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.

Democracy comes with duties

On my flight from Kunming to Bangkok on Oct 24, I sat next to an elderly Australian lady. We got chatting. She had been a public sector specialist with the World Bank and had worked in several eastern European countries in the early 90s.

She made an interesting comment with respect to those countries’ transition to democracy. I say interesting because it summed up my own frustration with the state of affairs in India.  “Democracy is not just the right to discuss and debate. With it also comes the duty to make a decision and be responsible for it.”

I can’t blame those countries for not understanding this. In India, despite 60 years of democracy, we still don’t understand it.

Aid to Africa does more harm than good

Thought-provoking interview conducted by Der Spiegel with Kenyan economist James Shikwati.

SPIEGEL: Stop? The industrialized nations of the West want to eliminate hunger and poverty.

Shikwati: Such intentions have been damaging our continent for the past 40 years. If the industrial nations really want to help the Africans, they should finally terminate this awful aid. The countries that have collected the most development aid are also the ones that are in the worst shape. Despite the billions that have poured in to Africa, the continent remains poor.

SPIEGEL: Do you have an explanation for this paradox?

Shikwati: Huge bureaucracies are financed (with the aid money), corruption and complacency are promoted, Africans are taught to be beggars and not to be independent. In addition, development aid weakens the local markets everywhere and dampens the spirit of entrepreneurship that we so desperately need. As absurd as it may sound: Development aid is one of the reasons for Africa’s problems. If the West were to cancel these payments, normal Africans wouldn’t even notice. Only the functionaries would be hard hit. Which is why they maintain that the world would stop turning without this development aid.

India needs less bombast

Personally I find TOI to be the crappiest of India’s major english newspapers. Incidently, TOI has the largest circulation of all english dailies which is not too surprising — increasingly, in all aspects of media, there is a correlation between more scale and dumbing down of the audience.

So, for once, I was even more surprised to find a thoughtful editorial in TOI. It’s a theme that I agree with — we, in India, think the world of ourselves, whether it be our aspiring superpower status or technologocal achievements or culture. We love in indulge in self-congratulations.

The fact is that India, the country, is a piece of crap. The country is creaking, chaotic and people here take the act of survival of the self in the worst possible way by thinking that they can get ahead only by pushing back someone else. The win-win mentality doesn’t exist here.

Don’t take me for an India-hater. I’m Indian, and after living abroad for many years, I’m back here because I’m excited about working here and exploring new opportunities. But the smugness of people and the media here drives me nuts.

Back to the TOI article, while the Indian media is gloating over being “the fastest growing telecom market in the world,” the article says:

‘ While India grapples with 2G, dropping quality standards, calling 256 Kb/second speed as broadband and 3G Spectrum, the world has moved on. In UK, British Telecom is already offering 8 Mb/second speeds to household users. More importantly, closer home, China has tested its own 4G technology for mobile telephones.

Strangely the Indian media and everybody else took just a cursory note of the Chinese announcement, for the China story is the real story in the long run.  ‘

This article is worth reading. It’s not just another one of those statistical comparsion articles but provides a thoughtful critique of Indian bombast.

Agencies, please get your act together

What talent crunch? Despite all teh hype, there’s no talent crunch in the Indian online industry.

I get such sloppily put together documents and presentations from people at top online media buying agencies that it makes me too ashamed to even sign my name to them. In general, no one pays attention to grammer & punctuation. I get documents which look as if people were sending text sms’ to their friends.

Folks, please get your act together! It’s shameful to send out such work  and it’s a huge waste of my time, not to mention a turn-off, to see/read such documents.

Caste consciousness in Bombay

Something peculiar about Mumbai is people’s insistence on inquiring about one’s religion and community. It’s only been 2 weeks since I got here but all the real estate agents I met with, my landloard and my neighbours have asked me already about my religion (Hindu) and community (Marwari). I dont particularly care to answer these questions but in the face of persistant questioning, one has no choice.

One of my neighbours has even suggested that I get in touch with the ‘other Marwari’ living 3 floors above. He probably thinks that we’re identical in every sense of the word.

For all the talk about Mumbai being a melting pot of communities, I think this place is still very provincial. Sure, there probably are more communities here than in any other Indian city, but the sense I get is they stick to themselves and conveniently ignore others.

When I inquired from a couple of brokers about the need to know my religion, they mentioned that many Hindu landlords would just not rent their properties to a Muslim. That’s just crazy. This would not happen in Delhi, and I think it’s deplorable that it happens here.

Setting up Komli’s office in Mumbai

Some time in December, Komli chose to set up it’s first India office in Mumbai. We chose Mumbai over Delhi since 90% of our clients are based here (Mumbai is India’s advertising and media hub) even though Delhi would have been an easier option since both Amar and I are more familiar with Delhi and have residential and office bases there.

I moved to Mumbai on 14th Jan, took possession of the office on the 15th and since then I’ve been juggling work, setting up and furnishing the office, and looking for an apartment. It’s been stressful to say the least. Our office came in a pretty bare-bones state, and we’ve had to upgrade the furniture, get blinds, fix electrical issues, apply for phone lines and broadband and various sundry smaller things. Thankfully it’s getting into shape now.

I took possession of my apartment yesterday after a week-long search wherein I saw about 10 properties. Once I got over my intial shock of how expensive rentals are in Mumbai, see an earlier post below, my biggest priority became finding a place within walkable distance off my office. It’s a hangover from my days in Kunming and Geneva; I just hate commuting, particularly given the level of noise on Mumbai’s streets.

The apartment’s unfurnished so I’ve also been running around trying to get basic supplies so I can not worry about my apartment and just get on with work. One of my frustrations has been that maintenance issues with the apartment and office just never seem to get over. For example, I realized this morning that my apartment’s toilet flush wasn’t working too well (I’ll spare you the gory details). Thinking it’s a simple issue with the flush and/or the WC, I called in the plumber — enough hassle as it is — who, dear man, investigated and told me that the entire drain below the WC is blocked up from accumulated debris from not having been used in over a year. Cleaning up requires major work over 2 days, including dismantling of the WC. Let’s count the problems here — not being able to use the WC for 2 days, worrying about the supervision of the work, worrying about leaving the apartment unlocked with the labourers while I’m away, bearing the not insignificant expense of the work, and arguing with the landlady to reimburse me for this work.

You get the picture? This isn’t an isolated incident. Similar complications occurred with the installation of blinds in our office.

Nothing in India is straightforward, everything is complicated. Trust me on this. India seems to obey only its own weird logic.

Oh, and I saved the best story for last: day before yesterday, I agreed to take the apartment, paid the landlady a token deposit and heaved a huge sigh off relief to have gotten this out of the way. Three hours later, I got a call from the landlady saying that I should continue my search because they hadn’t made up their minds to give me the apartment. I was incredulous. I’ve paid you a deposit, which you’ve accepted for god’s sake! The landlady then admitted that her mother, who must have been at least 70 years old, objected to the idea of renting out an apartment to a single guy! “But you yourself told me that you wanted only one person to stay here,” I said. “But my mother is objecting now. Let me talk to her some more and see if she agrees,” she replied.

The last thing I wanted to do was start another apartment search. Luckily the landlady’s mother came around the next morning and I got the deal stitched up the same afternoon but not before further drama about the lease agreement and delays on account of the lawyer showing up an hour late!

See what I mean about how everything in India is complicated?

When I look back at all this, I want to laugh. I think that’s great, because when all these things were happening, I was ready to punch a hole in the wall.

Here are a couple of snaps of our office undergoing maintenance work. They’re taken with a Treo 650 so they’re pretty low-resolution:

Apartment rental in Mumbai

I knew real estate in Mumbai was expensive but I had no idea how expensive it was. This place is insane. Our office is on Linking Rd, right on the border between Khar and Bandra. I detest commuting so I was looking for an apartment closeby. The prices are insane. For pretty shabby furnished and unfurnished studios, prices were anywhere between Rs 14,000 to 20,000 per month. That’s a lot of money for a small apartment.

Real estate is booming all across India but I wonder if prices are just getting unrealistically high. It’s not as if the quality of construction of most places is very good. Most places are in fact in a perpetual state of repair and/or dysfunction, but prices have skyrocketed with so much liquidity in the market.

I was talking to my cousin the other day about how salaried people survive in Mumbai. Businesspeople and financiers here have a lot of money here — Mumbai after all generates some 40% of India’s GNP, but life for salaried people is crap here. The housing is bad, traffic is nightmarish and everything is just so expensive, compared to other places in India.

My standard of reference is China, which is another rapidly developing country. In Shanghai, Hangzhou and Kunming, cities which I’ve lived in, in the last 3 years, the same apartment I’ve rented here would cost much less — in Shanghai probably 60%, in Hangzhou 50%, and in Kunming, 20% of what I’m paying in Mumbai. And the quality of construction would be at least 50% better.

Go figure.

Hello

Gosh, do I have the time for this?

I just signed up for this blog with the somewhat naive hope that it’ll kickstart my writing habit which I seem to have lost sometime over these last couple of years. You know, in the same way that people sign up for expensive gym memberships thinking that the guilt of paying all that money will goad them into exercising more frequently. Does it work? The jury’s still out. Wish me luck! Otherwise, thanks for visiting.

Hey ma, where’s my dinner?