Challenging the status quo ….

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.