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.
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.
The government plans to have 20 million broadband subscribers by the end of 2010. At current growth rates, that seems like a pipe dream.
One of my friends commented that every blogger is a narcissist because he/she thinks/expects to have an audience. I disagree based on own my feelings about blogging — I blog because I want to come back in some time and read what I wrote. In many ways, it’s my own note pad where I can centralize thoughts and articles that I find interesting.
Anyway, here’s a pretty cool article about the secrets to Amazon’s success (whatever that means):
Teams are small. They are assigned authority and empowered to solve a problem as a service in anyway they see fit.
Work from the customer backward. Focus on value you want to deliver for the customer.
Force developers to focus on value delivered to the customer instead of building technology first and then figuring how to use it.
Start with a press release of what features the user will see and work backwards to check that you are building something valuable.
End up with a design that is as minimal as possible. Simplicity is the key if you really want to build large distributed systems.
Take it for granted stuff fails, that’s reality, embrace it. For example, go more with a fast reboot and fast recover approach. With a decent spread of data and services you might get close to 100%. Create self-healing, self-organizing lights out operations.
Open up your system with APIs and you’ll create an ecosystem around your application.
Only way to manage as large distributed system is to keep things as simple as possible. Keep things simple by making sure there are no hidden requirements and hidden dependencies in the design. Cut technology to the minimum you need to solve the problem you have. It doesn’t help the company to create artificial and unneeded layers of complexity.
There’s bound to be problems with anything that produces hype before real implementation.
Use measurement and objective debate to separate the good from the bad. I’ve been to several presentations by ex-Amazoners and this is the aspect of Amazon that strikes me as uniquely different and interesting from other companies. Their deep seated ethic is to expose real customers to a choice and see which one works best and to make decisions based on those tests.
Getting rid of the influence of the HiPPO’s, the highest paid people in the room. This is done with techniques like A/B testing and Web Analytics. If you have a question about what you should do code it up, let people use it, and see which alternative gives you the results you want.
Create a frugal culture. Amazon used doors for desks, for example.
People’s side projects, the one’s they follow because they are interested, are often ones where you get the most value and innovation. Never underestimate the power of wandering where you are most interested.
Have a way to rollback if an update doesn’t work. Write the tools if necessary.
Look for three things in interviews: enthusiasm, creativity, competence. The single biggest predictor of success at Amazon.com was enthusiasm.
Hire a Bob. Someone who knows their stuff, has incredible debugging skills and system knowledge, and most importantly, has the stones to tackle the worst high pressure problems imaginable by just leaping in.
Innovation can only come from the bottom. Those closest to the problem are in the best position to solve it. any organization that depends on innovation must embrace chaos. Loyalty and obedience are not your tools.
Everyone must be able to experiment, learn, and iterate. Position, obedience, and tradition should hold no power. For innovation to flourish, measurement must rule.
Embrace innovation. In front of the whole company, Jeff Bezos would give an old Nike shoe as a “Just do it” award to those who innovated.
This is absolutely grand — Pubmatic, a Komli product, was showcased today at TechCrunch40, the most eagerly awaited technology conference of the year. More than 800 startups from across the world entered the competition in the inaugural year, of which 40 were chosen for the main event held yesterday and today in the Bay area.
More coverage is available here.
My colleague Mukul, who leads Komli’s engineering team in Pune, has a post about the launch of Pubmatic here.
Komli organized a mixer for the internet industry on May 8. The idea was to connect people in the online industry to exchange ideas and network. Ouch, do I sound like a drone? 
We had a pretty solid turnout. At its peak, there must have been about 60 people in the room. Going forward, we hope to do a mixer every month.
Check out some pictures here.
Some links to the story:
Mint (a WSJ newspaper): http://www.livemint.com/2007/04/18005730/Online-ad-company-Komli-Inc-re.html
AlooTechie: http://www.alootechie.com/News/2291.asp
ContentSutra: http://www.contentsutra.com/entry/419-ad-network-komli-raises-funding-from-draper-fischer-jurvetson-helion-ve/
Komli: http://www.komli.com/news/
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