Mobile Transformations July 8, 2007
Posted by savitakini in Technology.add a comment
When I returned to India in June 06, one of the most striking things I noticed was the usage of mobiles among the common population. There was a whole range of cell phones at reasonable prices, technologies that were available for people to vote for a TV show to buying plane tickets using mobiles. On a trip to Mumbai visiting my parents, my sister laughed at me struggling to type an SMS. She kidded me that for all my fancy gadgets that I used to bring with me from the US, I couldn’t do a simple SMS.
Since the last 1 yr however, I continuously have tried to apprise myself of the transformation in this part of the world caused by the explosion and availability of a mobile techologies at a cost affordable to most users. I have met from startups to MNCs looking at India & China as their next big growth market for telecommunication technologies. Voice is just one part of the big pie, there’s economics around – value added serves from text to multimedia messaging, gaming, mobile conferences etc. Combine that with other vertical industries – Finance/Banking services, medical, education, entertainment – the Innovation & Adoption continues at a fervent pace.
My exposure to this transformation started with the first MobileMonday meeting that was started in Bangalore in July 2006. I had met some smart folks who are driving some of this innovation at Netcore Solutions (Rajesh Jain, Veer Bothra, Girish Nair, Srinivas M) and that perhaps was the begining for me. Since then, after some 8 such meetings, I have become more aware of other interestingplayers in the ecosystems – ActiveMobs (SMS based groups), Zook.in, Motvik, Jatayu Soft, ZivaSoft, mCheck, etc to name a few.
India has the lowest per minute rate in the world for mobile voice calls. To give a comparison, in the US – we paid $70/- for 500 mins, approx 14cents/minute including all charges. Here, I pay about Re 1 per min (current exchange rate is Rs40=$1) and SMS is is almost free. In the US over & above the $70, I also had to shell out almost a $1 per message if I was not on a plan. In India, you don’t need to be on a specific plan to be able to send an SMS. Ofcourse, the carriers are not able to make much on per user basis, but they recover that through the sheer volumes. One has to really admire the operators in India for taking such bold, aggressive and even perhaps innovative business strategy.
What seems to be missing is, a detailed and continuous coverage of this transformation as it unfolds ?
The missing piece is also not just the coverage in terms of the technology evolution itself but also the adoption methodologies, business transformations that are happening in parallel.
Importance of a good team in building great companies June 26, 2007
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Over the years I have had a chance to work with a very different teams – startups, large, small, culturaly diverse etc. Often it wasn’t just the size of the team but what differentiated them was also how successful their products or services were, how they dealt with the ups & downs of the business.
Here’s what differentiated great teams
- successful teams had diverse talents who had their strengths and weakness, but they also shared common values and most importantly a common dream
- It wasn’t filled with ‘yes yes types’ but had people who challenged each other and thats how the shared knowledge and experience grew
- Over the years, their successes further nourished their fierce and independent thinking abilities, they thrived on that.
- during high pressure times, shared values, shared dreams became the bond which carried them through
Now coming to unsuccessful teams, the management continuously surrounded people below them who were the yes sayers.
Guess what happens then,
– the management has no one they can brainstorm with
– there are no independent thinkers
– no one challenges the management even if the management is wrong
– each is on his own,
– there are no shared common values because no one even knows what their own value system is, forget that of the company 
A big business problem – either competition, economy, changes in technology – is enough to lead that company down the road to disaster.
So next time you are looking to hire for a startup, think carefully about the long term. The ups and downs are going to be inevitable. You will want people who don’t just say yes to you but those who will challenge you, will brainstorm with you and help you grow to the next level.
Technology for developing countries June 11, 2007
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At Cornell, I had the opportunity to study under Prof Stuart Hart, co-author with Prof CK Prahland on the orginal paper – Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid. Among all the courses I took as part of my MBA, the Sustainable Enterprise Course taught by Prof Hart, connected with me the most not just because he is a wonderful teacher but also because of his passion and content of the course. Being a product engineer at Cisco in my previous life, I had often wondered how products that were priced so high be able to meet the dream of bringing the internet within the reach of every child on every part of the planet. Internet has truly allowed more people to participate in a global economy. However, its reach is not still happening at the pace at which it should happen and thats primarily because of the cost of broadband being so high. Technology companies in the west have often built products and priced them based on what was affordable to the local customers. Now the same products are being pushed in the Indian market. Because of lack of choice, the Indian telecom players have to make huge investments, and infact they have been quite aggressively making the investments on equipment especially in the mobile space. However, when it comes to broadband, the costs are still high, and the customer adoption is slow. The PC costs have also not come down enough, so the progress to reach out to every town and village has been really slow.
The Tenet group at IIT chennai has been trying to address this problem by creating an ecosystem of product companies, services companies that can leverage the broadband, and applications that will help drive the adoption. There are several such initiatives happening across India. What I percieve the lack of is the full-fledged commercialization strategies as well as serious venture capital funding to really take these experiments/technologies to the next level.
Going back to Prof Hart’s book, ‘Capitalism at the Crossroads’, where he discusses the challenges faced by the current model of capitalism, and why there has been such a backlash against it, it becomes much more important for us to focus and invest more in emerging technologies which will truly help us to design products suited for the local market.
The mobile phone makers – Nokia, Motorola – have seen the opportunities that become available especially in volumes as they introduce the more low end phones. Its time the other MNCs having their local engineering operations start looking at products for the local market which will infact benefit the global market.
This is just the precussor to more writing I plan to have on this topic. More in the the coming weeks/months.
Do parents really know whats good for the kids ? May 27, 2007
Posted by savitakini in Culture.2 comments
My parents had very little expectation about their daughters. Personally, I had no clue myself, except that my mom constantly pursued us to study well so we could get a job and be financially independent. I hardly knew what I wanted to do or what I was capable of ?
When I was in 7th grade, a campaign by one of the parents caused the Atomic Energy School Board to allow girls to take ‘Boys craft’ which was basically electrical circuits as part of the vocational training. Girls were required to attend stitching/knitting etc. Needless to say I told my folks, I was going to switch to ‘boys craft’ as I was too restless to sit in one place and do stitching. When I look back at where my interest in technology really began, that was the begining. Subsequently, I chose electronics in 12th grade because I hated ‘mugging’ biology. My dad perhaps thought medical or computer science was a better profession for females, but I said I wanted to play around with ‘gadgets’ so stuck with my choice of electrical, which got me to focus on embedded systems for a big part of my engineering career. Later, I decided to do MBA because I figured I was having a good head for the business/marketing angle. This time again my parents thought business was not good for women. Since then they have changed their thinking thanks to all the media attention which Indira Nooyi got as CEO of Pepsi.
Personally, I had no baggage of what I could do or couldn’t do, and just went with my gut instinct. My dad often didn’t agree with my thinking or what I was doing. He continues to be bewildered by decisions, but he is now gotten used to the fact that I go about my choices in life. I have taken responsibility for my decisions and fortunately, haven’t failed at any of the critical personal or career choices I made.
Its been 10 years since I was away. In India, now I interact with colleagues who have children who are getting to the as we call it here in India the ‘critical phase’. Will my child get into IIT or medicine, what percentage, which coaching class etc. On the other side of the planet, I had colleagues with similar aged children, and the obsession about childrens career was far less. The children had much wider choice of courses, training and opportunities. The parents provide the necessary support structure and encouragement.
Looking back at my own life, several of my friends chose alternative careers after long stints in the technology industry, and then there are those who continue to pursue their hobbies in parallel with the same or more passion then their careers. I wonder if our parents really know what we are capable of or even allow us to pursue our real passions. Will this ever change ? Some say its changing, but I am yet to see that. Sania Mirza’s parents seem to be a good example. But where are the rest ?
Moreover, will our society provide opportunities for new kind of careers hitherto unheard of in the days of my growing up in India.
Coming back to the topic thats my favourite i.e entrepreneurship, I met a young chap recently, who was having a hard time convincing his parents of letting him quit his well paying engineering role at MNC to work in a startup. Did the parents really know that their son could be the next steve jobs or bill gates or michael dell ?
Do parents really know what their children are really capable of ?
Entrepreneurial Women of India May 4, 2007
Posted by savitakini in Entrepreneurship.add a comment
Yesterday, I had a chance to sit in for my friend – Anjana Vivek’s – business plan workshop which she teaches as part of the Management Program for Women Entrepreneurs, offered at IIM Bangalore. This is offered every year in the summer, and it runs for about 6 weeks where women from all across India – about 70 of them- go through a series of sessions on marketing, finance, venture capital, strategy etc, at the end of which they have to develop their business plan and present it to the judges. I had volunteered to my friend to sit in a few sessions and pitch in with marketing related questions/doubts of the students. It was an experience for me as I am trying to understand more about whether this culture even exists or not, and more so, how does it fare in the non-technology sectors especially by women.
Kudos to the 70 women who made me think on my feet for over an hour on different business ideas and the challenges they faced in identifying their market, doing market research, segmentation and analysis.
In the past few months I had spent interacting with entrepreneurs in Bangalore, I had only interacted with technologists who faced similar issues of identifying their markets and going after them. The IIM experience even topped these guys.
The sheer diversity of the ideas along with the motivation which drove these women was quite amazing. I saw women wanting to start a pre-school in their area to an investment portfolio management company. I was put on the spot quite a few times and I had to dig deep into my cache of marketing strategies to think of handling the different segmentation problems these women faced. Unfortunately, time is always a limit and I had to leave quite a few questions unanswered. Personally, for me, I had found some new avenues for addressing my own needs – trekking guide, homemade jams/jellies, an ayurvedic doctor to name a few. Maybe I had guaranteed some discounts for myself in the process
I must applaud IIM and the NSRCEL for offering this wonderful program. It is really a step in the right direction to channel the entrepreneurial energies of India in a structured way in the right direction.
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
Posted by savitakini in General.add a comment
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.
