Sushrut Bidwai

Few times I have observed that people tend to barge into decision making process where there are not supposed to. One of such important domain in technology budget.

Agreed that startups will have tight budgets and have to optimize the budget. But that does not mean Mr CEO that you should decide who will call shots related to it. Just give your budget to CTO/VP Engineering and let him make calls. That is HIS job not yours.

There are numerous other reasons why such decision making powers should be given and later respected. One of the more important reason is that - Only a tech person will understand the continuous importance of having good programmers/developers in the team.

When a non-tech person starts making decisions which are related to technology like hiring of programmer, partnership with outsourcing vendor, then such decisions are more likely to go wrong. This person may not have understanding on cost of losing out relationship with a good programmer, development partner. As it is not his direct responsibility to deliver next release.

So all such decisions, communication should be always and always handled by a person who’s direct responsibilities and ability to deliver can be compromised.

Sure you are CEO of the company but that does not mean you are in charge or even capable of doing everything your company requires. So focus on things you are truly good at and let others take decisions and manage relationships in there focus areas.

Process, Startup CTO, decision making, Startup

Global warming or not, the city of Nasik which was till early 90’s (even late 90’s) was cool even in summers is experiencing very warm summers since last 2 years. Already in April we saw temperatures as high as 41C and May is still to come. Due to this weather we faced few issues which directly affected work.

1. Network equipment gets so hot that we experienced continuous packet drops and network drops.

2. Overall productivity of people.

I posted a query of Pune OpenCoffee club as to cheap solutions that can be applied. Here is a list of things people suggested. But before that a bit more information about our office.

Office is located on top floor. Its like a big hall with only one room separate for conference. There is very un-even distribution of people and machines in office with most of the folks sitting near east side of the office with west side kept empty for lunch and cricket. Due to my personal bad decision even inverters are near the crowded section of the office and hence this particular section was un-bearable to work in during peak heat hours few days ago.

Suggestions -

1. Flood roof with water.

Too much wastage of water and impractical.

2. Cover roof with grass, carpet or similar material.

Roof is a shared property and hence carpet etc could be stolen. There is a hospital in the same building and hence lot of people use roof.

3. Coat the roof with a special chemical like Dr. Fixit Heatshield or Surya Cool Cement

We received quote of around 55-60,000 Rs for doing these things. Since our’s is a rented place, we thought investing so much amount of money on something which we may not use for long is not a good idea. And hence parked this suggestion till we found some cheaper way.

4. False ceiling - Again cost + investment from long term was not favorable. Also would have taken much longer time and work would have affected while construction goes on.

5. Install more exhaust fans - We installed one and will be installing another one this weekend. Effect is pretty good.

6. We have north-east windows un-curtained. So suggestion was to put up vetiver curtains on these and water them. We are doing this. Cost of doing this was approximately Rs 2700. Result is very nice. Not only the place is cooler, it smells really good.

7. Put some matkas painted white on the roof. This will help in reflecting the sun rays and will reduce heating up of the roof. We bought 20 matkas, cut them in half. Painted them in white and put them around 3-4 feets from each other on the terrace. It does not cover entire area but covers the crowded and most affected portion. Reduced temperatures significantly.

8. Install ACs - Right now we do not have any ACs in the office. Reason is - cost + energy bills + inverter cost to keep them running during power outages (5 hours per day now with 2.5 hours slots). This was and is our last option. When we grow out of this office, we can take ACs with us, so investment is justified. But right now looking at the overall effect of measures we took, I dont think there is immediate need of ACs. Though we will always have the option open.

Hope this helps.

Misc heat, Ideas

Many people have written lot of things about Apple and Steve Jobs and there policies. Adobe Vs Apple. HTC Vs Apple and Apple app store policies have got worst press in history of technology products. But with 50 billion dollars in bank, they are of course not interested in listening. Here is my take on this problem.

Generally - when I buy a product I own that product. I can do any thing with that product. If I buy Nike shoes I can wear them on denims, shorts or with no cloths on. Nike can not bullshit me about what attire I should be wearing with those shoes. Similarly when I buy a PC, Netbook or Phone I should have complete ownership of that device. But Apple is exactly not allowing me to do that.

I am 28 and a programmer/hacker so I understand technology and would like to play around with my phone. Even if I can not recompile kernel of my Windows or Symbian machine like I can do with my Linux or Android machine, still I can do pretty much everything. I can install any app I want. I can install any softwares, third-party tools. I can run programs in any other language. I can watch porn if I want!

Apple and its terms and conditions now specify that we can not cross compile from LangX to C and run it on iEgo devices. Err.. why not Mr Steve Jobs? Whats exactly wrong with that? You are selling a phone and a phone experience or are you selling Objective C to developers? Why do you want to lock in people to a technology which you think is good? Next what - no SMS lingo when texting? All texts need to pass through spell-check before then can be sent out? Or no use of x-rated words in texts?

I can not install any app I want, I have to always install apps from app store. This is the most idiotic thing ever! Plus apple will take down any apps when ever they feel like.

The biggest problem is - Apple thinks users and developers of iEgo devices are witless dumbs and cant decide whats good for them on their own and need to police them always.

I personally never bought an iEgo device myself will never do so.

Misc apple, iEgo

Till about 10 days ago total amount I had spent over ecommerce website in India was = Rs 1,200

In last 10 days it is = Rs 10,000 .

Change - Flipkart dot com.

Before I started using it, for getting books I had to go to Pune as lot of books are not available in Nasik. Now I receive them in about 3-4 days after ordering.

Things to learn -

1. Very simple user interface.

2. Excellent stock.

3. Great consumer experience.

4. Once you have created account you can order books using credit card in around 2 mins max.

If you are an entrepreneur venturing into this space, you have loads to learn from flipkart.com.

Disclosure - I am not at all related to flipkart.com, havent met any of their team members ever and have not received any special gifts for give this shout out. This post comes straight from the fact that I just ordered entire LOTR collection in 2 mins while waiting for a conference call.

Uncategorized

Now this blogpost is not related to topics I generally write about, but anyways.

So some of the things that I would like twitter to do in 2010.

1. Ownership of my twitter page and stream - I should be more in control of my twitter stream. Since lot of people use twitter for professional purposes like getting business, putting up a strong profile to engage with tweple. So I should be able to customize my profile page. And by that I mean not just ability to put up a background page. But a bit more like widgets where I can put up rss feed for my blog. Click-able links to my linkedin profile, company website.

2. More features on conversation - This may not be possible or easy to do from technical standpoint, but what I would really like is to save a multi-part twitter conversation for future reference. Some thing like a favorite button, not for individual tweet but for entire conversations. And ability to play it back.

3. Analytics - If twitter implements my feature request 1, then analytics for all the links I publish. From where people are visiting my profile or my tweets and where they are going from my profile. Analytics related to retweets. Also analytics for links I tweet.

4. Stability - Please twitter, use that 100 milion you got in funding to provide a much much much more stable platform. I know its tough and very challenging but hope you can do it!

5. Spam control - Better way to keep those spammers out. May be implement superior crowd sourced things like if 10 people block a id you review it or something of that sorts. We want a clean followers list and currently burden is on users to keep it clean.

Misc 2010, twitter

I came across a post today and found it very useful from a lead developers stand point. One of the reasons why IT has come to become what it is today is - lot of “managers” or “decision-makers” still think of product development as classical engineering. IT is different. Growth of IT is dependent of productivity of people and not productivity of machines. Most of the other engineering disciplines are centered around making sure that machines are kept busy as much as possible so that manufacturing lines are optimally utilized. This does not hold true for IT.

Productivity of software development is directly proportional to productivity of people developing it under given process and technology environment. I am not saying Lisp, Haskell, Clojure, Python etc are the only way you can make people productive. Nope. But there should be balance between product you are developing, technologies used for them and processes designed for the same. But most important thing is - understand the people you have and structure your processes based on that. Or think about the processes you want to follow and hire people who fit into them. Technology may not be the silver bullet here. How you leverage people and processes might be, in my opinion.

Process Engineering, IT, Process

Search owned most of this decade. Information search, product search, images, news, location based and so on. New decade will mostly be around numbers, statistics. Google is already moving towards it from trends we see this year.  We should expect this market to get really competitive and to come of age in next few years.

Misc Data, google, internet

This is advice I received some time back from my mentor and I am merely passing it along. Views are mostly expressed by my mentor, but I do tend to agree with them.

Quoting (but in my writing style) him from one of his email -

For everybody who wants to be somebody derives inspiration, motivation from some one else. Lot of it comes from with in, but there are things which we are just blindly following from other peoples life. Be it Steve Jobs, Sergy Brin, Roger Fedrer, Alex Ferguson or any body else, who is successful. Many times, journalists create a very romantic picture about life of such people. Now the people I have mentioned here are very well known and popular. But there are cases where that may not be the case. A journalist telling story about how a 15 year kid innovated etc. What these people forget to mention is, what tools were available to this kid.

I am not trying to take away any thing from these success stories. You should read them. But just remember, you are in completely different surroundings. Tools you have available for achieving success (being successful does not necessarily mean achieving success) are very different from some of the people who are trying to emulate on some level. So beware - find the complete story. Don’t believe everything you read about people.  Dont push yourself the wrong way. If a kid all of 15 years old can do this then why cant I? Never ever base your professional (or personal) life on if they I can, then so can I. Thats not a very healthy and persistent motivation. It may give you spike in your motivational levels, but never a continuous thrust of inspiration.

Hope this helps you too, like it helped me.

Update - Dont know why but I felt like sharing this with you after watching 3 Idiots.

philosophy inspiration, mentor, motivation

I have been using google wave for managing few discussions and thought it would be good to share it with every one else.

First a bit of context -

Most of the teams I am part of (tech/sales/business) are distributed. Some people are in different timezones and hence managing a all-hands meeting/discussion is kind of tricky. Off course most of the things are taken care of over emails, but when you are at a particular milestone, its important to organize discussions in more disciplined manner.  So far meeting organizer would publish agenda 2 days ahead of time over email, or publish it on some sort of dashboard. Everybody goes through agenda, prepare their pre-meeting notes and bullet points. Then we conduct a voice conference using conference bridge or multi-party skype call. During meeting, everybody is taking down minutes, notes and publishing them after meeting is over. Meeting organizer will gather such feedback, inputs from every one and publish it as a road-map and follow up items. So far this worked well. But Google wave just helps us to make this a bit better.

How to use Google wave? Or rather how we are using it.

We create one wave and invite all concerned people (participants, observers, boards) to that wave. Meeting organizer will put down agenda as first message. Every body puts down their pre-meeting notes, inputs and organizer will keep on refining agenda taking this feedback. Any documents, links (including links to JIRA/Basecamp/Unfuddle) are posted to this first message. During meeting, we start talking about each bullet point from agenda message one by one. Call is still organized over skype or conf-bridge, but we make sure every body has access to wave during the call, so that minutes, notes are typed right there. So once meeting begins and every body has introduced, we start creating a message for each bullet point. Every body posts their thoughts, notes as we speak to this message as a reply. Once the meeting is completed, organizer will put up a concluding message on the wave with summary. No need to collate all minutes, as they happen in real time as we are speaking.

Benefit -

Typically most of us receive about 70-80 odd emails everyday. It is pain to keep track of all of them and their replies and play them back. Play back feature of wave is just a winner on its own! Second, we can attach various things to email, but we can embed them in wave. A slight difference, but a major benefit to make sure you can put context of the document and the document itself right next to each other. Real time notes sharing reduces time required to go through all of them and summarize. Since our use of wave is still limited, its easy to search through it much faster.

Typically we conduct road-map discussions for existing projects/products we are working on. This includes business discussions + technology. We also use this for preparing for a sales meeting and also for a sales meeting itself, when ever possible.

Hope this helps.

Misc google, Organizing, Wave

Vishal Gondal writes a blogpost about why he thinks that Wipro-TCS-Infy are evil and how they are converting IT talent to “outbots” , term coined by him. Now I understand from where is coming and I also understand that his perception might be very different from my own. I admire him for the kind of success he has achieved but I dont think his views are correct in this debate.  Here are my own view points as a startup entrepreneur myself.

When I started thinking about starting up, I also had similar thinking outlined by him, when I interacted with initially hires, interns I also laid out similar views to fresh grads. But when I started thinking more deeply about it, I realized that everybody does not want same things in life. There are very few people who wants to take up challenges, specially in India, continuously work hard, learn things. Professional satisfaction and personal satisfaction may not have equal importance for everybody. Some people wants to have laid back life, where their dreams are limited to having a healthy, moderately successful and fulfilling life.

This gets interesting based on what a person wants in life. People who are entrepreneurs, like Vishal and I, may derive our satisfaction from successfully taking up challenges. This essentially means sacrifices on personal front. Lesser time with family and friends, lesser vacation. Not much time to pursue a hobby. Off course you can do all this even while starting a business or working in startup. But its very hard and I speak this from personal experience. So is it compulsory that every one should look for these same challenges in life? I would say, no.

Everybody comes different background, has different dreams. Or may some people just dont have dreams. And that is perfectly fine from my point of view. Not everybody wants to become Sachin Tendulkar. Calling these service giants as evil, is similar to calling BCCI evil. That BCCI makes so much money that no kid wants to learn and master hockey and hence BCCI is evil and should stop earning that money!

The way I see it is - IT services sector has given opportunity to lot of professionals to earn a good life style. Off course these companies will keep on evolving as time goes by and may turn into much better organizations and remove the flaws that we see now. I think the credit crunch might be good in that way. These organizations, at least from what I heard from my network, are becoming more value centric and are willing to take a bit more risks, which is definitely a good thing.

Now what we can do as startup entrepreneurs - Most of the time we come to this debate that services companies are evil because they are taking up all our talents. So what I thought is a good way to build talent pool for my company is connect directly to fresh grads, interact with them. Try to open their minds to certain professional goals they can have. Try to give them that spark and motivate to them pursue a career with startup like environment. This takes lot of time and hard work, but I think that is the best way forward. Instead of trying to solve the problem from top-down by saying services companies are evil etc, we should be a bit more constructive and solve it bottom-up by collaborating with educational institutions, students, interns and building at least few people who will understand our views, passions and may be 10 years down the line all startups will have better time in hiring. At least thats what I do by going to colleges and talking about technology, product engineering and career orientation (presentation) .

philosophy Services, Startup, Talent