Taking pride in your work makes all the difference…

We had a very interesting experience in negotiating with our current cook when we were hiring her. We asked her how much she wanted for coming once and cooking for two people. She referred to the neighbor who had introduced us and said that she was getting Rs. 1800  there. It was temporary job and she expected Rs. 2000 from a permanent one. We were confounded. House helps had never quoted their current salaries while trying to negotiate, especially not if it was less than what they expected. Then she confidently said that we should see her work and then decide.

We have seen her work now and we’ll happily pay her Rs. 2000, although the amount of work she has here is less than what she had at the neighbor’s place. Not only is she a better cook than all others we had till now, she takes a lot of pride in her work and does it carefully. It is the small, little thing that matter. If an ingredient is missing, she doesn’t go whining how would she work without it. She reminds us to buy it, but also figures out how to cook without it at that time. She cleans up the kitchen after cooking, although she knows we have a maid who is supposed to the cleaning. She also cleans up the cooking utensils if she figures that the maid has already left and won’t come until tomorrow. We and many others we know have been the victims of super-inflated egos of the cooks. If the maid didn’t come, they won’t cook unless you give them washed utensils. And in most cases, they aren’t that great a cook either.

Pride is not vanity. Vanity is what makes many other cooks think too well of their mediocre work. Pride is what makes our cook strive to actually do it well and better. She is a South Indian, but makes much better chapatis than many North Indians. She didn’t take offense when I asked her to redo a dish with more spices. She used it to learn about our preferences and made the dishes after that more to our taste.

I would like to have a maid that would take pride in her work. Keeping a house clean and making it livable! And I’d pay her more than “market price” for this. It isn’t only the programmers and writers who would do well if they took pride in their work and loved it. Almost everyone can benefit from it.

The biggest mistake in giving advices

If 5+ years as entrepreneur has made me wary of one thing in life – it is advice. Although the experience is nothing unique to entrepreneurship, but I mention this because being an entrepreneur makes you especially prone to getting advices. It comes from every quarter starting from parents, relatives, friends, ex-colleagues, venture capitalists, earlier successful and failed entrepreneurs, mentors, gurus to the random person you meet on the train. It’s not like that you do not get advice as a student, an IIT aspirant, a recent graduate, a new recruit, a newly-wed, a new parent etc. etc. But I will take examples as an entrepreneur because I have personally seen maximum number of advices in that quarter.

Now, there is a kind of advice that is useless, but also harmless. It is the obvious one. When you show the newly launched website for your company, people will comment on the colors and fonts. How it isn’t appealing enough for people to stay. How the register button is not prominent enough to attract attention. How you should measure and optimize. They would ignore that you don’t have enough traffic to measure and optimize yet. What they would ignore to tell you even more importantly is that your offering makes no sense. There are people in the world who are happy with generating ideas. There are people who are happy applauding happily generated ideas. If only you would get the colors right…

These kind of advices are harmless because you might spend a little time tinkering with fonts and colors, but would soon realize what people are not telling you. That the offering does not make sense. Or that it does

Another example of such useless, but harmless advice is the expression “look at random.choice(x) company’s random.choice(y)”. Yes. I felt like writing some outrageously out-of-place pseudo python code in a wordpress editor. x and y are lists and I will define x and y with some more outrageously out-of-place pseudo python code:

• x = [z where z is an ostensibly successful startup and z has hardly anything in common with the issues you have at hand]
• y = [customer support, marketing, PR, sales, operations, technology, partnerships, funding, team, processes]

Does the above example make sense. Don’t worry, if it doesn’t. Particularly don’t get stuck up on the code-syntax. It is not supposed to be correct. There are other examples. But let us go back to the original intent of this article. The type of advices which come out of the biggest mistake in giving advices. The mistake of over-generalizing personal experiences. It is the biggest mistake and it is the easiest to make. Because advice, after all, is supposed to come from personal experience, right? Right. An advice coming from personal experience is a genuine one. An advice coming from over-generalized personal experience is a wrong one.

I remember two such experience vividly

• Speaking on the podium of a rather big-name startup event, someone had proclaimed that you should do three startups, because it will take you those many attempts to get your startup right. He had said something about what exactly will happen to the first two and how the third one will take you to stellar heights. And why? Because that is what had happened with him. What??!! How long does it take for anyone to think of ample examples where people have gotten the first startup right? Or where many more than three attempts have not produced anything significant? The audience was pretty savvy. But it never got questioned. Probably it was too big a platform for individuals to speak. Probably people didn’t bother. Probably they weren’t listening. What I sincerely hope hadn’t happened was anyone taking that advice seriously.
• In a smaller event, a bigger-name-adviser had gone all “Do social media. Do social media. Do social media. Forget everything else for marketing.”  Huh? Whatever happened to the idea of identifying your audience, evaluating your offering and then figuring out what channels work the best? Thankfully in this particular event, the adviser did get questioned. Some digging up revealed that he wasn’t over-generalizing his personal experience. He was over-generalizing his recent-most personal experience. Because in another company in past, he had to do the “dirty” old-world sales & marketing. Social media wouldn’t have worked in those circumstances.

There would be no dearth of such advices once you start noticing them. Hire/Don’t hire, Raise funds/Don’t raise funds, Hire-only-IITians/Never-hire-IITians, Hire-needy-relatives/Never-work-with-family-members, Marry-before-starting-up/Don’t-marry-if-starting-up, Start-early/Start-after-experience and so on…

Next time you are giving an advice, please stop for a moment and think. Is you advice based on solely your personal experience? Even worse, is it based on a single personal experience? If so, don’t blurt out a generic advice. I am not saying that you should not give advice based on personal experience. In fact, what I said earlier is that advice based on personal experience is a genuine one. Personal experience is the best, and probably the only source of genuine advice. Reading out of a self-help book is hardly ever useful. But what you do need to do is think it through and qualify it. What were the circumstances under which something did or did not work for you? For example

1. Instead of a generic hire or don’t hire IITians, consider something like following: I did not have resources or people to interview a large number of candidates. So, I focused on candidates from top-tier institutes. They are more likely to be technically good. But it is not like people from other places are not good. The noise is likely to be higher. But if you can put together a reliable test to weed out the wrong candidates, you should be able to find as good or even better employees.
2. Instead of a “get it right the first time” or “do three startups”, consider this: You might hit it right with the first startup itself. If that happens, its great. If not, don’t give up on entrepreneurship. While there are people who have gotten it right in the first go, there are many, many more who got it right in second, third, fourth or fifth attempt.

Agreed! The modified advice starts sounding “weak”. You can’t feel like a know-it-all guru, who can give people the exact, precise directions to success. But it is better this way. By giving the exact, precise direction, you are more likely to mislead anyone who trusts you.

If you are an advice-taker, “think for yourself” is the best advice I can give. Actually it is better expressed in a phrase in Hindi – “Suno sab ki. Karo apne man ki.” It roughly translates into – “Listen to everybody’s advice. But do what you believe in.” It does not ask you to ignore everyone’s advice. But take that as an input. If the advice you are receiving does not come with proper if’s and but’s, tempting as it might be to have such precise instructions, please do not take it at face value.

Am I over-generalizing my personal experiences here? You decide

By the way, what I have said about the problems of over-generalization is applicable for advices related to personal life too. Not all marriages succeed in the same way. Not all kids can be brought up the same way. And there is no guarantee that what has worked for the advice-giver till now is going to work forever even for him. So, please! Think for yourself.

Educomp might be dead, education is not!

The fateful Forbes article, if you go by the dysphoria, seems to have sealed the fate of all education-related startups. They are all doomed. Why? Because e-learning is dead! Why? Because Educomp is in trouble.

I hope when I put it that way, the ridiculousness of the tremors in investor, startup and media community becomes a little more obvious. Fine! Educomp has been the poster-boy of education and e-learning in India. But if Yahoo! being in trouble has not meant that Internet, online content and online advertising are dead. Educomp being in trouble can hardly mean that the business of education is dead.

What these FUD-rumour-mongers need to do it is to come down from their pedestal, stop taking a 100,000 ft high view of things and get into some nuances and bother their heads with some details. If we go by the article, Educomp’s troubles seem two-fold:

1. It diversified too much in search of quick growths, in areas that were not quite its core strengths (even if it all fell under the umbrella of education), could not manage the capital requirements, did some financial engineering to continue to make it look good, but ultimately could not avoid getting noticed by share market, investors and sensational journalism.
2. It’s original idea of “smart classes” was not taking it too far. From the anecdotal evidence schools were not adopting it and from the accounting evidence, they were not paying in time, if at all.

If #2 happens and there are investors and large number of employees to manage and give answers to, I would not be surprised that haphazard, hasty response results in #1. What startup investors really need to be concerned about is #2. Is there still an opportunity to bring value to education system using new technology, products and offerings? Or have all hopes died with Educomp?

Once you get past all the marketing jazz and buzzwords, what was Educomp’s offering? Multimedia content for school syllabus. Delivered over CDs. This is one of those concepts that sound right at a high level. Everybody in the world is wary of only “theoretical” knowledge spouted at the kids. What we need to show kids is how stuff actually work. What better way than animation, audio, video, right?

Possibly! But did someone do a field test to see which concepts are best explained through animations? What kind of animations manage to work better than a teacher explaining it in the class or the good-old textbook? Was there any measurable evidence of better learning outcomes? And given what matters the most to Indian parents, did the kids’ performance in exams improve? Beyond the ads, did jumping mathematical formula, instead of the one written on a boring board, really make kids more excited about going to the schools? Did teachers think that their lives became easier, or did they find it difficult to finish the syllabus while multimedia content took its own time to play and kids still sneered at everything in the classes?

All said and done “Smart Classes” are not about “technology”. The only “technology” involved is the use of multimedia content creation tools. The rest, and the most, of it is content play. And who is creating the content? Are these education researchers, who have an insight into how children learn? Or are these thousands of animation diploma-holders, who are going through the same “boring” textbooks and putting some graphics and sound around the same old content? My educated guess is that it is the latter.

Why should it be surprising, then, that the users did not adopt it? That nobody cared to research if the offering would work for them and it did not work? And that when the ultimate users (teachers and students) did not adopt it, buyers (management) stopped paying for it?

Content is not about technology. It is, unfortunately, tougher than technology. If it has to work, it can not be created trivially. Investors and journalists like to jump on the sales number. Those numbers can create initial euphoria. But if you are not monitoring how effective your actual offering is for the users, sooner or later the euphoria will die down. Accounting tricks and clever financial engineering is not going to make up for the basics faltering. The return in financial markets are governed by the value created in the market for real goods and services. It does not matter how complex we make the financial system, there is no evading the basics in the long run!

Educomp bet on usurping the educational content, did not do a great job of it despite creating some sales & marketing success, and instead of taking feedback and improving on its core idea, made some bad (in the hindsight, at least) diversification decisions. They are in a soup. They might be able to come out of it, or they might sink.

But this doesn’t prove that education does not need technology. Or even better content. There are real problems surrounding the quality and scalability of education. Someone needs to do a better job at these and create real value, which can justify the investment a customer would make in buying their offering. And if you are an investor, don’t run away from education sector. Or any sector for that matter. Instead of starting and ending with macro numbers, forbes articles, valuation in last round and valuation in next round, take some time to get into the details. Put yourself into the shoes of customers and ask these simple questions

1. Will I pay for it?
2. Will I pay enough for it?
3. Will enough like me pay for it?

Then put yourself into the shoes of the founders/team and ask

1. Will I be able to deliver what enough customers will pay enough for?
2. Can I create the team, if it doesn’t already exist?
3. Can I develop the technology/product/content?
4. Can I provide support after sales and keep getting revenues?
5. Can I do all this for a price that is lesser than customer’s life-time value?”

After these “small, little” questions have been answered, feel free to do the due-diligence on “stuff that really matters from 100,000 ft”.

I seem to be spouting things from Management textbooks. But I have kept the finance textbooks aside for a moment. Too few investors seem to do that.

This is true not just for education, but for any sector. And education, dear world, is definitely not dead! We have a large population of people looking to improve their lot in life through education. It is for us entrepreneurs to figure out how to make a profitable business out of it. The key will lie in creating something of value before creating newer buzzwords.

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P. S. Disclaimer: I am working with Aurus Network, which is in Education domain (but is NOT a competitor of Educomp). This is, however, not a marketing article!

 

Small Town

Where houses are big and unfinished,
And roads are narrow or non-existent.
Where a millionaire, his accountant and their house-help
May live on plots next to each other.
Where driving badly and parking arbitrarily are the norms.
And so is honking incessantly,
To stay safe from bad driving,
And to clear the arbitrary parking.
Where two-wheelers are not discarded
After buying a car,
Because cars can never go in the market.
Where the shopkeepers know a loyal customer
Even after a thirteen year hiatus.
Where giving a treat at home is still normal,
And going to a restaurant special.
Where you are expected to and you do
Turn up for an invitation sent barely an hour ago.
Where you visit the neighbours
Just to meet.
Where news can be passed on
By shouting across the street.
Where you still keep track of
Who lives where, who works where
And Whose kids have gone where.

The small town
Where I had grown up!

We will settle down

Don’t worry Darling
We will settle down
In the new house too.

All the junk
Accumulated over the years
Will again be stashed away
In cupboards and attic
Never to be seen
Never to be found
Never to be used.
The ones that will still remain
In the drawing-room
Odd and out-of-place
Will start looking just fine
To our eyes.
And even when the guests come
And notice
They will be polite enough
To not say a word.

Don’t worry Darling
We will settle down
In the new house too.