An experiment in light expression

Via SiliconIndia, “BPOs turn to regional accent proficiency to tap domestic market”. So the BPO wheel turns full circle and in these BPO’s as the article puts it “People with a heavy mother tongue influence are preferred”
This should give  solace to all those folks who wanted a break in the BPO/call center industries in India but weren’t proficient enough with the English language. Perhaps the Indian BPOs should start training people in Chinese next…

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 : - )

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.

I am glad to say that World Usability Day is finally taking off the ground. ( You can register for World Usability Day 2007, Bangalore at the event wiki)
After I started UPA Bangalore this summer with other like minded folks, i wanted to let things lie low for a bit and see some ‘emergence’ within the user experience community - that emergence seems to now be happening. Following the success of Bangalore Barcamp and D-camp, the design, usability, technology communities seem to be somewhat aligning and looking at User Experience as a whole - not merely from their own vantage points.

If you have any feedback or suggestions for the event feel free to add a note to the wiki or email me

So we finally rounded off Dcamp - India’s first design unconference (where else but in Bangalore, despite all the bumps and grinds of its existence) this Sunday at the cheerful and inspiring Yahoo Bangalore office on Airport Road.

The unconference has been covered quite well by Saurabh Minni, Anand Bora, and Muthu. Thanks to everyone who took pictures of the event - now what we need is a mashup of the DCamp Flickr images!
In this post, i will cover some of my observations and takeaways from the event:

1. A bunch of folks with a simple motivation, the right technologies, and light structures can indeed put together something new - the coming together of the team for Dcamp (myself, Muthu, Navneet Shrikanta, Ruta, Abhishek…) showed the power of both strong and weak ties in social networks, the power of Wikis for light collaboration (we managed to keep our event management related phone calls to 3 and our emails to probably a dozen), and (in my mind is a small but good example of) the power of emergence. I probably saw more emergence in this event than in the ponderous paper on emergent e-governance i wrote years back. I almost learnt as much from this event as the World Usability Day event i organized last year!
2. There is little co-relation between age and inspiration, organizational role and inspiration, and subject and inspiration. One of the most interesting presentations i saw was on Schematic Mapping by Arun Ganesh. Arun started his presentation by saying “…was in London in 1998 when i was 10 years old and I saw the now-world-famous London tube map…”. Joe Arnold’s wonderfully visual presentation on innovation using the story of the Wright brothers and the first airplane was inspiring - so was Siddhi’s take on the re-design of programmer workspaces considering the social nature of programming activity. All very inspiring despite their different contexts (entrepreneurial/organizational or technical/social)
3. This might be contraversial but as Indians, we do tend to be unpredictably argumentative. Edward De Bono put this point across today in one of his Times of India interviews as well. Many of the presenters - including Siddhi and Arun - faced what i thought of as somewhat discouraging and trivial questions (who will buy it? what is your solution? i dont think..blah…). On the other hand, folks like Harish from OneBigWeb who had a very interesting model on the touchstones of Interaction Design (creating formulas for design is always a tricky affair) simply didn’t get too many questions! Perhaps i’m being biased here but i always have more interest in seeing the possibilities of somebody’s work than finding out nitpicky flaws.

4. …and finally, the Bangalore ecosystem of ‘interesting people’ continues to grow. Among others I met two interesting developer-entrepreneurs, an out of box thinking photographer, world class talent from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, design freelancers, Chennai students who just landed up for the event, and of course folks running their start-ups out of their bedrooms. Bangalore does little to attract and retain global creative talent, but interesting folks end up through the cracks and staying here (till whenever they do) nevertheless.

On Friday, I attended a Siliconindia summit on Leadership. Since the 199os Siliconindia has been an inspirational magazine profiling Indian American and more recently, Indian success stories in the technology marketplace. I fondly remember reading the magazine back in grad school.

In this post, I cover highlights of a few talks at the event and my takeaways.

Sharad Sharma, who heads Yahoo R&D in India gave an excellent keynote on the journey from offshoring to in market incubation. He described some mega trends that characterize the new problem for multinational corporations – product clutter, aggressive and nimble international and local competitors coming out of nowhere, the emergence of overnight new technology innovations and unpredictable network/viral effects (He cited Facebook’s book application having 7000 Harry Potter reviews, the largest anywhere).

His viewpoint was that captive product development (such as the India Development Centers or IDCs of Microsoft, Symantec, or Oracle) and Outsourced Product Development (OPD) firms (such as GlobalLogic and Symphony Services) is already a fading story. Rising wage costs, talent crunch, and the tapering of Operating Margin gains means only one thing – it is harder to extract more business benefits from passive captive outfits.

The solution to this new MNC problem? In market incubation. Meaning the development of innovative products and platforms for local consumers, for small medium businesses, and the reorganization of captive units and OPD working arrangements to wards a multi-hub, autonomous, and risk sharing model (Sharad cited the Airbus/Boeing component responsibility model where landing gears are made in France and wings are made in Japan as self contained units!).

Sharad ended his talk suggesting that this new incubation model would mean the emergence of 3 key positions within the Indian product ecosystem:

1. Leader of a Global Center of Excellence with ownership for global or local products

2. Intrapreneurs – who seed inhouse innovation with access to go to market channels

3. Product entrepreneurs who develop new products or support the ecosystem

The subsequent panel discussion on Leadership traits included Dr. Anil Gupta from Sun’s India Engineering Center, and Vijay Anand from Oracle.

Vijay used famous CEO/Leader quotes to bullet his views on what makes leaders tick - including CEO views on newness, on opportunity, and on value systems.

Anil chose to go back to the basics of what makes a good leader tick – having a clear conscience, a human bond with employees, a healthy body, and a strong sense of values.

He ended with a lovely poem from the ex Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Touche!

“..Mere prabhu Itni Oonchai mat dena..

Gairon ko gale na laga sakoon..

Itni Rukhai mat dena”

The leadership panel was peppered with references to some very interesting books on the subject of leaderhip including Straight & Crooked Thinking, Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Fooled by Randomness, and The Whole New Mind.

All the panelists agreed about the need to have more ‘Integrative thinking’ leaders than reductionist/conventional thinking ones – and made references to a recent July HBR article on ‘How do Leaders think’.

..Other interesting talks at the event are archived here. I enjoyed most of the afternoon talks particularly the ones by Sanjay Singh from Akamai, Ramesh Srinivasan from Bally Systems, Santanu Paul from Virtusa, Alexius Collette from Phillips, and C Mahalingam from Symphony Services.

From a recent IxDA post, I found some good references for US salaries of Interaction Designers and Usability Engineers. The salary ranges show a skew which would disappoint most opponents of the labor arbitrage angle of outsourcing - On an average, designers and usability professionals in America make an average of $65000 whereas their Indian entry level counterparts in blue chip product or services organizations are still paid somewhere in the $10000 to $15000 range.

This makes me wonder - If MBAs coming out of India are now being paid extremely competitive salaries since they form the backbone of business success, why are designers not paid more money than say, the average Quality Assurance Analyst, or the average template-driven software developer who’s hacking together a bunch of APIs lifted from the web. Didn’t Bruce Nussbaum note not too long ago in Business Week– “When people talk about innovation in this decade, they really mean design”.

If business innovation is essentially about design innovation, why are designers not considered at par with business professionals? For those interested in some number comparisons, check out the following links:

http://www.indeed.com/salary/Usability-Engineer.html

http://iainstitute.org/pg/salary_survey_2006.php

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/salaries.html

http://www.peakusability.com.au/resources/usability-salary-survey.html

http://www.stcsig.org/usability/topics/salary.html

http://www.usabilityprofessionals.org/upa_publications/upa_voice/survey/2000_survey.html

http://www.spiritsoftworks.com/resources/2004-salary-survey.htm

http://www.designsalaries.org/

One of Prof. Sadagopan’s columns in i.t. magazine titled ‘As I see IT’ is very interesting from a trending perspective. Every issue, the article lists important trends in the tech economy, such as — number of mobile subscribers, graduating tech student salaries, the presence of Indian tech companies in top 10 lists of ‘something notable’, recent IT acquisitions, and the like.

However, whenever I get a chance to read through SS’s latest pot pourri of statistics (and I labor under the questionable assumption that the tech economy is an indicator of India’s overall success), I ask myself the question ‘Am I a natural pessimist about India or a cautious optimist’. After reading the article I find two conflicting voices in my head – one says that India is unquestionably headed in a better direction, and another feels that all these lists of achievements mean something only to the elevated and temporarily-sedated -with-retail-therapy middle classes and not the ‘great unwashed masses’ as a philosopher once called them.

That being said, India turns 60 on August 15 this year and despite being a cautious optimist, i feel quite happy to be part of this moment in spacetime. : -)

Alexander Kjerulf ’s blog has several interesting posts on innovative workplaces, work related happiness, and such. This post on ‘Top 5 reasons why the Customer is Always Right is Wrong’ should be read by those IT-entrepreneurs and large multinational companies laying out miles and miles of cube farms across Bangalore and other places in India. Could there be a corelation between the IT industry’s 15% attrition rate and the BPO industry’s over 50% attrition rate to the manner in which most Indian organizations care for their employees? Very seriously, very few Indian workplaces (with exceptions i’m sure - design houses, movie studies, MTV offices) would be considered as cool, hip, and happening. Or at the very least, inspiring.
If you are in Indian IT professional or manager, take a look at some of the cool workplaces in this post. The images suggest (doh!) that there is a lot more that goes into employee satisfaction, motivation and capacity for innovation than simply paying people 15% more money every year…If most of the drab, soulless, and cold Indian workplaces reflect the state of the innovation quotient of their people, then most workplaces are doing a great job of hiding their innovations or simply had none in the first place :)

Where have all the great workplace designers gone from India? Did they never exist?

I am a generally happy Airtel customer. I’ve used their landline, broadband, and mobile services for a couple of years now and I’m always happy to report Airtel generally as a world class customer experience - especially at those times when broadband woes strike in the middle of the night. I would rate my experience with Airtel’s call center agents higher than with any of their counterparts in the financial services industry (Citibank take note).

However, there is one interesting and somewhat perplexing feature of Airtel’s Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system for phone based bill payments (using credit cards) that is disconcerting. And its not only the booming voice, a point well noted by Shruti Bhandari in her blog post. It is the cognitive dissonance caused by listening to a Frankenstein voice - one mixed with distinctly Western, North Indian and South Indian English accents. Now the individual voices are in themselves not a problem. What causes my hair to stand on end is that the voice which validates your 16 digit number or phone number alternates between the Western sounding and Indian sounding voice. Imagine hearing 3 being read in a stern Western tone and 7 being read in a soft South Indian tone. By the time the entire number is read out, I have to say “creepy…”

I wonder how Airtel missed this. The booming mixed-locution voice almost sounds like Airtel picked up a few Western style number intonations from an old IVR system, got one of their agents to record the other numbers, and then cobbled the whole thing together with some duct tape.
That strange locution apart, I love the IVR - saves me and them the trouble of hunting for each other when its bill payment time every month.

That said, why doesn’t India’s fledgling technology products and services industry pay more attention to these simple aspects of consumer experience? Anybody remember the nightmare of dialing the Indian Railways number (139) and having to dial about fifty times before someone actually picks up the phone…..