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

First and foremost, thanks to all who encouraged me, and offered support and help when I wrote about leaving my own company. Many people, without any personal benefit in mind, connected me to very interesting opportunities. And this is exactly how I got my next gig.[1]

What was specifically amazing to me was that folks were connecting me to opportunities that I would not have heard of otherwise, and enthusiastically vouching for me. Now that was really humbling. Within two weeks of my blog post, I had a job! And I didn’t even have to look for it, so thank you guys. As Seth Godin put it, who needs a resume indeed!

InfiBeam

So where am I joining? InfiBeam – which I can best describe as “Amazon of India.”[2]

So why am I excited about InfiBeam?

In my previous startup, I experienced the phase of starting from scratch till creating a product. Unfortunately, I did not get to see the second part, the business side of things, including the hard part of selling, the act of knowing the customer, the logistics and operations, etc. I was still yearning for that.

At the same time, getting to see this second phase a few years later would not have made sense because I would’ve lost the enthusiasm and momentum that I have at this point in time. So, in that sense, I’m really excited about InfiBeam because I’ll get to be part of this second phase.

Second, I was specifically looking for companies in “core” areas, in the sense, someone who makes consumer products and services in India for India, and specifically, either ecommerce or mobile. And, voila, the universe conspired.

Third, I was being cautious and really looking to understand the people in the company and not only what the company makes. After all, it’s only the people aspect which makes or breaks your experience and enthusiasm. And I spent quite a bit of time interacting with the people I would potentially work with, and I came out of the discussions very happy.

Fourth, what I especially liked most about the company was their customer focus as well as the focus of building the right culture inside the company. It’s very hard for startups to focus on these soft aspects, because it easily gets sidelined compared to the hectic everyday.

There were quite a few opportunities that I explored, but I intuitively felt that InfiBeam was the place to be. And I went ahead with that gut instinct.

Both Business and Tech

And, as an example of a great fit for me, my job description says that I have to take up any product or strategy and deliver it end-to-end from the business model to the technical implementation.

I had thoughts of shifting back to pure coding at first, but then decided a business focus is indeed a good thing, and something I wish I had taken seriously right at the start of my career (better late than never!). For example, quoting from a recent Deccan Herald article: > It cites Nasscom study which states that India faces IT talent shortfall of between 8,00,000 and 1.2 million workers by 2012. It observes that, though many producers continue to work with universities, government and other firms to improve the quality of technology education, and Asian countries continue to produce large numbers of IT employees, they, however, lag in comparison with North America and Europe in providing well-rounded technology education. Among Asian economies, the concern is that education systems puts too much focus on pure IT skills and not enough on IT in the business context. Likewise, top schools in the US and Europe, which do better in this area, face long-term challenges in cultivating science and technical engineering skills of its younger students. Thus, globally, the study posits that investment in skills development remains long-term imperative.

If it feels scary…

I am positive about this gig because I will be forced to become good at what I do because of the quality of people I work with, and knowing that you’re in a good environment when you consider yourself the dumbest guy in the room.

In such situations, I keep quoting Jeff Atwood:

If it feels scary, it’s the right choice.

Wish me luck!

[1] Specifically, a shout of thanks to Nimish Adani of Workosaur.

[2] Yes, this was a way of skipping the topic that, yes, InfiBeam’s current web design looks similar to that of Amazon.com design. Yes, I don’t like it too. It is a distraction which prevents potential users to proceed to the next step of appreciating the amazing services provided by InfiBeam.

Update on Jan 31, 2010: InfiBeam has launched the first Indian ebook store and the first Indian ebook reader.

There was this guy who had come in for interviews for a technical role. He passed all the tech interviews with flying colors, the team liked his personality and felt he would fit in well, and the manager was all smiles. In the last HR-style round with the group head, he was informed that the team works on products that are completely owned by the Bangalore-based group and that there won’t be any travel to USA. The guy was taken aback. He told the group head “Sir, please let me go to USA for just one day. If I have a USA stamp in my passport, I will get one crore dowry.”

Needless to say, the guy was not offered a job.

I’m sure you can draw your own lessons and observations from this incident, because it will come into context below, about a discussion we’ve been having on Twitter. It all started with @debabrata who read my previous blog post on the magic of foss.in and asked:

why this ‘5 years limit’ applies to Indian software pro ? In other countries people are happy being programmer after 20 years .

I asked the tweeps for their opinions, and it got very interesting.

@cruisemaniac said: society defined age to get married and settle down = ~27 = 22+5 failing which u’re an outcast! and: also, post that age, ur risk apetite goes down due to family and other commitments…

to which:

@HJ91 said: True. Very true. Outcast is the right word, and its sad. Outcast. Insulting, hurting and pathetic.

Wow, this feeling runs deep.

so I asked:

You mean risk appetite or time commitment? … how does risk appetite relate to interest in coding?

And the replies came pouring in:

@mixdev: One of the reasons why brilliant people end up being (just) tell-me-whatto-do-n-leave-me-alone software engineers

@cruisemaniac: I’d say both… U cant risk a new tech and venture 4 fear of financial security… U want tat cozy safe zone and pay packet.

@cruisemaniac: time is a big costly commodity 4 us… we indians cant afford to spend it at our will with spouses and children at home…

@mallipeddi: It’s very hard to keep getting bigger paychecks yr after yr if you’re a 30 yr old coder. You’re expected to become a mgr/MBA

@abhinav: I believe the reason is our society. We tie success to degrees, and later, more ppl you manage more successful you are.

@abhinav: Where in western societies your idea fails, here it is you who have failed! Our society doesnt appreciate risk takers

@abhinav: Yes, more money, higher status, easy life. And most importantly, more dowry!

@mixdev: Because our goals are set by the society & achieving them also in their control. You get bored faster.

@debabrata: I guess to the great extent our society dictates us what we want to be unlike the west

I found it surprising that the situation why people cannot remain coders in India is almost the same as why people want to become entrepreneurs! It’s like this: The passion for coding will remain only when you’re doing cool and interesting stuff. But big companies (at least in India) want only stability which implies boring tedious jobs with standard languages and libraries. There is no room for experimentation. So the coder will have to move to a smaller company or a startup if he/she wants to continue to like coding (I’m ignoring the case of research laboratories for obvious reasons of numbers).

But moving to a smaller company or startup is, by definition, not encouraged. As @abhinav mentioned, there is societal pressure for more money, higher status, fancier cars and bigger houses. There is nothing wrong with wanting this, but don’t force it on other people! Alas, it is hard to reason regarding this. I remember having a long argument with an uncle of mine, he was, hmm, “strongly” suggesting that I buy a car and I reasoned out why it makes no sense (after all, most peers of mine use the car only for weekend drives, not for everyday commute) but it fell on deaf ears.

So I’m conflicted here: Are there not enough people who are actually interested in coding, or is it that the interested people are being peer-pressurized into “moving up” into managerial roles and hence lose touch with coding? Or are we completely off the mark here?

Update 1: As suggested by Peter, read this entry tited “Stuck in Code” by Ravi Mohan for his tale on this topic.

Update 2: A related article in NYTimes recently titled “In India, Anxiety Over the Slow Pace of Innovation”

The Good

Attending foss.in/2009 felt great for me because I took comfort in the fact that there are still people out there who are passionate about code and passionate about software. That is becoming rarer and rarer off late. I think it’s the “5 year limit” that I have observed in batchmates, most of them don’t want to code any more, and have moved on to so many other fields. While that is okay, the problem is that it has become a fashion to dis IT and software field.

Another factor was that everything is in the cloud and everything is a website these days, so does open source as a process matter anymore? First of all, the applications are not open source and even if we have the code (rare situation), you and I can’t fix the application/website unless you host it yourself.

But the foss.in community made me remember the joy of coding and joy of hacking.

Kudos to Team Foss.in for making the only community event and only IT event that is worth attending. It was fantastic to see how the concept of workouts had just taken off. And everyone’s been saying that all the keynotes have been fantastic.

In case you are wondering, I’m not the only one who was so enthralled by the event, for example:

See Lakshman’s writeup on the same. And so on.

Bottom line? Shut up and hack!

The Bad

Will miss the direction of Atul Chitnis.

What was missing

What I felt was missing is a discussion on the state of the art of software in each field, not just specific PoTDs. And I think this is more of a community perspective rather than the organizers’ perspective — organizers just provide the platform, community provides the content, as Atul keeps reminding us.

For example, consider my pet topic, the state of NoSQL databases – what’s good, what’s not, is it strange or expected that so many of them have come up in the last 1-2 years and all of them are open source (or at least the ones that we hear of). Taking it a step further, how it affects other fields of software. I’ve attempted to ask this before in a session at barcamp on whether webapp frameworks will adapt to NoSQL.

Similarly, what is the future of compilers, will LLVM + clang replace GCC (as @artagnon was speculating)? Will WebKit and V8 take over the world and leave Mozilla + Tracemonkey behind? Why are there so few projects using AGPL? What does it take to get full database dumps out of Wikipedia ? Will open source phones never take off? How does Eucalyptus help have an alternative with EC2? How does appscale help have an alternative to GAE? And so on.

In toto, I think there are three parts to this and I believe only the third part of which is done well already by the community and organizers: (1) what are the different fields and layers of software, (2) what is the state of the art of open source software in those fields, (3) getting people started and involved. I feel that only when we think on these lines, we will achieve Atul’s stated vision of “open source being the mainstream, proprietary software being the special case”*.

Thoughts?

* No flamewars please. I believe that the world will be better off by having all the infrastructure as open source software and having only the business logic / trade secrets as the proprietary part. At each stage of evolution of software, the stack grows higher, and the infrastructure/open source stack can grow higher along with it. For example, Robot Open Source and the Hadoop umbrella.

All the successful apps that are making money are transaction-based. For example, ngpay takes a cut from every movie ticket you buy through it. This is only possible for entertainment-oriented apps. The only other successful ones that I see are, of course, communication apps such as Gmail app. I see almost nobody using utility applications on their phones.

Things can improve only if internet-on-mobile was affordable! I think we need 3G for mobile app market to grow in India, but it is delayed yet again (Apparently, the government is not satisfied with the expected 250 billion rupees).

Let’s take a look at few numbers:

• 93.2% of Vodafone India subscribers are prepaid customers, which means it is unlikely they subscribe to monthly fees for internet-on-mobile. Right?
• 96% of Urban Indian mobile users are not accessing the Internet and 48% of Urban India mobile users accessed the Internet on their mobile only 1-3 times a month, on average!

Of course, there is no denying that there is growth year-over-year, but for an entrepreneur, it is not enough yet. Because you can’t build yet-another-social-network nor can you build content unless you have tie-ups with the big movie/music companies. The top websites in India for internet-on-mobile conform to the core needs list that I wrote about earlier, especially entertainment. The free wallpapers from zedge.net seems to be the hottest thing right now. Or as Rajesh Jain keeps stressing (and practises), focus on SMS and Voice for now.

Let’s hope the IAMAI will help things move forward.

Even when we get affordable internet-on-mobile, I wonder if ad-supported free applications will be the only popular ones always. Where’s the money?

Maybe I completely mistaken or I’m just whiny, because MediaNama paints a much brighter picture, from comics to unlimited music for Rs. 99/month to movie rental and chocolates. Hah! There is a gotcha there — all those announcements are from big guys. Where are the mobile app startups?

I am planning to attend Silicon India’s Mobile Conference this month to gain more perspective on this.

To round things up, here are some rough notes that I jotted down when Karthee Madasamy of Qualcomm Ventures talked about How to make a winning mobile startup at an OCC Meet on Aug 15. It was probably the only time I felt hopeful that a mobile app startup is possible today.

• Understand the status quo. Don’t do the status quo.
• If there are hurdles, that’s your opportunity. Otherwise, others would’ve taken advantage already.
• India 400 million mobile phone users.
• Segment the customer. Otherwise, big companies will be already on it.
• Don’t aim for 1% of ocean. Go for 50% of a small market that you undertand well.
• Don’t do today’s technology. Go for future. Don’t be 10% better, be significantly better.
• Do you have something unique that gives you strengths? Have a honest discussion on the problems and future competitors and your strengths.
• Can you partner with others in the ecosystem, support their weaknesses, and together be more strong.
• Ecosystem problems – operators, heterogenity of platforms and mobile phone capabilities, difficulty in educating customers, no Internet on mobile, etc.
• Only way a startup will succeed is by discovering a latent demand or latent technology.
• If operators are critical to the ecosystem, obviously they will charge more money! Why is that a problem because they are giving value back. Get the first million customers yourself and the operators will put red carpet for you. Startups’ strength is to turn the tables!
• Find a mechanism of educating customer about value of the product and that will obviate the need for operators.
• If only 40 million mobile Internet users, you only need half a million users to break through the barriers! People will come after you.
• Assume cost of building product or app is zero. Only building half a million customers is something.
• 120 million capable phones today. India is a fast market. Imagine 2 years later.
• Startups should change the game to their advantage. At the same time, it is NOT a zero-sum game. Make a win-win partnership. Both people should profit.
• Don’t complain about market research. Ultimately, you HAVE to understand the market better than anybody. Be resourceful. Also, accuracy is not important, the direction of the market growth is more important.
• Don’t go to VCs without 20,000-30,000 users.
• Can you scale up to 20 million dollars revenue? Then you’ll get your pay-off.
• Startups need to think how to beat the big guys.
• Make a state-of-the-art technology or business model and ask people to pay premium for it.
• First step for product management is segmentation.
• Make it clear to yourself about how you’re reaching your target customers. Don’t do it in a haphazard manner.
• Read about Ron Coase economist why companies exist.
• Read about Teece theory on who captures value in technology.

• “Today, the average age of India’s population is below 25 years. Approximately, 77 crore of our people, or about 70 percent of the population, fall below the age of 35.”

From Tracking The Growth of India’s Middle Class:

• “Over the next 20 years, India will likely grow to become the world’s fifth-largest consumer economy.”
• “If India can achieve 7.3 percent annual growth—a reasonable assumption if economic reforms continue—consumer spending will quadruple, from about 17 trillion Indian rupees ($372 billion) in 2005 to 70 trillion rupees in 2025. The dramatic growth in India’s middle class, from 50 million to 583 million people, will power this surge.”

From “Tainted money” by Devinder Sharma:

• “In India, 77% of the population is able to spend only Rs 20 a day.”

From Atanu Dey :

• “Today one of out every two children below five is malnourished”

From Shashi Tharoor :

• “Anything that you say about India, the opposite is also true. But India is more than the sum of its contradictions.”
• “600 million people don’t have electricity”
• “260 million are below poverty line, i.e., < 30 rupees per day”
• “400 million illiterates”
• “540 million people < 25 years”
• “60 million child labourers”
• “72% of children in govt. schools drop out before 8th standard”
• “IT employs a total of 5 million people, but 10 million people enter workforce each year”

Feel free to draw your own conclusions.

Only Capt. Gopinath (Independent) had arrived on time. Ananth Kumar (BJP) arrived a bit late but immediately greeted each and every individual in the hall and asked them to vote. When the organizers decided to go ahead even though there were only 2 candidates, Prof. Radhakrishna of JD(S) arrived. Krishna Byregowda (Congress) never turned up at all.

The session was mostly about questions asked by Mohandas Pai (Times of India) to the candidates and gave them roughly a minute each to answer.

Most of the questions were good and thankfully the answers were also forthcoming.

IMHO, Prof. Radhakrishna was rambling more than making sense. Since Krishna Byregowda didn’t show up, I don’t know much about him even though he has spoken well in interviews. Ananth Kumar and Capt. Gopinath were both impressive, made a lot of sense and had vision. It is going to be very tough to choose between these two candidates for me.

Plus points for Ananth Kumar include that he has been an MP four times, been the Civil Aviation Minister, etc. and he answered questions to the point. He indulged in rhetoric about why Congress has brought India down, and why things were great during Vajpayee’s tenure – ignoring these aspects, he seemed like a good candidate.

Plus points for Capt. Gopinath include that he has been an entrepreneur himself – Deccan Aviation made flying possible for the average person, he has been in the army and fought a war in Kashmir, and he voices Bangaloreans’ concerns well. He was vocal about the state of the Metro and questioned why trees in Lalbagh has to be cut down, and the whole crowd cheered for that statement.

Towards the end of the session, the audience also got turns to ask questions, but it turned out to be rhetorical provoking questions rather than questions with real value.

For more details about Bangalore candidates, read the full interviews at SmartVote.in. I’m sure there are more sites out there for the other constituencies in India.

I think there are two takeaways from the day for me.

First, vote for the candidate, not the party. If you think voting for an independent candidate is going to be a “waste” of your vote, think again. Is it better to have 500 excellent people in the Lok Sabha regardless of which party they belong to, or is it better to have 500 people, whose usefulness is doubtful, belonging to 2-3 big parties in the Lok Sabha?

There are good people stepping into politics trying to make a difference and we should encourage them. After all, we don’t jump into politics, let us support those who do. For example:

1. Rajeev Chandrasekhar, who was an engineer in the team that built the first-ever Intel CPU chip, founded BPL Mobile way back in 1994, CEO of Jupiter Capital VC company, and is now a Rajya Sabha MP (Website, Twitter)
2. Capt. Gopinath, as I already mentioned (Website, Twitter)
3. Mallika Sarabhai who is a noted Indian classical dancer, has a Ph.D and an MBA, and is now dipping into politics as well. Just listen to her, she makes so much common sense. (Website, Twitter)
4. Dr. Shashi Tharoor who has served as the Under-Secretary of the United Nations, is the author of 10 books, and won several journalism awards. (Website, Blog at HuffingtonPost, Twitter)
5. Meera Sanyal, chairperson and country executive of ABN Amro bank. (Website)

And so on.

These are well-qualified and well-off candidates who I believe are in a better position to serve the public. As Capt. Gopi insisted, he wants to do his own business as well as work in politics because unlike others, he does not want to make politics itself a business for him.

Second takeaway from the day was that the biggest problem is not the candidates or the system, it is the apathy and indifference of the voters. I’ve heard various statistics that less than one-third of the people in Bangalore actually go out and vote, which directly relates to why the politicians cater to those who actually do vote, then how can we complain that nothing is being done about the infrastructure?

If things continue as-is, our public life will go on deteriorating while we expect our private enterprises to continue prospering in spite of all the social problems.

As Deccan Herald put it:

You’ve got the dope,
you are the antidote;
Shut up and vote.

Please spend a few minutes off of IPL and think about why you are/are not voting, think about why people around you are/are not voting, and think about the candidate that you are voting for. See How to choose your Member of Parliament for guidelines.

If all this wasn’t food for thought, may be some cynicism (or astute observations, depending on your point of view) by The Comic Project is what you need:

Last but not the least, the election dates are listed on Wikipedia and you can follow the social media conversations at Blog Adda.

Update : Despite all the media attention and campaigning, 54% of Bengaluru did NOT vote. I am ashamed of Bengaluru at this moment.

I had grown up among engineers, and I could remember the engineers of the twenties very well indeed: their open, shining intellects, their free and gentle humor, their agility and breadth of thought, the ease with which they shifted from one engineering field to another, and, for that matter, from technology to social concerns and art. Then, too, they personified good manners and delicacy of taste; well-bred speech that flowed evenly and was free of uncultured words; one of them might play a musical instrument, another dabble in painting; and their faces always bore a spiritual imprint.

– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in his book “The Gulag Archipelago”

Though the Lok Sabha elections are just a month away, more than 50 per cent of voters in Bangalore still do not have Electoral Photo Identity Cards (EPIC).

Ramakrishna blamed lackadaisical attitude of citizens, especially software professionals, for low EPIC coverage. “People working in IT and BT firms show indifference towards EPIC. Even though our officials go to their doorstep on weekends, they do not respond. They say that EPIC is of no use of them,” he pointed out.

However, there has been a good response from those living in slums, the official added.

– Deccan Herald on March 20, 2009

• VentureWoods
• Pluggd.in ‘coffee’ forum
• Pluggd.in ecosystem section
• Hello Intern
• Sutra Jobs
• Indian Jobs board at ‘Joel On Software’
• Barcamp Mumbai Startup Jobs section
• NEN Startup Jobs section
• Startup Lunches, part of proto.in
• Startup Dunia     [added to this list on Mar 17, 2009]
• Talentty     [added to this list on Mar 28, 2009]
• Work For A Startup     [added to this list on May 15, 2009]
• My Special Job     [added to this list on May 15, 2009]
• Workasaur     [added to this list on Nov 18, 2009]

Are there other resources that should be on this list? Please let me know in the comments.

There are other questions I’m wondering as well:

• Which are the popular places followed by the startuppers who are looking to hire interns, freshers and experienced people?
• For passionate students/freshers who want to work in startups, where do they start? Should they just apply via these sites or should they first do in-person networking at OpenCoffeeClub, Startup Saturday and similar meeting grounds first?

These days I’m finding it hard to read Kannada newspapers because my vocabulary is clearly lacking, and consequently I would probably never get to read novels by Kannada novelists like Shivaram Karanth and other respected writers.

On the other side, there has been an influx of a lot of people from outside Karnataka into Bengaluru in the past few years. Since you can easily get by in Bengaluru with English or Hindi, most of them don’t learn Kannada even though many of them would like to.

What if there were word lists for Kannada just like GRE/TOEFL to improve people’s vocabulary? But in a more fun setting on the lines of what DailyLit is doing – they email you 1-2 pages of a book each day, so if you read your email each day, you’ll end up reading a book as well.

It can also be done similar to what @rajeshlalwani has done with his hindi word of the day series on twitter.

If there is already a service like this, please let me know, I’ll sign up.