One More Thing

I can’t believe it’s September already! In the last few months, my life has seen big changes (all good) on the personal and professional front. On the professional/career front, I’m happy to let my readers know that I just started on an exciting journey: the full-time MBA program at The Wharton School in Philadelphia.

After my varied career experiences, one might ask if I really need an MBA. For anyone, the decision to get an MBA is multifaceted and comes down ultimately to personal factors. I’ll try to share my two biggest reasons here for choosing this path.

First, my career transitions so far were marked by a lot of legwork and no small measure of luck. After getting to a place in my career that I really liked, I realized that I can’t leave future career transitions to chance in the same way. By enrolling at Wharton I am investing in my future by way of acquiring a good schooling and a great education.

Second, enrolling at Wharton will enable me to focus on my entrepreneurial pursuits more seriously. Lamhe continues to grow and I have a few ideas on how I can help it grow even more. Before anyone asks, I think an MBA is neither necessary nor sufficient to be an entrepreneur, but unlike a full time job, it will give me time to think and make some very interesting connections, both personal and synaptic.

Wharton has been wonderful so far. I’ve met classmates from all over the world during pre-term and Philadelphia has been a pleasant surprise all around. I don’t plan to make this blog a ‘b-school blog’, so if you have questions about my Wharton experience, you’ll have to reach out directly. However, to capture my own sense of anticipation as I begin my Wharton journey, I’ll leave my readers with a thought I heard at a pre-term lecture by a popular Wharton professor. I can’t quote from memory but I’ll paraphrase:

Some people think an MBA is like a cruise ship. You get on it, have a fun vacation for two years, and then return to the real world. To some, the Wharton MBA is like a cruise ship. But I think it can be much more. It can be like the Mayflower. You’re beginning an uncertain and grueling journey but when you’re done, it’s something that will really stick with you for life. After all, even today, nearly 400 years after the Mayflower landed in the New World, there are people in America who proudly trace their lineage all the way back to the Pilgrims.

This analogy really resonated with me, and I’m going to try and live up to it with my Wharton experience. So far, I must say I have really not been disappointed!

At the recent Defrag 2010 show in Broomfield, CO I was interviewed by John Taschek of Salesforce. The interview video appears below. I talk about how VCs have generally stopped investing in pure packaged software startups and are increasingly looking at cloud-powered software companies. This observation may not seem blindingly original, but nonetheless deserves to be acknowledged. There’s also some other stuff at the Salesforce CloudBlog, where the video is originally posted.

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At the behest of my friend Aneel, I am writing this post about what the Internet will be like in 20 years (sorry Aneel—I know you asked me a really long time ago!). Niels Bohr once said, “Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.” Prognosticating about the state of the Internet in 2030 is probably a foolish exercise, but I am going to try anyway.

In the last couple of months, I’ve been watching all the episodes of the X-Files again, starting from Season 1, which is set in 1992. In the less than two decades that have passed since the beginning of the X-Files, the way an investigator might do their work has changed so dramatically. The Internet makes no appearance in Season 1. Mulder frequently conducts his research in actual libraries, surrounded by piles of books. I am now in the midst of Season 4, which is set in 1996, and the Internet, albeit with a dialup modem soundtrack, keeps popping up in several episodes as a way for Mulder and Scully to look up something quickly in a specialized database. The mobile phone, which is so central to many people’s lives today, also started to make an appearance only somewhere in Season 3. Seeing how differently these TV characters lived less than 20 years ago has only made me wonder how transformational the next 20 years will be.

So, without further ado, here are some ways in which I think the Internet in 2030 will differ from the present-day Internet:

1. The Internet will be more international. The Internet has already been the catalyst for some fairly extraordinary changes in developing countries all around the world. Yet, English dominates the fabric of the Internet. English accounts for a plurality, if not the majority, of content on the Internet. In twenty years, this situation will have changed considerably. Earlier this year, ICANN approved non-Latin characters in domain names and URLs. Many of the next 3 billion who will come online in the coming decades will not speak English, and will expect to see content in a plethora of languages and character sets. The repercussions of this trend are too many to list here, but just about everything from Internet content production and consumption to Internet security will be affected.
2. The Internet will be more peer-to-peer. The complex network we know as the Internet today is organized primarily in a hub-and-spoke style. A few fat pipes in densely populated advanced economies carry a majority of the traffic on the Internet, and feed some capacity to secondary markets. As network connectivity and cloud computing become more widespread, more Internet traffic will be routed around ‘the edges’ rather than ‘the center’. A big reason for this is efficiency. After all, if the number of connected devices is increasing, why must traffic in and out of them be routed all the way to a hub if there are faster ways of getting that traffic to its intended destination? Which conveniently brings me to my third point.
3. The Internet will be an Internet of Things. Despite lingering skepticism, some say the Internet of Things is already here in the sense that more Internet traffic is consumed by machines than by humans. If that’s not already the case, it will soon be. There is a tsunami of data consumed over mobile phones currently underway. In addition to that wave, the next billion devices and objects to come online will change our lives beyond belief. Much has already been written about the Internet of Things by others far more qualified than me. The bottom line, however, is that cellular phone networks provide a backbone for just about everything to go online, including your car, your TV, your clothes, your shoes and even the medical device that you’ll receive as an implant in 2030.
4. The Internet will be more implicit. Most human activities on the Internet today need not intersect significantly with people’s offline existence—hence all the current backlash against kids and young people spending too much time on the Internet at the expense of ‘In Real Life’ activities. In the Internet of twenty years hence, this wall of separation between online and offline will crumble and make. The Internet will permeate our offline life much more deeply; rather than being an explicit destination we seek out, it’ll become a lot more ambient and implicit in our lives. We’ve already made a good amount of progress towards a portable Internet identity, via initiatives like OpenID and Facebook Connect. Internet carriers are beginning to own the last mile of connectivity to your home and to you by means of content. How long before your behavior on the Internet becomes linked to your ability to apply for a loan, or your car insurance rates or even whether you’re put on the federal No-Fly List? Perhaps not the most encouraging state of affairs, but I think it’ll come to pass.
5. The Internet will become the internet. Please indulge the language geek in me for a moment. The Internet will become the internet, because it’ll be so ubiquitous and integrated into life that it won’t be a destination whose notability needs to be marked with a capital I. I can’t exactly hold a candle to the brilliance and genius of Prof. Donald Knuth, but this point is my version of his ‘email vs e-mail’ point. The internet will stop being a big deal, so I hope we’ll just drop the capitalization by 2030.

Whatever the internet will look like in twenty years, we can be sure it’ll continue to disrupt value chains and fundamentally change life as we know it today all around the world while creating lots of opportunities for entrepreneurs. What do you think the internet will look like in 2030? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Internet software

Long ago in Internet time—when memes were known as just ‘email forwards’—there was a silly gender stereotyping meme making the rounds. It was called Man’s Brain vs Woman’s Brain. It must have probably graced several office cubicle walls before evoking threats of sexual harassment lawsuits. But I digress. I would credit the author of that meme here for inspiring me to write this post, but I am not sure of his/her identity. If you’re reading this, thank you!

For some reason, I ran across this meme again recently and decided to have a little fun with it. I repurposed the original diagrams into sillier diagrams that stereotype entrepreneurs and VCs, who, by most accounts, appear to hail from Mars and Venus (I’ll let you decide who is from which planet).

Before anyone purports to launch a flame war over these diagrams, I’d like to state that these were drawn with tongue firmly in cheek, in the spirit of late-summer humor. The inspiration for these diagrams is from two sources: gross over-generalizations of my own observations as a VC and some stereotypes commonly bandied about in the startup blogosphere about both kinds of people. I’ve tried to be even-handed in my critique of both entrepreneurs and VCs. If you find either one of these diagrams to be a grossly unfair critique, take heart that the other one isn’t exactly full of glowing praise either. In fact, one big concern I have about the end product is that my view may appear a bit too jaundiced. Be that as it may, I hope at least someone who sees this gets a few chuckles out of it.

Meanwhile, I beam my sincerest respects to the excellent entrepreneurs and visionary VCs out there, who keep alive entrepreneurial innovation, that most crucial segment of our global economy. Namaste!

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been helping review applications for next year’s Startup Leadership Program (SLP). After a successful year in Boston and Silicon Valley, the SLP (formerly known as the TiE Leadership Program) is opening new chapters in Delhi, Bangalore, Beijing, San Diego and New York. I’ve been involved in evaluating applicants for three of these chapters: Boston, Bangalore and Delhi and have noticed several remarkable differences between applicants to the India chapters and those to the Boston chapter. An off-hand comment I made on Facebook raised requests from some of my friends that I expound on these differences in a blog post.

First though, some background. The SLP is intended to groom current and future startup CEOs by assembling a top-tier class of entrepreneurial leaders. Through a combination of flexible mentorship and peer learning, SLP aims to inculcate lessons in many aspects of running a business, from ideation and fundraising to commercial deal negotiations and building a killer sales and marketing operation. The ideal demographic for the program consists of motivated professionals between the ages of 25 and 35 that are either working for a startup or developing a business idea.

India has had an entrepreneurial, risk-taking culture for several hundred years, but not in the same way that high-growth entrepreneurship is understood in the US. The ‘Silicon Valley-style’ of building high-growth businesses in short time windows using angel and venture capital (i.e. other peoples’ money) has only taken root in India in perhaps the last decade. Although it has captured the imagination of many young, motivated professionals in India, it’s still far from mainstream; for most college and business school graduates, success means conforming to the norm of stable employment in a large (ideally multinational) corporation. Several of the following points arise from this status quo.

So without further ado, here are some of the more interesting differences I observed:

1. Age and professional experience. The India chapter applicants tended to cluster more around the ends of the demographic range relative to the US applicants. The older cluster was fairly senior in their organization (most of the time a large company), whereas the younger cluster had graduated college in the last two or three years and has worked in several small or medium-sized companies.
2. Entrepreneurial experience. The younger cluster of applicants had often done multiple startups already and generally conformed to a sophisticated serial entrepreneur stereotype substantially similar to that seen in the Valley. The older cluster of applicants had often never done a startup and most applicants in it were just thinking about a startup. Particularly in the older cluster, there were several applicants thinking of startups far afield from their previous experience. For example, it wasn’t uncommon to see someone with 10-12 years of business process outsourcing experience thinking of forming a clean tech startup in the next 12-18 months. This pattern of majorly switching fields wasn’t often observed in the US.
3. Motivations. Both younger and older applicants in India frequently viewed entrepreneurship as a means of building a new India. It may seem that stating this is part of playing the application game, but this fact came through not just in words but in their past entrepreneurship and leadership actions as well. In the US on the other hand, the most common motivations for entrepreneurship I’d heard were either making a difference or implicitly, making money.
4. Startup obsession. The SLP application asks applicants for an example of a time when they made a genuine difference to an individual or a group. Most US applicants and a few India applicants took this as a signal to talk about community service and volunteering experiences, whose immediate impact is measurable. India applicants who are full-time entrepreneurs, however, frequently cited their current startup or their previous startup as the response to this question. Whether or not this was true, to me it indicated a much higher degree of obsession with their startups and indeed, a view that the startup is wedded to their ability to make an impact and by extension, to their significance. For venture investors looking at India, this may indicate a lower ability for the founders to separate themselves from their business.

Applying to leadership programs like SLP resembles applying to business school in some respects. Applicants may perceive the process as an a elaborate game, where dropping the right buzzwords in response to purposely ill-defined prompts increases your chance of acceptance. The above observations are only intended to sketch out general differences I observed. Nobody should take anything I said above as specific tips on what to put in their SLP application.

Regardless of what India or US entrepreneurs said in their applications, it was clear that even though Valley-style entrepreneurship may be new to India, the caliber of applicants to SLP is at least as high as that of US-based applicants. Moreover, India applicants seem to have a risk-taking profile and sense of purpose not commonly seen in the US, which gratifies me and only reinforces in my mind what an exciting time it is to be an entrepreneur in India.

Building a product or service to match your vision can be very exciting. Every so often though, it is good to step back and crystallize that vision and your thought process into documents such as a presentation (slides) or an executive summary (one-page document or ‘one pager’). The work required to make these documents will most likely take away from the time you spend building your product or business, but remember that unlike you, not everyone is living and breathing your business. it is really important to have these documents on hand so that you can represent your business effectively to anyone who is not involved day-to-day with it. This post will talk about the two presentations every startup should have on hand.

Some people think business plans are completely passé. Regardless of what you think about business plans, your startup should at least have two presentations prepared: the teaser presentation and the pitch deck. I’m in the process of preparing these two for Lamhe but I figured I’d share my thoughts here for anyone else who might be in the same process.

The Teaser Presentation

The teaser is a quick glance through the essentials of your business. A good basic structure for a teaser is Guy Kawasaki’s 10-20-30 Rule of Powerpoint. To think about what’s appropriate in a teaser presentation know the following:

1. They will be shown in a VC partner’s office or in a small conference room in a one-on-one sit-down conversation. The slides will probably be displayed on your laptop.
2. The audience will consist of one or two people who will be fairly knowledgeable about your industry, from their past investments.
3. Teaser presentations are not just delivered in meetings. They will often be emailed around and printed (sometimes in black and white). Make your teaser presentation on a white background so it prints faster and wastes less ink. And if you can, make your presentations thinking of a color-blind person – your slides should not depend on the availability of color ink to make sense.
4. Feel free to go into details on the slides even if it makes them text-heavy. Put the really really detailed slides into an optional appendix that comes after the main content. I am ordinarily not a fan of slideumentation, but teaser presentations should at least carry answers to the most frequently asked questions that will come up in the conversation. Teaser presentations should also be capable of being printed out and read as standalone documents. Don’t get carried away with too many details though. Keep the total number of slides under 20, because these slides might need to be printed and stuffed into the back of an airplane seat, along with 5 other presentations like yours.
5. Don’t use slide builds. When printed, they usually come out looking fairly messy.

Pitch Decks

Pitch decks are usually associated with a specific request (I refuse to use ask as a noun), such as funding or a business partnership. Keep these points in mind when making your pitch deck:

1. Pitch decks are usually delivered to the entire partnership and investment team in a VC firm’s ‘pitch room’, i.e. a larger conference room with a projector.
2. You may expect good baseline business knowledge from this audience but don’t expect them to know your industry very well. For this reason, pitch decks should not contain too much low-level detail. Save details for an appendix, which has the beneficial side effect of making you look exceptionally well prepared for the post-presentation Q&A.
3. Pitch decks should ideally have a ‘show quality’ to engage your audience and maximize the chances of a successful pitch. Facts are important, but try making an visceral connection as well – you have to make something in the VC’s head light up to get them to the next step. For this to happen, reduce the amount of text on each slide and use backgrounds and good images so that they convey The Big Idea effectively.
4. Feel free to use slide builds if you think they will communicate your idea better. This tip is especially useful for technically complex pitches.
5. Make sure to put in a call-to-action slide. If you’re asked for the slides after the pitch, email your teaser presentation plus your call-to-action slide (not your pitch deck).

What tips for startup presentations do you have? Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments below!

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.