Mail going to spam on yahoo accounts? Yahoo does listen – contact them.

I have heard others facing this problem; so thought I would share my experience here.

Our mail is hosted with Google Apps for your Domain, while our hosting is with godaddy and is on a shared ip. Mails from Pothi.com to yahoo ids were almost invariably being delivered to spam folder. And it was a while before we realized this. In all likelihood we lost some business. Even after realizing the problem, sometimes we just did not pay attention to the fact that a query had come from yahoo id and the mail never got delivered. When we did notice the yahoo id, the only solution at disposal was awkward. We’d respond to them from pothi.com id and then forward the mail to our personal id and resend from there. I ended up transferring some of the business discussions to personal id, which was not a great thing.

We had no clue what to do, but on the suggestion of an ex-yahoo friend, decided to shoot a mail to the customer support. From there on the experience was good.

I could not find a place to report this specific problem. So, I shot a mail to their customer support from their help page which is meant to resolve problems with your yahoo account, not other things. But the beginning of the good experience was that the mail did get forwarded to the right team. I received “Automated Confirmation” a couple of times; so I guess it got forwarded more than once before reaching in the right hands. But that does not bother me, since they promptly replied back. They asked a bunch of questions about servers being used for mails, hosting server IP addresses, volumes and policies about newsletters being sent out etc. It was a long questionnaire; so it took me a few days before I actually sat down to respond to it. I finally responded today afternoon and just now received a confirmation that because we have a shared IP they can not fully exempt the IP, but have made suitable changes in the database. I hope it means that our domain is white listed. Abhaya just sent a mail to his own yahoo id. Earlier these mails always ended up in spam, not this time.

So, I definitely give a thumbs up to Yahoo Support for this. And in case you are facing a similar problem, contacting them is worth it. The right place to go to is http://postmaster.yahoo.com . If you click on one of the questions there, the page has a “Contact Support” link too.

The misplaced founder and the rightly placed Red Hat

This post on proto.in was written for pluggd.in. A thank you for the free pass

–

There is no universal rule for success. In entrepreneurship or elsewhere. It is good to take inspiration, it is good to try and learn from others, but each success story is unique. If it were possible to imitate your way into success, especially in an activity full of uncertainty like entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship would not have remained so uncertain after all! Further all this inspiration, all this learning, taken outside of the context could simply be disastrous.

“The mis-understood co-founder” was a conversation track at the fifth edition of Proto.in, which meant well. The idea had come from the experience of how and when people go around looking for co-founders, which includes

• Writing mails to people like Ashish and Vijay and others in the ecosystem asking them to find a co-founder!
• Trying to find a co-founder after a lot of ideation and probably even implementation has already happened.
• Trying to find a co-founder amongst the people they have never ever known in past

In such scenarios, there are some questions that genuinely come up

• Does it make sense to try to search for a co-founder like an employee?
• Can you expect to get along with a co-founder in ups and downs if you have not nurtured the start-up from the very initial stages together?
• Would you not be better off looking at hiring good employees, rather trying to find a co-founder? Since in these cases when you say you are looking for a co-founder, you are essentially saying that you want somebody smart, with complementary skills who would work for you for nuts or nothing! That probably does not work.

So, just when one had geared up to have a meaningful discussion around these questions many of the aspiring and existing entrepreneurs face, we had a pronouncement from the speaker. You do not need a co-founder or even better you SHOULD NOT have a co-founder. A learning from his life! And how exactly? So, I try to put together bits and pieces of what came out form the talk and answers to the questions:

• He had a company (with a co-founder) which was earning enough money to support him through the four years when his successful-without-co-founder company was not making any money.
• He then decided to go to the US for a prestigious MBA, and got lucky with hiring for this successful-without-co-founder company.
• Over next two years, when the only founder was not around, the company grew (100% YOY?), paid for itself and is successful today.

Wonderful! And the learning is “You should not have a co-founder” stripped out of all the context like

• The founder’s life did not depend on the success of the company.
• It succeeded without even the founder – why should one learn anything about co-founder from that? (In fact it succeeded after the only founder had left it in the hands of employees! Makes me think of Indian Railways turn around more than anything else.)
• It is a website around user generated content – not necessarily representative of numerous other kinds of start-up you have.

In nut-shell, the track did not address any of the genuine questions one would have around finding a co-founder. Even worse, whatever point it went on to make, was not made. Interspersed with bashing all “web 2.0 companies” in past 8 years, and challenging those who had co-founders to come back to him after four years etc. it, in fact, left a bad taste in my mouth. Somebody had twittered that it was not clear what the speaker was trying to say. I would have liked to say only as much too, but I had promised Ashish a blog post unfortunately.

But that does not mean that all the hope was lost from Proto itself

Fast forward to next day’s Keynote by Bob Young and his story of Red Hat. It was an interesting take on how he himself went about learning and unlearning the rules of the game and finally came up with a successful company around something nobody in the industry thought could make money! The Free Software. And the best part was that he was not fanatic about it. He was very balanced and clear about where it works and where it does not. He is not the kind of person I saw in the newsgroups of IIT Kanpur shouting from the rooftop that all the desktops should have Linux too. He hadn’t built Red Hat for desktop and was very clear as to why Linux may not be the best thing for home PCs in the hands of non-techies. He also ended his keynote by clearly stating and free software and open source cannot take good care of all the situations. Any advantage that comes from being able to play with the source code comes only to those who can actually play with the source code. So, there is no point selling open source to dentists looking for an dentist office automation software.

One big learning for me from the talk was something simple. Be clear of the context and value proposition. Sell to those for whom you have a value proposition, rather trying to force fit your solution for every situation.

Amen!

My talks during Megabucks (IITK)

I was at IIT Kanpur for three days over the weekend, ironically to speak during Megabucks. [Those who know my love-hate relationship with Megabucks would be able to see the irony ]

So, Megabucks (and recently launched e-cell) organizers figured that they should get some recent alumni who have done their start-ups. Then another student related to Placement Office, who has been scouting for people from recent years in various domains to conduct workshops for students, stumbled upon my name for entrepreneurship. He thought Megabucks was the right time to get some one for entrepreneurship. So, he got in touch with Megabucks folks and I ended up in the campus once again.

There were two talks I gave there. First one was in the inauguration. Second was a part of the panel discussion.

Here is the summary of the two talks:

——————-

On Inauguration

Topic: Entrepreneurship

Theme I: Entrepreneurship is not Management

When I first heard that there was an entrepreneurship cell (e-cell) being launched at IITK, the first question that came to my mind was “Why an e-cell, when Business Club is already there”. And that’s when I looked at the typical activities Business Club has gravitated towards over time. Since, I myself was a part of business club during my days at campus, I know that we also tried to conduct similar activities: understanding stock markets, trading games, marketing and strategy exercises, case studies, print and TV ads etc. These activities are very much a part of the world of business, but they are very managerial, MBAish activities. No offenses meant by calling them managerial. I am only differentiating between managerial and entrepreneurial activities. As an entrepreneur, it is highly likely that you won’t have money to create tv and print ads, won’t have enough data and time to create huge, detailed marketing plans and stock markets might as well be something alien to you (unless you start-up’s main business has something to do with them!). So, business club has been taking up a lot of these managerial activities. Therefore, there is a space for e-cell to take up purely entrepreneurial activities.

Theme II: Learning about Entrepreneurship is not just the case studies of successful companies

This is something I have discussed even earlier in this blog. Success, if and when it comes, is great. Nothing like it. But the toughest and most crucial phase for an entrepreneur are those days of starting up and then building up, the days of uncertainty. If one has to learn about Entrepreneurship, it is very important to have a glimpse into those days of an entrepreneur who is not yet on the top of the world. How do you survive there? And even enjoy it? Because if you don’t enjoy it, you will not be able to survive. That’s why I liked the idea of having recent entrepreneurs come there. While it is important to get inspired by listening to the success stories of people who had humble beginnings, when you are aspiring to be an entrepreneur, it is useful to have a glimpse of the gory details of the difficulties and challenges of starting up.

Theme III: Entrepreneurship in India

Again something I might have discussed in the blog earlier. Entrepreneurship in India does not start with Narayanmurthys of the world (again – no offense meant. Have all the respect due to this gentleman. Point here is different). I picked up some generic, and some specific examples IITK students would identify with

• Person who manages to procure and sell a Dove shop in a remote village or an essential piece of medicine
• Shopkeepers in the ShopC (ShopC = Shopping Center at IITK)
• Person who gets your passport applications done (IITK specific – there is one guy who takes care of all the formalities up to submitting the form in Lucknow for a small fee)
• Your travel agent
• Tutors who taught you during school days

They are all Entrepreneurs. They are not a post 1991 phenomenon. True, there was license Raj and hence we didn’t have more Tatas, Birlas, Bajajs and Dhirubhais. But we still had one of the largest number of retail outlets. Thanks to the entrepreneurs all around us. Your milk reached you daily on time, so did your newspaper. These small, private enterprises also employed (and continue to employ) a large number of people. These guys undertook activities that created value for their customers and in the process created livelihood, if not wealth, for themselves and all others employed by them.

Moral of the story is that Entrepreneurship is more prevalent in India that we normally think. To appreciate this, we need to understand that Entrepreneurship is not just about tech start-ups funded by the VCs. If I have to give this statement a nationalistic hue, I can say that we did not import entrepreneurship from silicon valley

This traditional Entrepreneurship in India was driven by two things:

• By necessity: People from states like Bihar and U. P. would appreciate this. You did business when you did not land up in a government job. By necessity.
• By tradition: As opposed to the kind of people mentioned above, there were Sindhis, Marwaris, Gujaratis, who did not do jobs! They did business. It was the tradition, in their blood so to say. They started or joined their family businesses. Grew it by adding more businesses, which could be totally unrelated to their existing businesses. Thus they went through the experience of being an entrepreneur again and again.

That said, it isn’t that last 2-3 decades have not contributed significantly new things to the world of entrepreneurship.

The first thing that is new, at least as such a well known phenomenon, is Entrepreneurship for Passion. You are a well placed engineer, manager, consultant etc. On your way to higher positions in the corporate ladder. Everyone in your family is well educated and in respectable jobs. You yourself have been a brilliant student. You satisfy every criteria of respectability in your society. And yet one day, you decide to chuck it all. Become a Sadhu, start an NGO or become an entrepreneur. This is Entrepreneurship for passion.

I am sure that detailed research papers could be written on how this kind of entrepreneurship developed, but I think one important thing that has made this concept widespread is the prosperity of a certain class in India. This is the class that benefited from the opening up of the economy and realized for the first time that they do not need to feel financially insecure for all their lives. That they can afford to take some risks to follow their hearts. They managed to break away from the traditional mentality of “Stay safe, hold on to what you have, don’t change too many things, live a peaceful life”. And with time the ecosystem built up. A certain prestige and good will developed around this kind of entrepreneurship. Institutional funding came in. That is called VC money. So, overall an environment developed which praised, supported and encouraged this Entrepreneurship for passion like never before. This is a good thing for us. I, you, e-cell, business club, Megabucks, all the people attending the festival have grown up in this environment of good will and fascination around entrepreneurship. So, let’s celebrate that.

But with the prestige and goodwill comes a danger. I call it Entrepreneurship for Fashion. Like a well paying job, family wealth and other things that add to the social stature, there is a possibility that being an entrepreneur becomes such a socially prestigious thing that people jump into it without figuring out whether they really want to do it. It has not become very prevalent yet, but you can already see this happening, when somewhere we start comparing entrepreneurship with a ‘regular, old, boring’ job and depict entrepreneurship as something superior. This is dangerous. Let’s get this straight. There is nothing superior about ‘entrepreneurship’. Its all about figuring out what you want to do. If you would rather be an artist, be so. If you are happy in a job and would use the money you earn to pursue your passions and hobby, so be it. Don’t do anything just because it is a fashionable thing to do (including entrepreneurship). This can become a topic in itself. So, let me leave it for now.

Theme IV: Recession and Entrepreneurship for students and fresh graduates

So, enough of history and philosophy of Entrepreneurship. With recession and bad placement scene, the most important thing for most students right now is what to do and whether entrepreneurship is an option. Let’s leave behind the Entrepreneurship for passion for a while (that can be pursued anytime, recession or no recession) and get back to the Entrepreneurship for necessity. And there is nothing wrong in that. With a better market, you might just have taken up a job, gotten decent salary and used your weekends to pursue your hobbies and passions. Perfectly good way to balance life. And if you don’t see that happening, you can’t just sit back and mourn the lack of jobs. Even if you would not have considered Entrepreneurship then, consider it now.

The question would of course be, how?

Typically you would think of entrepreneurship in terms of starting a company, with all its overheads. Registration of company, registration under any applicable tax authorities, getting a registered office, putting in the minimum required capital of 1 lac for a private limited company etc. etc. This is the way to go if you have a solid business plan in mind, are in to the idea for long term and have some initial money to invest. Depending on the business plan, even looking for institutional funding, for example through Venture Capitalists may be necessary.

But there is another way as well. Closer to what our traditional entrepreneurs did. Not about the business plan or huge money or lot of investment. Do you personally have a skill that has some value in the market. Probably its not making papads for most of you. But are you a great coder? Do you have an uncanny ability to do design? Do you write very well? And a bunch of other such skills. Then you can be a freelancer. Its not easy money. It has all the elements of entrepreneurship. You have to fight it out, get clients, probably team up with someone to complement your skills. But you can avoid the overheads of setting up a full fledged company. And there are places online to get started. So, consider this option. This is something you can start even as a student. So that by the time you are out there, you have already made your way into it. So, do consider this option in the current job market scenario.

——————-

In the Panel Discussion

Topic: From Confusion to Decision

The idea here was a little different. My purpose here was to address one of the most common complaint people have with their life at that stage. That of ‘confusion’. “I am so confused between x, y, z (all totally different) that I do not know what to do.” So, I did not take them through my entrepreneurial journey, but through my journey to entrepreneurship from the days of being confused as a student. That’s where the topic came from.

I talked a bit about my own career choices and confusion at various stages starting from first year at IITK and drew simple conclusions about things. Many may not agree with the actual conclusions (like bunking classes is cool, but attending classes is clever), but the idea was more to make them feel comfortable with confusion and ‘inspire’ (can’t think of a milder word) them to continue trying to find their calling instead of feeling bogged down by the confusion.

I spoke about how I wanted to be an IAS officer in my first year, a scientist in my second and an MBA by the third. And of course, after doing an MBA, the conclusion was that MBA wasn’t about leadership, vision blah, blah. But rather about a job placement! And that’s it. How an internship with an FMCG company killed the budding marketing person inside me too How not getting into McKinsey had frustrated (probably depressed) me to no end, but how I know today that it was the best thing to happen to my career. How I got into Product Management without properly knowing what it means. How the days in Google were so much better without managers. And how I finally figured that in the worse case I would land up in xxxxx (an approximate competitor to Google, but Abhaya doesn’t believe it would exist when the time for me to land up there would come! ). And hence, how I ended up doing Pothi.com and how irrespective of the future success or failure I am happy doing it.

Happy New Year

If you like it, please feel free to go ahead, download the high resolution pdf, take a print-out and put it up on your desk in the office, wall at home and whereever else you fancy!

Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital

I guess, if you have started giving gyaan about entrepreneurship, you can not escape talking about Venture Capital. So, how could I?

I have talked something about the absence of real angels in India sometime back. But let me take up the broader VC money and entrepreneurship issue this time. Let me warn upfront that this isn’t going to be a tip on how and when to approach VC. But it should tell you something about the perspective I have developed about VCs in a still just-started entrepreneurial journey. Whether you find it useful or not remains to be seen until (and if) you read through it

Many a times, even before thinking about an idea or a business, people think of the VC funding. Somehow, entrepreneurship and VC funding, as concepts, have become almost synonymous in certain circles. This is absurd and that is what I want to talk about first.

While people talk about how entrepreneurship has taken off in India after liberalization etc. the fact is that India has been a very entrepreneurial country since ever. License Raj may have restricted certain kinds of entrepreneurship because of which we could not create more TATAs and Birlas, but at smaller levels entrepreneurship always flourished. India has one of the largest number of retail outlets in the world and this number is not driven by government ration shops, but by all the entrepreneurs around you who ensure that you get things right in front on your house or even on your door-step. And apart from these visible entrepreneurs, there are bunch of people involved in the whole supply chain, who manage to make things reach your hands when needed despite all the infrastructural problems.

But yes – entrepreneurship has not been the glorified activity it is considered in the professionally educated circles today. In parts of the country if has been “in the blood” so to say (the Marwaris, Gujartis, Sindhis etc.) and at other places it has been the default choice when you can’t secure a job. The glorification of an entrepreneur as someone who has sacrificed present comforts for bigger vision is something new. It is good, it is encouraging, but it would be sad if in this new glorification, we forget the fact that entrepreneurship by itself is not something new, and the bells and whistles that come with this glorification are not essential to entrepreneurship. One of those bells and whistles in also Venture Capital.

No, I am not trying to belittle the importance of venture capital. The point I am trying to make is that venture capital is not an essential ingredient for entrepreneurship all the time. There are only certain kinds of businesses, in certain stages, where venture capital makes sense. Hence, you should not be thinking of how to get Venture Capital before thinking of the actual idea.

Now the most important thing a VC looks for when funding an idea is….?? Guess?? No, not whether the company would exist 100 years down the line It is simpler than that. When can the VC exit and at what kind of returns?

VCs are using other people’s money (part of it may be their personal, but for most part they are answerable to their investors). The assumed reason behind why these people have invested money with the VCs is that these guys want better returns than what a bank deposit and even the normal share market can give to them. Hence, they bet on start-ups. They take ‘higher’ risk and want high, really high returns, when they exit.

Then they can’t wait indefinitely to exit. Most of the funds VCs have would have a definite life, say 8 years. So, when they invest they look at an exit by the time the life of the find is over. (So – yeah. If the expected time to exit is higher, you’d be better off being funded early in the life of the fund).

So, we know the criteria. They want to exit and exit with good returns. So, they need to believe that the business can give something like that to them.

Some of the things that can be concluded from here are:

• Most of the time they are not likely to invest if the business is sustainable, but can not grow at a rate that will give huge, huge returns. They won’t invest in a Kirana shop, although it would be perfectly good business for an individual.
• If you have a research output and a product plan that can give returns within the life time of the fund, you are fine. But you can’t possibly get VC funding to do research in the start-up and hope for something that gives good returns. Don’t propose pharma research lab to a VC.

But (and this is BIG one), that does not mean you shouldn’t be doing a business if it is not VCable. If a business is not VCable, it does not mean, its not viable. That is a different to keep in mind and it also helps if you can decide whether you want to build a VCable business or are you happy with a sustainable business. Once again, sustainable need not mean that you would be running a non-profit and would never make money. Depends on the business, but if you have a good one, it probably means that money will come from the success of the business and hard work that goes into ensuring that, rather than form the capital invested by the VC.

Before ending this post, let me throw some gyaan about exit options too. There can be three kinds of exit options for the VCs

• Acquisition of the start-up
• IPO of the company
• Purchase of VC’s shares by another institutional investor in the next round

The last of these is something almost everybody will feel skeptical about. If it is a VCable business as defined earlier, there shouldn’t be a reason to go for this route. Even if you are able to come up with a genuine reason, it is not likely to be taken kindly.

So, either given the market you should be able to prove as to why someone will acquire you? Or should be able to show that you can go for an IPO in these many years.

Some of the reasons others may acquire you are

• You will have a technology that would be tempting enough for a big player couple of years down the line.
• You will be able to create a large base of loyal users, which would be valuable for someone to acquire.

Probably the only thing that can justify your claim that you can go for an IPO would be that you can grow to a certain level of revenue and profits. I have heard numbers for what this level is, but I am not very confident about them. I guess it would depend on the a bunch of things, but for example can you have a revenue of Rs. 4 crore by the time you break-even in 1-2 years (for an early stage fund)?

Anyway – enough of gyaan. Don’t have time to re-read and proof-read it right now. Its 4.25 am, I am yet to sleep and there is a long day ahead. Will correct any incoherences later.

गति ने की हमारी दुर्गति

So, there was this shipment which weighed around 50 KGs. Had to ship a relatively large number of copies of a particular book to Kolkata for personal use by the author. Don’t get baffled by the 50 KG figure. The paper, and hence books, are pretty heavy. (Don’t you remember your heavy school bags?)

Now, normal courier would be rather costly for this. Even speed post. Gati, which I had used in past, seemed like a good option. Their rates are much cheaper compared to courier folks, closer to the rate of the road transport guys, but you don’t have to wait forever for their trucks to get full. They ship things everyday and you can track your shipment like any other courier. What more, if you have packed the stuff, they pick it up from your doorsteps.

So, I go to their website and give a call to their call centre number. They tell me the rates, which I quote to the customer. Everyone is happy. Books are produced and packed. I give a call to Gati again to book the shipment and then….

Is this a commercial shipment or a personal one?

Being the novice that I am, I am not sure what is the definition of commercial. So, I tell him, we are a business, but the books are not for further sales. They are for the personal use of recipient.

You need to fill up the form 505 for outgoing from Karnataka and form 50 for incoming from West Bengal for VAT/Sales Tax purposes.

Ahem! What are those? There are no taxes on books meant for reading. We’ll give you the invoice and also a declaration that the books are not for resale.

No – pick-up won’t be done unless you give us those forms.

So, we look for those forms anyway to see if it is something very simple. Turns out that form 50 in West Bengal is supposed to filled up by the receiver, who should be a registered dealer in West Bengal. If he does not have a TIN, he has to go to the Sales Tax office to get an evaluation done and then send us the form 50, which we need to provide along with the shipment…

Hfff… Just how ridiculous can it get. You mean to say that as a customer, whenever I buy something online, I will have to go the Sales Tax office, get an evaluation done and then….

We send books everyday, for God’s sake. I called up my accountant and confirmed that the invoice copies and declaration will be enough. All other couriers do this. This time I was stuck with Gati because I have quoted the rate to the customer. Not realizing that I am going to be talking to some blockheads. I even asked for the escalation of the call, but the answer was the same. The guy pretended that he had spoken to his superior, although I highly doubt it. He did not transfer my call. Probably I should have told him that I am very impressed by your loyalty to the company policies and I want to drop in a word of praise to your superior. Will you please connect me?

Anyway, then the Indian common sense came to me. I called up the local pick-up office. They confirmed that the declaration is enough. They said that they will do the pick-up. I felt better (and baffled. Talking to the people at these two places, you would think you are talking to two totally different companies, with totally different policies, probably even working in two different countries, with two different sets of laws!)

But that was not the end. The church street office, where I first called, gave the number of the sales guy in our area. The sales guy in our area gave me the number of the operations guy in our area. The operations guy in our area confirmed that he would pick the consignment up the same day, or latest the next day. He did not come the same day. The next day, he did not pick up the repeated calls we made. We were already late, since we had told the customer that we were shipping it the previous day. So, we called up the sales guy again and asked if there was some place we can drop it. Yes, there is one – in Domlur. Gave me another number of Mr. JP. We called him up. Confirmed that we can come at around 4 ‘O clock to drop it. We got an auto and reached Domlur as per his directions. As is common, the last mile is alway a problem and you need to call the person up to get the direction from the last landmark. We called, and called and called. At least 15-20 calls, but nobody picked up. Abhaya went around the whole of Domlur looking for a Gati office, while I waited with 50 KGs of books on the road side, hoping that God Indra does not become too eager! No Gati office to be found. No Mr. JP to pick up the phone. So, we call the sales guy again. He gives us the direction. After some trial and error, we reach a place, which does not say anything about Gati, is closed since morning (according the kids playing there), but is supposed to be a Gati franchisee. Hff… The sales guy is equally clueless. Promises to call me back after talking to Mr. JP. I don’t expect him to have better luck in reaching Mr. JP. Two more numbers are mentioned on the board there. We try those too. No luck. The clouds are so dark that they are threatening to pour down heavily anytime. Finally, we think of something better. We decide to drop it in the church street office. We know for sure that there is a visible office there. And they were reassuring on phone. To the credit of sales guy, he did call back and was relieved to know that we are on our way to the church street office. We get an auto. Load the books again, reach the Church Street . Pain is not yet over. I am in the auto, while Abhaya is on the scooter. By mistake his mobile is also with me. And the auto wallah tells me, after reaching at the other end of church street, which is a one way, that he can not come from the other end on the Brigade road, because autos are not allowed on Brigade road. Wonderful! Now, I am supposed to walk down the church street with 3 carton weighing a total of 50 KG. I am no weakling, nor is it that I can not carry a reasonable amount of luggage, but trust me – 50 KG is a lot! And I can’t even connect to Abhaya telling him where I am, so that he can come and we can carry it together. Because his mobile is with me.

I don’t know why, but I call up Gati office to as how far they are from the other end of the church street and it turns out that Abhaya has already reached there. Sigh! Finally we talk, he comes over. We use the scooter as a bailgadi to load all the cartons, and drag it close to the Gati office.

Now, things are better. As I carry one carton inside, the guy there comes out with me and helps carry one of the others inside. Although we ourselves carry two out of the three cartons, but this gesture of coming out is a bit reassuring, especially after the careless behaviour of people for last two days. The guy is calm, helpful and gets it done with the declaration. Just because of the simple gestures of this person, we have still not given up on Gati. Next time, we have a heavy consignment, we’ll simply drop it in Church Street office. To hell with all others. But we would have certainly considered them for more things, if the overall experience, right from the call centre, hadn’t been so bad. And if they decide to shift the church street office somewhere else, or the guy working there moves out – I am done with them. Probably our customers will have to pay a higher shipping charge for heavy consignments, or be content with normal transport options. But for all its innovativeness – no more Gati please!

Taking Cues…

When I was taking somebody’s interview for the first time on my own at Google, it turned out that the candidate used to follow my blog and I was totally nervous. It was the first time I was on the other side of the table, and was fully conscious of what all I hated about interviewers and was going to do myself. “Why do you want to join Google?” “What are your strengths and weaknesses?” I thought that most of such questions were so well rehearsed that if you were picking people up based on the answers to those, you might as well pick people up randomly. The answers show nothing about the individual.

Since then, I have gone even further on the other side of the table. Then, I at least had the excuse that I was merely following the procedures of the organization. Now, I am on my own and randomly picking people up is not an option! So, consciously or unconsciously, I am developing cues on my own. They are of course not going to be correct all the time. It would be interesting to hear people’s views on some of these things. [But please don't take anything written here personally].

• When I see everything from C, C++, Java, php, perl, html, ajax, asp .Net, Database etc. etc. in skill sets, I generally leave such profiles out. Unless there is a very strong looking project, or exceptional academic performance in the profile. If one claims expertise in everything, I am absolutely not sure which ones can he/she actually do.
• If there are projects with fancy sounding names, but no description, I am generally skeptical about the profile.
• Cover letter/e-mail does not matter, except if it is written in a bad language, in which case it is a negative. Flamboyant cover letter is not a positive.
• Something that sounds like an attempt to glorify things unnecessarily is a put off. Not just in resumes, but elsewhere too. Scanning social networks is a common practice. Somebody’s profile somewhere said that they work for a “leading software company” in a field where they were supposed to put the name of the company. It just made me skeptical. Heck! Working for a small company is not at all a negative for me. If anything, it is a positive. But not being comfortable about it tells me that you are doing it out of compulsion. I think even if I were a big company, I won’t feel good about it. As a small company, it makes the person a no-no.

One practice with resume, that is very useful (which I always practiced, but never thought consciously about) is to ensure that the contact number and e-mail id are on the top. Leave all the personal information for the end of the resume. But not these. Believe it or not, it is indeed painful, when you are trying to schedule an interview, to scroll down just to find that phone number.

And one thing that I strongly believed in earlier and continue to believe in is that length of the resume does not matter. Content is the king, with some intelligent placement of the things, of course. If you have content worth 3 pages, write a 3-page resume. If you have content worth only one page, do not strive to get into a second page. If you do have a 3-page resume, just ensure that the most important and eye-catching things are on the first page. You won’t be penalized because you exceeded the golden limit of 2 pages!

By the way, if you have been wondering about recessions and jobs and start-ups, my guess is that it is a good time to join or do a start-up. There is sufficient risk in the economy anyway, why not take a little more and be in a start-up!

First Employee!!

No, not a technical person yet. Its not easy to locate affordable people with open source experience.

But we do have an office helper now, whom we picked up with the help of the person who collects our couriers. She is not comfortable with computers and Internet, but has proved an immediate help in operational things including production and packaging of book and filing the papers.

This help and relief comes at the cost of the flexibility though. Heck! We can not lock the office and go for a morning show of a movie now. As someone quipped, “For the rest of us the reason is that my boss won’t let me go or the client is super-demanding. For you it is – my employee is here!”

Taking a break between two jobs, this person was inviting us to join him in a morning show.

Back to being an employer for the first time. Even this is an experience for us. Sometimes I am surprised by how quickly she registers things. And at other times I just can’t find a way of getting across to her. All those theories about communication gap come to my mind, but they aren’t much of a help. Even when you know there is a gap, figuring it out and filling it up is so difficult! We spend a lot for time discussing all kinds of business and technical issues between us. Now, another aspect that has got added to our discussion is how to make her most productive. How to teach her new things? And slowly we are realizing that a lot of notions about how to interact with people has to change. For example, I find it a little odd to tell people something and then ask a question back to ensure that they have understood it. Feels too patronizing somehow. Too “teacher”ish… After all, if they do not understand they will say so. Why become patronizing? But it seems like its a good idea to do this with her and she would not mind it. She is otherwise hesitant is outrightly accepting that she did not understand and this will encourage her to communicate. Or will it not? I do not know yet. Let’s see.

Apart from the customers, I guess dealing with non-tech employees is also going to teach us a lot!

Learnings from Pothi.com

It should come as no surprise that running a start-up brings its own sets of learnings. The biggest ones for me are coming from our users. We have users as young as 17 years and as old as 65 years. And its just us interacting with all of them. Its so totally different from the kind of experience your get while being in Internet industry. As a Product Manager in a consumer products company, I was supposed to be clued into the market constituting of non-techies or average users too, but it was a very macro level of understanding that was required. Even the kind you get out of focus groups etc. are very generalized ones. These people were not a part of my daily interactions. My daily routine consisted of trying to translate this generalized understanding in to the jargons I and my industry-veteran colleagues were comfortable with. Even the people I interacted with outside the organization were of the similar league.

But its so totally different now. On a daily basis I am talking to people from very different backgrounds. And some things start coming back. Addressing people by first name is not the most common thing to do. I had to learn to start on a more conservative side and switch to first name only when I am sure that the person is as comfortable with it as I am. It isn’t about respect or anything. I do not mean disrespect to all the senior folks I address by names, some of them older than my parents. Its just a way of doing things. And addressing people more formally is also another way of doing things, which is *the* way in India outside of certain circles!

Sometimes the learnings have come from situations that were outrightly funny or embarrassing! Would have loved to share some of them, but can’t do that. Since they’d involve people about whom I shouldn’t be writing just like that (no, no – there are no dark secrets. Its just that you have to follow the basic rules of respecting privacy ).

Miles to go…

Before I sleep.

I had decided that tonight (yesterday night?), I am not going to work and here I am awake at 3 am, updating the site and replacing the default search with Google Custom Search engine on it!

Things are progressing well at pothi.com. Do check out new books and services for writers (including a very affordable cover design service).

Bug has bitten us recently though. We lost all the newsletter subscriptions of non-registered users and could recover it only for those who had subscribed after 16th August If you were one of those who had subscribed before that and are not registered on pothi.com, please do go there and subscribe again. If you do not remember when you subscribed, there is no harm in subscribing again as the system detects that you are already subscribed.

The most exciting feature release is that of book preview. It will be enabled on all books by 25th August. But you can check out many right away.

• Corporate Poetry
• Do Shabd Tumhare Liye
• On the Contrary
• Start Programming with C#

And many others too.

We are probably the first online store in India to launch the preview feature!

After some glitches, paypal is back again. We are trying to arrange things so that we become eligible to sign up with one of the Indian payment gateways. Let’s see.

Keep an eye on some exciting stuff in near future.

If these things sound interesting and you have a technical profile, there may be some opportunities. Get in touch!