.

To further continue with the list, the CRM software can increase sales, give better ROI, maintain transparency, help you set goals, and the list goes on with endless possibilities. A CRM software cannot only help you manage your start-up but also assist in every stage of its growth. Thus, a CRM software can not only help your startup, but also add wings to it to fly through the stars.

Guest Post by Kalpesh, Sage Software

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Patent shift: Hope for IT innovation, not litigation

One of the persistent threats to India’s software product ecosystem is from the constant push by MNCs for allowing software patents in India.

India’s nascent software product industry is growing rapidly and is on a trajectory where we can see global brands like Amazon, Google and Facebook emerge in the next 10 years.

One of the persistent threats to India’s software product ecosystem is from the constant push by MNCs for allowing software patents in India.

The MNCs (or more often, their well paid lawyers) cleverly couch this argument by saying that this will promote “innovation” and help the domestic software industry .

To which, we at the Indian Software Product Industry Round Table (iSPIRT), would like to respond by saying, “Thanks for your concern, but let us Indians worry about innovation within our own country”.

Over the last several years, we have seen many attempts by MNCs to (mis)interpret the Indian Patents Act in such a manner that software patents will be allowed in India.

We firmly believe that software patents are a recipe for litigation and not innovation. The history of patent litigation in the US serves as a cautionary tale for India. If you are a software developer in the United States, writing code and innovating is a risky proposition. The moment you are successful, patent trolls land up, claim that you are violating their patents and try to extract royalties from you.

Research conducted by James Bessen and Michael J Meurer, explained in their widely acclaimed book “Patent Failure How Judges, Bureaucrats, and Lawyers Put Innovators at Risk”, has shown that patents in the area of software have high rate of litigation. Due to the nature of software, the boundaries of patents granted in this field are often hazy and this leads to increased litigation.

The authors in a study published in 2012 estimate that direct costs of patent assertions by patent trolls total about $29 billion accrued in 2011. In 2011, a number of mobile app developers, most of them based in the US, got legal notices from a firm called Lodsys.

The notice claimed that in-app purchases used by these apps violated the patent held by the firm and threatened them with legal action if they did not enter into a license agreement with Lodsys.

Thankfully , Indian software developers and startups have not had to encounter such frivolous legal notices until now. Individual developers and star \tups can innovate freely in India, thanks to the foresight of our parliamentarians who exempted computer programmes per se from patentable subject matter. More patents has never meant more innovation.

This is a myth that patent lawyers love spreading, as patent litigation serves to expand their market opportunities.

However, the “Guidelines for Examination of Computer Related Inventions (CRIs)” (2015 guidelines) issued by the Patent Office on August 21, 2015 could have changed the scene in India as it was worded in a manner that permitted patents in the field of software.

Although the guidelines are only meant to ensure a uniform approach by the staff of the Indian Patent Office while examining patent applications and does not constitute rule-making, these would have led to a liberal examination process resulting in grant of more patents in the area of software.

This would have made innovation in the area of software akin to step ping on a mine field. We therefore welcome the order issued by the Controller General of Patents, Designs and Trademarks dated February 19, 2016 finalising the Guidelines for Examination of Computer Related Inventions (CRIs).

It is also important to call out the role of lawyers in this discussion. Warren Buffet, the ace investor, famously said, “Never ask your barber if you need a haircut.” In a similar vein, policy makers must disregard the self-serving clamour call from lawyers for more software patents in India. Most of these lawyers stand to benefit from increased patent filing and increased litigation.

Allowing software patents would have paved the way for digital colonisation of India, since the vast majority of software patents are owned by MNCs.

We therefore applaud the Indian Patent Office for revising the guidelines and promulgating a clear test for issuing patents. We believe that these guidelines are some of the clearest guidelines anywhere in the world and we believe this will help innovation, not litigation.

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Tax holiday for startups should be provided in first few profitable yrs instead of first 3 yrs

Progressive steps taken by the Union Government for the Startup Community in its Start-up India initiative are encouraging. We hope the Union budget will reflect a similar sentiment and introduce policies around tax relaxations and process simplifications.

The structure of taxation and corporate laws in India is not very conducive for startups and early stage companies. A lot of these issues were addressed by the Union Government in their Start-Up India policy.

The industry is hoping for a fair budget and has a lot of expectations from the government to help ease setting up businesses. There are a lot things that can be improved to make the environment more friendly for startups and here is what we feel can be done to boost the ecosystem:

Income Tax: Mr. Modi recently announced that startups will not be charged Income Tax in the first 3 years.

Though that’s a step forward in the right direction, it’s common knowledge that very few startups are profitable in the first 3 years, and if that is the case they will any ways be not paying tax.

Instead of capping it on based on the number of years, tax relaxation should be provided in the first few years of profitability.

Additionally, while a company is making losses, they still have to pay tax (through TDS) and the tax gets refunded after 5-6 months at the end of the financial year. For a startup any proportion of liquidity is critical. Government should propose a solution such that loss making startups don’t have to part with critical liquidity.

Capital Gains Tax: Creating personal wealth is one of the core motivations for entrepreneurs to build startups. This ambition of personal growth often leads to creation of large enterprises that benefit thousands of people and is an enabler for the overall growth of the country.

Lesser capital gains tax in countries such as US and Singapore makes it more lucrative for entrepreneurs. Mr. Modi has announced relaxation in capital gains if they are invested in government schemes, however the relaxation should be across the board.

Simplified Policies: There are lots of policies, especially in the Companies Act where the processes are too complex for early stage companies, which often do not even have an accountant on board.

For instance, ‘Rights Issue’ has been made the mandatory process for allotment of shares. For startups, which often go through multiple rounds of funding these procedures are not only expensive but also time consuming and confusing. Simplifying such processes will go a long way in enabling founders to focus on core business areas.

Guest Post by Sachin Gupta, Co-founder and CEO of HackerEarth

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How the UPI Platform will transform the Payment System in India? #FinIndia

UPI Platform is Cheap, Secure, Reliable mobile first, inter operable/ open source, instantaneous settlement, both pull and push.

One major disadvantage of pre paid wallets is in a given month they can’t do more then 10,000 worth of transaction with out KYC, while UPI enabled platform bank accounts can do a transfer upto Rs 1 lakh instantaneously.

Since Money sits in your bank account, you are earning your savings bank interest which is upto 4% per annum.
My points in elaborate:

Cheap: Cost of each transaction is going to be less then Rs 0.45, think of all the savings from and to bank accounts.

Virtual address: Now one can use virtual/ disposable accounts to do transactions generated right from your bank app. By this the merchant or the payee willn’t know your details and even if he is hacked you needn’t worry about losing money.

Pull & Push: Amount can be requested from a certain account or paid into some other account.

Instantaneous: The transfer is instant, yet to come across any other system over the world which works for the banks.

Mobile First: Its one of the few systems in the world designed for new mobile age, helping with easy integration across various platforms.

Inter operable: OTP generated on one bank app can be used across another for transaction authentication. Also, multiple level of identifiers can be used ( Bank account, Aadhaar number,  virtual identifier, mobile number.., etc) to send or receive money.

Bio-metric integration gives a 2nd factor authentication securing your account like none other in market.

Recurring Payments: Even though, directly not supported, but Payment Support Providers can provide an add on for easy to do recurring payments on top of UPI.

Open APIs: Most importantly i see open APIs are going to be game changer as before one with Cash & Contacts can’t control the ecosystem. Its a level play ground, by which even a small start up can do what a gaint MNC can do.

Hence, i feel UPI platform is going to be a game changer and going to give stiff competition to Mobile Wallets and would be enabler of payments.

Source of the image: mpf.org

Guest Post by Sainath Gupta, AnythingAI

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The six key pillars of software that enables Innovation-led growth

Ever wondered if a Software could help business chart the next growth curve?.

The marketplace is changing and the competition is catching up. Organisations need a new concept to break out to create the next growth curve and they depend on functions like Strategy, NPD ( New product development ), R&D Teams internally. Some of these organizations also use external consulting firms, crowdsource, outsource, merge, acquire and do many things more.

In order to bring in rigor and predictability, organisations need sound processes, but the paradox in Innovation-led growth, unlike other variants, is the need to have the right balance between creative freedom and execution discipline. Most organisations are designed for execution discipline while some are designed to be creative. But, today’s organisations need both in the right mix to win in the long run.

We need to manage Innovation-led growth like any other process and to institutionalize this, a structured approach which would balance creative freedom and execution discipline would be more effective.

Well, can a Software help with this?

If yes, what should be the pillars of such an Innovation-led growth Software?

Business would need 6 Es to Innovate.

Empower:
Organisation needs to draw the creativity and drive to make things happen.Often the best source for innovation is the team within the business. A great leader turns them into entrepreneurs who are hungrily looking for new opportunities. The key is empowerment. An Innovation-led growth software should empower teams to achieve their goals through their own ideas and efforts.

The leader sets the destination, but the team chooses the route to get there.

Enabler:
Enable employees to adopt an “entrepreneurial mindset” to showcase their ideas and ideals. Allowing them to propel innovation and show initiative is the key to a successful workplace revival and an opportunity to re-energize individual and organic organisational growth.
Innovation and workplace transformation represent two-sides of the same coin.
An Innovation-led growth software should help business in tossing the coin instead of taking sides.

Effective:
Effectiveness isn’t just a property of the idea but, more importantly, a property of the execution, and that’s where an Innovation-led growth software comes in. It should help business with it right from the word go & ensure effectiveness on all sides by having an innate ability to look at your problem from multiple viewpoints thereby ensuring a holistic overview.

Engage:
The most important part of any business idea is to maintain traction, and that requires engagement: the kind which can grab the right audience. An Innovation-led growth software should help business create a meaningful engagement with and within the audience, be it internal or external. Software should help organizations get perspectives from people who matter and thereby helping it to improve its offerings.

Evaluate:
Evaluating Innovation-led growth initiatives is something that very few organizations have understood. Most of them use the traditional criterion which works against the constructive collaboration that is required. Software should have a new set of evaluation tools that supports such a collaboration and help business in making the decision.

Efficiency:
Efficiency is the result of all the other Es coherently and cohesively coming together to function in a synchronous manner. Software should have proven techniques that shall improve the efficiency of generating new business concepts at a faster rate and continuously.

Edge:
There are few companies, which have few of the above 6 Es.Not any single company possess all 6 Es at the right proportion for the right yield. Experts who are proficient in the field of innovation vouch that iEnabler Software has these 6 pillars at right proportion for companies embarking their Growth journey. For your reference (www.ienabler.co)

Guest Post by Sridhar D.P, iEnabler

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An Entrepreneur At 40? This Is What Not To Do…

I have often heard people say that most men hit their mid-life crisis at 40. That’s when they run a marathon, try to reinvent their personal image or quit their job. Though, as a general rule, I do not believe in such lores, I must admit that it might have been true in my case.

I experienced my ‘Eureka’ moment when I was merrily ambling towards my 4th decade. Sainergie was thus, borne.

I am one of those entrepreneurs who believes that age is just a number. Because, my success is directly co-related to my idea, passion and commitment. I have learned hard lessons along the way and have developed a nice blueprint on ‘what not to do’ things for first generation entrepreneurs like me who might or might not have hit the ‘mid-life crisis’.

Not keeping an intent to learn

 Irrespective of your long standing experience working to your advantage, you are still taking baby steps in entrepreneurship. You are as good and as bad as your fellow entrepreneur. Learning should be a continuous process. If you meet an entrepreneur younger than you, but with more ‘startup’ experience than you, there is no reason to feel conscious or disappointed. Rather, try to draw inspiration from people around you.Also, it doesn’t matter if you face an adverse situation. A smart entrepreneur learns a valuable lesson from a bad mistake.

Stop evolving and adapting to the changes

Right from technology to consumer behaviour, everything is dynamic and changing at a swift pace. You should be ready to embrace these changes in your product or strategy. Until you adapt to what customers are demanding, you wouldn’t be able to take the right course of action to achieve your vision. The bright side of things is that the smaller or newer your startup is, the easier it is to evolve.

Making a rush for seed funding

 When I launched my startup, people would ask me, “How will run you the show?“. Well, my thought process was very clear that my startup will remain a bootstrapped company as long as I can manage. Of course, given my age, my risk appetite was comparatively lower than an entrepreneur in 20s or early 30s. I had my children’s education and other family expenses to take care of. But, I had a decent corpus accumulated from my corporate earnings and I had invested wisely to manage my personal expenses even if I wouldn’t be earning. So, I didn’t hesitate to invest my money as the ‘first capital’ in my startup.

When the initial risk has subsided and your startup starts doing well, you can bring investors on board.

Trying to grow too fast

 I have observed that most new entrepreneurs prioritize on increasing the sales volume and the company size or diversifying the business. But, all these exhaust resources in terms of people, processes, time and efforts. Rather, you should focus on building a good company that creates value, even if it means being a tortoise in the startup race for the first few years.

Encourage the culture of innovation in your startup and groom your team for multi-tasking roles. This way, you can remain a lean company for many years and still drive your business in the right direction. Investors don’t look at how big you are, they see what potential you have to earn profits.

Making things complicated

“It was always very simple; I just made it complicated.” No matter how great your idea or product is, if it takes more than a few minutes for you to explain or for the customers to understand it, perhaps you have complicated things. It’s all about the basics, use all your career experience to plug the gaps and eliminate the barriers. You should keep things simple, smart and transparent so that your winning becomes simpler.

When deciding to become an entrepreneur at 40, remember that you have experience, network and maturity to back your vision and passion. All you need is to roll up your sleeves and take a plunge!

Your thoughts?

 

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Applications are open for the Summer 2016 Accelerator batch!

And…we’re ready to accept applications into the third batch of our accelerator program (time flies!).

As before, the 100 day program helps founders in the early stages of their startup do these things:

  • Build products their customers will love
  • Accelerate their progress; and
  • Become investible faster.

If you’re a startup building a technology enabled startup in one of the areas we like, and want to solve big problems, what are you waiting for? Apply now. Applications close on March 4th, 2016.

Here’s some more detail on how this works:

Axilor Call for applications Summer 2016

 

Guest Post by Udhay Shankar, Axilor

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Q-Prize – A US$ 350,000 opportunity for Startups in Make in India week

With only a few days to go for the Make In India week, the Department of Industrial Policy & Promotion (DIPP) is set to announce a Rs 2 crore bounty along with Qualcomm.

During the Make in India Week being held in Mumbai, the DIPP and Qualcomm Incorporated, through its venture investment arm, Qualcomm Ventures, have announced India’s largest Startup prize till date will see the winner walk away with US $ 350,000 in equity funding.

QPrize-MakeinIndia-Banner-3To submit your entry, download the application form here, fill your startup details and email it to [email protected], for further information please click here.

Don’t forget these key dates:

  • Contest opens on February 4, 2016
  • Start-ups can submit their entries on the DIPP / Make in India website.
  • Last date for submitting entries isFebruary 12, 2016
  • DIPP will announce the shortlist onFebruary 15, 2016
  • Shortlisted companies will be invited for the final pitch presentation during the grand finale on February 18, 2016
  • Jury will consist of eminent names from the Government, industry and Qualcomm
  • Winner will be awardedUS$ 350,000 (Rs. 2 Crore)as equity investment from Qualcomm Ventures

The grand finale will be held at the Make in India Centre, MMRDA Grounds, Bandra – Kurla Complex and will be televised nationally. Winners can look forward to a large dollop of publicity, glory and much more, thanks to the hundreds of CEOs and founders of top Start-ups from across the country that are attending the Make in India Week.

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Planting the Start-up Gene in Enterprise IT

Every company in its inception is a start-up. However, excelling and remaining relevant in an ever changing, competitive market eventually transforms ‘start-ups’ into enterprises that follow a set of conventional/’safe’ methods of doing business in order for them to become profitable and remain so in the long run.  Conversely, the current start-up buzz is posing fundamental questions to the enterprise. Can enterprises imbibe innovation, agility & turn ideas into products or solutions in  a short period of time?  Can enterprises showcase the DNA that kept them ahead of the pack when they started their operations?

Times have changed, and so have the methods of doing business and there is much to learn from start-ups today.

PM Narendra Modi’s ‘Start-up’ India movement has provided a much needed impetus to budding entrepreneurs and encourage them to establish their own businesses. With tax exemption of first three years and faster patent registrations, this is just the start to a whole new business environment. The DNA of start-ups is booming with innovation. Leaders and thinkers across the world have pondered the subject but what got my attention is this one by Rorie Devine whose view is that three things that Corporate IT can learn from Start-ups 1. The right attitude, 2. The ability   to constantly test and measure, and 3. To not think like a dinosaur. This last, in my view is key. Rorie says and I quote ‘To be agile and survive, big companies need to organize themselves as a collection of small, independent, self-organizing teams doing the right thing at the right time.’

Innovation is only possible when the organization and each member of the organization is committed and passionate to the idea of breaking through the clutter and to shine above. I can well argue that for most part Enterprise IT has imploded (into itself?) as a result of the very size, complexity and process adherence that has made it enterprise quality in the first place. That said, there are a large number of enterprises that continue to break boundaries at the technology infrastructure level in order to deliver noteworthy innovation for business. The theme for NetApp’s annual innovation awards this year is ‘Planting the Start-up Gene in Enterprise IT: Accelerating Innovation’ celebrates this breakthrough spirit every year, but we believe that there is a new urgency driven by, but not limited to, shrinking budgets and increased competition. We at NetApp want to recognize the efforts and risks taken by start-ups to out think the ecosystem. There are definite insights to be gained from India’s successful Start-ups, particularly around how they have engineered their technology backbone to plan for innovation and mushrooming growth – within the new business ecosystem.

This takes us to the idea of organizing oneself for growth and innovation. We at NetApp tell Start-ups to plan for growth, and to therefore organize their IT infrastructure into easily expandable additive blocks that can scale up or down easily. The value of using a set of smaller parts for best performance and efficiency is not new. Advance planning is critical to their survival as unlike larger organizations they cannot afford to make errors and see themselves going into a dark abyss. Trust forms a valuable component to their success which comes with the assurance of providing quality products and services to customers.

And for the enterprise, it is important for us to break ourselves into small competitive groups within – to build, create & spur disruptions in the market place – accelerate innovation and become a platform for new ideas like the start-ups.

Guest post by Parag Amalnerkar, Netapp

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Startup India: What Can You Do?

At the Startup India event, our honourable PM shared that government’s impact is highest when it decides, intentionally, to stay away, and I agree with him. But we, as the citizens of India, can play a huge role. And we must.

But as a co-founder of NowFloats, a startup, here are some of my asks to you, my fellow citizens, and you may fall under multiple categories:

To Consumers: Sincerely, kindly adjust.

Like most of you, I have cursed Ola/Uber as much when the driver cannot read the GPS. Many of NowFloats’ over 200,000 customers escalate to me directly. All this is a part of the startup journey. We learn from this and hopefully act fast enough on it. So, please crib to us (speaking for all startups here), act obnoxious, throw a fit, expect the best-in-the-world quality, but don’t give up on us! Because we will fix things, once we get that next round of capital or find more efficient ways to train the drivers or the sales people.

To Enterprises: Startups are a feature, not a bug.

When a startup comes calling, please keep aside your desire to be an entrepreneur. That is a parallel process and highly encouraged, because it will make you adopt the new technology or product. If you are unable to do this, you may be unable to do that startup either (#harsh), where you are required to be a new person every single day (#think). So when a startup approaches you, it’s an opportunity to understand the latest technology, perhaps even get feedback on your own business plan. It’s not the time to feel left-out or ask questions that make you go ‘I could have done this so much better’. BTW, almost all startups are happy to discount their product (or even make it free), if you just agree to adopt (#hint).

To Investors: Stay true to your investment thesis and stage.

An angel investor is (and should be) very different from an institutional seed, and this should be very different from a Series A and so on. Only the wearer knows where the shoe pinches, and therefore only the stage-walla investor knows what the entrepreneur needs. Angels will typically give money based on trust and that’s all they should be bothered about. Blume Ventures (for example) is a seed stage investor and they understand their thesis and stage well. They don’t ask for monthly, 10-page reports from all companies but watch out for the ones who are sending these pro-actively. Their support and help is different for each and they will spend significant resources to deliver ‘personalized’ mentoring to each startup. This will not be the case at Series B, when the startup has its resources (now) to find (read pay) for external support. Our Series A investors, Omidyar Network, puts the next stage of pressure on us, helping us with higher growth and velocity.

To Government: Stay hungry, stay away.

In my opinion, the government has already done something that even they don’t realize it, yet! While some of the policy changes expected by startups remain open (refer my pre-event opinion in Mint & iSPIRT’s 34 point asks), but many were awesome starts. And by doing what the government did, they have unleashed a (wonderful) monster. They made the world (to borrow from them), stand-up and take note. This aircraft has taken off and it’s not landing anytime soon, supported by mid-air refuelling of new and relevant policies in future. Things will just have to happen given the velocity on the numbers and stuff we see every single day (see Digital Desh) (#no #choice).

To Family: Stay.

The real entrepreneurs are the families of entrepreneurs’, even though this was forced on them. To them I have to say only two things: Thank you and please stay the course. Pass or fail, this experience is going to change your family for generations. Just take my word, send your partner that home-made food (to save money and health) and… Stay! (#rockstars)

About Me

I am Jasminder Singh Gulati (@GulatiSinghJ), worked at global corporates for over 18 years, including 12 years at Microsoft before co-founding NowFloats in 2012 with Ronak Kumar Samantray, Nitin Jain, and Neeraj Sabharwal. NowFloats helps local businesses get a meaningful digital presence that connects the business with local consumers, resulting in higher revenue & profits. Over the past 3 years, NowFloats has over acquired over 200,000 customers (90% of them in India) and drives over 6M consumers to them every month. NowFloats has 6 patents, all ‘Made in India’.

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Turbocharging #StartupIndia

Maker Culture’ and ‘Make in Universities Programs’ for creating a cultural change in Engineering Graduates; to be job creators rather than job seekers. 

Our nation is faced with an exciting challenge – it needs to create over 1M new jobs every month for the next 20 years to give employment to the 200M youth who will join the work force.

These jobs will have to come from new companies; and therein lays the paramount significance of creating a fundamental shift in our higher education system where the most brilliant minds are trained to be job creators (of new knowledge, employment and wealth) in the society, than be job seekers.

A strong case study – Kerala has been a front-runner in social indices and literacy; but the lack of timely changes in higher education and their inability to be in tune with the industry job requirements, has created a situation where the state has around 25lac unemployed but highly literate youth. The contrast is stark as the state has around 25Lac migrant laborers for blue collared jobs.

As every challenge presents in itself an opportunity, Kerala which had almost no startups and little to show for entrepreneurship culture, took the first step into student entrepreneurship by announcing the Student Entrepreneurship Policy in 2012.

This landmark policy gave engineering students 20% attendance and 4% grace marks every semester. Today, there are more than 200 student startups In Kerala and the promising early signs of a growing startup ecosystem.

The visionary Vice Chancellors of Gujarat Technical University and Kerala Technical University have now come together and are at the forefront of creating the University Student Startup Policies to support these changes across affiliated colleges. With over 1 million students joining the engineering stream every year across India, the education system needs a serious overhaul.

Changes in Curriculum for the Startup Era

The engineering syllabus needs to undergo major changes, in order to be in tune with the national objectives of the ‘Make in India Program.’

Every first year student has to compulsorily take the Practical Workshop classes as a part of the degree certificate. Thus, students in 2016 still learn carpentry, smithy, fitting, plumbing, sheet metal and lathe. We have to move from this system designed for the 1980’s to the Digital Manufacturing Era of 3-D printing, Milling Machines, Laser Cutters, 3-D Modeling and CNC Machines. This change is needed to create world-class hardware and software product designers who can then build and create the next Apple and Google from India.

Professor Neil Gershenfield, the Head of the Center of Bits and Atoms at MIT, Boston teaches a course called “How to make almost anything”. This course is also available online and by upgrading our workshops to Digital Fabrication Labs (Fablabs), we can encourage our engineering students to “make things” rather than learn theory lessons. Around 400 such Fablabs are present around the world, while India today has nine.

Converting Final Year Projects to Startups – A real taste of industry

All Engineering students have to also submit a final year project as part of the degree certificate. Currently, this is a non-imaginative and near repetition of what was done by the previous senior batch.

Instead of a theoretical final year project, creating a startup project allows students to create real products that can be used by customers. Leading Universities such as Stanford allow such programs where undergraduate students can do projects on Facebook or Google, getting a taste of the best in-class technologies that are being used by the industry.

Creating a startup while in college also means that students work together in groups. In the real world, everyone works in teams but we have an education system that is tuned for individual excellence. Student teams can now build prototypes of products every six months and by the time they graduate, they would have worked on 3-4 product ideas.

Along with the Software Product Industry Think-Tank iSPIRT, a program is being planned where young students across Universities in India can be allowed to work with cutting edge startups.

Introducing Online Education from world class Universities.

The lack of adequate faculty has been a key problem in introducing ‘Make in Universities’ till now. With massively open and online courses (MOOC’s), students can now learn cutting edge courses in machine learning and big data from many leading universities around the world.

Almost 95% of startups fail commercially. However, with over 9B USD (58,000Crores) in investments in 2015 alone, the students who are building technically successful products gain real world skills in using next generation technologies and become highly in-demand graduates for startup jobs.

The stage is set for the Prime Minister to convert these early experiments into National Frameworks. By scaling up the blueprint of University Startup Policy at Gujarat and Kerala across the nation as a ‘Make in Universities Program’, it would contribute significantly in creating a great pipeline of skilled talent and innovative ideas, which would help transform India from a ‘developing’ economy to a ‘developed’ economy in the knowledge era.

Guest Post by Sanjay Vijayakumar – Founder of Startup Village, India’s first PPP Model Technology Incubator. He is a part of iSPIRT’s Product Circle. He is also a Member of Board of Governors of APJ Abdul Kalam Kerala Technological University. 

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Why govts should open source software it develops?

I am surprised not to find a single Indian govt software being open sourced. This is despite the fact that most of them have horrible user experience and highly buggy. In all probability the code behind it would be equally poor.

The govt. continues to spend crores of tax payers money to IT service providers to develop these abysmal portals instead of open sourcing it.

Examples of some portals that I used personally:

  1. Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) complaint portal
  2. LIC portal
  3. IRCTC ticketing portal
  4. RTI portal
  5. MSEB bill payment
  6. I wont be surprised if this is true for most govt. sites/apps.

Each of them to say the least have poor user experience and worse is highly buggy. E.g., I logged a complaint in the PMC portal and got an email with ticket ID. To my surprise when I logged back in the portal after a week, there were 0 open, pending or closed tickets in my account!

Why open source?

First of all its built using tax payers’ money. Why should be is hidden property unless there is some trade secret involved in it?

Secondly, why would every state, municipal and even country“reinvent the wheel”? E.g. if Pune builds a complaint management system, why should Pimpri Chinchwad have to build another one for itself? If Maharastra builds a software for vehicle management (RTO office) why should rest of the states build another? And just a different state, even someone in Sri Lanka or Nairobi can reuse it.

Thirdly, India has the highest number of programmers in the world. Most of them are bored or frustrated in their day job, and looking for an exciting side project to work on. They would be more than willing to contribute for free to such projects. Its not only exciting but also a sense of society contribution involved. Similarly students doing college projects are another source of free hours that can be utilized. As in any open source project, you need strong gate-keeping to ensure quality of code contributed is high. Its is very easily doable as is done in 1000s of open source projects across the globe.

Fourth, if and when, for whatever reason govt has to change the vendor who is in-charge of developing the portal, it will be very easy to make the transition since the code is publicly available. Govt wont be at the mercy of a single vendor for life.

Overall, “open source” is an important aspect of “open government” after “open data”. Its a no-brainier that all government projects have to be open source unless confidential information of national or trade secret is involved. Especially in the context of smart-city and digital India, this will be critical since government spend on IT is expected to go up exponentially.

Unfortunately, no one has come forward to do it. The only reason could be vested interests of the IT services companies i.e. cartel between decision makers and software companies. Naturally open sourcing is not great for them since it will mean lesser projects and worse their “code quality” will be exposed to the whole world.

Hopefully we will see this change in the near future. Being an open source product developer myself, I will be happy to help any organization in learning more and moving towards open sourcing their projects — for free of cost.

PS: We are developers of OpenSpecimen — an free and open source software for clinical research centers.

Guest Post by Srikanth Adiga, OpenSpecimen

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The Dark Secret of India’s Start-up Boom

The Modi Government has made bold moves on the world stage. Its now time to make one at home!

By Mohandas Pai & Sharad Sharma

New-age startups are making waves. Flipkart has redefined retail. Ola is changing how we travel by taxis. PayTm is at the threshold of disrupting banks. Forus Health is attacking blindness with gusto. Eko is bringing financial inclusion to millions. Team Indus is on its way to land a rover on the moon. Nowfloats is bringing lakhs of businesses online. Pick any sector, even agriculture, and you’ll find a new-age startup gamely trying to bring about change.

These new-age startups are not like our traditional small businesses. They are peculiar in many respects. For one, they don’t play safe. They take on incumbents that are many times their size. They seek out David versus Goliath battles. They have a ‘panga’ mindset where our traditional small businessman was all about ‘dhanda’. This craziness in their DNA makes them wonderful change agents. No wonder, these new startups are transforming India from within.

We are blessed to have these new-age startups. It turns out that this new species of small businesses thrives only in a few places in the world. The most famous locale is, of course, Silicon Valley. Europe, unfortunately, is a veritable desert. South America has only Chile as a small oasis. Asia, however, looks really promising. Israel became a startup hub first, then China and now India. We are now the third largest startup ecosystem in the world.

But there is something dark about India’s startup boom. Six of the eight Unicorns have domiciled themselves outside India-in Singapore or US. In 2014, 54% of all new-age startups raising money chose to domicile outside India. Last year this number grew. It is estimated to have crossed 75%! This points to a big problem.

You might wonder why it matters where Flipkart is domiciled. For starters, when Flipkart has its IPO, Indian citizens won’t get a chance to participate in it. Worse, the intellectual property of these redomiciled companies moves to their new home. But the worst is that the money that the founders and investors make at the time of an IPO or an M&A goes to their foreign bank accounts and tends to stay there. It stymies the creation of Rupee risk-capital system in India. It makes are startups almost fully dependent on foreign capital leaving most of them starved and under-capitalized in their early years.

Startup India is an opportunity to stop the exodus. It turns out that only 34 issues, across Ministry of Finance, RBI, Ministry of Corporate Affairs and Ministry of Commerce, need to be tackled. Work has been underway on them since 23rd Oct and 60% of the issues seem to be on their way to a resolution. But this 60% fix is a recipe for failure. Unless all the 34 items are resolved, exodus will not abate. Just one friction point is enough to send the startup to Singapore, where, a welcome band awaits.

Anything that we do in Startup India without addressing the issues on the Stay-in-India Checklist is a gift to Singapore. The Modi Government has made bold moves on the world stage. Its now time to make one at home!

Mohandas Pai was the CFO and then the head of HR at Infosys. He is now Chairman, Aarin Capital Partners.

Sharad Sharma was the CEO of Yahoo India R&D. He is a co-founder of iSPIRT, a non-profit think tank that wants India to be a product nation.  

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Start-ups and think tanks are game-changers

It is time for us to embrace new-age start-ups and local think tanks for India to prosper.

Human development indicators improve rapidly when countries learn to provide health, education and financial inclusion more effectively. Incremental increases in expenditure on welfare schemes and subsidies do not bring about this change. Plugging the leakages in government distribution helps, but it is not a panacea. What we need are game-changing innovations that can tackle India-scale challenges.

In the past 30 years, it has become clear that game-changing solutions do not follow a prescribed path to discovery. Instead, they are born out of hundreds of experiments. These experiments can’t be limited to the labs of a few resource-rich incumbents.

We need to widen the funnel to include the new-age entrepreneurs and innovators. To do this, the government needs to adopt and evangelize pro-challenger tools and policies that reduce barriers to experimentation, create level playing fields and encourage innovating around national issues.

There is some good news on this front. In the past few years, a collaborative effort between several government agencies and the Indian Software Products Industry Round Table (iSPIRT), a non-profit think tank, have helped create key enablers for hundreds of experiments.

A digital infrastructure for cashless, paperless and presence-less (on smartphone) service delivery is now in place. It is colloquially called the India Stack. It offers all the building blocks that are needed as public goods. And the rapid adoption of Jan Dhan Yojana, Aadhaar and mobile numbers (JAM) has created a ready pool of citizens to try out these services.

This enables new-age start-ups to do more complex things than they could do before, making them transformation agents for real India.

These new-age start-ups will deliver 10x gains that we need in health, education and financial inclusion to make India successful.

But we must think beyond start-ups. The Indian state must evolve too. It must learn faster, change faster and implement faster.

A 2013 paper by Luke Jordan of the World Bank and Sebastien Turban and Laurence Wilse-Samson of Columbia University shows that the Indian state performs poorly on these dimensions compared to the Chinese state. They identify many factors for this.

For instance, China has undertaken reform once every five years since 1978, while India has only attempted it twice in 65 years. Therefore, China has been continuously tuning up its capacity to learn and deliver.

In India, substantial administrative reforms are overdue. (The reforms recommended by the Second Administrative Reforms Commission still remain unimplemented.)

It turns out that think tanks have an important role to play too. A dense network of think tanks is necessary to conduct and spread research.

Indian think tanks are mostly central or foreign, with only a few having strong links into the policy system. China has think tanks observing and explaining change. This is a structural gap.

Because of this, the Indian state is conspicuously lacking in its capacity to generate new knowledge, transmit it across the system and act on that.

It is time for us to embrace the two new players—new-age start-ups and local think tanks—for India to prosper. Only then will we able to break free from our current trajectory to meet the aspirations of our young citizens.

Jay Pullur is founder and CEO of Pramati Technologies. He is also a co-founder and governing council member of iSPIRT.

Shashank N.D. is founder and CEO of Practo Technologies. He is part of iSPIRT’s Founder Circle.