Smart Techie Startup City
Yesterday, I attended The Smart Techie Startup City event. It was intended as a showcase of startups as well as for learning/sharing/mentoring.
I had taken some notes during the day. As I was expanding it into a blog post, I realized I was just adding filler words which was a waste of bits, so here it is as-is:
- Ashish Gupta, Helion VC on “Concept to Success : Milestones for
startups”
- India is a startup (positive way of looking at things)
- High energy
- Lots of growth
- Small absolute number (relatively)
- Little infrastructure or process
- Lack of talent
- Lots of optimism
- Need to innovate to survive
- ⇒ Once in a lifetime opportunity
- Significant change in dynamics (negative way of looking at it)
- Whatever can be made efficient will be done so.
- We can in turn get bangalored and some other country will benefit.
- Creative folks will thrive.
- ⇒ We have no choice.
- Whatever can be made efficient will be done so.
- Hardest evolutionary steps
- Those that requires behavior change
- For example, starting to think “Become cash flow positive”
- Next level CEO, process, tech, business model, etc.
- Those that requires behavior change
- Put in place metrics to measure everything - will help identify whether one has already hit an inflection point.
- Rules of thumb
- Focus on customer/issue
- Focus on continuous improvement
- Intellectual honesty
- Results matter - only for MEASURING (measure progress on a larger scale)
- ⇒ Same rules for person, family, company
- India is a startup (positive way of looking at things)
Avenue Road
People often say there’s nothing much to see in Bangalore. But if you get to know some of the old parts of Bangalore, you’ll slowly start to see something special. Avenue Road is one such place:
This mini documentary was created by my friend Vineetha who was a business analyst at an IT software services company some time back and today is a journalist at CNBC!
The Sunfeast 10K run
I did the Sunfeast 10K Open Run today. I finished in 1 hr 10 min 26 sec. Finally, a timing I am happy about.
Best of all, it was a good run. I didn’t have any of my usual performance anxiety symptoms, mostly because I made sure that I didn’t plan or think about the run. I’d just get up late, hurry and reach the place, just wait to run and hope everything goes well.
I’m thankful that it worked out exactly to a T and it was a good run. A really feel-good steady-pace run.
I needed an extra boost in the end to bear the searing sun and that was provided by “Get Up! Go Insane!”. Thanks Fatboy Slim!
There were people running for their charities, people running for fun, people running in costumes, and even people running out of curiosity. I was running to fight against my off-late tendency to give up easily.
On a different note, I must appreciate how well-organized the entire event was. After the run, they gave everyone bun and biscuits. It may not mean much in a normal situation, but after a run, it’s really important and I was thankful they had thought to this level of detail.
After I came out of the Kanteerava stadium (the start and end point of the run), I bumped into an old school mate after a really long time. He looked at me and asked:
Him: Oh so you came for the run?
Me: Yeah
Him: So you completed?
Me: Yeah…
Him: (has the ‘not bad’ look) So how long did you take?
Me: 70 min.
Him: Oh. (face expression changes) I took 90 min. Okay. cya later.
So next time, don’t underestimate that fat people can’t run.
Running is the greatest metaphor for life, because you get out of it what you put into it.
– Oprah Winfrey
Barcamp Bangalore 6 Day 2
Day 2 of Barcamp Bangalore No. 6 (Apr 20 Sun) started off on a pleasant note because I just had to stop and admire the greenery of the IIMB campus.
Had an impromptu discussion on development on Nokia Phones with Ashwin and another person who worked in Nokia. Surprised to hear that it costs so much!
Then, attended a session on “Pattern Labs” who are trying to create a better knowledge base for GAP, a conglomerate of NGOs for sustainable development. What they’re trying to achieve was quite admirable and definitely needed, but for the life of me, I just couldn’t understand what they’re trying to do in this Pattern Labs and what kind of software they’re trying to develop.
This was followed by a 5-10 min discussion on Web 2.0 for K-12 education, it was interesting to note that there were few success stories where kids used a wiki to collaboratively write a poem using the “diamond pattern” they teach in school and were benefited by this approach.
Then Rajiv Poddar initiated a discussion on the legal status of VoIP in India and why there should be a correction. Basically, VoIP calls cannot reach a PSTN/PLMN i.e. landline or mobile phones in India. Why? Because it will hurt VSNL’s revenues. An equally relevant issue is that VSNL is the only gateway in India trying to control all traffic for no real reason. But why is VoIP important? Because it makes phone calls damn inexpensive and there are many innovations that can be done around it - right from system integration to enabling live voice discussions for a website, all at a low cost.
Rajiv equated this situation to the telephony space - the government was afraid that BSNL won’t make money, but once the space was opened, everyone now knows the story of the rapid growth of telephony and communication in India, after all India is the fastest growing market. It did more good than harm.
Previously I had known that there are some legal issues with VoIP but had never ventured to learn about it until I happened to walk into this session. A group called Voice of VoIP was created on the spot to take the discussion forward and see if something can be done about it.
Then I went into a session on Scoping, Closures and Objects in Javascript. The speaker Venkatesh Choppella was a professor at IIIT, Trivandrum and held a Ph.D in computer languages. I was mighty impressed that there are such lecturers out there! Interestingly, he teaches JavaScript as the first language for some of his classes at his university. I learned a bit about JavaScript and language theory.
Then, Vinayak Hegde had an interesting session on High performance websites. Again, the crowd had a lively discussion on tips and tricks right from something called “CSS sprites” to using YSlow, Minify, Expires Headers, ETags, and so on.
And in between all this, I met many people. In fact, when we were mingling, few of us decided to go to the Coffee Day outlet in the next building to get something cold. It was such a sultry weather. And there we found, Shourya and another college student (Jayanth?) playing guitars and singing Def Leppard songs!
There were some amazingly funny and insightful discussions going on as well, many of which I can’t write here, but I’ll especially remember Kushal Das’ stories. I never thought someone had the guts to pull off giving an Intel 865 motherboard to his girlfriend on Valentine’s Day! And they even have fights over GCC. Wow, that’s like a geek’s dream, right? Anyway, I wish him all the best, hope they’re together for a long time and more.
The day ended with a feedback session on the good, bad and ugly of Barcamp. Most people had suggestions and cribs but they said they got used to it once they understood the idea of how Barcamps work - it’s meant to be not organized and scheduled properly. Things should happen on-the-fly. And again, people asked for video archives of the sessions because they missed many due to the parallel tracks. Simple answer - get a video camera and record. If 4-5 people can volunteer, the problem is solved. The real problem is not enough people willing to do these things. Barcamp works only when everyone pitches in, whether you are initiating a session, volunteering or at least putting your name on the wiki.
There were more discussions, but in the end people agreed that the current format is great and nothing needs to be changed for number 7.
Bottom line: Adjust maadi. Don’t make it a “conference”!
There are only a few things that can get me high - running, passionate techie discussions, meeting new people, and interesting and insightful conversations. I had a good dose of all of these in two days, so BCB6 was simply well-spent time for me. And it looks like many other campers feel the same way as well.
P.S. If you want to be updated on when’s the next barcamp, just follow the mailing list and the website.
Barcamp Bangalore 6 Day 1
For the uninitiated, Barcamp is an “unconference” which means its a place where people meet, but all the usual rules of a conference do not apply (hence the ‘un’). The best part about any conference is usually the hallway crowds where people say hi and end up engaging in some of the most passionate discussions. Imagine if a conference had only hallway discussions as an agenda - You want to discuss something? Great, go write the topic on a post-it and stick it on the wall in the available time slots. That’s what Barcamp is.
Barcamp actually started off as a response to the FOOcamp i.e. Friends of O’Reilly Camp to which only the crème de la crème were invited and others had to stay out. So people like Tantek and Messina got together and decided to make a new “for the people, by the people” format which was the exact opposite of FOOcamp. And since programming has had “foo” and “bar” as standard variable names in examples, they called it “barcamp”. That’s right, it’s got nothing to do with alcohol. Now, Barcamps have become a worldwide phenomenon.
Day 1 of Barcamp Bangalore #6 (Apr 19 Sat) started with an introduction session where everyone stands up and explains what sessions they’ll be initiating at which room or “dari” and at what time. This itself was an indicator of how the next 2 days were going to be.
Since we techies are traditionally not used to getting up early on time, the sessions started half an hour late. In any case, the whole crowd started mingling.
The first actual session I attended was Kaashif demonstrating self-defence. Seriously. He explained that he has had unsavoury experiences at places like Marathahalli at night and its important to know how to defend yourself, not that you should go looking for trouble. He explained things well right from what are your opponents weak points regardless of their size to the three basic steps - do the defend action, do the ’shout/cry’ that happens when you hit with force, and then run.
For step 3, people had to come to our running discussion. That went better than I would have expected.
The rest of the day was of two parts for me - fleeting in and out of discussions and meeting people.
One thing about Barcamp is the no-holds-barred discussions. Diplomacy has no place here, let’s talk what you are really thinking. For example, there are many startups showcasing their products and taking feedback. One such startup that I witnessed was LifeInLines. The crowd, sorry to say this, literally murdered them. They were like “This is just twitter minus rss plus privacy controls. Is there anything else?” and the guys had a hard time convincing them of the value in their website. It reminded me of the recent discussion on Aren’t There Real Problems To Solve? Any way, I think this is the perfect reason why startups should showcase at Barcamp - you’re not going to get more brutal and more honest feedback than here.
Then I met a lot of interesting people. For example, Anand Bora who has an interesting passion called “mathematical art”. Wow, I didn’t even know such stuff existed. While we were talking, he scribbled something on a box and showed me, it was my name ‘Swaroop’. Then he turned the box around, it still read ‘Swaroop’! Wow again. Apparently, they’re called ambigrams and he’s done many of these. We had a long discussion about life and thoughts and where we’ll be in 5 years. And a few hours before that, I didn’t even know him.
Then bumped into people like Vid Ayer, Arun and a guy from Cisco, and they asked me about my ’startup’ experiences. This topic was a story by itself, so I’ll write about it separately. What was interesting, was putting faces to names. I’ve seen the name ‘Vid Ayer’ on mailing lists and blogs, but now I get to actually meet the person. This trend continued in the twitter meetup as well.
I think the ‘dari’ idea was awesome - just a bunch of carpets where people can sit and gather around. The discussions varied from “The Great Dating Session” to “Lessons from Kamasutra, not that kind” to writing Mozilla applications. Heck, even the sessions varied from raising awareness of the girl child issue to asynchronous i/o.
The only problem is that sometimes there were no topics of interest to me and sometimes there were 3 things happening in parallel and I wanted to attend all of them. But, yeah, that’s a problem that can’t be solved.
The whole day was fun. I couldn’t wait to get back to Day 2.
Why You Should Run
One fine day, I was running by myself. It was a few weeks before Barcamp Bangalore 5. I got an idea that I should talk about a non-techie topic at Barcamp since I’ve been giving tech talks for the past few years and I wanted a change of pace. I brainstormed many ideas on the reason for the talk, what to say and how to explain, etc. all during that one run.
Unfortunately I couldn’t attend BCB5. But I stored the notes in a safe place. And when BCB6 was announced, I wanted to be sure to talk this time around.
A few weeks back, Ramjee called me and asked whether we can talk about running. I smiled and thought to myself “Great minds think alike”. Or at least “Runners think alike”.
So I made a ppt and we landed at Barcamp on Saturday morning. We had never discussed the presentation. And we were going to give a session on it. Truly unconference style.
Note: The slides below have been modified to make it useful for a web audience. It has a lot more text now.
| DownloadBarcamp crowds are very inquisitive and so we didn’t actually go past half the slides, which is actually a good thing. Instead, we discussed a wide range of things about running right from finding good places to run to trouble with dogs.
In spite of the delays causing us to start at 12:45 (which means almost lunch time) the discussion went on till 1:45 and 90% of the 30-40 odd crowd were present till the end. When we went to grab what was left of lunch, lot of people asked us questions including how to avoid knee pain (tip: it’s the shoes). Since questions are always a good sign, I think it was a successful discussion.
We both still consider ourselves amateurs at running but at the end of the day its an activity we like and Barcamp is a perfect platform to talk about our passions.
Oh, and if you’re still not a believer, I’ll end with a quote:
Games require skill. Running requires endurance, character, pride, physical strength, and mental toughness. Running is a test, not a game. A test of faith, belief, will, and trust in ones self. So hardcore that it needs a category all to itself to define the pain. When game players criticize, it’s because they aren’t willing to understand, not because they’re stronger. Running is more than a sport; it’s a lifestyle. If you have to ask us why we run, you’ll never understand, so just accept.
– Jessica Propst
Update: SlideShare decided to make it a Barcamp spotlight presentation:
The online slides has had 1274 views and 116 downloads as of this writing (2008-05-04 Sun 10:04 PM).
Two unofficial traffic rules in India
- Ignore all honking. Most of the honking is by nincompoops who want
to save 30 seconds in travel but waste away their lives during the
rest of the day.
- Solution: We should ban all horns. It’s purpose has been lost. Reduce the noise pollution, please.
- Never drive in front of an auto, beside an auto or behind an auto.
In other words, stay away. As far away as possible.
- Solution: We should reduce the angle by which autos can swerve, at least by half. All hail the king of the road.
Web Innovation 2007 Day 2
Yesterday, I attended Day 2 of the Web Innovation 2007 conference.
The irony to note is that the conference website is so NOT Web 2.0. For example, where are the slides that people can download? These guys can learn a thing or two from the foss.in website and conference. Again, for a web innovation conference, why is there no wifi? How are you supposed to access the websites?
On the other hand, this conference has been surprising to me in the sense that it actually turned out to be interesting. I think the quality of people who have come to speak here is high and that’s probably because these people are high up in the decision-making chain and they have come to talk about what they do best - websites and business.
Of course, the other half of the speakers are doing just boring sales pitches but that didn’t deter the audience from asking tough questions and seeking their value from it. They even directly questioned how their company lives up to what was described in the presentation.
Continuing Day 1’s trend, here are the transcribed notes:
Jayabalan (CTO, Netmagic) on “Building scalable and resilient infrastructure for web applications”
- Users, Connectivity, IT infrastructure, Application infrastructure
- Challenges - Growth (number of concurrent users), Hardware failure, Software bugs, Security threats
- Management and maintenance, Connectivity/routing issues, Secure connectivity, Cost
- Failures can’t be avoided
- Features and functionality alone not sufficient, Performance also required
- Difficult to get people with end-to-end knowledge
- Recommended setup - Storage, SANSw, Web + App + DB, Switching, Accelerator, Firewall
- Develop for future - scalability in all layers
- Performance optimizing techniques - Compression, TCP multiplexing, TCP optimization, TCP buffering, Caching, CDN, Load balancing, URL/content/cookie switching, Content modification, SSL offloading, Surge protection
- Please outsource parts of these infrastructure to experts who have good infrastructure and service
- Netmagic caters to all of the above (can it get more blatant than this?)
- jb at netmagicsolutions.com
- Replies to audience that Yes, Providers in India do have such infrastructure now. Power and Connectivity are major issues that you can’t scale in-house, so outsource it.
Rohit Varma (Founder and CEO, Techtribe) on “Delivering Value through Social Networks”
- (Unfortunately, missed this session in the business track because the session in the other tech track was long)
- Get into the press, only way, do not depend on viral marketing
First Bangalore Ultra Marathon
Today, I caught the 4.45 am transportation to get to ONV for the first ever Bangalore Ultra Marathon where people can get to run or walk 26 or 52 or 78 or 104 km. A true endurance event.
I participated in the 26K run. I can’t even imagine how so many of those guys and gals ran 52+ km.
The first 19 km of my run was good. My knees felt good during the pounding of the feet although my shoe soles suffered and literally came apart. After that, it was a nightmare.
I got severe backache. Probably because my rotund belly has added layers over the past couple of months because of lack of exercise. I really struggled for the remaining 7 km. The killer was the last 3 km.
I somehow managed to complete in 3 hr 52 min. A timing that I’m not proud of, but under the circumstances, I don’t think I could’ve done better.
In the end, I must say kudos to the Ultra Team for one of the best organized events I’ve ever participated in! They have looked into every little detail always putting the runner first in all their decisions and especially for choosing such a picturesque location for the run. The grassland field that we entered in the start of the run was a true sight to behold just as the sun was coming out.
My aim next time is to do a half marathon without me throwing up in the end, which has become a custom these days.
As I twittered a while ago: “Sometimes I wonder why I even run. Then again, I wonder why I’m even alive.”
Update: Sabine has lots of photos in these two albums.
Update 2: Congratulations to Niara for winning 2nd position in the Women’s 26K Open category with a timing of 2:38 hours!
“I always loved running…it was something you could do by yourself, and under your own power. You could go in any direction, fast or slow as you wanted, fighting the wind if you felt like it, seeking out new sights just on the strength of your feet and the courage of your lungs.” - Jesse Owens
Hack Day India
I was at Yahoo! Open Hack Day at Bangalore on Friday and Saturday. 24 hours of hacking, meeting lots of old friends, and sarcasm unlimited. It doesn’t get better than this.
- 2007-10-05 Fri 02:30 PM
- Arrived at Taj.
- Registered myself, got the schwag
- Met Raghu and discussed the presentation he’ll be making on Flex
- Social networking, the offline kind
- 2007-10-05 Fri 03:30 PM
- The presentations start.
- Joe starts the ceremonies.
- Chris starts the first talk on what Yahoo can do for you. Yahoo APIs, that is.
- 2007-10-05 Fri 05:30 PM
OpenCoffeeClub 2
Yesterday morning, I dropped in on the OpenCoffeeClub Bangalore, 2nd edition. It’s supposed to be a place where people interested in entrepreneurship show up, have coffee together and discuss.
The theme of the meet was marketing. There were some interesting discussions, and the one that interested me was when Pratik (and friend) from Muziboo explained some of their experiences followed by the subsequent discussions and free advice and suggestions thrown in. One good advice was to actively market Muziboo to the teachers and students of the various music schools, “there are around 10 of them in just the Koramangala area”, and so on.
I was pleasantly surprised to see people have actually heard about ion and I was asked to tell the story of how we chose our poster design, people found it amusing and relevant (”market research”) at the same time. I gave some inputs that offline marketing, but targeted offline marketing really does help.
Although I didn’t mention it at the meet, we did stand outside the Aerosmith concert and marketed ion to people. That was such a humbling experience. Sales is hard.
Coming back to OpenCoffeeClub, the mix of people was not surprising - mostly “software engineers” who are ashamed of the term. The interesting people were a lawyer, a chartered accountant, a director of the entrepreneurship wing of an IT college, a non-IT businessman, etc.
The lawyer made an interesting point that she couldn’t get one of her contacts to come visit OpenCoffeeClub because 2 hours every 2 weeks sounded like too much time for him. That’s interesting because if someone was really passionate about their startup/business/passion, they would be out there working hard at it, instead of talking about it. Not to take away anything from the meet, but people need to be out there “doing their thing”.
I guess where the meet plays a role is it gives a support network to those people who are about to start off on their venture and need the confidence and advice in interactions with others, and the feeling that other people are into it too. Maybe that explains why there were more wannabes than been-there-done-that kind of people. However, the intensity of people that they wanted to do something was quite palpable. It reminded me of the title of Gusteau’s cookbook in Ratatouille : “Anyone can cook”. If you need to be in such an atmosphere, you should think of attending the next meet (it happens on alternate Sundays).
It also reminded me of a chance meeting I had with the founder and CEO of Pepper Square at the Flex Users’ Group meet last Friday. It was refreshing to meet someone whose mission was to make people understand the value of “design”. Even though he’s 42 years old (although he appeared half that age), he still has the “we’ll change the world” attitude in him. Inspiring stuff.
