I’ve been a long-time reader of Ramit Sethi – I love his irreverent approach to money which has influenced me positively. About a year and a half ago, he launched the Earn1K program and I was immediately curious about it. Having failed to run a business once, I thought this was a great way to “hack my brain” to learn about business.

Eventually, I signed up for it. Of course, I have never mentioned this before to anybody other than a handful of friends because most people would balk that I paid so much for an online course and consider me an idiot. I guess I’m just not the latte saving kind of guy – I don’t earn a lot and I don’t spend a lot, but I do want to spend on the things that I really want. I’m mentioning this today because I have results to show from having gone through just half of the course.

A few months ago after I left my last job, most people expected me to jump into a startup again:

Having the spent last 3 years in startup land, I learned a few things which have made me wary and weary of startups. It had gotten me to think of what it is that I was actually seeking.

It turns out to be simple – “I like coding. I like building interesting and meaningful projects. I like working with good people. I like getting paid well.” That’s it . After all these years, I still love coding, so I kept thinking of ways to focus on just that and stay far away from the business and management side of things. “At least, let me indulge in coding till I have the enthusiasm for it” was my refrain. But how to achieve that?

That was when my lessons from Earn1K kicked in.

Today, my full-time freelancing is going better than I had anticipated a couple of months ago.

There was one more reason why freelancing seemed like a great option to me:

To be happy, your work must fulfill three universal psychological needs:

1. Autonomy – control over how you fill your time.
2. Competence – mastering unambiguously useful things
3. Relatedness – feeling of connection to others

This was what I came across in Cal Newport’s blog whom I pay attention to.

As you can imagine, freelancing has given me an opportunity to further each of the above three points – I get to choose the projects I work on, I get to choose projects that improves my skills and I get to choose to work on projects that I want to be a part of. I am not bound by a company’s roadmap at all.

There are other pluses such as not having to commute, not having to take phone screens and face-to-face interviews, no meetings, not having to worry about sales and product roadmap (my clients take care of that), not having to worry about the competition (my clients take care of that), etc.

There are minuses, of course, such as not having a team to interact and learn from, not having the opportunity to meet wonderful colleagues, no paid holidays, and so on. Thankfully, Pomodoro and GTD help me stay focused and productive and the other minuses haven’t bitten me strongly yet.

At some arbitrary point in time in the future, I’ll do a personal review of how things stand, especially if I have a reasonably steady income. If all is well, then I’ll probably continue freelancing, otherwise there is always the option to jump back into a regular job. Until then, my new life experiment is in progress and so far, so good.

P.S. I’ll talk about my current projects in subsequent posts.

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“The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.”

— Nassim Taleb

The last article on difficulty of hiring for startups in India generated a lot of discussion (also see the HackerStreet.India discussion about this article). I was surprised to see so much response within 24 hours. I guess it shows how much of a pain point it actually is:

Ramjee says: “Bang on, This problem is very severe.”

Gowri says: “oh you could not have hit the nail on the head better!! We are a small, serious high technology company and find it really hard to get good people. First many don’t want to talk to no-brand-name companies. Even when we get to make offers, we end up losing so many because TCS or Wipro or IBM or Accenture gave them 20k more for a maintenance project where they will end up modifying 50 lines of code every 3 months. I feel like crying for them!”

Abhaya says: “Next time we meet, remind me to buy you a drink. I sometimes wish all the people in Startup ecosystem will stop exhorting people to start their own companies and instead join one of the several hundred around as a first step!”

Abdul Qabiz says: “We have been working hard, for last two years, to build a small team, with not much success. Also, hiring is relatively harder for startups in third-tier cities because good ones move to metros.”

These comments are actually the best part of writing a blog – getting to hear from other people knowledgeable on the subject and who are actually in the trenches. The various thoughts added by the community was so good that I thought it was best to summarize it in a new post for my own cognition:

Startups are not promising, yet

We all agree that hiring is an issue. But why is it so? I think the best articulation on the subject was by Manu J (summarized here, please read the original comment for his full thoughts):

1. Stock options have made money for people in Silicon Valley startups. What about in India? “How many makemytrip employees made it big? How many rediff employees?”

2. “Startups do nothing to differentiate themselves from the big corps. If you are offering just a market salary why would a good engineer work with you rather than a big corp which offers that and more?”

3. “Uninspiring work. Not to knock on any startups but some time back facebook clones were all the rage. Now it is groupon clones.”

4. “Lack of technical leadership: Lot of US startups and techies actively participate in the tech community. They usually have a tech blog where they write about scaling challenges, best practices, new products tested out etc. I have learned a lot from these type of posts. I have never found an indian startup which has a good tech blog. (Couple of indian startups do have people in them who are well known and contributed back for ex: you ) but as a company I’ve never seen an indian startup which contributes back to the tech community”

Regarding Point No. 2, Syamant adds:

“Perhaps you should consider non traditional working models as well as talent from outside bangalore who could work remotely. Also consider people who are experienced and have opted to not work fixed hours.”

And Anirudh adds:

“If someone’s good at what they do, they are most likely selling their skills to the highest bidder – namely google, microsoft, amazon, etc. The ones who are trying to work independently (like me) do it because of many reasons – one of them is that you get utmost power, control and authority. Working for a small startup offers neither.”

Regarding Point No. 4, Harish Mallipeddi adds:

“Great technical work & leadership – do not build yet another PHP/MySQL site. Is at least one of the founders, technically well accomplished and smart? If you built Google News and you quit Google to work on your next big idea, then I’m sure that would instill a lot of confidence about you in the minds of potential hires. But if you are completely unaccomplished yourself, then it’s going to be a hard sell”

As far as I know, Manu hits the nail here on the real problems – startups need to do a way better job of making the job look attractive on the strengths of a startup (technical leadership, technical growth, long-term pay-offs, flexibility of timings) rather than trying to compete with big companies on the strengths of big companies (salary, facilities, etc.)

Even things like liberal work-from-home options or double the number of leaves of a regular job can make startups more attractive, like Harish Mallipeddi said:

“Different work space/work culture – you could try renting some cheap office space near a beach in Goa. I’ve worked for Yahoo and I’ve seen Google’s offices – they all have swanky office spaces with free cafeterias. You cannot compete with them by renting out a third-grade office space in crowded Bangalore. Try something different. If you look at all the Valley startups, they don’t just sell you a job – they sell you a work lifestyle – ‘come work for us; this is the kind of work culture we have’ is always their pitch.”

Good Founders are rare, most are stingy

Pranay says:

I am an early career engineer, and I have seen many of my friends leave startup jobs to get into well-established company. Mostly because the startups seldom live up to the exciting work culture image they generally promise. Also, many of the founders are very stingy in terms of giving away equity. The general view is that, its not fun to be in a startup, unless you are the founders/co-founders.

Anirudh says:

“In India, developers are generally treated like crap. I’ve got tons of offers from ‘business’ guys who have a stupid idea and a little spare cash. They don’t understand technology – and more importantly – it’s limitations. Anyone with a little field experience will automatically be wary of such people.”

Maybe the situation could be different if the founders mentor the employees, as Ayush Jain puts it:

“People who do join startups are mostly the ones who are interested in entrepreneurship or starting up themselves. These people do it for the ownership, respect and the appreciation of being entrepreneurs. The biggest mistake founders do is to treat them like employees. Consider talking to people you wish to hire about stock options as they join, or give them some reason to feel proud as an entrepreneur. This would also add to their ownership of the work they do and you would see a visible difference in their attitude towards work. But most entrepreneurs find it difficult to share the ownership of the company with them and thats why they find themselves struggling.”

As “Have to be anonymous” says:

“The founders of the startups are in the attitude of “giving life and supporting a family” for a few people than “taking help from a techie” mindset. Even if they know an employee is not a beggar who has joined his company to help him succeed in a venture, the employer’s behavior seldom reflects they have acknowledged this fact. This could be seen right from giving appointment orders till making the employee cry for relieving letters. And it would be funny to note the same employer read about “brands”. Would they know customers are of two types, internal and external?

“Yes, I was working in startups, and have now finally decided settle down for the “big fish nets”. I am now one of the so called tier 1 company employees. Afterall, if the current project is over, the company would actively search in full swing to depute me on another project. I wont get a pink slip as fast as I would get in a “get-the-job-done-and-go-home” startups.”

Good Startup Hires are Rare

As Rams says:

“There are not that many startup-type techies out there. That’s the simple truth. I am going through my 3rd startup and the reality couldn’t be starker. No, they are not hiding under a rock.”

As Upasana says:

“I am going to have to disagree with several people – Ayush, Ashish (Pocha), etc. above stating founders are stingy. I know at least a dozen including myself willing to give away 10-20% equity + decent monthly cash for a solid hacker. From architects in Yahoo and Amazon, to 1-person IT consulting guys to 3-4 years experienced guys in IT Services company to guys working in a 6 year old American startup’s Indian devcenter – tried them all. You know what? They just cant take the risk! So I dont think badgering Founders for not being open to dole out equity is a good enough reason.

“We got some early employees using a fair equation where some wanted more monthly cash + low equity, others wanted low cash + high equity. The decision was left to them on which package they wanted. We found that one of the guys after working 2-3 months and finding out the real revenue/margin numbers himself wanted to reduce his salary for a higher equity.

“I think smart hackers should know their self worth and also the worth of what they are building. If what they are making is exciting and hard for them may be its worth a pay cut for 2 years with a possible equity upside potential? After all last few months are showing indications of a bright M&A future.”

Ecosystem

Let’s face it – our ecosystem and family mindsets are not ready yet, we know this one and I think these are the “growing pains” of any startup culture. As Gowri puts it:

“These people talk nicely about wanting challenging jobs and new technology and all that, but get lured by ‘social status’ of branded companies and few thousands more.

“I even had one guy who left our company because his future father-in-law did not like that he didn’t work for one the ‘large’ companies!

“One guy resigned because he could not get a good bank loan since the banks were looking for branded or large company employees.”

Geek Out

When I had mentioned that I wish there was a ‘geeks grooming culture’, then the irreverent Pramode C E pointed out that that was exactly his latest venture – and he seems to have had great results in just a month since he started:

I began my new venture of mentoring B.Tech completed students on August 25. The ideas was to take in motivated students, build up their FOSS skills by making them write code/solve problems full-time, and try to use whatever contacts I have with friends and former students in the FOSS community/industry to get them placed with companies who need capable programmers.

Learn more about this on the IC Software website.

The lack of skilled people is an open secret. As Rohit says:

“At a general level, what we see is a clear lack of skills fulfilling each role, be it engg, sales, marketing etc.

“For eg: when we look for an engg. to write features, we only seem to get folks who know to write code. Customer acquisition strategies which many speak about are mostly traditional and nothing innovative. Forget about finding folks who help us scale, there are probably handful of them in India who are already picked up Yahoos and the Googles or now Facebook.”

Let’s hope that Kiran Jonnalagadda and HasGeek can indeed bring these skilled people together and breed a culture of such skills.

Hiring Strategies

Regarding, good hiring strategies for startups, Sameer Guglani has written extensively on this subject on his blog – Hiring method that works, What to look for in startup interviews? and Early employees – Salary & Equity.

Bottom Line

Startups need to pitch why they are better than big companies, it is the same whether it is about the product or about hiring!

As Saurabh Narula puts it:

“As you point out in your statement, hiring for a startup is a lot different than hiring for big companies – attacking the different problem with same mindset often misleads people in the hiring process.”

This has been an enlightening discussion for me, thanks to all of those whom I’ve quoted here (and many whom I’ve not quoted for reasons of length of this article) for their thoughts on this subject

Update: More great insights by Manu J in the comments.

Update 2: See Ravi Mohan’s take on the same.

Update 3: See Stalk Ninja, a unique initiative to whet good students and get them involved with startups.

We’ve all heard about how startups are key to the future economy of India and we’ve heard about how hiring should be a top priority for any company – then why is it that hiring is NOT a majorly discussed issue in startup events in India?

I ask this question because, in fact, it is HARD for startups in Bangalore to hire. The problem is of two extremes: The good folks you would want to hire either become entrepreneurs themselves (full of challenges) OR work for big money in big companies (may not have challenges, but feeds their social status). There seems to be no middle ground where people want to enjoy the work which is full of challenges and also have the stability of a salary and the promise of stocks.

Hiring has become almost impossible for startups – right from IIMB-incubated startups which have full of challenges and exposure to companies like Infibeam which does crores in revenue per year and pays market price salaries.

Where to find such good people?

• What happens to all those people who started startups via iAccelerator and Morpheus Ventures and did not succeed? Do they go into consulting or join a regular job?
• What happens to all the college students who talk enthusiastically about joining startups? What percentage of those students switch to chasing the money because of peer pressure? I’m told majority of students don’t end up joining a startup when they have a higher salary offer from a big company.
• Who are the kinds of people who go to events like DoctypeHTML5? Are they part of startups or are they part of big companies?

I really wish Pluggd.in would setup an anonymous/discreet matchmaking service between “startup-mindset coders” (the scarcity) with good startups (which seems to be in abundance these days, the irony!), i.e. focus on finding good people first, and then promote the available startup jobs.

Maybe the need of the hour for our startup ecosystem is hiring-for-startup events (“get people to get things done”) rather than startup events consisting of motivational speeches (“listen to high-level talk about how to get things done”).

Sometimes I think that what is missing in Bangalore (and in India, in general) is a hackerspace culture and a geeks grooming culture. Let’s hope HasGeek has something up their sleeves…

This is just a thought running in my head which I’m expressing it here – I’ve heard the “Why can’t I hire good people for my startup?” question so often in the past few months, almost on a daily basis these days, that I really needed to get this out of my head and type it out!

On the other hand, if you think hiring for startups in Bangalore is not really an issue, please do advise, many people I know would be interested to know how to go about it

P.S. I’m writing this while I’m listening to sessions at the NASSCOM Product Conclave and can’t help but wonder if all the topics discussed here are even possible without having the right people with you in your venture, after all, the founders can’t do everything by themselves

Note: This article was a result of a discussion with Ram of Metaome, a IIMB-incubated startup. They’re looking for good folks to join them, if you’re interested.

Update: Indus has a different take on this.

81 people have asked me about “Innovation – ways to make people innovate.”

That’s a hard question. Especially because I’m always wary of using such an ambiguous term. And more so, when there are far more qualified people to answer out there.

Since I have been asked the question, I am jotting down my thoughts on the subject here (the usual disclaimers apply):

I think the question really is about how impactful can a person be, rather than this nebulous word called “innovative.” In fact, I hate the word “innovation”, because the focus should be about problem solving.

Innovation (regardless of its definition) is almost always the by-product of a successfully executed product. You don’t start by wanting to be innovative. You start by looking at interesting hard problems. You only end up being innovative. So, Solve the Problem first.

For example, I always find it amusing to see the feedback on isbn.net.in – people have said “It’s awesome! It’s wonderful!” I replied “It’s just a bunch of regexes!” … But it just goes to show that what matters is how much the user values it, not how it is implemented.

Now, back to topic: If you want to be able to attack interesting hard problems, then my honest opinion is that you need to keep this equation in mind:

Creativity x Organization = Impact – Scott Belsky at the 99% Conference

Regarding Creativity / Ideas:

1. “If you think you don’t have any good ideas, that’s because you don’t really have bad ideas. You get one good idea only after you get a hundred bad ideas.” — paraphrasing Seth Godin in his latest book Linchpin.
2. Frequent Inspiration helps. A lot. Keep reading Springwise, Yanko Design, Quirky everyday and you’ll be inspired to “innovate” as well.
3. Observe. “If you’re looking for problems to solve, you’re better off to be around real people whose problems can be solved via your trade (such as software).” — RWW article
4. Follow the Trends, such as Gartner Identifies the Top 10 Consumer Mobile Applications for 2012 and 10 Tech Trends for 2010 — Time , and more importantly the kinds of technology and products that are being created, follow those “cutting edge” technologies that we love to adore and wonder “Wow, how did they come up with this stuff?“

But you have to be careful when ideating, because it is very easy to get into “analysis paralysis”:

Another important thing is to not get so carried away by the shiny new things that you forget the basics:

Regarding Organization / Discipline

1. There is this guy in Adobe Bangalore office who is a “patent machine.” He files for a patent every two weeks. No kidding. And these weren’t only trivial ones either. What was his trick? He spent a dedicated half hour every single day on thinking up new ideas or solving problems. It’s as simple as that. This is called the Seinfeld “Unbroken Chain” philosophy.
2. Body and Mind need a predictable routine and that’s when it’s optimal. And once it has a routine, it is hard for the body and mind to accept any other way. That’s why smokers find it so hard to get out of their addiction, because body and mind is used to it and is craving for it. Same goes for coffee, same goes for writing code, same goes for creating new ideas. It is so ironic that discipline breeds creativity. It’s a truth that we don’t want to accept, because it makes us sound less “human”.
3. Don’t judge an idea to be good or bad until you have tried to manually solve it yourself once or prototyped it. After your first attempt at solving the problem, if you still feel good about it and feel that some pain point has been relieved, then it is a good idea. Take Jack Dorsey’s simple approach to creating as an example: draw out the idea, gauge the right timing, and iterate like mad.

To summarize:

1. Focus on the problem, not the solution. As Dave McClure says: “problem, not solution. customer, not technology. UX, not code. distribution, not PR. acq cost, not revenue projections.”
2. As Seth Godin would say, “Artists who ship” have the most impact. Read Linchpin to internalize it.
3. What is your impact? Can you qualify it? Can you quantify it? Measure it every month – Within 6 months, you will know whether you are “innovative.”

Update #1: Related Reading, as pointed out by Srikanth in the comments: The Discipline of Innovation by Peter Drucker. Looks like I keep reinventing what Drucker has already said.

Update #2: See 10 Laws of Productivity by Behance team.

My alma mater, PESIT (in Bangalore), has an interesting proposition for startups – mentor students and get office space in return.

The background is that they are working to improve the quality of education in the IS / CS departments. One of the ideas they identified was to work with in-industry programmers who can answer questions from students on the innumerable topics out there, from a practical point of view. Of course, GIYF would be your first response, but students who are just starting out need face time and guidance to make them comfortable, even if the answer is going to be “Check this URL.” Some of the kinds of questions you can expect are:

• How can I use the vi editor to edit my file?
• What is CouchDB?
• How can I compile my program better than typing javac myProgram.java?
• How can I use the Facebook OpenGraph API?

The only way for PESIT to make this happen is to get motivated in-industry programmers to spare some of their time to mentor students. And what better way is there than offer office space to startups who can work out of the PESIT campus and mentor students face-to-face right there!

Startups can also get access to clusters of hundreds of machines in the computer labs and even get interested students to work as interns with you!

If this sounds like an opportunity for your startup and an opportunity for you to improve the quality of CS education, then go ahead and write to Mr. Harihara Vinayakaram (visiting lecturer at PESIT) at nextgenerationbangalore [at] gmail.com with “Startup Student Mentor” in the subject line.

I will be speaking in a panel at the HeadStart Conference, Hyderabad today regarding what is the funding that was granted by the Govt. of India to my ex-startup, and how you can apply.

I converted the content I had prepared into for-web-only slides for your perusal:

Yesterday was my last day at IonLab, the company that I built with a few friends. It has been a wild ride but I could continue no longer. I am leaving due to internal differences on the progress and transparency in the company.

We have been well-supported in our experience, right from a Govt. of India grant to being one of the few to be selected as a TiE Entrepreneurship Acceleration Program mentee. We owe special gratitude for the people who made that happen and supported us.

But as any been-there-done-that startupper would expect, we delivered on technology, but we sorely lacked in maturity of management skills.

Simply put:

“Shipping is a feature. A really important feature. Your product must have it.” — JWZ

I can’t explain more because it would then amount to washing dirty linen in public.

Anyway, time to move on. Hopefully second time will be better!

I have been reflecting on many of the experiences I’ve had. So I thought I’d jot down the biggest lessons I learned as a startupper:

Stop reading. Start doing.

For every hour that you read, you must gain 3 hours of experience.

I read so much about entrepreneurship, although only after jumping into the startup. One and a half year later, we had made all the mistakes that those articles warned us about. The problem is not in the reading or understanding, the problem is in internalizing what you read. Wannabe startuppers read all the Paul Graham essays and say “Nah, that’s not going to happen to me, I’m going to be awesome and successful”, but when I read his latest essay What Startups Are Really Like, it felt like he crept into my head at night, stole my experiences and wrote a letter to me. Yes, really, it felt like that. But, of course, you won’t believe me. Until it happens to you.

What was the most common response from the YCombinator startups to Paul Graham?

When I look at the responses, the common theme is that starting a startup was like I said, but way more so.

Read those last few words repeatedly 6 times.

And I repeat, my warning to you is that simply reading A-Z of books and essays is not important, you have to internalize the learnings by testing it out on the field and realizing the value for yourself instead of saying “that makes sense” and forgetting about it a few minutes later.

Empathy matters

It is funny how most people will discourage you from doing a startup, and, today, perhaps because things have changed now because of all the media hype, most of my friends were discouraging me from leaving it now!

There are two aspects to this. First, read The Dip and you will know why I decided to quit. As Seth Godin says in the book, “The old saying is wrong – winners do quit, and quitters do win. Winners quit fast, quit often, and quit without guilt – until they commit to beating the right Dip for the right reasons.”

Second, as one of my friends observed, I talked to about 7 people (both acquaintances and friends) whose judgment I trusted. 3 of them sympathized and agreed with my decision and 4 of them admonished me and asked me to “hang in there.” You know what was the clincher? The first 3 had done startups themselves and the latter 4 had not. The latter 4 did not really understand the context, even though they meant well and are intelligent folks.

Imagine that a decision like this was so hard for friends-who-know-you to understand. Imagine how much empathy you should have for the motivations and work life of your customers!

Business is not a big deal, it’s only a mindset

The day I realized that I had started to think in terms of business was this conversation:

Friend: Hey, I wanted to talk to you about a gadget idea. Most phones have large storage space and bluetooth facility. Most cameras have small storage space. I have both of them on trips. I usually run out of space on the camera. So can there be a gadget similar to a bluetooth dongle that can move photos from the camera to the phone?

Me: Interesting… there is much to evaluate there (for example, I want to understand how much battery power it would eat up, which is the major concern when on a trip). But if you’re thinking about such a product, I think we should skip bluetooth and talk about peer to peer WiFi^*.

Friend: What? Bluetooth is there on every freakin’ phone out there!

Me: Yes, but by the time you build this new gadget, all the devices would have moved to p2p wifi because it means supporting only one standard. Right now, phones have to support two standards – both wifi and bluetooth which is additional hardware and headache for the manufacturers. Since p2p wifi builds on top of the existing wifi standard, it makes business sense for them to standardize on that. Comparatively, the only advantage of bluetooth, AFAIK, is low power consumption, and that factor will reduce with increasing battery life. So, in 1 or 2 years, bluetooth won’t be the in-thing, and that is when the product will be ready if you start now.

Friend: stunned silence

Me: Did I say something wrong??

Friend: You really are a businessman now.

Me: Heh

See? It’s not a big deal, you just have to learn the right mindset. Note that I didn’t say it was easy, I’m simply pointing out it’s simply a different mode of thinking, and it is doable.

I realized that doing a tech business means you should know both tech and business really well (duh). And since I’m not there yet w.r.t. tech, I’m going to stick to that as my core for the next decade. Or at least, that’s the plan. Coding is still my first love. Update: After some thought and discussions with close friends, perhaps I can contribute in additional responsibilities such as product manager-type responsibilities as well.

^* Also see What’s next for Wi-Fi?

Focus matters

A great advice I got from Muki, an entrepreneur was: “Start focusing on three things from day one – relationships, cash flow, balance sheet. You already know how to handle the rest.”

Notice he doesn’t talk about innovation, technology or all those other things. On the same note, the best explanation I’ve seen is that “Innovation is the by-product of a well-executed product”, which brings me to my next point.

“Focus” in the context of startups can be interpreted as good product management skills, which I strongly referred to in my StartupDunia guest post on the recent NASSCOM Product Conclave.

Maintain good relationships with partners, vendors, mentors, and all other folks that you meet in the course of your business. Don’t look at these relationships as opportunistic, look at it as an opportunity to co-create and learn.

Track your cash flow. Yes, you will earn millions later, but if you don’t have money now, you’ll die. You may not realize that the single highest factor why startups die is because of bad cash flow.

Don’t trivialize any aspect

Anything that is not managed will deteriorate, said Bob Parsons.

And it’s very true in this case, whether it is your legal company paperwork (yes, those stuff that you don’t want to be bothered with) or your project timelines (yes, tracking what’s on the critical path is very important, but you already knew that, didn’t you?) or thinking long-term as well as short-term, or networking with similar folks.

We, as tech people, think technology is everything and other people have it easy. I was like that. I learned it the hard way that “Easy is a term you use to define other people’s jobs.” I have a lot of respect for marketing and sales folks now. They have a really tough job, because it is about tenacity and psychology, compared to tech work which is write-once and scalable. Pop quiz: Did you really understand the signifance of that last sentence? If not, go back to my first point.

Have a sense of urgency

For every decision (and you will have a lot more of them than you realize), make sure that you do due diligence but at the same time, have a sense of urgency.

As Tecumseh Sherman said: “A good plan violently executed today is far and away better than a perfect plan tomorrow.”

Bottom-up always wins

This is the single most important learning, if I had to pick one.

Time and again, I’ve observed that bottom-up always beats top-down approach to problems. Note that I’m not discouraging you from planning, but I’m discouraging you from focusing purely on the plan. The plan is a guide to your actions, you should not spend more time on the plan vs. the actions and results!

And you can observe the power of bottom-up thinking time and again, whether it is in terms of societal change or productivity paradigms like GTD or the reason why Wikipedia and open source software are successful. As Linus Torvalds says “Software is grown, not built.” Mull that!

How does this apply to startups? Let us take one specific example: You have a new idea to solve a problem and you want to test if your idea works. If the prototype takes a couple of weeks, then you should go for the prototype. If it will take longer, how do you know that it is worth investing the time? Simple, use Adwords to assess demand for your new product/service. Same thing for doing market research.

Notice that in this example, we first start top-down by ideating and brainstorming, but then switch to bottom-up thinking once the initial plan is done – immediately jump to action by a real evaluation about the need that you are trying to solve. Then decide the second action based on the results of the first action.

How to define failure

This is how I explained failure to a friend: You walk into a new restaurant, and try the food. It can be good or bad. But you still have to pay the bill! You don’t know whether your effort is going to succeed or not, but you still have to put in the effort.

And the friend replied: The problem with most people is, they don’t want to risk eating bad food, that’s why they keep going to the same restaurant, even if they are bored of it!

When to call yourself an entrepreneur

I have this personal demarcation that I will call myself an entrepreneur when I have (1) created something new (2) made money. Until then, I’m a startupper (someone who has done or been in a startup).

This is the End

Hope these reflections are useful for future startuppers and entrepreneurs. All the best! (also see 10 things I wish I was serious about before starting a startup)

As for me, I’m cash-strapped (Didn’t I say lessons learned?), and hence looking for a job (product manager or senior technical role). Do let me know if there are any interesting opportunities out there.

Update on January 15, 2010: I joined Infibeam.
Update on July 04, 2011: Interestingly, Splitterbug is a YCombinator 2011 Summer Batch startup that is pursuing the very same idea. Just goes to show that the idea had and still has potential.

The irony in this world is that “To get somewhere, you already have to be there.”

From an individual perspective:

• If you want to make money, you need to already have money.
• To get a job, you need to be one-year experienced and not a fresher.
• If you’re experienced and want to apply for a job that you really want to work on, you should already have the background of working in that area, and you should already know how to do all that the job entails.
• If you want to write a book, publisher expects you to have already written a book before.
• To be listened to, you need to be an expert, not an amateur, but how do you eventually become an expert if you’re never listened to?

From a startup perspective:

• If you want to get funding, your startup should be in a position to not need funding.
• If you want to stock your product in ezone, you should not be a 1-product company, but a 5-product company.

And on and on.

To get somewhere, you already have to be there.

P.S. I’m not condemning, condoning or approving of the situation. Just making an observation.

Here is a guy who sells dosas and rice items in his push cart every evening.

I didn’t realize that he was my entrepreneurial benchmark until my friend explained it to me:

• He has at least 100 customers everyday because he is there for 4-5 hours every evening, and we’ve never seen him without customers.
• 100 customers * 40 rupees per customer = 4000 rupees per day
• 4000 rupees per day * 30 days = 1,20,000 rupees per month
• ⇒ A roadside push cart wallah makes more than a lakh a month!

And he doesn’t intend to go to VCs any time soon

It’s only when you get into this entrepreneurship thing that you realize how hard it is to make money.

I hope every wannabe will plan to have at least as good as this guy’s cash flow ASAP for their startup.

I have a guest post up at StartupDunia. Please do read and chip in your thoughts and comments.