Sushrut Bidwai

I have written last two posts on founders/co-founders. There are few more things I would like to write about, so thought it will be great to make a check list.

First of all, whether you need a co-founder is itself a big question. This post is not a discussion about that question. I will try to address that question in a separate post.

This post is about things that you should look for in a person before starting a venture, from a very India perspective.

Checklist - 

1. Piggybacker - Is he trying to piggyback you? If yes, then may be he should not be an entrepreneur, but more of an non-executive member of the team who is just providing some financial support to the team. Call him an angel if you want, but not a co-founder. Details about such piggybackers can be found here.
2. Daydreamer - I have discussed this point thoroughly too, and you can read it here. So if s/he is one of those daydreamer, then may be not a good idea to have him/her in the team.
3. Vision - How far can he see? Can he think ahead of time for the responsibilities he will be shouldering? For example, if he is going to be technology head in the company, can he see where geek community is moving? Can he be one of those person who will lead the community in right direction? 
4. Social - I strongly believe that you can not create culture in the company. You and your founding teams personality is directly reflected on the team. So if your founding team is not very social, your company will not have lot of social aspects. People will be just coming and working there with out much of interaction. I dont prefer such companies. Hence I would like a co-founder who is social like me.
5. Sacrifice - Taking financial risks and career risks in one thing. But sacrifice even some part of personal life is a big thing. If your co-founder is going to be attending each and every family event with out even considering current work pressure then he is not a good fit. One of my mentors and a serial entrepreneur told me a very good story about himself. When he started his first company, his wife was pregnant with their first child. Yet he used work from 7am to 2am everyday including weekends! Now he is very successful with millions of dollars. I am not saying everyone should make such sacrifices, but there has to be some. Its a tough thing to be an entrepreneur, no matter how hard you try there are going to be taxes on your personal life. You cant talk to your girlfriend for hours and still be part of next big thing you know.
6. Reason - Why a person is looking for entrepreneurship? What is a driving force for him? What keeps him awake at night? What will keep him motivated in the journey when your burst you tyre/s ? If money is the only reason, then dont even consider him. Most important reason I would look for is does he drive to be the best in what he does.
7. Comfort zone - Lot of people have tendency to get into comfort zones. With hints of even a small success such people will start underperforming big time. They will start spending lot of money too. Plus since they cant be fired from the company, that puts them even deeper into their comfort zones. This attitude will soon be reflected on people who work directly with them and so on. Not a good fit. An entrepreneurs needs to be agile in bad times but equally (in fact more) agile in good times. Momentum needs to be carried forward and forward.
8. Originality - Some people are original in their thought process initially. But after a while since they are not may be reading things, learning new stuff or not interacting with peers/mentors, they lose their originality. Does your co-founder have a drive to find solutions to problem on their own? Is he original enough and does originality drives him? 
9. Team person - Its absolute essential for him to be a team person. He should be work for the betterment of the team. Any thing and everything he can contribute to the team, should be contributed. If he is going to keep things to himself, then team as whole is never going to grow. Also fluid discussions in the team are not going to happen if he is not a team person.
10. Brand - All co-founders will typically be leading few parts of the company. How big is your own brand in what you do? If you are in technology, are you respected as a programmer/architect? Great people wants to work only with other great people. Does your co-founder have ability to create brand for himself to attract such other great people?
11. Decision maker - Last but most important, does he have confidence to take all important decision on his own. Typically an ideal co-founder is some one who can run the company completely on his own without you. 

Uncategorized Startup, startup advice, startups

There are lot of people out there who wants to be entrepreneur.

A large percentage of these people only want to be entrepreneur to become rich!

That is not the motivation for entrepreneurship.

Most of the times these people will try to piggyback with some one else who is true entrepreneur. Who believes in his ideas, concepts. Who has commitment and passion required to lead those ideas to success. 

But lot of people just have apetite to take up financial risks. They dont have entrepreneurial drive.

Beware of people who want to piggyback you. And if you have someone like that in your team, get rid off that person.

Startup Startup, startup advice, startups

Since the resurrection of dot com phenomenon and with astounding success of youtube likes, many entrepreneurs dream of making it big.

There is no problem in such dreams.

But problem is entrepreneurs think that making it big in very quick time with not much efforts is very possible.

They dont realize, youtube like financial success is very rare and almost fluke.

It is not a repeatable success story.

You can never know if your venture will turn out to be a next youtube story.

So stop daydreaming.

People who always keep thinking that some Google will come and buy us out, all we need to do is have the product out there, are just kidding themselves.

People who think, even if we fail in dot com venture, some company will buy out our user base and hence we turn investors, are kidding themselves.

If you are thinking about what to do with your success or with your failure when you are running a company, then stop running the company.

You are not meant for entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurship is also not for retirement minded people, who wants to just make few lacks or couple of crore rupees and live the rest of life without doing anything, are the worst kind of entrepreneurs. In fact such people should join bureaucracy, as they dont even deserve to be in corporate life style.

Startup, philosophy philosophy, startup adivce, startups

Many times techno-preneurs, specially those who are not looking to raise money do not write a good business plan. With good I don’t mean a jargon friendly, marketing pitch business plan. But rather a business plan which can actually help you in execution. Various arguments presented are “Business plans will change”, “It takes me 3 months to build the product and take it to market, lets just do that first”, “Its boring”. Thing is business plan is probably the most important tool you can have at your disposal. Unfortunately like most of the things I know now are through my own mistakes and realization about importance of business plan is one of those.

Important parts of business plan:

Note that I am not talking about how to write business plan to attract investors, but how to write a business plan to help you put together your thoughts and research.

1. Vision:

  Vision has to be presentable in one or maximum two lines. If it takes more than that to tell your vision, you are not very clear about it. Do your homework find out what is the most important thing you want to convey and generally that is your vision. Now once you have that one line, print it out on a paper and stick on top of your monitor. If after reading for a week continuously you feel its still worth a goal to take all the required risk, then you are on right track. If at end of one week you feel the one sentence does not motivate you any more, time to check things. (Making tons of money is generally assumed so try put in something other than that. Kidding.)

2. Executive Summary:

  One pager giving away information which gets readers like partner, customer, new hire, investor (in order of importance again!) interested in reading further. This one page document essentially, when you read it after a gap of several weeks, will give you everything you wanted to know about your own venture. Problem you are solving, solution overview, competition, market and structure of your team.

3. Team:

   This is the most important part. And the part where most of the entrepreneurs make mistake. All focus on plus point, which is good to sell the team to VCs. But to really understand yourself put down all plus and minus points about every one involved. Right from socially awkward to technology genius are all important attributes. What you need to find out is who is best in doing what. There are several responsibilities a team has to take care of in a venture. All things are not as big as designing state of the art banking system or pitching to Fortune 500 client. There are lot of small things like who is better person to talk to a local electricity related person in case of any problem, who can handle low level operational things like writing invoices and cash-memos. Found out these thing about your team and put them together. Sure, while presenting this to VCs you may want to remove some things from the list, but internally maintain entire list. And make sure everyone involved is working on improving on some basic set of skills, if they are lacking in any.

   Also note down skills missing from the group and how you are going to acquire them. If you are going to recruit a marketing head, what you have so that best marketing person available will be ready to work with you? How are you going to find these missing people. Your team structure and roles various people involved are going to play.

4. Competition Analysis:

  This again is really important piece of information for any stake holder. Keep this part updated regularly. You have to know your competition. Right from how much money they have raised, from whom, for how much valuation to who are the core non-founding team members. You have to know everything about your competition. Their marketing strategies, strategic partnerships, investors, customers, outsourcing partners and every other person who has a tangent with them. Find out about what your competition is strong in and what are its weak points. What differentiation your are offering. Overlap of features. Your unique selling point/s. All this is very important when you start marketing your product/service. Never look at competition negatively. Competition always helps you, at least most of the times. Frankly if you could not find single competitor to your offering, I think you are understanding the term competition in itself.  Also one quote I always remember is “There is always enough room at the top”.

5. Market opportunity:

   Never lie about market opportunity. At least not to yourself. Yes, VCs will look for billion or at least few hundred million dollar market size. But if you do not have that kind of market, does not mean you can put up your fantasies here. Specially for dot com startups I have found people really struggling with how to evaluate market opportunity. If you have done competition analysis thoroughly then that will help to some extent. Important thing is how much money your customer is going to make or save using your product. Typically some ratio (1/10th I think) is the price customer willing to pay for your product. This can be a good way of finding true valuation. Though I am not very good at this myself .

Exit options:

   There are good times exit options and bad times too. Good time options include merger and acquisitions, going public. who will be your potential buyers. Which companies will be looking to merge with you to gain strategic advantage. Is your market size big enough for you to go public at some point? Can you keep running the company with good return on investment for lifetime with out reaching any of the exit milestones. 

   Bad time options include selling off your technology, user base, marketing channels. Are you creating any patents or technology that you can sell off? If yes then to which companies? Why would they buy? Are your creating marketing channels which a particular company will be interesting in acquiring? If you are a dot com startup, then what user base you minimum need to reach to at least cash-in some part of investment if things dont work out? Have you acquired a domain name which might be very lucrative for your competitor?

There is more to business plans and will be in second part of this post.

Startup business plan, entrepreneurship, startup advice, startups

Every where I have gone, be it barcamps, be it startup events, one question asked by lot of budding entrepreneurs is “What if BIG companies decide to enter my market and compete with me?”. What I generally feel is small companies, startups should not be afraid of competing with big companies. Instead big companies are always afraid that some entrepreneur is going come up with bright idea and take up market pie.

Reasons why you should not fear big companies -

1. Google factor - Google is not the only company around. Yes, it is one of the most respected, highly competitive company with great products, has tremendous market reach. But still it is not the only company. There are many big companies Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, Time Warner, Facebook and others.
2. Big companies ain’t that big - So Google is around 100Bn, Microsoft is around 300Bn in market capitalization. These companies bring in few billion dollars in profit. True. That does not mean they can invest all this profit in new product. Nope. They have to pay dividends, provide market guidance, provide information about capital expenditure. If a startup is well funded i.e. backed by VC, it typically has amount of cash necessary to compete with biggies. Series A + B funding is typically the amount biggies will also invest in some new product, at least to start off with. So on cash wise you are almost as big as them.
3. Market mobilization - Once a big company enters a market, it enters huge. It mobilizes millions of users/customers. If you are smart and can position yourself well, you can take advantage of such market conditions which are in fact very conducive for your product offerings.
4. Smoother and better exit options - Say you built a new kick-ass web application. And Google decides to copy your idea and build a me-too product. Good, in fact great for you. Now every big company which is looking to compete with Google will be interested in the market and essentially looking to acquire you. These companies will be giving you much better valuations, better terms and conditions and more respect!
5. VC interest - Its very very difficult to convince VCs about competition and about market size. Once a big company enters your market, you have a case study which you can sell to VCs a little more easily than otherwise you would have.
6. Agility of management - Google CEO and co-founders might be the best in the world. I think they are. But can they be as Agile as you? How much do they have to lose if they make mistake? Billions of dollars. How much you have to lose? Probably nothing. You have only one thing to focus on. They have 100s or 1000s of things asking for attention. You are competing with, say, only them. They are competing with lot of such entrepreneurs in varied markets. So you can move much faster. Adapt to market requirements quickly. Your spiral of innovation is much more faster than theirs.  One example - It took months for Google to actually integrate Orkut and Blogger or Orkut and Picasa. Still integration is not perfect, you cant view comments on blog in Orkut. Hence, its not so easy for companies like Google to catch up with market. That’s why they acquire in the first place instead of building.

Bottom-line is don’t worry about big companies. Millions of dollars have been invested in search based startups, after the Google went public. Why? Because VCs know market is huge and they know that even Google can be defeated! Go for it.

PS: Thanks for your feedback on theme. I guess I will continue with this one for next couple of months and will review again.

Startup entrepreneurship, google, startup advice, startups

Well everybody is talking about what to watch out for in 2009, so here is my own list of things I am looking out for in 2009.

1. Cloud - I would not be surprised if Cisco finally decides to throw away appliance model and embrace cloud for its VoIP product offerings. Clouds are here to stay. Replicated, distributed (continentally) pay as you go payment and deployment models are working out good for all sorts of businesses. It is going to explode in 2009 given the current economic situations. Its sad to see though that bad times like war, recession are required to propel growth of the common sense and technologies based on common sense.
2. SaaS - It was web based applications that dominated the enterprise market in late 90s and 00s, next entire decade will see world transitioning to Cloud based SaaS applications. But I would like to see collaborative SaaS something which takes ESBs as way to integrate various services available in the SaaS form and provides single-sign on and integration to end user. I would like to see integrations between various vendors like Salesforce, Google, Zoho for a start. Widgets/Gadgets/Plugin based Enterprise SaaS platform is what I am looking out for in 2009
3. Android - Well you will not agree on this and I know why. But let me tell you Android is going to be big. Bigger than Symbian, bigger than Win mobile and bigger than iPhone. 2009 will see it getting the true momentum it deserves. If you want, check the amount of job postings for Android on freelancing websites. It has rose by at a very high rate and in 6-12 months time it will take over iPhone.
4. Mash-up - With Mozilla ubiquity now available for beta testing, I see mash-ups hitting a whole new level in next year.
5. Enterprise 2.0 - Its not more of technology, but still there is significant technology part involved in it so. Enterprise 2.0 is not just about having collaborative environment for enterprises, but its about collaboration between tools, frameworks from different vendors to talk/communicate collaborate with each other. Open ended architectures with web service interfaces are already being implemented. But with rise of SaaS I see this taking a big leap. So all your tools, frameworks, no matter if Microsoft, IBM, HP or any one else is the vendor, should and can collaborate with each other. Any one who is working in this space, do contact me asap .

Startup, Technology 2009, android, cloud, enterprise 2.0, saas, startup advice, startups, Technology

Web 2.0 is no more a new concept. Web 2.0 is here from last few years now, all users understand it. Web 2.0 technologies are mature, stable. There few more Web 2.0 technologies coming in but I do not think I can call them bleeding edge now. Buzz is already started around what could be Web 3.0. But I am not talking about technologies, concepts. No. If you are building a web 2.0 application in any space make sure you build it right.

When some concept is very new, there is not a lot of penetration in the market, you can get away with ugly applications. You can get away with mediocre implementation, pathetic presentation as user has not seen what can be done with these concepts, technologies yet. But once the market starts maturing you need to make sure either you are providing something which is completely not provided by any one else out there OR make sure your presentation, usability, implementation is par with the competition. You should not expect to get into a brown market with mediocre product and think that users will give you more chances to better your product.

Yesterday I got invite from an application developed by a entrepreneur I know from some time. I was hoping for a very kick ass implementation as the domain he has ventured into already see 20 different players. But sadly I could not even get through with Screen 1 of registration process. And believe it or not, they have been developing it since almost an year now! Plus have some angel funds available to them.

In my opinion if you are building a web 2.0 concept, in today’s markets your first impression is going to be your last one. Lot of socio-net applications came in India in 2006, all with really really awful user experience and now they are about to be shut down. So first impression matters, do not expect you will get time to incorporate user feedback etc.

Startup, Technology entrepreneurship, startup advice, startups, Usability, web 2.0

Most of the consumer Internet startups ideas come from need of the concept to entrepreneur. Many successful startups (even Google) have been conceptualize this way. People try to do certain things and when they do not find a good solution, they have the idea for killer startup. Fair enough.

But at some point, very early in evaluation, you have to realize that you are not going to be only user of the product. In Internet consumer space, you will have to attract millions of users today to be successful. And even after having such large user base you may fail to monetize it. So you have the idea. Good. But now do some user behavioral research. Do some basic market research. Which users are using similar applications. Why are they using it. Is it just cool factor? Or is it really adding value to their online presence?

Once you have done this research and still think your concept is worth pursuing further. Great, go ahead. But stop telling me that, “I personally never used this”, “I personally would like this feature” etc etc.

Startup entrepreneurship, internet consumer, startup advice, startups

Many startups start developing their product with out a ‘development plan’.  Many of the entrepreneurs I have talked to, found this as common thing. Common mistake that leads to mediocre technology is not having a decent development plan.

Well yes, startups can not adhere to some plan. Things are figured out as we go along. Things are added, removed, enhanced many times during the first beta release. But, that does not mean we can not have a plan for development.

Problem I see is, if you do not have a plan a target release date, you are aiming at a target which is not there. Result, you miss! and you miss BIG time. Worse is startups that put in place a very very aggressive development plan. 200% of times that target is never achieved. Once you miss one deadline you are going to miss many deadlines.

You need to find out set of features that you are going to implement in first release, no matter what. Find out function point estimations for this. Do some basic resource management math. Put it in an spreadsheet (I personally recommend Open Office!) and start shooting.

Now if you come across things that needs to be added, enhanced put them under on-hold changes. Release the product (even if internally) on or before the target date you had set. And then start incorporating those changes.

Advantages you get is, changes are required too often. Dev cycle is broken, processes go out of window when you change too often. Also many times changes are done and only to rollback in couple of days time. So time is wasted and wasted again. Instead keeping changes on hold, gives you time to really think about it. Make sure you are going in the right direction and not detouring so early in the development.

Summary: Always and always have a decent enough development plan in place and try to follow deadlines. No matter how cool features you have, how ‘All Stars’ development team you have. Teams have struggled hard when they do not follow at least basic software engineering principles.

Uncategorized entrepreneurship, Process, startup advice, startups

Did you hear people saying this is the best time to startup? Off course you did, it is all over! Everyone wants you to startup. Every one is saying, “Technology has made it the best time to startup”, “Cost of starting up is so low right now”, “Just assemble your team and starting kicking ass”. Fair enough on their part. But I do not agree.

VCs are saying this is best time to start, as off course they are looking for good deals.

Media is saying (bloggers,  tech-media) so as they always need ’something’ to talk about and drive their own growth.

What you need to understand is -

1. Do you believe in yourself and your vision for becoming an entrepreneur?
2. Do you believe in your concept?

If you believe in these 2 things, do not wait, just start. No matter where the economy is going. No matter if shadows of war are looming over. No matter if people think you are stupid or brave. You have to, absolutely and 100% , believe in those two things. Time is right when you set it right.

Startup entrepreneurship, startup advice, startups