One More Thing

Today is a day I’ve been working towards for over a year. Today is the day Project Tofu is unveiled as Lamhe, India’s premier online destination for luxury gifts and experiences.

Lamhe (which means “moments” in Hindi) brings a well-curated catalogue of high-end and experiential gifts to anyone who wishes to give gifts to their loved ones in India, no matter where they live in the world. Over the past year, we have been hard at work building the website and assembling a catalogue of creative, memorable gifts that will excite and engage our customers. In addition to bringing unique experiences to gift givers living in India, the service is of particular interest to Indians living abroad, who wish to reliably and securely send high-end gifts to their friends and relatives living in India. We aim to delight our customers with exceptional gift offerings and customer service that goes the extra mile.

In addition to offering creative and unique gifts, Lamhe also offers its customers wishlists, which enable them to create lists of gifts they want from Lamhe’s catalogue in ways similar to gift registries in the US. Although gift registries are relatively uncommon in India, we found a surprisingly high degree of receptivity to the general concept among our target users. We also listened to what detractors to the concept had to say and incorporated their feedback to create wishlists, our own culturally appropriate flavor of gift registries. Wishlists tap into the gift-heavy culture of India and take the guesswork out of giving gifts on special occasions like weddings, birthdays, housewarmings and births.

Rising standards of living for India’s burgeoning middle class point to an increase in discretionary spending that isn’t about to go away anytime soon. Consumers in India are starting to look beyond conventional gifts such as cash or material gifts to high-end experiential and luxury gifts. We believe Lamhe is well positioned to fulfill this need.

Lamhe is currently in an invite-only mode as we look to grow our service sustainably while maintaining a high quality user experience. Anybody can request an invite by entering their email address at http://lamhe.co.in. I promise to send you an invitation to join the service as soon as we can make space for you.

Just over a year ago on this blog, I announced my intention to embark upon Project Tofu, as a way of putting certain ideas I had about Atomized Enterprises into practice. This post isn’t so much about Project Tofu itself, but about the lessons I’ve learned so far through my work on it.

But first, a brief recap of the facts. Some of my readers may remember that I described Tofu as an online service aimed at the Indian wedding market, specifically around gifts. I’m equally happy to report that I couldn’t have dreamed up a more perfect demonstration to myself of Atomized Enterprises as I had conceived them. After several lucky strokes of serendipity and many late nights, I’m happy to report that Project Tofu is now in private beta and stands at the threshold of launch as a service to the public.

I couldn’t have made it this far all by myself. Thanks to some chance conversations about the idea with the right folks, I was able to get connected with two co-founders who have been indispensable to bringing the idea this far. One of my co-founders is based on the west coast of the US. She was able to recruit one of her old friends, who had just moved to Mumbai, to join us as our third co-founder. As you might imagine, building an Indian venture entirely from outside India might have been a bit of an uphill task, so we were glad to get our third co-founder on board.

I didn’t know either of my co-founders before, but we quickly discovered that we had at least a dozen friends in common, so they were really friends I hadn’t met yet. Talk to people about your entrepreneurial aspirations. At the time I got introduced to my co-founders, Tofu was a skunkworks project I was keeping under wraps. Yet, by a twist of luck, I happened to mention the idea to someone who put me in touch with my now co-founders who I would probably not have met otherwise. If you believe in your idea, talk about it with people; the universe has strange and fortuitous ways of unfolding. To be sure, this area is something I need to work on myself.

Because there were a couple of ideas we had conceived of, we had to hammer out the details of our shared vision for the service. Get cofounders because they’re the first people to whom you’ll sell your vision long before there are customers, and to whom you’ll be accountable. And so we came together as three co-founders, each in a different timezone but with a shared vision that gave us our sense of purpose. We are spread across multiple timezones but we set aside a time to meet weekly. The very earliest days of a startup in my experience are a punctuated equilibrium, where a lot may change in a little time but long periods can pass with relatively few changes. Our standing meeting time kept us continuously accountable to each other, even if there were not many updates to share on that specific week.

Rather than first write a business plan and shop it around to raise money to build a product, we realized that we were eager to get something out there to see what the response was. As readers of this blog probably know, “show rather than tell” is a good rule for Web startups to live by these days. The full extent of our vision has not been realized in Project Tofu’s feature set today, but we figured getting something out there would give us clues on how sound our theses about the Indian Internet market are. When getting an Internet startup costs only a tenth of what it used to cost a decade ago, the goal of an entrepreneur should be minimizing time-to-market-validation.

We have been getting this venture going with our own money, so we have had to be fairly tight about conserving cash. If you’re short on money and long on brains, use your brains where you might have used money instead. We developed our service using an outsourced development who represented a good compromise between competence and price for us. That tradeoff may happen at a different place for you. I decided to take on much of the responsibility defining features of the service at a granular level and having them be implemented by our development team, rather than laying out a broad vision and letting the development team figure out the mechanics of shaping it into a product.

Project Tofu has been a great journey so far, and much more excitement is ahead of us. After about two weeks of private beta, the secret (or not so secret) identity of Project Tofu will be unveiled on this blog. I’ve been quiet for long periods this year on this blog entirely because I’ve been spending so much time getting Project Tofu to where it is now (hint: starting Atomized Enterprises is not easy). But I hope to be able to air my thoughts more frequently on this and several other topics once we get going.

I’m pleased to say I’m part of the TiE Leadership Program, which is an entrepreneur mentorship and development program for current and aspiring entrepreneurs. The program, run under the auspices of TiE, brings together professionals in IT, life sciences and clean tech who are either full time at a startup or thinking about starting a venture for a series of monthly seminars and other activities on the skills they would need to lead a startup. As a result, I’ve been meeting a bunch of very cool people in the Boston area and listening to insights from several inspirational speakers.

Of course, all these sessions have got me brimming with so much inspiration that I can’t keep it all in. I’m blogging about these sessions with my classmates over at the TLP blog, for those who are interested in entrepreneurship-related topics.

I’ve been remiss in updating this blog for several months now, but let me assure you the reason will quickly become clear in another post soon to be put up here. In June I was invited to speak at an Intuit developer event titles Startups and the Cloud. My task was to lay out the state of play in the fast-changing world of cloud computing and get the audience excited about the cloud.

The edited video of the talk as well as my slides have been available for several weeks now but I finally got around to embedding them below. The slides below are slightly modified from the slide deck I actually used during my talk; I figured removing some you-had-to-be-there jokes would make more sense all around.

I hope you like this talk! I certainly had a lot of fun preparing for it and delivering it.

BarCamp Boston IV was held at MIT’s Stata Center this weekend. The turnout was lower than we expected given the number of registrants, but at least some of that could be attributed to the gorgeous weekend weather in the Boston area, Having said that though, close to 300 people turned out over the two-day geek fest, with a bigger turnout on Saturday than on Sunday. There were talks on several technical topics, including Web application development, geek community organization, open source frameworks and non-software hacking. There weren’t a whole lot of talks on entrepreneurship to the larger audience on Saturday, but there were a couple on Sunday. Here’s a snazzy collection of items (including tweets) about Barcamp Boston IV.

I gave a talk on Sunday titled “Playing Minesweeper with Term Sheets”, where I mentioned some of the minutiae and pitfalls entrepreneurs should watch out for when looking over a term sheet from a venture capitalist. There is much unneeded antipathy towards venture capitalists among entrepreneurs (especially the more recent ones) and I think a lot of it is because entrepreneurs aren’t aware of exactly what they are giving up in return for capital and connections. The solution to this of course is to give entrepreneurs resources to read and understand the fine print in term sheets that can dramatically alter their financial incentives. I present my (somewhat barebones) slide deck here, but feel free to write to me with any questions.

At the behest of a friend from high school, I attended the Harvard Business School India Conference this weekend for a day packed with informative panels and thought-provoking keynotes, not to mention a ton of suit-clad b-school students very uncertain of their employment prospects. One comment from a panel stuck in my mind:

India is not one market but three: it’s an Australia, wrapped in a Mexico, surrounded by an Africa.

– Venkatesh Kini, VP Marketing, Coca Cola India

I thought this statement was an especially succinct way of saying how the Indian consumer market is segmented. Kini visualized consumers in India as forming a pyramid with three layers. At the top are about 30m people with Western-level incomes, lifestyles, hopes and dreams, whom he mapped to Australia. Right below them are about 100m people who map quite well to the midmarket of Mexico: aspirational consumers with perhaps not as high an income as ‘the Australians’ but with significant aggregate spending power nonetheless. At the bottom of the pyramid are nearly 900m people whom Kini mapped to Africa: living on $2 or less a day and barely getting by. What they lack in income they make up for in sheer volume. Kini went on to say how global companies eyeing India get googly-eyed over the 1.3bn people figure without realizing that its really three distinct markets they should be targeting.

This succinct summary of the Indian consumer market no doubt has implications for how Project Tofu’s promotional materials and consumer outreach will be structured, and we found it an especially useful statement to structure our market research and development for Project Tofu. Wait a minute—’we’, ‘our’? Watch out for more on that in a general update on Project Tofu to be published in the near future!

A friend forwarded me a Bloomberg piece about the rising tide of negative sentiment against H-1B workers in the US given the current state of the economy, especially at high tech employers like Microsoft and Intel. Echoes of this piece have also been heard in the blogosphere.

The issue of H-1B workers has been a testy one for quite some time, especially in the tech industry. For those unfamiliar with the H-1B program, it’s a 6 year long temporary work authorization granted by US Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS, formerly known as INS) to highly skilled workers whom their employer demonstrates to be qualified for a position. The employer undertakes to pay H-1B workers a prevailing wage and further asserts that they are being hired because no qualified US citizen was found for the job after reasonable recruiting efforts, such as posting it on publicly accessible job boards. A US business may choose to apply for a green card for an H-1B worker during the term of their employment. Barring certain occupations, a maximum of 85,000 new H-1B visas can be issued each year.

There are just as many misconceptions about the H-1B program as abuses of it by unscrupulous US employers. In the court of public opinion, H-1B workers are classed along with qualified offshore labor pools; both are viewed as undermining the US job market because H-1B workers are supposedly willing to settle for a lower salary in return for the chance to build a life in the US. H-1B workers are not paid under the market rate; the requirement of an employer to demonstrate their ability to pay prevailing wage guards against that. H-1B visas, however, tie a worker to one or more employers specifically authorized by the CIS. This lack of free agency, coupled with the fact that there is often a green card application riding on the job means that H-1B workers can be coerced into settling for less by unscrupulous employers.

I am currently an H-1B worker myself, and thankfully I’ve always been treated well by my employers with regard to the H-1B program. The most egregious abuses of the program allegedly come from Indian employers, who contingently apply for vast portions of the H-1B visa quota without intending to actually fill those positions with a regular US-based worker. Qualified IT workers from India are rotated in and out of the US on these approvals for short stints that can be used to pad their resumes.

It’s unfortunate that the popular discourse has conflated outsourcing, the H-1B program and immigration of the legal and illegal varieties. No doubt it’s an emotionally charged topic in the US especially when viewed against the backdrop of the wane of its hitherto unquestioned global influence. To take a protectionist stance against skilled immigration programs like the H-1B, however, would be suicidal for the US. H-1B visas are not just for unscrupulous body shops; they are also used to advance fundamental research by companies like Microsoft, who is one of the largest beneficiaries of the H-1B program.

Granted that the H-1B program does suffer its share of abuses, but it also helps employ talented, skilled labor that advances the state of the art in fundamental research and brings innovative products to market in a bunch of industries. With a widely lamented pre-university education system and all-round declines in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) enrollment from citizens, protectionist attitudes against immigration are just what the US needs to hammer in yet another nail into the coffin where its future will peacefully rest.

Much career advice I have come across works from the assumption that career changes happen largely in response to burnout, personal epiphanies or major life events. Recent radical changes in how knowledge work is done today mean that career changes must become more frequent. In fact, if anything, career changes can be a significant part of one’s personal development.

I had wanted to be a software engineer since I was 15, and my college years at MIT only intensified this resolve. I looked up to my particularly talented classmates, who largely aspired to be brilliant engineers who stood out among their peers. I was also part of an MIT subculture that cultivated a healthy disdain for smarmy ‘business-y’ types, who went after plum consulting and investment banking jobs. So, when I graduated from MIT with a computer science degree, my heart was set on being a software engineer. The problem is, my heart was wrong. It wasn’t that I was a bad engineer; in fact, I had a decent aptitude for the job. But I quickly realized that my heart wasn’t in it.

As someone who views his job not just as the source of a paycheck but as a vocation, I couldn’t have tolerated that state of affairs for very long. I embarked upon a process of soul-searching that led me to venture capital, the career that I am in today. This is my third career and fourth job since graduating from college, but the first one in which I can envision myself ten years down the road. I’ve written at some length about why I am attracted by venture capital. Having been through two career transitions, I figured I’d set down some of the how—tips that helped me through them for the benefit of my readers.

• Know what you want. This part is by far the most important step in motivating a career change, or even a job change. It is, however, easier said than done. For the better part of a year, I went through a process of identifying exactly what it is I value in my ideal job. You too must ask yourself the kinds of things that would attract you to a job and keep you there: work environment, working style, lifestyle, compensation, future job options, location or any other meaningful indicator. Prioritize them and write them down to begin to form a picture of what attributes your ideal job would have. A career change is a major transition rife with moments of indecision, especially if you’re choosing among multiple career options. Doing this work up front is a huge help because it helps ground your thinking later.
• Do your homework. Once you know what you want, it’s a lot easier to actually do the requisite research and groundwork. The next step is converting the values you identified above into functional career areas by function and industry (e.g. marketing for tech companies). LinkedIn is a wonderful tool to reach out to folks whose careers you are intrigued by; if approached nicely, nearly everyone is willing to spend a few minutes relating their career story and giving you tips on breaking into their field. If you feel strange using LinkedIn, go to meetups in career areas you are considering—after all, the attendees at a meetup are there to be social. Eventually, you will come up with a list of potential job titles and descriptions you want to interview for. Look at job postings for your target job titles on job sites and get familiar with the target skill set and jargon your prospective employers use in the ad. If need be, polish your knowledge in the target job’s skill set by reading books, taking courses and finding mentors already in the field.
• Emphasize the positive. A chronological resume can be an impediment to career changers because it emphasizes a job timeline rather than a skills profile. The first step is to pick apart your chronological resume and distill it into a set of skills matched to the target skill set. In addition, construct a list of skills you have accumulated at your current job, independent of whether they apply to the target job. Then construct a functional resume, which emphasizes your skills profile for the target career; you may include a brief employment timeline to place your skills in context of the jobs at which you acquired them. Construct a crisp one-minute ‘elevator pitch’ about yourself that emphasizes your strengths and what you can do for an employer in a target industry. When an employer invites you for a phone or in-person interview, use this pitch to introduce yourself. Employers are not inherently averse to hiring career changers, but they are taking a fair amount of risk when they do so; distilling your thought process into an elevator pitch signals to them that you have done the legwork and thought seriously about your target career. During the interview, be honest about what you don’t know as a career changer, but emphasize the unique perspective you can bring to your target job given your background and current skills.
• Don’t forget the personal touch. Job hunting in the Internet era has sadly become a joyless numbers game. Candidates submit resumes to job postings without really reading them, and employers consequently have to deal with a barrage of potentially irrelevant resumes. Coping mechanisms for potential employers may include tactics like keyword matching, but if you have done your homework properly, you should be able to overcome these filters. The act of hiring ultimately is highly personal though and is very dependent on chemistry. Take advantage of this fact to stand out among the competition, even those already in the target career. Plus, it’s a lot of fun to actually try and build bridges with real people rather than use resumes and job descriptions as proxies. When contemplating my first career change, I dropped off my resume in person at the office building’s front desk, requesting an informational interview with Nick, who would later be my manager. I happened to find out from Nick’s blog that he likes to cook, so I included a couple of seasonal recipes in the resume envelope I dropped off. Resumes and recipes—a little incongruous right? But it highlighted my application and showed that I wanted to make a personal connection. Likewise, I send a small box of chocolates to every recruiter through whom I find a job.

The job market is going through some convulsions right now and employers are hesitant to hire people from their field, let alone career changers. Even in the worst job market, however, good people who know what they want are likely to have less trouble than average in finding the job of their dreams. So, good luck!

A while ago, on my old(er) blog, I wrote a post called Ten Things I Miss About Cambridge, in which I wax nostalgic about all the things I missed since I moved to New York from Cambridge, MA, the town in which I went to college. I love the energy and intensity of New York and I highly suggest that everyone spend at least a couple of years living in the area if they have the chance, for an experience they will not find in the rest of the US. My New York experience, however, comes to a close for now, as I move (back) to the Boston area in January and begin a new job as a junior investment professional at Longworth Venture Partners.

One of the best pieces of advice I received from my high school principal was to always think of what’s next, be it in my life, my career or any other of my pursuits. Onescore and four months ago, I switched careers from being a software developer on Wall Street and became an enterprise software industry analyst at The 451 Group. When I became an industry analyst, I had way too little operational experience that would inform my career in the field effectively. After all, there are few things worse than an uninformed cynic. As luck would have it, I happened to break into a unique firm like The 451 Group, which is truly doing some great work in the industry analyst industry with its eye on emerging technologies, startups and its connections into the investor community. After getting my bearings in my new role as an analyst, it dawned on me that the next step in my career, which would give me additional operational experience, should be either at a technology vendor or a technology investor.

My role at The 451 Group has by far been my favorite job to date for three big reasons: the wonderful people I work with, the kind of work I do and the sheer amount I have learned about how the high technology industry works. I’ve always tried to be around people smarter than me so that I can learn from them and it has truly been an honor to work with my fellow analysts at The 451 Group. My work as an industry analyst fits my preferred working style very well–short, well-defined, intensive projects with considerable variety. I’ve personally come to value breadth of knowledge over depth of knowledge in any given domain because I figure I can always delve deep into a specific topic (or draw upon the specialized knowledge of smart people) if need be. For all these exact reasons, a career forward as a tech investor rather than at a tech vendor seemed the best step to take.

Longworth Venture Partners is an early-stage technology venture capital firm, whose past successes have included Softricity and Constant Contact. The firm closed its third fund of $180m this summer and is actively looking to invest in infrastructure software, mobile/wireless and online content companies. The firm is big enough to have healthy deal flow but small enough that I’ll have much to learn about the venture investing process.

Venture capital is a line of work I’ve always eyed with keen interest and I’m delighted and thankful to receive this opportunity. As glamorous as venture capital may seem though, it is extraordinarily hard to identify what exactly makes one an effective venture investor. Even if I find that I don’t have that secret sauce, this path opens up several opportunities, be it in entrepreneurial circles, senior operating roles or investment circles.

I’ll miss New York and all my friends and associates here. I know the New York startup community has a lot of promise from my own interactions with it. Longworth is active in New York and other East Coast entrepreneurial communities, so I’m sure I will be no stranger to New York. If you are an entrepreneur and would like to bounce ideas off me, you know where to reach me.

On the brighter side, I look forward to reexperiencing the Boston area (this time not as a broke college student), reveling in all the things I now miss about Cambridge, and perhaps discovering other things to miss and write about in future posts. So, here’s to venturing into capitalism!

I recently read the Four Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss. The book lays out the case for ‘lifestyle design’, where you, me and Joe the Plumber can become financially independent and use our time to do the things we really want to do–like ballroom dancing, kickboxing, meaningful charity work or otherwise become a Renaissance Man–rather than being chained to a desk in the most fruitful years of our lives. If you detect a faint note of disdain in my description, you are not too far off because that’s how I initially greeted the book and how it was marketed.

The initial chapters of the book reminded me of Aleksey Vayner and of tons of spam that poses as advice on how to become a PUA. If you’re willing to overlook the almost-intentional hokeyness of the early chapters, you can walk away from the book with several thought-provoking ideas on simplicity, the value of time and the virtue of being more effective by working smarter rather than harder.

More than anything else, the book emphasizes the value of time, once the time-money trade off shifts in favor of time. Ferriss ruthlessly condemns conventional wisdom, which advises people to defer enjoyment until they have retired, at which point the change of pace is a big shock and might lead to regrets and aimless time-wasting anyway. He lays out some techniques that will help readers become fully detached and mobile from one’s work; to become financially secure in ways that will help them accomplish their dreams; to trim the fat of unnecessary possessions, ties and expectations from their lives and to take advantage of labor arbitrage to aggressively outsource mundane tasks to others. The last theme especially might give some food for thought to entrepreneurs running Atomized Enterprises.

Above all, Ferriss emphasizes active living, i.e. imbuing everything you do with intentionality, self-awareness and explicit volition. The man’s effort is commendable–what starts out sounding like a tacky, get-rich-quick book winds down sounding like it came out of a Zen text.

It’s good for Tim that he has been in sales roles for much of his life, because those roles can afford a reasonable amount of mobility. At my current workplace, several of the top-performing salespeople are perfectly fine working out of a home-office so long as they are ’smiling and dialing’ enough. As part of the Generation Y ethos, I hope for a flexible work environment, varied activities and travel in my career, but I still expect to spend several more years in a traditional office environment for the kind of work I want to do. But Ferriss’ exhortations on the value of time–the fierce urgency of now if you will–are definitely something to keep in mind as I strive to live a fulfilling life.

I’ve started my next book, Getting Things Done by David Allen, which takes a whole different approach to time management and efficiency. There is a huge online cult following for the book already, but I might report back with some of my own thoughts.