An experiment in light expression

Thus spoke Rajeev Purnaiya at last Sunday’s Open Coffee Club in Bangalore. OCC Bangalore is an informal fortnightly meet-up organized by Amarinder Singh, Ramjee Ganti and Vaibhav Pandey. It is aimed at getting together entrepreneurs and ‘intrapreneurs’ in companies to share business ideas and get informal feedback and mentoring.

This particular OCC was hosted by Hooeey.com. A couple of things happened at the event including a presentation, introductions to new entrepreneur forums, and useful networking. In this post I will mainly transcribe some of what Rajeev shared in his fascinating entrepreneurial story of Cyberbazaar and Hooeey.

I will cover Rajeev’s talk through the lens of several key aspects of entrepreneurship:

1. Team building and advisory board

Rajeev mentioned that during the formation of Cyberbazaar he and his co-founders found a natural alignment with key required roles. One founder had a good grasp on dealing with the telecom regulatory authorities, another was good at Sales & Marketing and a third had the financial expertise while Rajeev was the man on the ground managing everything. Other than the core team, Rajeev mentioned their leverage of an informal Advisory Board which even had mentors who could bring a perspective from related industries. Hooeey has also successfully conducted an internship program and graduated 25 summer interns in 3 batches.

Personal Note: I can strongly relate to the value added by interns to a company and its product development process. In my experience with interns from the IIT design programs in the past few years, I have felt that these interns have added a great deal of energy, perspective and value to the projects they worked on.

2. Product development – Cyberbazaar

Cyberbazaar was India’s first conferencing service provider. It understood the pain points of the IT industry in india especially how employees had to stay back in the office to make US calls. It was a pure phone conferencing service that could be run off any ISP and hardware which could be used by employees to work from home and communicate with their US peers. The service evolved to include into an online conferencing offering as well.

Rajeev and his partners thought Cyberbazaar was a good idea since liberalization had taken wings in India and the Internet was just getting its foot in the door.

When they started CyberBazaar, they first ran into the venerable Department of Telecom (DOT) and the VSNL and suddenly realized that what they wanted to do (phone conferencing service) was just not possible because of the VSNL monopoly.It took Rajeev and his team a good 3.5 years of full time product development before they sold a single unit. They learnt a lot about licensing, funding issues, dealing with bureaucracy and red tape. Rajeev felt trying to convince people in state agencies was a useful experience – it helped them modify their own assumptions.

3. Product development – Hooeey

Hooeey is a memory system for the web which is the next step to managing your web experience after bookmarking. It provides a longitudinal view of your browsing history.
Rajeev started hooeey by first looking into areas of the web experience which he felt could do with improvement.

(On Hooeey versus Google: Google showed a spotlight on the web history area recently and that has helped raise awareness about the need for this product space. Hooeey in general is more discretionary as a product and does not do auto-logging.)

One possible business model for Hooeey is to provide recommendations based on past browser history/usage and provide both consumer and enterprise productivity features based on the aggregated data collected by Hooeey. Hooeey is free for consumers but is looking to build premium services for customers and looking at licensing and tie-ups.

Personal Note: Hooeey is a good example of a service incubated in India which targets the global community of internet users. Its ‘design’ is neither Indian nor American but global - let no one say Indian companies cannot create good consumer web experiences!

4. Dealing with the government

While dealing with government agencies can be tricky, it is useful to keep simple straight examples at hand and explain things calmly. For example, when asked about whether Cyberbazaar would be able to keep privacy of phone conversations, they gave the example of how in India if passports are couriered, then the delivery person can always open and see the passport. The reason this does not happen is because the delivery person (and Cyberbazaar and other vendors) have no personal interest in the business conversation/transaction of the two parties they are connecting. Rajeev mentioned this seemed to have worked with the government. I appreciated Rajeev’s even handed description of working with government bodies.

Personal Note: Dealing with the government is never easy, but arguably, the government is also human and if one can build the right channels, the Indian government still remains the largest consumer and distributor for technology products and services

5. Partnerships with large companies

Cyberbazaar partnered with WebEx which had slowly grown to a $25 million company. It had already scaled to Chennai, Delhi, Hyderabad and was moving into niche horizontal services. In 2004, WebEx offered to acquire Cyberbazaar. As passionate as the Cyberbazaar founding team was, Rajeev felt that an entrepreneur has to be very dispassionate about selling and consider the inorganic growth opportunities and the value created for early employees.

One word of advice Rajeev shared was to get a good internal referral within the large company that one is targeting. A strong referral who believes in you and can put in a good word helps in working the channels within large companies. Also useful is getting people used to the service and then building a case with upper management based on feedback from the early adopters. One audience member mentioned that there are 3 types of people in large companies that entrepreneurs encounter: Influencers, Decision Makers and Showstoppers. It is important to build bridges with all three of them so the deal does not get stalled at any level.

Personal Note: Large companies are notoriously monolithic, narrow-visioned, and political. It certainly helps to be savvy and plan the political maneuvering upfront - and if required spend more time in drawing the network of influencer, decision makers and show-stoppers and plan a relationship strategy.

6. Market research

While formal upfront market research is a luxury for start-ups, they can always study the market by tapping research results from universities and other individuals. In case of web products, there’s already a lot of research on online consumer patterns that can be found on the web and this can be leveraged. Informal sources of data can be valid if entrepreneurs can make ‘reasonable’ conclusions from these sources. It may also not be a bad idea to take feedback from a close and knowledgeable circle of friends and family. Hooeey even takes product feedback from bloggers and visitors, whether about their site or the product. It is important to meet enough people in the trade.

Personal note: Using online and crowdsourced research services and leveraging university research is a great way for new companies to stay ahead of the curve. R&D on end users need not be siloed into an ‘innovation’ or ‘design’ department. If the right question can be framed, the Internet-Goddess will figure out a way to find out the answer in most cases.

7. Other tips for new entrepreneurs

Regarding whether one should work full time on their start-up or work part time and bootstrap on the side, Rajeev strongly felt that working full time on the startup was a decision that worked very well for them. Also, while you bootstrap it is crucial to network relentlessly with people within your industry, build your own ecosystem and learn to pitch your services in different settings.

Regarding WebEx acquisition, Rajeev and his core team conducted town hall meetings in different national centers to smoothen the transition. They felt the core team had a good opportunity with WebEx and all the founders also continues on with WebEx except Rajeev who moved out after 1 year of working as Managing Director of WebEx India.

Regarding product ‘originality’, Rajeev felt that every product idea or implementation in technology may possibly have an ‘alter ego’ product our there. The trick is to have a clear focus, get the basic market targeted correctly (before targeting the enterprise market), getting the viral online loops worked out and working closely with the online and blogging community. Early R&D including on Amazon S3 and EC2 helped Hooeey months before the product was actually built.

Regarding managing expenses, Rajeev stressed that many of the expenses incurred in the first startup were better managed in the second startup. For example, he optimized more on spending on capital goods and instead devoted part of the money to R&D. He also felt that the main difference in doing a startup the second time around is that there’s more patience and the ability to stick to the plan when things are not picking up. Otherwise as such he felt entrepreneurs are free to make new mistakes and explore new opportunities as well everytime they start a new venture.

Regarding facing crisis situations, Rajeev felt that entrepreneurs should not internalize all the chaos and struggle they feel. They can also externalize and open up to a larger community and build their support structure. Also, crisis situations are opportunities to precipitate your own thought process and reach new avenues of thought.

Regarding where things can go wrong, Rajeev felt that the biggest problems occur when assumptions are not validated and enough time has not been spent on the ground to understand how people actually work and what their real problems are (is the product solving the right problem?)

Personal Note: Entrepreneurs like Rajeev do not see the world in Black and White absolutes - they are able to navigate very flexibly through changing assumptions, shifting market preferences and wavering stakeholders. My personal experience is that one can gain a priceless amount of real world business experience by working with the right kind of startup.

Do you have your experiences as entrepreneur to share - do write a comment : - )

I am busy with planning out Dcamp 2.0, the second edition of the Dcamp unconference series. After last year’s rather fun experience of organizing Dcamp 1.0 at the Yahoo campus in Bangalore, I’m looking forward to seeing newer topics and perspectives this year. This year, the folks at Aditi Technologies have been nice enough to provide ample event space in their Bangalore campus.

I am hoping to invite creatives from other fields to Dcamp as well – including from art, photography and film. If you know of any good folks I can send a Dcamp presentation invite to, please email me at pande dot amit at gmail dot com

Via Doubtsourcing, an irreverent and in-your-face take on global and distributed product development, outsourcing, offshoring and the like - by Sandeep Sood with artwork by Aron Botham.

Sandeep also runs Badmash.tv, an animation company out of Berkeley and Bombay. One of their pieces has Amitabh Bachhan as an anti-Obama candidate for the 2008 US presidential election. Fun!

The Economic times reported the results of an interesting CEO survey.
CEOs believe that Mumbai and Bangalore are India’s cities of the future while Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore (in that order) are India’s most investor friendly cities at the moment.

Patna and Guwahati were perceived to be the most investor - unfriendly cities.

The rankings relatively make sense to me - Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore are arguably the  Indian cities most geared and oriented towards global business and global competition. They still retain a strong vernacular flavor but their human resource base has become fairly international and the quality of corporate goods and services continues to improve (despite the absolutely shoddy infrastructure, especially in Bangalore).

However, I also believe that atleast for Bangalore the rising costs, increasing crime, political instability, slipshod infrastructure and absurd and nonsensical rules (like the curfew at 11:30 pm and the ban on dance floors) have made it quite unattractive for the creative class that Richard Florida keeps talking about. If all the interesting people that made Bangalore what it is leave it or become uninteresting, dull and mediocre then I would imagine that Bangalore will quickly lose the branding it has projected to the international business community.

Plus, it would be a darned boring place to live, notwithstanding the mostly congenial weather!
Or maybe its just that I’m recovering from my Mumbai weekend hangover - but more on that in another post.

It is around 730 am in the morning and I am headed towards Bangalore International Airport to catch a flight to Nagpur. The experience thus far has been reasonable enough - the Airlift shared cab was waiting for me on time on Old Madras Road, my Tata Indicom wireless connection (despite some serious troubles in activating it) seems to be giving enough signal strength to blog live and Outer Ring road seems a lot less maddening at this time of the day.

Where is the Bangalore ecosystem headed - its a question I ask myself everyday. On the one hand (now don’t start off with Roosevelt’s assertion about wanting to meet only one handed economists) it has the trappings of a network hub with the necessary knowledge infrastructure, talented and creative people, a pace of life which is still slower than Mumbai and Delhi by a healthy factor (some might argue that geographically the main Bangalore region is not more than a few Mumbai or Delhi suburbs), and a fairly aggressive consumer spending base not just through IT professionals but also otherwise. On the other hand having experienced the absolutely anarchic traffic situation, the 11:30 pm curfews, the mundaneness of the MG Road area, the soulless and relentless construction and the blase attitude of may of this city’s residents, I tend to also wonder if Bangalore is a blip, a brief burst on the horizon which fades away into the sunset with a one liner in history textbooks.
Anyways, I need some coffee soon in my system …

Yesterday on Mar 6 we finally managed to lift one foot off the ground and get the Bangalore User Experience and Design community closer through the first event of 2008 - a guest lecture by Murli on User Experience ecosystems, creativity, design thinking and innovation held at the Oracle Outer Ring Road office and supported by UPA Bangalore, CHI Bangalore, IxDA and various other individuals with a passion for user experience and innovation and that sort of thing.

Muthu’s just posted some pictures from the event on Picasa at http://picasaweb.google.com/bangaloreux/Mar06UXmeet/

If you were there, we would love to hear from you on what you thought and what kinds of things you’d like the community to keep working on further.

I am off to San Francisco tonight and will soon post my reflections from the event.

Last Saturday I attended the Mindtree hosted ‘icamp’ or innovation-focused Barcamp.

I must say I was rather disappointed by several aspects of the event. While the organizers got the ’structure’ somewhat right (the registration was smooth, the food was OK, the presentations were on time), they screwed up on the ‘content’. Most presentations were fairly dull and some were simply rip-offs.

A certain gentleman started valiantly on how innovation can be taught in MBA schools and was heckled immediatly by the audience with inane questions along the lines of: Why MBA schools? What is innovation? Why not the other schools? It made me realize that the word ‘MBA’ elicits a strange response from non-MBA’s - its sort of like using the words ‘Lawyer’, ‘Financial Planner’ or ‘Software Programmer’ - people either love them or just can’t stand them. Anyways, after much hand waving about Black Swans and Prototyping and Scenarios and such he managed to finish in time. My personal opinion is that the speaker had his heart in the right place but needs to get more fundamental inspirations from design thinking that he can share with students.
The second presentation was by the eclectic and sharp Murli, who, much to his discomfort found himself using a Powerpoint presentation. The minimal graphics content heavy Powerpoint was no match for the energy and vigor of the speaker and the whole experience got a bit disorienting with the rather lame Powerpoint and the rather convincing speaker. I loved Murli using paper with large text to convey that he sought disagreement and more questions and positive argument. I hope Murli tells organizers he doesn’t need Powerpoints.
A third presentation was by a senior gentleman who spoke about ‘Unusual Sources of Innovation’. While his hands on and interactive style went some way in making the presentation bearable, his content was simply too dull and commonplace in the end. Using Apple, Google, TV and the Tata Nano as starting points he launched into a discussion on what made these companies and their products successful and tried to relate how any learning from these case studies can be related to one’s job. Now the problem with Apple or Google case studies is post-hoc rationalization. It is rather easy to fit any explanation to explain their success - design, marketing, stickyness, rabid users, technology, user experience etc. I found the spirit in the presentation but the speaker would have been so much more convincing if they had used genuinely ‘unusual’ sources - how about ideas generated from sleep deprivation? from watching corny Hindi movies? from opening random pages of random (not only science fiction) books?
I bailed out in the early afternoon - couldn’t stay around long enough to be inspired to share my thoughts in that setting. It is events like these that make me question Bangalore’s claim to being the cutting-edge, futuristic metropolis. It ends up projecting itself as a city which is mirroring San Francisco or New York or London with a time lapse.

These past two Friday afternoons, I’ve been visiting the National Institute of Design (NID)’s Bangalore campus for providing industry inputs and teaching a class on ‘Prototyping and Usability’ to students of the Masters in Design program.

Over the next few weeks in January/February, I will be covering (with Adesh, a brilliant and enthusiastic Senior Interaction Designer from my team) the following topics through a mix of presentations, case studies, examples and hands on activities.
- How prototyping drives design and innovation
- Overview of prototyping, fidelity and tool selection
- Fundamentals of low, mid and high fidelity prototyping
- Group and individual exercises on different prototyping techniques
- Usability evaluations: Methods, metrics and protocols

All the students are in their second semester and are taking other classes in User Experience Design including on web design, usability studies, Interaction design and user research.
I’m quite excited about how the next few sessions turn out. Its always energizing to be in the presence of students - keeps me on my toes too.

I’m also looking forward to my visit to IIT Kanpur’s design program in mid February for a design workshop we’ll be conducting over the weekend of Feb 15.

While listening to Barry Vandevier of Travelocity, i noted that very few companies have actually walked the talk in terms of ‘open innovation‘. Most companies pay lip service to building an innovation culture across their global workforce (from the mailroom boy to the documentation guy to the UI designer) but end up building ‘innovation’ silos which, when they interact with the rest of the ‘normal’ organization do so very little, very late.
In this regard, Yahoo and Travelocity’s Hackday initiatives are inspiring. Both companies have held Hackdays regularly in their US and international locations, and Yahoo has even gone one step ahead and hosted a ‘public’ Hackday. The notion of bringing in select groups and individuals from outside the company to seed new knowledge networks within the company is an old one but doing so in a Hackday format is pretty innovative. There is a difference between a 1 hour staid lecture and a 24 hour marathon design and technology creation session.
There is something exciting about the Hackday format - throw in a lot of smart and hands on people in a large room with lots of coffee, pump up the challenge by having multiple groups competing, and then select winners based on audience polls and expert reviews - i would argue that this format is suitable for any sort of post-brainstorming work and especially so for ’suits’ - there is nothing more heartening than seeing people create new concepts and ideas without the bureaucracy of top down organizational structures.

Yesterday while shopping for clothes and such at the Garuda mall in Bangalore, I found myself noticing that they have a propensity for 80’s pop - there was Madonna all over Shopper’s Stop and while i can normally tolerate Madonna’s brand of music, I find it too strong for the shopping experience - sort of like a bubblegum chewed too long.

The overall experience was alright - at Shoppers’s Stop i did notice some overstaffing, unresponsive sales persons and strange rules (you can only take 1 shirt of each brand to the trail room - their rationale - once you’ve tried one size in Arrow or Mario Zegnoti or Indian Terrain apparently you’ve tried them all!) - but overall the selection and ambiance was reasonably good.
I also noted some interesting ‘local content’ in Garuda mall - including a neat display for Ganpati/Dusshera and creative ads for Sprite all over the place - i hope to see more culture specific content so the Bangalore malls feel different from the ones in Minnesota or Singapore.