Drive from Bombay to Delhi

I was planning to fly from Bombay to Delhi on friday, oct 24, to be home for Diwali the following week when i got a shock of my life. The cheapest airfare was at least 3x the regular air fare. I know, because I fly between Delhi and Bombay every week.

Now, it makes me pretty mad to think that airlines (or anybody for that matter) charge high prices just because they can. Sure, it might make business sense but it’s also pretty under-handed. So, I decided to drive down.

I left from my apartment in Bombay on Saturday, oct 25, at 6:30 am, and reached home in Delhi on Sunday, the 26t, at 9:30 am, covering a distance of approximately 1500 km. I spent 27 hours on the road, of which I was driving for 23. Caught a couple of hours sleep on Friday night, somewhere outside of Udaipur and took a few breaks here and there — 30 mins every 3 or 4 hours. It’s not like I was in a mad rush to get home, but subconsciously, I think the thought of getting home for Diwali, seeing extended family and expecting a week of festivities had me pretty wired.

I took NH8 from Bombay all the way up to Udaipur, and then NH 76/79 from Udaipur to Jaipur (via Chittorgarh), before ending up on NH8 again from Jaipur to Delhi. The drive was pretty good except for the first 6-7 hours which were slightly painful because of lots of new highway construction from Bombay up to Vadodara. The scenery for an hour, leading up to Udaipur, was beautiful.

Komli’s 2nd anniversary party photos

Komli celebrated its second anniversary on 5 Oct. To celebrate, we threw a party for employees at Kino’s Cottage in Bombay. Photos are here.

Christ I’m having a slow afternoon.

Judging a Business Plan Competiton

Being an entrepreneur is something that is very gratifying to me, and I’m always looking for ways, albeit lazily, to spread ‘the message’. I had the chance today (thanks Amar for passing on the invite!) to be on the jury of the elevator pitch competition today at NITIE’s Empresario business-plan competition. NITIE is a premier Indian B-school based in Bombay.

The format was that each team got 2 minutes to present their plan, followed by 2 minutes for a Q&A between the jury and the team. There was a 3 member jury, including me. There were 33 teams, some 80% of which were composed of students still in B-school, and the rest were of working professionals. Interestingly, 4 of the 33 teams, or 10%, submitted plans that were in the online space. None of these four were very good, but it’s a heartening statistic to see a relatively high amount of interest in the online space. Most of the plans were in the education and training area, not surprising, since most of the participants are still students.

The winner, by unanimous consent of the three member jury, was a team of working professionals from Godrej that submitted a plan to commercialize bio-gas, by selling it in cylinders, just like LPG and CNG, to restaurants and households. This team was really passionate, knew their stuff (they had a well-thought answer for every one of our questions), and the idea was scalable. What I really liked about this team was that they were walking the talk. They just didn’t have an idea, they were executing it too.

I was delighted to be among students who are starting to think about entrepreneurship. The only feedback that I have for many of these students is that 95% of them thought hard about the idea and the plan, but stopped at that point. What’s the missing part? Execution. Very few of them thought about execution – about the team and how they would get it done. What is it about them that qualified them to go make a run at something? For example, one of the teams made a really strong case for opening a chain of bowling alleys. They had the numbers all figured out, and they were passionate about bowling, but what do they know about the dynamics of real-estate and of managing large facilities. The plan would be a lot stronger if they had a team member who had been in facilities management, or had worked in real estate, or best of all, worked at or managed a bowling alley.

I had a great time. It was my first time doing something like and it made me realize that I’d love to do it again, and again. I actually realized today that I had a lot to say, from experience, to these young uns’.

Komli in the Wall Street Journal

I’m back, after what seems like a lifetime, to announce that Komli was featured in the WSJ last week.

The WSJ is a password protected site but you can get a preview of the article here:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121563492172840249.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Righto, later.

Ad:tech San Francisco

I’m back in Bombay after attending ad:tech San Francisco last week. I also took a minor detour via Shanghai on the way back. It’s good to be back except that it’s so fricking hot in Bombay. I think the average temperature has increased at least 5 C in the 10 day time span that I was gone.

Ad:tech was awesome. Some great meetings with clients and partners and a visit to SF thrown in as a bonus. I got to see a couple of friends I hadn’t seen in ages.

The trip to Shanghai was rushed. I flew in one day and flew out the next, canceling vacation in the process. Just a bit too much going on at work to be able to get away for more than 10 days. I hope to take some time off next month, or maybe the month after.

Hanging out with my man J-Liu in Hong Kong

How many Indians does it take to install a fan?

Nine, by my count. I snapped this picture at the Kingfisher Open tennis tournament in Sept 07. These nine guys spent some 15 minutes standing around the fan and gesticulating before they got it started — I’m not kidding.

Hiring People for a Startup is a Huge Problem in India

My post today is on the difficulty of hiring for startups in India. Quite a few startup founders that I know of in India have complained about the paucity hi-quality talent available for startups in India. I’m not sure how the general audience reacts to this statement since we seem to be constantly surrounded by news of brainy Indian graduates taking over the world.

Let me put it this way – the number of Indian graduates, brainy or otherwise, taking over the world is tiny, no more and no less than those from any other country, proportionately of course. The vast majority of brainy Indian graduates are just brainy, just that, period. They are not what startups, or for that matter, our country needs.

Startups are all about passion, desire to execute and compete, or precisely about those attributes that folks in India don’t have. Tell me the last time you met an Indian who was passionate about anything or believed that thought without action was meaningless or who didn’t believe in the ‘participation is good enough’ drivel that our education system has shoved down our throats for ages. Tell me.

We are, as a people, lazy and content with accepting things as they are, which is one reason there are a very small number of Indian startups that have become successful with home-grown talent. It typically takes for us to go abroad for some time, get our asses kicked to figure out what competition is all about and then come back home to execute with those learnings.

Unfortunately, not every startup has the luxury of hiring people who have returned from abroad. We hire people from wherever, which sounds nice, but since we are based in India, most of our applicants are from here as well.  Most people from across the world are not ready to move to India yet.

Komli today is a 40 member company, up from 2 in Oct 2006 and we could easily be a 80 member company, except that we can’t find people. Sounds like a joke in a country of a billion people, right? We get plenty of CV’s, we probably interview about 10% and make an offer to 1-2%. Pretty tough, you are thinking. It’s not that we want to be tough for the sake of it, but we are not finding the kind of talent we want. We are getting CV’s of some very smart people with some great credentials, but they lack most of the key attributes, enumerated above, that startups need. We make it a point to drill down deep during our interview process and usually come up short on passion and drive. Most people just seem to be, diplomatically speaking, going with the flow. Sleepwalking through life. That’s not what we need. That’s not what our country needs.

Another unexpected problem I’ve encountered during the hiring process more than a few times is when applicants insist that they do not want stock options, just a higher salary. I can understand if you don’t want any stock options from a no-name company, but I’m pretty sure that when applicants ask to work at a company like Komli, in its current stage today, without stock options, they either don’t understand stock options and/or don’t care to understand and/or don’t really care to think about why they want to want at a startup in the first place. These aren’t huge problems in themselves – there are more fun things to do in life than understand stock options — but if money is your goal, which it is for a lot of people, then I expect you to make the connection between risk and rewards. A staggeringly large number of people I’ve encountered just don’t. I lean towards thinking that this isn’t particularly smart of healthy (isn’t this representative of our society’s fixation on short-term gains?), but who am I to make that call.

I still dream of the day when a really solid candidate will come to us and say forget the salary, pay me with stock options. The startup scene in India would have arrived then.

Komli to represent eBay India for all their ad sales worldwide

Komli and eBay India have entered into an exclusive partnership whereby Komli will represent eBay India for all their ad sales worldwide. In addition, Komli’s ad network optimization technology PubMatic will optimize eBay’s unsold ad space for maximization of revenue.

This is very exciting news for a couple of reasons:
1. A global internet giant has chosen to partner with an Indian startup for its superior understanding of online advertising and online advertising technology,
2. This bodes well for the growth of online advertising in India — large portals, which in the past have not looked at online advertising as a key revenue driver, are starting to do that now.

For details see official news release at – http://www.komli.com/news/ebaypress.php.

Back from another trip

I’ve had a really hectic month. I just returned from a 10 day work trip that took me to New York (for adtech) and London. I feel quite exhausted from all the flying and the running around but I will say, it was fun. Aside from work, I got to hang out with close college friends in New York and with my brother in London.

Coming back to India, it’s all about work. Yeah, that’s the way I like it anyway.

Here are some pictures. The date stamp setting on my camera stays on by default and it always takes me a while to realize that and turn it off. So even though some of the pictures say they are from 2004, they are not.

This is crazy

See for yourself: