Category Archives: startup

The thing about strong opinion..

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.. is that its just an opinion put forth strongly. This doesn’t mean its more appropriate  or better than other opinions. Actually, it shouldn’t be treated any different than other opinions.

It generally depends on the personality of the person stating it. Some people are more subtle in their statements and some prefer to be more affirmative.

A correct and well thought out opinion, is slightly different. In the sense, it doesn’t only focus on the pros of the opinion. It also highlights certain drawbacks, and gives a logical conclusion where pros outweigh the drawbacks. They’re much more educated and the ones which should gain more attention.

Other thing about strong opinion is, its emotionally backed. Its a major drawback. Emotion doesn’t always go well with objectivity and reasoning. If the same emotion is not shared by others in the group, it generally goes unnoticed.

Its extremely important how you put forward your opinion in a group and how you appreciate opinions from other members. Give more weightage to objective ones. Try to avoid emotional ones and strong(loud) ones.

Pitch the dream, not the job!!

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Startup hiring is one of the most interesting and humane part of the whole starting up experience. Not something that companies do very well, though.

I’ve seen startup founders feel very apologetic when discussing career options with an employed person. The discussions go like “We wouldn’t be able to pay your current salary”, etc. etc.

Once you’re apologetic yourself, think of what the other guy thinks of you. I’ve been in such situations myself and can say that they’re not the most comfortable situations to be in.

Let’s change the scene a bit.

Founder pitch:

I can offer you a “life changing experience” which your current job is not capable of.

What I have to offer is the “thrill, dynamism, new identity” which your current job cannot provide.

Think of an environment “non-bureaucratic, filled with energy, enthusiasm, challenge, camaraderie”.. Think of us.

And guess what.. I’m paying you for all this.

I mean.. yeah.. why should you be apologetic about offering a lifetime opportunity..

Sell the dream.. Pitch the prospects.. not just the job.

[Shameless self-promotion]

Wanna join us at Orbis.. Send me a mail at satyan[at]orbismedia.in with details of yourself (less fluff, more code..) Thanks.

Interviews – Two at a time.

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One of the factors that you look for in a candidate during interviews is his collaborative skills. How good is a person when it comes to carrying a conversation with a fellow colleague. How about disagreements? Does he respect arguments or gets aggressive..

How do you do that?

Here’s a proposition..

I was once in an interview session, and were short of interviewers. Lot of people showed up and we had limited time. So we decided to have paired-candidate session. This is where two candidates would appear together in an interview session. It was fairly effective and surprisingly pleasant experience. Here’s my observation from the experience..

1. There was a basic comfort during the session.

Since interviews have gone on to become this huge one-sided affairs, its become really difficult to gauge a person’s original nature during the interview. Getting a person into a proper discussion is quite a challenge. There are hardly any constructive arguments or discussions. Just questions and answers which are not a good representation of a person’s capability technically, leave alone his collaborative skills and interpersonal skills.

With another candidate in there, it is more comforting for the candidates and when they discuss, it can be more natural. This also spawns many useful discussions and arguments.

2. Simulate a typical work like setup

At work, you’re faced with similar situations fairly repeatedly. You are always discussing technical solutions with your colleagues. Either looking for support or challenging a solution. However, this situation is not repeated effectively during a interview session.

Two candidates at a time can help simulate a typical work-day, and can help gauge a person’s interpersonal and technical capabilities.

3. Interviewer as a moderator

I’ve always felt that interviewers should be doing more of listening. Just get the candidates talking and listen to them. With one-to-one interviews, mostly the sessions end up becoming a quiz situation. If that is all you want, there are many softwares which might do a better job at it.

With two folks in there, it can be really useful to have a good moderator as an interviewer. One would need to get both of them started in an argument or a discussion and observe how people react to individual points.

Knowing each of the candidates before hand can help a lot in moderation. Look up their details on the web and fit the right candidates together to get opposing views and opinions.

Conclusion:

In all, its a nice session to add to your interview plan. It’ll not only help you gauge the technical abilities but will also assure you of how the person would behave during the actual work. This coupled with initial research about the candidate can be a wonderful combination to add to your plan.

Have you ever conducted a ‘Two at a time interview’.. Please do share your learnings from the experience.

Sprint or Marathon.. What’s your model?

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I’ve observed a basic difference when it comes to a sprinter and a marathon runner thats very relevant to a business ecosystem.

A sprint is a short distance run, fastest one wins. Speed is the most important attribute. Competition at its best.

When you observe a sprint, you’d typically see 10-12 athletes who’re running individually to beat the other one to the finish point. They don’t look at each other at all except after the end of the race. The key thing here is.. they don’t rely on each other much.

A marathon is however a longer run and tests your stamina, endurance and sustainable speed. It is competition, but of a different nature.

When you observe a marathon, you’d see groups running together for most of the distance. Its only at the end that people move away from the group. Running with each other helps athletes psychologically where they feel part of a group. They draw strength from each other in an implicit manner. They form a support system.

How is your business model structured?

If you’re running alone, is your business of sprint nature? if not.. see if being in right group can help you. Form a group of companies which offer similar services/products and benefit from each other without affecting the competing agreements. Share your knowledge to younger folks and encourage your fraternity to grow. It’ll only help you in the long run.

If you’re in sprinting business.. practice hard, run hard.

The UnConference of Entrepreneurs

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Imagine a place full of enthusiasm, activity and positivity. Thats how it was at Chennai Tie Unconference event last saturday hosted at Thoughtworks premises. The theme was “How to scale your business” and the idea was to do it in unconference style. This model we believe results in better knowledge transfer between the seasoned ones and the rookies.

The day started with Dorai sharing few details about the event and then requesting for participants to declare their proposed sessions. To be honest, we did not expect much activity in the beginning.. but we were surprised to receive about 20 sessions right within the first 5-10 minutes. So there we had the agenda for the whole day. Great start to an unconference.

Then started the sessions.. Couple of them that I enjoyed being part of were,

1. When to become an entrepreneur..

2. Bootstrapping your startup

3. (the high point) Panel discussion on scaling your business

Lots of discussions, many useful ones.. some not so useful, but a nice event at the end. It is rather difficult to summarize the events since they were so many and so distributed that I lost track of them all. But I’ll try to share few things that we tried out and learnt from this experience.

1. The position paper experiment

This was seriously good and has given me many ideas to make such unconferences/events more interesting and useful to all participants. My experience from conferences and events have been that I’ve always found myself bored at speakers/lectures sessions and waiting for them to end so I can meet other participants or engage in networking. Now imagine if I already knew all the participants and knew the reasons they’ve brought themselves to the event, it gives me a clear idea of who to talk to and what to talk as well.

2. Three sessions in parallel

Sometimes this means, people can only go to one session and lose on other sessions. But it also means lot of people getting a chance to share their views and having a smaller audience who’ve preferred this to the other things going on. Beneficial to both the parties.

3. Panel discussion

This was the only organized session in the whole day. Terrific panel and crisp replies to questions. Extremely efficient use of time. We expected this to be the high point and it was.

Pictures and more information on individual sessions are available on facebook and twitter

Organized by Tie and Thoughtworks with the help of Dorai, Sid, Satya (myself) and host of other volunteers.

Awaiting many more in future too..

What are your interview questions?

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Well.. What are they?

Let me try and guess..

1. How long have you been working in Java/.Net?

2. What is your current project?

3. What are your current interests?

4. Solve this puzzle for me..

5. My favourite.. Tell me about yourself.

Let me tell you one thing. You’re not only wasting your time, you’re wasting the time of the other person too.. All the information is already available one way or the other on the net. Go lookup.

And if you don’t find his information on the web… be sceptical. Start the interview asking why you did not find any information about him on the web.

Lets stop being so superficial in interviews. Especially for developers. Please.

Go deep. Get conceptual. Ask him to code. That is why you recruit him.

Some of my earlier posts of recruitment are Part1, Part2, Part3, Part4

Emails are just getting hotter!!

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Just when you thought Emails are losing their feet and better tools are replacing them, comes a host of applications on top of common emails. You’d agree with me when I say, there’s no bigger database than emails and if that data is studied properly, would reveal a lot about the person starting from personal stuff to professional. His taste in music, movies, choice of friends, business interests, job interests.. name a thing. Its available in the mail account.

This is what I’ve come across lately..

1. Rapportive


Excellent tool. You typically have social applications asking for emails to import your friends. Reverse it now. That’s rapportive for you.

You need to hover over the email id of the person in gmail and you can see the social profile of the person in different applications like linkedin, twitter, myspace, etc. Many CRM tools have tried to do this, in the bracket of Social CRM. But this tool integrates seamlessly with your email and nothing better than that.

It makes good use of the otherwise useless ad area. Is very unobtrusive and intuitive at the same time.

2. Priority Inbox

Always wanted a tool that would show you only the most important messages to read. Typically, you do it through labels and multiple inbox.. but nothing better than the email client filtering it for you. I’ve been extremely impressed with the simplicity of the feature, though not a very simple feature if you come to think of it. Certainly a move in the right direction.

Two excellent tools here.. and there are many more out there to make your email experience better.

Target your prospective employees

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This is the fourth installment in the Interviewing series. The first three can be viewed here.. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

How do you target your prospective employees? The answer is.. the way you target your customers.

Go where they are most likely to be..

Are you looking for good programmers to join you? By good programmer, I mean one who can code. No.. not just write code, write code which is readable, maintainable, well tested and easy to change.

Where are you looking?

Job site

If you think job sites would provide you with such people, all I can say is keep trying.. someday you will find them. Its just too much effort to find one good programmer from a herd of resumes. Too painful and not very rewarding. And by the way, good programmers have started to remove their resumes from those sites. Thus your chances of finding one is made even more difficult.

Recruitment Companies

All I can say is.. well.. I can say nothing. They’re supposed to find you a good resume. I’m sure if you close your eyes and pick a resume from a pile, your chances of that being a good one will be equivalent to the ones filtered by these companies. And bonus.. it won’t cost you anything.

Go look at..

1. Technical conferences

2. Programming community (online/real-world)

3. Open source code bases. (github, code.google, and so many)

4. Gaming channels/forums (well.. atleast 50% are into virtual reality)

5. Twitter and stackoverflow. (There are some serious folks out there..)

Once you’ve found a few developers who you would like to have in your organization, what do you do?

1. Torment them with joining calls from your HR/calling staff.

2. Send them endless emails about sending their resume to you.

Well.. enough. You’ve already lost him. Now, let’s try something else

1. Have a chat with him about his interests (in programming and other things..) whenever you meet him.

2. Host a session on programming and invite them for a talk/session. They’ll respond willfully.

3. Host a session that matches their interest (gaming/social networking meet/others..) and invite them to participate.

4. Have an open-office day. Invite people from outside to come and visit your office. Let them have a look at how you work.

5. Constantly seek feedback from them. What do they like about you? What they don’t like about you..

Believe me.. you won’t need a formal interview after all this.

Its not easy. Certainly not. But the chances of finding a good programmer are much better this way. Certainly better alternative to a 1-hour interview session.

Why I did not build my first product..

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Couple of years back I was at this job at a software company building stuff for large enterprises. Regular day included writing large modules of software with no vision of who’s going to be the final user of the system. We would mostly be provided with a spec and all our development would be centered around it. This would get fairly mundane fairly quickly and then starts this long wait for the project to end and next one to begin. In all likelihood, the way outsourcing projects work, the new project would be similar to the last one, except for different people.

All the time, there were few ideas growing in my head to start a software product on my own. It gained constant momentum and in few months I had two more people interested in one of the ideas. There started this journey of my first startup.

The Idea

The initial idea was to make a platform for fashion designers to showcase their talent and share it with the world. This would be a part of community where people would visit profiles of different fashion designers and choose among them. This would enable even middle-class citizens to select designs and accessories, helping the budding fashion designer community too. Sounded a great concept. With this in mind we started our research. I was still in job when we started this.

The Research

We needed to get the opinion of fashion designers on this concept and also of the potential buyers or middle-class fashion enthusiast. We started with the fashion designing community. This led us to different parts of our country and to some really odd/funny looking fashion designers too.. We figured few things from our research:

1. Fashion designers won’t put their stuff up on the web easily.. since there’s lot of plagiarism in their industry and they do it themselves too :)

2. There isn’t really a community of fashion designers. Well at least, as far as we knew.

3. From the buyers side, one always wants to touch and feel their clothes before buying them. so they wouldn’t really buy online (unless it’s from a brand)

4. We really sucked in the skill required to talk to those fashion designers. Just two different worlds.

(This was just our assessment of the situation from our limited research. The inferences may not hold true for all people, I may add. )

This just meant, we had little interest from suppliers (fashion designers), consumers (online buying market) and we totally did not understand their language. Nothing was going for the idea.

Guess what.. we dropped the idea.

During the Process

There was this other thing that was happening while we are at the whole research thing. We were meeting lot of business people and we were getting exposed to lot of real-time problems that they were having. Some went like managing their demand and supplies, working out their cash flows, working with illiterate people, and handling their sales team effectively. Hang on.. lets zoom on the last point. Handling their sales team effectively.. Wasn’t that problem solved already by all these super Sales Management applications? Apparently not. They themselves are a problem most of the times.

So during our research for our first idea, we came across all these things and ignored them first. Once we dropped our initial idea, we looked at an alternative and there was this interesting situation.

The first idea, we were passionate about, but we did not know our customers or consumers. We lived a different world. The next set of ideas came directly from the customers (or people/companies with problems).  We figured that the best way to go about was to solve the problem that we knew about and had a customer to help us out in testing the solution.

The Product

So, out came Lead Simplified. A platform to help manage your sales leads. And in next few months, we had the product out in the market and implemented with a dozen customers. Now Guess what.. It worked. It solved the exact problems that they were having and did nothing more. It started growing and people started referring our product to their friends and circles and we started getting many enquiries and suggestions for more features to be included. We were pretty overwhelmed with the response.

This was the product  in its 5th month and we started getting inquiries from the biggies of the country. Not something that we were prepared to handle.

This concludes my point and rest of the story is for later. The point is:

The Conclusion

Our first approach started with an idea in head and then doing the research on that. The second started with some research already done and the product was based on a problem communicated by the users themselves.

Both these approaches have something in common. ‘Knowing your Customers/Users’.  The first one, we did not. The second one, we did.

Are you able to draw the characteristics of your users correctly.. absolutely to scale?

Do you know the pitfalls of the industry you’re targeting?

Is there really a problem that you’re trying to solve?

Never guess.. Just ask them.

The key is to just go out there and listen. Talk to people. Listen to them talking. Try to solve problems that people actually have.

Also, while solving it, constantly keep checking with them if you’re in the right direction.

Now.. go out there. Talk to your customers.

working for vs. working with Customers.

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Customers are always right.

Customers know what they want.

In my career with customers ( and I’ve met a few), I’ve concluded that both our previous statements are not entirely true.

One thing that is true is, Customers have a problem to be solved. And When they hire consultants or vendors, their plain expectation is that they’d solve it.

Most of the times, customers can define their problem fairly clearly. Other times, they don’t. But lets ignore the latter ones for this post.

Ones who’ve managed to define the problem, also seem to have an idea of a solution. A solution that would work, not necessarily the best solution to the problem.

This is where consultants/vendors come in.

There are two approaches that are possible from this time on.

1. Consultants can try to reach the actual problem, and propose multiple solutions either supporting or contradicting customer’s idea.

2. Consultants can just help in executing the conceived solution for the customers.

This is the crux of the title of this post. First point is what I would like to call “working with” and the second one as “working for”.

I’ve always believed that if you have a part in designing the solution for the problem, it becomes dear to you. The level of dedication goes up a notch. This doesn’t necessarily mean that your design has been chosen as the one, it’s just that you’ve been part of the process of arriving at a solution is the key. You tend to relate to the problem better. You tend to feel a part of the solution. End Result, you perform better.

I’ve not been totally convinced with the second part. Its like a Hit-man at his job. He gets a phone call.. a picture of the person to kill.. and he goes kills him.. done. Engineering doesn’t work like that. There are many things that go into executing a solution. Morale and Passion are a big factor. If you lack that in you or the team you’re working with, be ready for mediocrity. That is what it would result in.

So you decide what you want to do.

Work with customers and relate to their problem. Deliver a solution to their actual problem (which may be better than they had thought. Exceeding expectations) or

Work for them. Deliver the solution they asked for (which may not be a solution at all). In this mode you’ll be doing great if you match expectations. Most times you’ll fail to do that too..

Modern organizations, work with customers. They’re much more concerned about customer’s investments, and most importantly.. they believe in delivering a solution that actually works.