One More Thing

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.

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!