What now?

So, my previous post has given the news. I have left Google. Me and Abhaya are starting up a company of our own. More details will follow soon, once our site is ready to be linked from here.

But one difference that this change in life brings to this blog is that I would talk about my work life more often. I don’t know where this journey is going to lead us, but I thought it would be a good idea to document it in the blog.

First things first, we are working on family and friends funding right now. There have been some talks with some funds who invest in the companies in early stage, but it is still in the talks stages. So, we are in absolute cost saving mood. Any wealthy individuals around, who consider themselves as angel investors must talk to us 🙂

So, the first step was incorporation of the company. In general, getting a good CA or firm to do it for you works. However, despite having done a careful selection of the company to do it for us, we kept running into glitches. Things got more difficult because Abhaya is still in the US. Hence, he needed to send each of the signed forms from there. But anyway. Finally we are done with the incorporation after months of going back and forth. Other registrations are in progress. We need to get a bank account too. All this in my To-do list.

Over time as I prepared to get into working on my own, I realized how spoiled the companies make you. Google was taking care of pretty much everything in daily life for me. Mobile phone (equipment and bill!), laptop, broadband bill, food, transport… And then travel. You land on the airport, there is a cab waiting for you; you stay in a hotel where you could pretty much forget to carry everything and still be okay. And I felt it when I recently made a trip in connection of this business plan to Kolkata. Just the amount of care I had to take in packing the stuff! But so is life. You can’t be independent as well as comfortable. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. So, I have decided to eat it now 🙂

So, the preparation started with the search of a good mobile phone. Having gotten used to blackberry, an equipment with QWERTY keyboard seemed like a necessity. Blackberry did not seem like a good option for price, unless you are a corporate, which needs to do a lot of centralized administration. So, turned to Nokia E-series. Nokia E61i seemed like a good choice. But then I saw Nokia E90. Now, I must confess I have never fallen for a phone like that. Despite all the struggles about cost, I decided to indulge one last time before getting into cost saving mode. So, I got that. And yeah – Subhiksha Mobile indeed has the cheapest price. I checked at bigger stores, smaller stores everywhere before going there. They were the cheapest. In case you are confused like me, Subhiksha mobiles are separate stores from their usual supermarkets, though often co-located. I got mine form their store in Indiranagar, near BDA complex.

Then a new SIM and plan. Rate plan at One India Roam (Airtel) is a no brainer. Their usual monthly GPRS plans don’t have unlimited data option. But they have a 140 Rs. weekly plan for unlimited data. For some reason, it does not appear in their usual menus, where you can subscribe to a plan with sms. Call up their customer care and ask for instructions on how to subscribe to that particular plan.

The laptop. I needed something with a decent configuration, but at the price range of around 50k. Getting a laptop from US was not an option for me. So, it had to be here. And I was surprised to see that most of the laptops in that price band had only 1 GB of memory. Because its VISTA on all of them, I got the advice that I should get at least 2 GB of memory. Finally, after going back and forth several times, I decided on buying SONY VAIO CR 24, with an upgrade for the memory. This model’s MRP was 55k (54, 990 to be exact) and upgrade would cost another 3800 Rs. Almost all the places I went to including smaller shops, Staples, e-zone and some exclusive dealers, that turned out to be the price they were selling at. Then I came across this shop called Binary World. They claim to have the lowest prices and that was indeed the case. These SONY laptops, for which I was unable to get a discount anywhere else, were available at lower prices here and I could actually buy CR 24 with upgraded memory for around 55.8k. So, I went ahead and placed the order. I was pretty happy, but this shop gave me a more pleasant surprise. They called me up after I had given my order to tell me that a newer model has just come (CR 36), which has 2 GB memory in-built and a faster processor than CR 24 and I can get that at only 150 Rs. extra over what I was paying for CR 24 with upgraded memory. A no-brainer again. But I was really pleasantly surprised to see their initiative. They could easily have sold me CR 24 for that much money. I had already placed the order at that price and paid the money. And the very next day, CR 24’s prices were dropped to 50k (49, 990 to be exact) across the board, after CR 36 was introduced. So, I got CR 36 for around 56k. I was happy. And then I went to SONY’s website and noticed that the MRP for CR 36 was actually 55k (54,990 to be exact!). I was devastated. Was I duped after all? All right they did not sell me CR 24 for 55k, but they did sell CR 36 for 56k 😦 I wasn’t expecting much, but I gave them a call anyway. That guy assured me that something like this would never happen at Binary World and if there is a mistake, he’d certainly get back to me. And to be sure, without any further questions asked, I got a Demand Draft for 1k at my home two days later! It turned out that while calculating the price for CR 24, they had accounted for memory upgrade. This was not required for CR 36, but they had forgotten to reverse it.

So, needless to say that Binary World was overall a very pleasant experience. I strongly recommend them. Their prices are all on-line. Check out their website. Use only in IE. Unfortunately does not work well in Firefox. I know its not a well designed website, but do you care about that if you get things cheaper? 🙂 They have a store in Malleshwaram and one in Indiranagar BDA complex. Addresses are on the website.

Next I had to set up a home office. I got my old computer table. Put it in hall. Used an old bed-sheet as a table cloth (cost savings – remember?). And there it was. There was only one glitch. Because of the limited space that is available in the hall, and because of the location of Phone’s cable, the lan cable was coming in the way of entrance. That got sorted out yesterday when I got a wireless router. Wireless Network had to be set up anyway. Would be helpful as I get more machines which would need to be connected. Don’t ask me yet, where would I keep any more machines in this small apartment. We’ll figure out a way. “Infinite elastic ke bane hote hain ghar!”

More as we navigate the space further. And yeah – I know I haven’t told you what we are going to do yet. But that’ll be out soon. Its not a secret, but I might as well wait.