Women & Entrepreneurship April 24, 2007
Posted by savitakini in Entrepreneurship.add a comment
In july 06, I had the opportunity to attend a panel discussion organized by the TiE – Women’s Forum in Bangalore. This was the first time, I had the opportunity to meet so many women from the Indian IT industry. The last I attended an event similar to this one was when the TiE Santa Clara launched the TiE- women’s forum. Essentially both events seem to have become just one-off events, and nothing emerged from it since then.
The contrast is interesting – the santa clara one had all women entreprenuers in the panel, infact some of them had done multiple startups, that too, product companies. The bangalore one had senior VPs from the industry – Wipro, Lucent, Prof Vasanthi from IIMB. The topics also could be contrasted, the santa clara event had a lot of discussion on leadership (Michelle Bolton, author of Third Shift), taking risks, finding support from family & friends etc. The bangalore event was mostly concentrated on the management challenges in the IT industry, attrition, expectations of younger generation etc. Both were very engaging.
I met very interesting, smart women from different streams in the industry – finance, mktg, consulting etc. For once I felt that the women in B’lore were much more attuned to the industry and were business savy. Ofcourse, coming back from the US, I have had a tough time getting used to seeing saree clad women executives 
. The only women role models in saree I had seen were my people in my mothers generation, or my school/college teachers. It has required getting used to seeing saree as a professional attire in India.
The issues that women entrepreneurs talk about continue to be similar – family support, work-life balance, priorities, team support, challenges raising funding (VCs are still a male dominated world) etc. A lot about entrepreneurship is dependant on your educational, work experience, credibility as well as networks that you can rely on to raise funds. I have had the opportunity to meet many women CEOs/executives – Radha Basu (CEO of Support.com), Kiran Mazumdar (CEO of Biocon), Vani Kola (VC w/ NEAIUV), Uma Reddy (CEO of Hitech Magnetics), Jayshree Ullal (SVP @ Cisco),Anu Shukla (CEO of Rubric, Rubinconsoft), Judy Estirin (CEO of packet design), many others. Many of them ofcourse in Silicon valley. It was an amazing experience to have had the opportunity to listen to this wonderful and diverse group of women who have stuck it out on their own and been quite successful.
The role played by the NSRCEL @ IIM Bangalore by offering workshops for women entrepreneurs will go a long way in creating a similar environment in Bangalore. I am helping my friend Anjana Vivek (founder/director of Venturebean) with the business plan workshops as part of the program. I highly recommend this program for aspiring women entrepreneurs.
Is Bangalore really India’s silicon valley ? April 17, 2007
Posted by savitakini in General.1 comment so far
Any news article you read since the emergence of the Indian IT industry often talks about Bangalore as India’s silicon valley.
It’s going to be a year very soon, since my husband & I relocated to B’lore. We have enjoyed the experience very much. The environment is dynamic here and the new generation especially those in their 20s are embracing entrepreneurship with more enthusiasm then I saw while I was growing up. Silicon valley had the same dynamism in late 1990s but after the dot.com bust, somehow life didn’t seem the same anymore. I hope things have improved in the last couple of years.
I thought its a decent enough time to do my own comparison between Bangalore, & the real Silicon Valley.
From the living experience point of view, Bangalore has been great – it’s definitely a much liberal city compared to other cities in India. I have got the best organic basil for Rs 6/-. . The weather, the greenery, the nearby hills/mountains are similar to the Bay area. The red soil, fruit orchards all remind me and make me feel nostalgic at times. As you go along the main arteries of the city, if you can keep from not being knocked off by the traffic, then the fancy buildings of the tech companies can really give you a jolt. When I first saw the Intel campus, I was sincerely shocked at how they had recreated the look & feel of the Santa Clara campus. A lot of startups have also spawned all over the city and I have come to know many of them as well as aspiring entrepreneurs.
Bangalore’s emergence as a tech city really happened after the IT services companies picked up steam. Until then most of the innovative research & product companies coming from Bangalore never got the attention that they deserved. The IT companies started attracting the best minds from public research institutions with their salaries and onsite offerings. The growth of IT companies & cost difference attracted US/European technology companies who found it cheaper to have their own offshore development center so they could have more control over their IPs and also put in place a longer term strategy.
Most of the work done today in these offshore offices as well as the IT service companies is still the of the extended kind or cost reduction work that cannot happen in silicon valley. While definitely there has been some improvement in the kind of work that is happening here, it’s not comparable to the kind of cutting edge research and innovation that happens in Silicon Valley. The new startups are also mostly taking the beaten path as far as technology is concerned. Adding to the already skewed environment, the VCs have been flocking to the city hoping to capture the best deals. To manage their own risk, they continue to invest in late stage deals or in the services model. Some of the deals which happened in the last 1 year have majority been in the dot.com internet companies which my new friend Sramana Mitra calls as concept arbitrage. I am not passing any judgments here. In a way it’s good because at least the entrepreneurial culture will get reinforced and more risk takers will emerge.
However, to be really compared to Silicon Valley, we need something much more broader than the current mixture of IT services & products model.
We need to fund more research through public-private partnerships. Our institutions themselves need reform so that they can attract the best brains to do their PhDs. This also requires attracting the best minds into faculty positions who can do research but are also connected to the industry so that the best research also gets opportunity in commercialization. The current cream of PhDs that returned back are strong enough to put up with beaurocracy in the institutions and fight it to some extent.
To create a more nurturing environment, we need the thought leaders in the industry to come out and openly support young entrepreneurs as angels. This piece of the puzzle is completely missing.
Apart from the part about funding, nurturing an entrepreneurial company also requires ability to provide strategic inputs. But if the current crème of the society has come from services industry, I will find it difficult to say they can even support the product companies. Most of the folks in the IT industry haven’t been strategic thinkers themselves except to the extent of doing the same thing better and more efficiently. Also, they most leveraged the huge engineering population base to grow their companies quickly. Whether they really understand the challenges of a product company, it’s hard to say. Moreover, the few product companies who did try to stick it out – example: Deccanet – their failure itself has blocked out the risk-taking ability of the senior people in the industry. To address this problem we need the best entrepreneurs, I will even go to say, we don’t even need entrepreneurs, but even if a few senior people from the product companies in silicon valley are able to nurture the upstarts, they will be able to provide more strategic inputs from their own experiences and challenges they faced with their products.
So my humble request to people, lets stop calling Bangalore as Indian’s Silicon Valley. We are not even 10% of what Silicon Valley is all about. Lets get to the task of reaching there, rather than pat our selves on the back for few $$ that we made in the past decade.
Narayan Murthy & the anthem goofup April 16, 2007
Posted by savitakini in General.1 comment so far
Last week was a tough week for Infosys, what with Narayan murthy coming under much criticism from the media as well as the karnataka politicians for having canceled the singing of the national anthem during President Abdul Kalam’s visit to Infosys campus. While Abdul Kalam seemed quite excited about Narayan Murthy being proposed as the next President, Not sure whether that will hold true anymore.
Anyways, lets evaluate Narayan Murthy’s reasoning for cancelling the singing of the national anthem. He believed he didn’t want to make his foreign employees uncomfortable with the singing of the national anthem of India. In his own words “singing the national anthem would have “embarrassed” company employees of foreign origin”.
This made me think of the times when I was studying & working in the US. I have personally stood and been part of many gatherings where the US national anthem was sung. I stood with the same respect and attention as I did for our national anthem. Having read and understood about U.S history, I have definitely been able to respect the anthem even more for what it meant, which was ‘all about complete freedom’. US is perhaps the only country where this freedom was protected so well. Ofcourse after Bush came along, all bets are off about what is remaining.
But anyways, the point I wanted to make how can an Indian company in India feel uncomfortable about making its foreign employees who happen to be in India feel embarrassed. If I know how much I know about these ‘foreigners’ from my own collections of friends & colleagues, my bet is they would have stood with respect and hardly have felt embarassed. Afterall I as an Indian is perfectly entitled to sing my national anthem in my own country. Even if my employees are from abroad, they will know that and will respect my right as much as I will respect their right to sing their national anthem on the occasions they will feel like doing it.
It feels strange that a company which puts out about flatworld really doesn’t understand the meaning of what a flat world means. Its not just about building technology from any part of the world, but its also about human freedom & human rights for all. Maybe the older generation of Indians have still not gotten over the worshipping of the ‘foreigners’ or may be they still have not gotten over their inferiority complex.
Developing a discipline for products April 7, 2007
Posted by savitakini in Innovation Management.add a comment
Responding to my friend Sujai’s blog, I wanted clarify a few points so that it helps clear up doubts that the points I raised in the session interms of challenges and takeaways are not misinterpreted to be some long term initiatives.
Going back to my own experiences with product companies, one thing which was extremely critical was following a discipline – customer, competition and our product. What is it that we are trying to build here ? How does it address the market need ? How much is the market willing to pay for it ? How much more investment we need to make ? When can we get the prototypes done ? Who can we identify as ‘early customers’ ? so on. Finally, the most important question to continuously ask and checkpoint is ‘whether the market changed’? If yes, what I can do quickly to address the changing market and restrategize around my core technology ?
98% of the companies turn out differently then when they started. Its that evolution & reinvention which helps them to survive.
In the last 8 months of being in Bangalore and having met many entrepreneurs here, the above ‘discipline’ is what seems to be missing in a lot of cases. The companies that seems to be doing well are those who have their act together.
In my opinion, its really sucidal to build a product & go for entrepreneurship if there is no clarity in the overall strategy. While one may argue that Google didn’t know how they were going to make money, yahoo when through a similar episode & was affected by the dot-com bust, those are rare examples to use to argue against this discipline.
Just because you build a ‘Great mousetrap doesn’t mean the whole world is going to come running to buy that mousetrap’.
Also, to argue that one doesn’t need a business mind, and that techies will be able to learn business as well, thats being arrogant. I have been a techie myself and I know how foolish we can be sometimes. In the Indian context however, I find many techies not too eager about interacting with consultants/MBAs/business minds because of the general idea about ‘bean counters’ these personalities have projected. But in the shortterm if the startups cannot afford hiring business people, the least they can do to help themselves would be to partner with some strategic consultants.
It will help them to increase their pool of experience to go after their goals.
In the session that I conducted at Barcamp Bangalore 3.0, I had also raised other points – education, accepting failures, transforming our startups to make the engineers feel cool about having taken the risk to be in a startup, being able to challenge the mindset of our own parents & extended family that we are on to something big etc….But these are difficult things to do but if the startups want to really think big and think about scaling, they will have to get into these as well to attract and retain talent in an already crazy ‘job hopping’ culture.
Finally, without the capital to expand, most of our startups will remain just small ideas, so the need of the hour is not big VC (there are plenty of those !) but angel investors who can bet on the entrepreneurs with small amounts.
As far as the service companies go, they are already seeing signs of trouble. So the need of the hour is to become more agile, and invest on innovation. Innovation should include innovation for the domestic market and engaging with the domestic product making companies because it will benefit everyone in the ecosystem.
Barcamp gets me to blog April 1, 2007
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Today was the conclusion of the barcamp 3.0 in bangalore. About 350 people attended the first day, 150 in the 2nd day. The organizers claimed it to be a huge success and the topics also seem to have matured. Perhaps we had more diverse people from across the technology & social context.
I attended the ones on innovation, a few product & business idea demos which was interesting. I conducted a session on the question which has bothered me since I have come back from the US after 10 years, which is ‘Are we ready to move from services to products’ ?. The session was quite well attended and had quite a few opinionated people. I had a tough time keeping the discussion moving forward and fortunately, we came out with some decent take aways.
The barcamp was a great experience for both my & my husband Subbu. After spending such a long time in the US especially in an environment where technology, products, innovation is nurtured very well and I must say smartly as well, I have been now exploring what is really happening in this country.
A lot has changed in the last 10 yrs since I left to study/do my M.S. I am happy to see the younger generation taking some interesting risks. Interesting because I am afriad that they seem to be ignoring the fact that one can learn from the failures of the others and don’t need to commit the mistakes. But lets see. Whatever experience I can share and help these young upstarts, it becomes a learning experience for me as well. At the moment, I haven’t decided if I want to start something maybe other than a seed fund, but it also will have to wait for sometime.
I will write more on the blog as I go along. My interest ranges from – gender & social issues, sustainable enterprises, technology with a purpose, indian entrepreneurship, venture capital.
