vijayr

Looks like the Indian cricket team is back to doing what it knows best - breaking the hearts of Indian fans. Sachin must have renewed his nightmares of Chennai. Can anyone else contribute so much, single-handedly, to a team, and yet see it fail time and again? What an awful way to get out, after having played so well!

Leading the retro(grade) action was the old horse - he literally looks like one - Nehra. He's always given the impression that he is perfectly calm, walking to the gallows. Jadeja continues the grand ol' choke tradition. The way he's running, he can continue running 'til he's back home, and stay there.

Ah well. At least it didn't turn out to be a total whitewash.

Oh, btw, in case the morons in charge of the game - ICC and various country associations are paying attention - the format of the game doesn't really matter. To hold the viewer's attention, all they need are:

1. Two great (or even very good), evenly matched teams


2. Sporting conditions


3. Enough of a gap between series

Stop giving us meaningless tournaments every second Saturday, and all will be well!

Dan Costa of PC Mag covers Google social search. He is worried that this is too much personal information, too easily findable - "Google is doing its job, making the world's information searchable. But as it fulfills more and more of its mission, the rest of us need to recognize how this changes our lives. The line between public and private information is blurring. And every time Google makes information easier to find, life for consumers gets more complicated. Most of us just don't realize it. "

He's missing the point - Google did this now, but it could have been anybody else, including one of the biggies or a startup. The reality is that things changed as soon as we started publishing things online - mostly for the good, some for the bad. As Scott McNealy said - "Get over it". :)

We put up with such invasions of privacy because we do benefit - greatly - from it. I'm an optimist - though I believe that the potential for doing harm is great, I feel that the benefits will far outweigh the drawbacks.

In a previous post on preparing to startup, I spoke about the importance of not being a manager.

In this post, I will take about another broad pattern of behaviour to unlearn. When working in a largish, stable company, the job you do usually has a fairly well defined role. If there are grey areas, they are handled by escalating to your manager and ignoring it. And, if you're lazy (let's face it, which developer isn't!), its quite easy to avoid work by saying that "its not my responsibility". If you're a manager - you're unfortunately well on the way to becoming an evolved programmer. Depending on your seniority, you can either grep for error messages in the log, or you ask your minions to create a log error report for you in excel (hopefully, you can at least analyze the aggregate and thus provide SOME value ;)).

All this is terrible if you are in a startup. While its good to have broad areas of responsibility, you soon realize that there's so much to find out - about how users are using your site, new technical problems to solve, bugs to fix, etc. - that its extremely dangerous to punt stuff. This is a really difficult behaviour pattern to break out of. It goes against your instincts, and is also probably inimical to your reputation - "Oh, there comes THAT f*** know it all, does he think that he's God??". The only cure that I can think of is a sense of ownership - an attitude that it doesn't who's responsible if the company fails, we all lose.

As a founder, this is one trait to watch out for in potential hires - what is their propensity to punt on problems? You should also inculcate a sense of ownership in the initial hires, and very actively encourage them to go outside their area of responsibility.

PS: my product search startup, WisdomTap has posted a minor update the mobile phone index - many new models, such as the Nokia N97 now have a lot more information.

Of books, that is, and its ebooks. I'd been itching to get an e-ink reader for ages - I read a lot of technical papers on the computer, and after 2 or so, my eyes start crossing. I finally took the plunge and bought the Sony PRS 505 reader. I chose the Sony rather than the Kindle because I live in India, and the whisper net crap is meaningless. Besides, as Theodore Tso points out, the Sony is much nicer looking, and better supported on Linux due to Kovid Goyal's wonderful calibre ereader manager software (go desi open source programmers!).

After reading quite a few books (some great ebooks freely available from feedbooks) and papers, I am thrilled that I plonked down the significant amount of cash to buy this device! Initially, when I turned it on, I was a little skeptical, as the screen seemed dull - but after much reading, mostly at night, I can testify to the HUGE difference it makes to mitigating eye strain. It really *is* very close to reading a book. The screens are getting bigger, the price can only go down, and colour on e-ink readers are on the way.

So why do I think that this is the future of books? Its convenient - one small device carries tons of data. Its very user friendly and easy to read. There is already a LOT of content out there, and more is coming. Hopefully, the fucktard publishers will realize that crippling DRM (I can't read drm'ed books on Linux, even if I want to buy them!) are counter productive, and go the way of legal drm free mp3. Also, a lot of the sentimental claptrap you read about going to the bookstore and feeling the books while reading them smelling the fresh glue off the books and zOMG I CREAMED MY PANTS!! is bullshit. Ever tried reading a big, bulky book when you have RSI? Ever tried reading a mouldy, worm-eaten old book? Also, I don't know about you, but I don't browse to find books to read anymore - I'm almost 100% recommendation driven. My sources are primarily Amazon, who does a bang up job of understanding my buying and browsing, reviews in the Sunday paper, and recommendations I run into while reading blogs (mostly technical, leading to mostly recommendations for sci-fi, fantasy, or technical non fiction).

Viva la revolucion!

Let's say you dream of one day starting your very own tech startup. Also, let's say that you work at a big tech company (such as my previous company), and you want to make the best use of your time there. My advice is to either remain purely technical - where a large part of your job is writing code - or find a purely customer facing role, which involves being responsible for customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction means that ultimately, you're responsible for generating some revenue. Sales and Marketing are both good options. If you can't get either of this, you probably shouldn't be starting up.

The reason for this is that the only two skills which matter in the early days are the ability to crank out code at a goodly rate, and the ability to find out what customers will buy/use. Everything else is largely irrelevant, or flows out of the first two roles.

The absolute worst preparation is if you're an Engineering Manager (or anywhere in the Engineering management chain). This role only teaches you to keep track of others doing useful work, reporting up and down the chain, wasting time building your empire (as measured by number of reportees - direct *and* indirect), and assuaging the egos of pony tailed prima donnas whining about the lack of italian food in the canteen. The next worst prep is if you're a product manager for a "platform" product whose customers are internal - you're world view of what it takes to get customers to use your product is warped by internal politics.

So - if you think you want to start a company one day, better start coding!

While there has been a huge brouhaha over King Khan's US tribulations upon entering the USA, there has no coverage at the (routine?) tribulations Indians put up with when flying Air France. In one instance, an elderly couple were treated shabbily and turned back for no apparent reason. In another, earlier incident, passengers complained of preferential mis-treatment when their flight was delayed. All this appears even worse when Air France seems to be trying to build a brand in India, from all the ads in the papers.

While the US secondary screening can be scary and seem arbitrary, I don't know if they are overtly racially rude. The Air France kind of rudeness is especially galling given our colonial history. Time to tell them to catch the next flight back??

What're some of your air travel experiences related to your desi-ness?

If you write code for a living, and have been doing so for some time, you know that you need to do certain things - use version control, write tests, document your code, etc., etc. But how often are any/all of these things done? And why not?

My take is that the big culprits are lack of discipline, and fatigue. When you try to work on some painstaking bug, and bang your head against it obsessively for hours, you feel so relieved when done! You've accomplished so much! You've straightened the tail of the dog! Now the LAST thing you want to do is spend another 10 (or 20, or some trivial amount) dotting the "i"s and crossing the "t"s.

Your experiences and theories?

"He who has the gold, rules". That's a rule that any early stage tech entrepreneur trying to raise money in India can empathize with!! Here's a free piece of advice for an Indian tech entrepreneur trying to raise VC money without paying customers - don't!

When I started out WisdomTap, I of course had a mental model of what a consumer facing tech startup would be, based on Silicon Valley examples like Yahoo!, Google, etc. As I've thought more about this, what I expected was that

• You can raise seed money based on a strong technology idea and a good team


• You can raise a larger venture round based on a product prototype

What I've come to realize, though, is that by and large, a demonstrated idea does not matter to people with money. Historically, startups have primarily failed because they've not been able to find a market. This was a revelation, and largely explains why fund managers look for some form of market validation, rather than go with gut feel or their impression of the product.

This is all well and fine - what I find most galling is how far along you, as a startup, are expected to be before you raise money! Derisking is fine - but almost by definition, a startup HAS market risk. If the market was clear and validated, where is the need for venture funding on (usually) usurious terms? My point is that except in a very few cases, market validation too takes time and money.

It hurts even more when VCs themselves are significantly derisked when they raise a fund. There is typically a 2/20 rule - 2% of the fund value as *annual* fees, and 20% of the profit after a certain threshold. On an aside, it looks like certain MF houses are trying to get into the PE/VC game in India. IDFC had a laughable set of terms - 2% entry load, 2% annual fees, 20% profit share!! Sheer arrogance.

Anyway - if there are other desi entrepreneurs reading this, what's been your experience with fund raising? What are your expectations on how much money you need, what you think the right milestones are? And, if there are entrepreneurs from other countries, does this gel with your experience?

A business does need a certain amount of money to get going. If its going to be so difficult to raise money, I wonder how the product tech ecosystem in India is ever going to get off the ground.

Blue Vector, in the rfid management software space, is hiring. They are looking for an experienced C++ engineer. Details:

Profile: Software Engineer /Senior Software Engineer

Experience: 3-7 years.

Desired Skill Set:

• Strong C++ and OOP in unix/linux development environment
  
• Strong in data-structures and algorithms
  
• Client server systems, multi-threading, RDBMS a plus
  
• Network Programming (exposure to frameworks like boost, ACE etc is a plus)
  
• Basic RDBMS, SQL skills, and some scripting language like Perl, PHP, Python
  
• Basic Web technologies (HTTP, HTML etc)
  

They prefer Bangalore based candidates. Send your resumes to ajay at bluevector.com

My company, WisdomTap, has quietly been rolling out a lot of features, and I wanted to write about them.

1. We have a new Home Page which hopefully does a much better job of introducing the new user to WisdomTap, what it does (product search), and how it does it (based on expert user comments across the best web communities). The product snapshot gives a quick overview of the features product - overall rating, an expert opinion, and the 3 best uses for this product. We have highlighted a selection of top ranked, new, and products with deals. We also show 3 opinions from a random selection of expert users we crawled from across the web. This is to tell new users that we're tapping the wisdom of the web's best experts. Finally, the navigation is much improved.


2. As part of the new home page design, we changed the look and feel of all pages - specifically, the header and the footer. The colours are much more bright and attractive (in my opinion, of course!)


3. We enhanced our IWannaBuy Facebook social shopping app. You now have the ability to message a specific set of friends to ask for their opinions on what to buy. For instance, I might want to make sure that yathin and code_martial help me choose a dslr. The other change we made is that on the "your polls" page, you can see which friend recommended which product. The thinking behind both these features is to instill more trust in the recommendations.

Do give both our product search site and our social shopping app a whirl, and let me know your feedback!

I'm closing in on two years since starting my own company (WisdomTap, providing product search). As I was thinking about certain recent events, something struck me. As part of building the company, providing unique technology, we've faced a lot of questions from a variety of people, from technical advisors, from VCs, from potential clients and from potential partners.

• Is the problem technically tractable?
  
• Is your market big enough? What's your market, actually?
  
• How is it different from product xyz?
  
• Why will someone use it?
  
• Why will they pay for it? How much will they pay? Why will they pay so much?
  

This is just a sample of the questions we faced. Notice how negative everything is?? That's my insight - so many of the people seem to look at the downside, rather than at the upside. i.e., what are the various ways in which the new venture may fail? This was common across all class of people we interacted with, *except* advisors and users! Advisors are the only ones who balance the business downside by looking at the upside. And, of course, users of the products also give us a lot of feedback - both positive and negative.

I wonder whether this "these are the various ways you can fail" attitude is an Indian thing. I'm especially struck by how negative potential investors (VCs, angels, etc.) are. We have had tremendous support from our original angels, though.

So, my big takeaway as a startup founder - find the conviction and the inner strength to say no to the nattering nabobs of negativism. As someone starting a new business, you're very aware (or soon become extremely aware!) that things will not go according to plan. There are a lot of unknowns. While its good to be aware of potential pitfalls, you've got to remain optimistic, always believe that you will hit the upside.

Peter Roebuck has a great article on the importance of captains in cricket. After watching the IPL this season, and of course, based on my own stupendous knowledge and experience of the game, I have a few observations to make. First, I think that you can write off the Mumbai Indians. I love Tendulkar the batsman. I don't think that there's any better that I have seen. But, he's a terrible captain. In the past few matches, he's been getting pretty much everything wrong. How can you not bowl out Bhajji's overs? And, in the last match against Delhi, when attack was their only chance, the field was too defensive. And his body language said that the game was lost before they started bowling.

Take another useless captain - KP. At least he was trying hard on the field, and never seemed to be disheartened. But, tactically, he was poor, to say the least. Why keep bowling Praveen Kumar at the death, when he was getting murdered? Why keep playing Uthappa, and in the same slot? When things are not going well, you've got to change tack. What a huge change Kumble has made!

Delhi is the strangest team of the lot. I don't think that Sehwag is a good captain - he's very aggressive, but doesn't know what to do when things don't go his way. However, they've been winning pretty much all the close games...

I'm sure that there are lots of lessons we can learn and apply in the business world.

I recently went through the very interesting description of Facebook's photo hosting stack. It reminded me, yet again, how scaling web software is both simple (in concept) and difficult (to practice) at the same time. Here's a simple conceptual framework to follow which will solve an estimated 80% of web scaling problems:

1. Identify your bottleneck. Is it cpu, disk, memory, network bandwidth?
   
2. Fix it!
   
3. Repeat
   

:)

Some tips while fixing bottlenecks -

• Memory access is orders of magnitude faster than disk access.
  
• Your memory should be enough to hold your working data set (which typically follows extreme power laws - say, 99-1 - compared to actual data set), so its important to determine your working data set size.
  
• Design your system to be able to scale various layers independently.
  
• Watch out if you've configured your web server (apache is the one that I use) to be able to use too many server processes. Context switching and swapping will kill you under high load
  
• Do high load tasks as infrequently as you can. For instance, load some back lookup table once at startup time. Or, open a MySQL database once per http request, and reuse it for all db access during that request.
  

Of course, there are probably lots of unique cases which can't be solved so easily conceptually.

More resources - Cal Henderson - ex-flickr, yahoo - has a great presentation on web scalability. There are lots of others available as well.

Comments welcome!
Of course, there are probably lots of unique cases which can't be solved so easily conceptually.

In the upcoming elections, my constituency is strongly middle class - I want personal safety, good roads, electricity, no corruption, efficient government, and an opportunity for good jobs. I don't care (*really*!!) about the caste, age, or religion of the person who can deliver.

In the limited time that I get to see TV, and read magazines (outlook), I start to wonder if I'm out of touch with much of the electorate in India. For instance - almost everyone states that much of the voting is on a caste basis first, and religious basis next. This boggles my mind. Is it because voting on caste/religious lines has largely proven beneficial to those? Or, is it that those voting on caste/religious lines are scared that if they vote outside their caste/religion, things will get worse? Do many people realize that their lot is quite pathetic (look at our pathetic performance on the millennium development goals, and can be easily set right? Having interacted with some people from a completely different social background, albeit in cities, I do know that they have high aspirations for themselves and their children. How is it out in villages? Slums? Small towns?

Are we (you know, educated, well off, blog reading desis) too elitist? Are we completely out of touch? Too relatively comfortable to do anything about this? (Yes, these are rhetorical questions).

What about people who follow the vernacular press? Is their coverage of issues any different from what we see?

If we want to fix a problem, we must first recognize what it is.

I have a nokia 6300 and an airtel connection. While the builtin browser works, I can't get any other apps requiring internet access - like the gmail app or yahoo go or opera mini - to work - they error out saying "subscribe to packet data first". In my connection settings, there are 3(!) entries for something called mobile office, whereas the builtin browser uses some connection called Airtel Live! (with the ending quote). Any idea what's going on, and how to get apps like opera mini to work?

The Nokia menus are quite indecipherable. There are multiple options dealing with connectivity. Its extremely confusing, and quite badly done. Shame on them!

Ace photog and fellow birder yathin has written a kick ass article on how to start building a dslr collection - check it out on the WisdomTap blog. Thoughts?

My company - WisdomTap - is doing some search engine marketing for our conversion engine - and I have run into some major annoyances with the Google Adwords tools.

First, I get a 404 for following some internal links like this one!!! WTF???

Next, if there are a set of topics - say, all about campaigns - its a set of links. I HATE HATE HATE this style of creating web pages where you have to unnecessarily click through to topics, when it could have/should have been all on one page. Terrible usability!

For a product which is driving your company's revenues - its mind boggling that such lack of attention has been paid to such trivial issues. Ah well, the joys of a monopoly, I guess.

My company, WisdomTap, just released a newly created index of digital cameras. Read more about it on the company blog. Like it? Don't like it? Drop me a line!

Dear Denizens of Middle Class India, have you forgotten 26/11 already? Has your mind been numbed so soon? Has the wax of a million candles - and the lifeblood of around 200 people - been shed in waste? Are you going about building up an extra layer of fat on your esteemed middle class arse - or are you actually doing something about it? (I'm in the former category, I'm afraid).

Don't know what to do? Never fear! That's what I'm here for!

• First and foremost, support, and insist on police reform. If you don't put the fear of breaking the law into people - politicians, bureaucrats, drunken speedsters, etc. - all hope is lost. Create a law abiding and law fearing society first.


• Look to civic activity organizations, such as Janaagraha, for more ideas on how to participate.


• You *are* registered to vote, right? Start interacting with your elected reps.


• Consider an alternate party, such as the Lok Satta
  

That's it for now! Please go back to sending your outraged sms'es to the TV channels (btw, both the phone company and the TV are making money out of your outrage).

I was at Headstart 09 last weekend, demo'ing my company, WisdomTap's, product search capabilities. We even got nominated as one of the top 10 product startups in India! While we personally had a great time interacting with the visitors, and made some important contacts, a few things about startups in India stood out:

1. The number and variety of startups was mind boggling. Its just fantastic to see such energy and innovation out of India. And, to think, that this is just a fraction of the actual Indian startup scene. Heartening indeed!
   
2. Venture Capitalists are revered and worshiped as though they're stars.
   
3. Almost universally, the UI was "raw". I can't remember any company who's UI had the necessary pop.
   

Let's take these one by one. First, the number and variety of startups - surely, its a matter of time before we have a monster hit out of India? However, there is a palpable lack of experience in selling and marketing (my company included). The other big problem is lack of an audience in India. In general, there are more technical guys than sales/marketing types at a startup. Hope that this changes, and fast.

Next, the way people are awed by VCs. It was almost as though VCs were expected to be the enablers of startups in India. All the VCs I interacted with seemed like nice guys (i.e., not the kind of pricks you read about at the Funded), and some of them had some excellent knowledge to share (Ashish Gupta of Helion had a kick ass keynote which was very poorly attended). However, my impression after trying to raise money is that VCs want to invest at later stages, when the risk is less, and expect a bigger share of the company, than expected by most startups. i.e., there was very little chance of any of the startups at headstart getting funded by a traditional VC. So, why do Desi startups still look at the VC community with stars in their eyes? I think that part of it is the excellent PR the VC community worldwide has received. The other part is probably the lack of marketing, sales, and finance people in the startups - so perhaps we tend to believe that getting a VC to fund us would somehow magically enable this aspect of the company...let's stop worrying about VCs, and start worrying about customers and how to acquire them, people!

Another important aspect which must be made very public is that there is a big mismatch in the expectations of an Indian startup to get funded, vs a traditional style VC funding them. There are just too many more mature organizations - not necessarily in technology - competing for this money, and they are less risky from an investors point of view. Also, the amount of money required to run a startup is far less than one thinks. I think that there is a huge opportunity to create some kind of Angel Exchange in India.

Lastly, the UI fiasco. Given the talented graphical designers, and the ability to learn about UI best practices from across the world, its a shame that we're not seeing something better. Oh well.

Lastly, more power to the headstarters to continue helping the nascent tech startup scene in India.

PS: My company, WisdomTap, provides a product search engine which helps you decide which products to buy. If you're looking for reviews, ratings, and recommendations for digital cameras and lenses or mobile phones, do check us out. We also provide this same service to ecommerce retailers to help them increase conversion rates on their site.