Swaroop C H, The Dreamer

proto.in Edition 4 at Delhi

I attended the proto.in 4 conference last week (held at the beautiful IIT Delhi campus) and had a very productive and thought-provoking time.

Day 1 was the fastrack “startup school” sessions.

The keynote session was Kiran Karnik, ex-President of NASSCOM, who pointed out that this “recession” is not a bad thing. Just like the BPO and Outsourcing outfits reinvented themselves in the last dotcom bust, this is a great opportunity to reinvent ourselves again during this phase. Why? Because when things are going good, nobody is willing to change or tinker with the processes. And when things are not going well, people are willing to take more chances and bet on newer/different things so that they can survive, such as big companies working with startups or risking new ideas.

The story of BharatMatrimony.com by the founder Murugavel Janakiram was inspiring. The concept maybe so simple and maybe even creating such a website maybe simple, but the kind of business model, customer understanding and outreach, and constant trial of new ideas that they went through was simply amazing. For example, sticking to his gumption that the site should be a paid one and that was the only viable business model, to things like collection of payment at the doorstep. After this talk, I had new-found admiration of his matrimonial site.

The third session was a talk on “Business is a Game” by Bhavin Turakhia, of Directi. I had never known about Bhavin until this day, and after this talk, most of the audience were his new fans, including me. The first audience question was “Do you have an opening in your company? I want to join.”

The talk was about the lessons we should learn from games and sports, and how to apply it to business. And it made so much sense. Sometimes it is the basics that we overlook that make all the difference. This was pretty much in line with my off-late philosophy of “Enough Fundas. Back to Fundamentals.”

Bhavin said that he has read many books and stories about successful companies, and trying to distill why they succeeded, he came down to just two things to run a successful company:

Gather the right players
Empower them to make the right decisions, most of the time.

He said the first point is fairly obvious but hard to do. In this talk, he concentrated on the second point, and gave 7 principles on how to do achieve this:

Teach the Game
- When you play a game, say cricket, all the team players need to know how to play the game - the rules, the strategies, the howtos. If only few of them know it, and the rest don’t, the team collectively will suffer, right? Same for business.
Share the macrovision
- What is the final objective? Why are you playing this game?
Near-term targets.
- A team usually plays for a season or a championship. That consists of multiple games, which means there are milestones and targets to achieve. Same for business.
Keep score
- Bhavin says he likes games like cricket where every kind of statistic possible is analyzed, right from the average score of the batsman on this particular ground to the average scores of the teams overseas, etc.
- In a game, the score is always visible on a public scoreboard, which drives the team in achieving real scores.
- Recommends reading a book by John Hayes called “Open Book Management”
- Measure everything. Don’t focus on more than 2-3 critical numbers. This reminded me of a quote by Bob Parsons (of GoDaddy fame): “Anything that is measured and watched, improves.”
- Keep changing critical numbers.
- Explain why these critical numbers are critical.
- Statistics are fun, make it a game, have real targets, because no one wants to fail a target.
- Bhavin explained that most of Directi employees have 3-4 monitors at their desk - 1-2 for work, the other 1-2 for monitoring live statistics. People love to watch scoreboards and feel joy when they achieve their targets whether they are number of downloads or response times.
Line of sight
- Each player should be able to link their actions to the outcome of a game i.e. how they contributed to the outcome directly.
- This makes the player feel he/she is contributing to the team and feel he/she is a part of the team.
Celebrate your victories
- Celebrate the small milestones, especially achieving targets.
- Have a Victory Party
- The act of recognizing > how you recognize
Align everyone’s interests
- To the victor(s), belong the spoils
- In a game, everyone’s equal and aligned, no separate us vs management, because success of each other is interlinked
- Linden Labs has an internal website to “give love” to other employees who have done good work
- How direct is the co-relation?
- Company performs best when its people see themselves as partners in the business
- American universities are run mostly by student communities and the knowledge is passed on to each new batch. And there’s this feeling that “I belong to my alma mater” vs “I belong to my organization” which people hardly say.

When asked if these ideas put a constraint on the size of the company, Bhavin said this is the only way that you can scale a company. To specifically note, if everybody is not able to take the same decision as you, you become the bottleneck ⇒ size constraint on the company.

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Date and Time : July 24th, 2008
Category : Business, India, Meet, Startup
Comments : No comments

Ideas are Cheap - Build your mobile

It’s that time of the year when proto.in fever spreads. And the ideaworm has got to me.

Inspired by Vijay Anand’s “Ideas To Toss” series, I thought why not start my own occasional series as well? I’m calling it the “Ideas are Cheap” series. The name is a take on the common proverb “Ideas are Cheap. Execution is Everything.”

So here’s the idea for today:

Can we have a business where the users can customize the hardware that goes into their phone?

This is not a new idea. We are just applying Dell’s business model to mobile phones. If Dell can do it for desktops and laptops, why can’t it be done for mobile phones?

The customization can range from how much memory you want, whether you need a camera or not, etc. to choosing the color and the type of body (candybar or flip or other form factors) and so on.

The range of customization possible depends on the capabilities and costs involved in the assembly process. For example, users may be able to customize the phone by having a name for a special button called ‘Mom’ (or ‘Dad’ or ‘Son’ and so on) that is hotwired to call you. You can gift this to your corresponding loved ones. The advantage is it becomes a wonderful ‘personal’ phone and becomes easy-to-use for technophobic people.

The implementation will be challenging. For one, desktops and laptops can be assembled because of the plug-and-play IBM PC architecture as well as because the operating system easily adjusts to changes in the hardware. AFAIK, mobile phones are not built that way as of today and requires some configuration in the software based on which hardware features are present and which are not (please correct me if I am wrong). Making the software easily adaptable will be a major feature.

The other interesting part is to build a factory that facilitates this. It is very hard to build a supply-chain system for such a factory.

The good part is that the technology could be built on top of OpenMoko - after all, this is the kind of ideas that FIC (the sponsors of the OpenMoko project) had in mind in creating a mostly-open-hardware and open-source-software mobile computing project.

Personalization is one of the buzzwords that is supposed to make the big moolah for companies these days, and allowing people to customize a device that they carry around all day definitely has potential.

End credits: This idea was part of a random discussion between Ramjee and myself.

On a different tangent, there are lots of ideas waiting to happen in the software. For example, it’s not only Apple that can do an App Store for their phone, this can be done for this platform too. Of course, we’ll have to start off a holy war of choosing that one linux distro…

Perhaps similar ideas can be done on top of the Asus EEE PC as well?

Date and Time : July 17th, 2008
Category : Business, Ideas are Cheap, Linux, Open Source, Tech
Comments : 7 comments

Tips for Working From Home

Working from home full-time is a different experience than we are used to. You make or break things, there’s no one asking about your progress and there are no deadlines. It’s all up to you.

My productivity has varied a lot during this time and I was wondering how to make more days productive than they are as of now.

So I polled some of my friends who also work out of a home-office on how they they maintain productivity / motivation / focus, and I got some interesting replies:

Manish Jethani says:
- Make a separate “office room” in your home. You could convert your old study room into your office. You go into this room only for work — fully dressed for work (not in pyjamas!). When you get out of this room, you leave your work behind. In other words, you have a proper office located inside your home.
- Cut out the distractions. Make your family know that this is your office. No visitors, no phone calls (except work-related), etc.
- Follow proper timings. Work fixed hours.
- To stay motivated while working out of your home, I think you basically have to enjoy what you do.
- Self-discipline is the key.
- The concept of an office, as we know it, is relatively new in our history. Throughout the ages humans have worked out of their homes. Think about it. It’s the more natural way of things. Thanks to the internet, working from home is likely to become the norm in the 21st century (also because commuting might become prohibitively expensive).
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Date and Time : July 9th, 2008
Category : Productivity, Startup
Comments : 5 comments

The meaning of Touch

While I was cycling today, I had an interesting thought.

I always have my ol’ iPod Nano with me while I’m cycling. As usual, if I want to listen to a song again, I click the left button to repeat, if I don’t like a song, I click the right button to skip to the next song. But while cycling, I have to do this without looking at it. It is possible because I can feel the click-wheel and it has a good feedback so that I know when the press has worked.

Compare this with the touch-screen rage - can a person use the iPod Touch/iPhone without looking? From my limited usage of a friend’s iphone, I do not think it is possible.

It makes me wonder which is really the “Touch” - the one I can use without looking (using only sense of touch), or the one that has a touch-screen UI (requires both sense of touch and sense of sight)?

Date and Time : July 5th, 2008
Category : Apple, Design, Physical, Tech
Comments : 6 comments

Trekking in Kodachadri

This weekend, one of my long-pending wishes came true: I finally trekked Kodachadri.

Kodachadri is a mountain in the Western Ghats, in Karnataka. It is a famous trekking spot.

On Saturday morning, we reached Nittur, grabbed some breakfast and then proceeded towards Kumble, the starting point of the trek. Right there, I could see clouds playing hide-and-seek among the mountains and I knew it was going to be a good trek.

What I didn’t know was how awesome the 14 km of terrain was going to be. At one moment we would be trudging in the mountain avoiding branches and forcing through thick vegetation, the next moment we would be crossing a stream of water…

… Some time later we would be climbing up very slippery stones right next to flowing water, then suddenly in an open area and then walking along the edge of a cliff while it is raining and then walking in the clouds, literally. This was easily one of the best trekking spots I’ve ever been to, and I was so happy that I finally got to be there. We even got to drench ourselves in a freezing cold waterfall.

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Date and Time : July 1st, 2008
Category : Trekking, Trip
Comments : 7 comments

To live unconventionally

Imagine a conversation with your doctor that goes like this:

“What do you do for work?” the doctor asked me at the beginning of the interview.

“Well, I’m trying to start my own social movement.”

(There was a long pause, but he didn’t ask anything else about that. Instead, he looked at the next item on the list.)

“Do you take any medications?”

“Not usually, but when I need to, I buy them in Africa.”

(Another pause.)

“Do you exercise regularly?”

“Yes, I just ran a marathon on a cruise ship last week!”

Such a person should surely be interesting.

That’s how I first read about Chris Guillebeau (via Cal Newport).

So when Chris mentioned on his blog that he has a manifesto coming up soon, I was eagerly waiting. He calls it a “A Brief Guide to World Domination: How to Live a Remarkable Life in a Conventional World”.

Well, surely, there have been many people who have made tall claims over the years, why this should be any different? Because this guy walks the talk. What else can you say about someone who has visited 83 countries so far and he’s only 30 years of age. His goal is to visit the remaining 115 countries by April 7, 2013. How’s that for a goal?

What I liked about the manifesto is that it reminds me of a rule that I’ve been following off late: “Enough fundas, Back to fundamentals.” The manifesto does not tell you anything earth-shattering but makes you think about the simple basics of your life.

If you choose the path of being “just like everybody else”, then you’re already set because that is what majority of the world does.

If you choose the path of “non-conformity”, then be prepared to face all the problems but at the end of it all, you’ll get to live the life that you want (assuming that’s what you want).

If you want to truly go for BHA goals (Big Hairy Audacious Goals), then you need to take care of yourself and contribute to others as well. The latter is not simply charity, but there are several ways. After all, the greatest joy a passionate programmer or artist can get is when he/she sees someone using/admiring what they created and they are getting benefitted from it. And so on.

All this reminds me of this quote by John Davis:

You all laugh at me because I’m different, I laugh at you because you’re all the same.

That’s what I say to myself when people stare at me in the mornings when I’m running with a fuel belt around my waist. Hey, it may look funny, but I need that water while I’m running so that I don’t end up dehydrating (which is bad, speaking from experience). So I may look unconventional, but I need that water, and that’s how I want to do running.

So what else have I done unconventionally?

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Date and Time : June 25th, 2008
Category : People, Social, Thoughts
Comments : 12 comments

Super Crunchers

Today, I re-read a book called Super Crunchers: How Anything Can Be Predicted by Ian Ayres.

So what is supercrunching?

Now something is changing. Business and government professionals are relying more and more on databases to guide their decisions. The story of hedge funds is really the story of a new breed of number crunchers - call them Super Crunchers - who have analyzed large datasets to discover empirical correlations between seemingly unrelated things. Want to hedge a large purchase of euros? Turns out you should sell a carefully balanced portfolio of twenty-six other stocks and commodities that might include Wal-Mart stock.

What is Super Crunching? It is statistical analysis that impacts real-world decisions. Super Crunching predictions usually bring together some combination of size, speed and scale. The sizes of datasets are really big - both in the number of observations and in the number of variables. The speed of the analysis is increasing. We often witness the real-time crunching of numbers as the data come hot off the press. And the scale of the impact is sometimes truly huge. This isn’t a bunch of egghead academics cranking out provocative journal articles. Super Crunching is done by or for decision makers who are looking for a better way to do things.

This is best explained by the chess example:

We tend to think that the chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov lost to the Deep Blue computer because of IBM’s smarter software. That software is really a gigantic database that ranks the power of different positions. The speed of the computer is important, but in large part it was the computer’s ability to access a database of 700,000 grandmaster chess games that was decisive. Kasparov’s intuitions lost out to data-based decision making.

(emphasis mine)

The book starts off with the example of Orley Ashenfelter, a Princeton economics professor as well as founder and editor of the Journal of Wine Economics who wanted to apply supercrunching techniques to predict whether a wine from a particular year would be a good wine or not. He ended up with the following equation:

Wine quality = 12.145 + 0.00117 winter rainfall + 0.0614 average growing season temperature - 0.00386 harvest rainfall

You can imagine the commotion that followed. The wine experts brushed off this theory and that numbers can predict the wine quality better than they can. After all, “Just as it’s more accurate to see the movie, shouldn’t it be more accurate to actually taste the wine?”

And yet, the equation did indeed make better predictions, especially with the prediction that 1989 and 1990 wines would be bestsellers.

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Date and Time : June 23rd, 2008
Category : Books, Research, Social, Tech, Thoughts
Comments : 2 comments

The Need to Fight

Long ago, a wise friend I used to know once told me that humans have many kinds of needs - physiological, emotional, etc. Along with these, there is also the need to fight.

I’ve been thinking over and over on how true this is. Or whether it is just baloney.

The need to fight. And I’m not talking physically. There is something that you’re always fighting against - whether your focus is challenges at work, or road rage, or even fighting with your loved ones.

A basic human need is to fight. That’s why we have wars and battles all the time. Especially in the mind. I know many people who coded best when they were angry. Maybe our genes and body are built for action, for the rush of the battle.

Maybe that’s why the milestones in a startup feels more “earned” than when working in a big company where the same situations are so shielded.

Maybe that’s why you get things done only when you have a deadline.

Maybe that’s why people do sports, trekking, adventures, long distance biking, etc.

Maybe that’s why people with rags-to-riches stories are more happier than kids of rich people.

Maybe that’s why people feel fired up after a debate or a race, irrespective of whether they win or lose.

Because you’re trying to fight the odds.

And if people don’t have the fight in them, or don’t fight for anything, that’s when they seem so boring, so bored and so lifeless.

Maybe that was part of the message in the Fight Club.

P.S. Has there been any organized pillow fights in India?

Date and Time : June 16th, 2008
Category : Startup, Thoughts
Comments : 9 comments

Cricket on your desktop

I’m not a cricket buff but the IPL had got even me hooked. Well, at least during dinner. But for people who are crazy about cricket and want to follow ball-by-ball updates and certainly don’t like refreshing horrible-looking websites, then you might find Cricket Nirvana’s CricketCentre interesting:

The best part is that it runs on your desktop.

The good part is the range of functionality - real time ball-by-ball score updates, full scorecards, wagon-wheel and what not statistics, you can throw flowers or tomatoes at the cricketer of your choice and most of all, it pops up a GTalk-style notification for important events like a sixer, four or a batsman gets out!

The bad part is that the look and feel is too kiddish for my taste and the UI needs to be more simplified.

Back to the plus points, my favorite part is the mini-score card mode which will show up on the bottom-right corner of your desktop:

This idea was conceived and (as far as I know) executed entirely by Ramesh Srinivasaraghavan, Srinivas Annam, Arun Madas and many others in the Adobe Flex team in Bangalore. If this isn’t cool stuff happening in India dev centres, I don’t know what is. And what better way to show off AIR’s capabilities

I know they have had some tough times in convincing cricket websites about this idea, but it’s good to see it finally out.

Date and Time : June 12th, 2008
Category : Adobe, India
Comments : 3 comments

Launch of ion2

Last week, we quietly relaunched ion, our USB charger. The very next day, we shipped ions to customers in Bangalore, Hyderabad, Kolkata and Mumbai. And an hour ago, I shipped one to Bhubaneswar. It’s good to be back!

First of all, thanks to all those 96 people who wrote to us in the past few months who kept asking us when we’ll be back in stock. The fact that there are people really interested kept us going. And we really needed that boost.

I’m sure there are a lot more people who would have also visited the website, saw the ‘Out of stock’ sign but not written to us. We felt bad in having to turn away so many people for so long. But we are very conscious of delivering the best goods, hence we ended up taking a lot of time to do it right.

The good news is that the next generation of ion, unimaginatively called “ion2″ is here and now available.

Not only does ion really solve a pain point, what sets it apart from other USB chargers are:

Is the smallest USB charger available in the Indian market.
Of very high quality. It is CE certified.
Works anywhere in the world. No more voltage conversions.
Works with almost any device that can be charged via USB, including all kinds of mp3 players (the entire iPod family, Zune, iRiver, etc.), mobile phones, and so on.
Advantage of ion working with so many devices is that you no longer need to say “Do you have an iPod charger” or “Do you have a Nokia 6300 charger?”… Just ask “Do you have an ion?”

</shameless plug>

Date and Time : June 9th, 2008
Category : Business, Startup, ion
Comments : 10 comments

Sharavathy Valley Day 2

I thought I would get a damn good sleep in the night because I was so tired. Unfortunately, it was not meant to be. Not with the snorers around. On top of that, it was so cold and I didn’t have a jacket. I kept tossing and turning all night.

At 4.30 am of Day 2 (June 01 Sunday), I was jolted by a shrill cock-a-doodle-doo sound. Soon enough, our leader Narayan woke us all up. I was surprised to see everybody get up immediately. At around 5.30 am, we all went out in search of sighting some animals. Unfortunately, we were too loud to get to see any animals. Even our footsteps, especially when crushing leaves, were loud enough to alert the sensitive-eared animals. Our guide who was in front saw some bisons but they ran away in lightning speed. I didn’t know they could do that.

We were soon enough on top of another hill and got to see another beautiful view. Heh, I’m such a landscape-voyeur.