The Courtship

I haven't updated much about my personal life during the past 6 months ... probably the most 'unusual' 6 months of my life. I met Divya exactly 6 months ago on July 12th (this was at the Oberoi Mall, Goregaon), and probably the first time I drove her back to her office in KulupwadiBorivali (also the locality where she stays .. till now).

Sidethought: I am feeling spooky about my life again! My courtship is ending in an exact 6 months (a limit I secretly desired for my courtship period). I got engaged on 15th August and am getting married on 25th December. Something is really spooky ... why does my life have so many 'perfect' endings?

Since then there have been numerous trips to Borivali - in fact averaging 2 per week - one each on Saturdays and Sundays. Today, as I was driving back on the Western Express, I suddenly felt nostalgic realizing the fact that today was the last time I dropped Divya off to 'her' home in Borivali; the last time I was driving back as a bachelor from Borivali to Powai; the last weekend of continuous trips to and from Borivali was almost over ...

I endured a lot on this road in the last 6 months .. the making of the Kandivali (Times of India) flyover and the resulting dreaded traffic jam, the loads of cars from JVLR to Malad moving at snails pace, the crappy cab and call center drivers, the potholed turning from WE Highway into the JVLR at Jogeshwari and numerous sights of Oberoi Mall - getting the butterfly in my stomach everytime I cross it.

In the meanwhile, Divya who came in my life as fresh breeze on a a newly discovered hillock has become inseparable part of my life - more so without letting me feel so much in the intervening period. My life which felt just about ok till I met her, now feels enriched and fulfilled by the voids she filled in me, which I never knew existed.

Another sopan in life comes to an end - while my bachelorhood ends officially this Christmas - practically, today marks the end of my courtship period!

PS: Do visit my marriage invitation website .. www.divnik.in

PPS: Related posts - the other sopans in my life:

• The end of a film-story life!
• Juda ho ke bhi ....
• London

How To Design A Website

A presentation I gave at a 'mock training session' during an adult learning workshop organized at KPMG.

Do Contact me if you need more inputs than this presentation.

And Btw ... as many would know, I am getting married on this Christmas - the wedding invite is at the website www.divnik.in (which is the screenshot that you see below on the title slide)!

Do visit ... and comments invited.

How To Design A Website

View more presentations from Nikhil Kulkarni.

StRoKe of a Lightening

There are some actors who are attractive, some who can act well and one in a billion that are StRoKe of lightening. Shah Rukh is a stroke. Even the word stroke has his initials. http://bit.ly/7mg4Xo

Some quotes from Retd. Col. R K Kapoor's interview (maker of Fauji) :

(During Audition for Fauji) I asked them to fight me like an enemy. I punched a couple of them really hard. But Shah Rukh, in his turn, gave me the punch of my life. He hit me so hard that I saw stars in the daylight. Then, I knew he had something in him apart from a charismatic face. I had found my Abhimanyu Rai.

What has worked for Shah Rukh is that he is universal. He is not an angry young man. Neither is he a `sanyasi' or a lover boy. He is all of them and still none of them.

Other SRK related posts: Chak De Review, OSO review

How to spark a ‘product innovation’ revolution in India?

Continued From: Why doesn’t Indian startup ecosystem churn out product companies?

Let me start by picking up a few ideas from Paul Graham.

Not Buildings
If you go to see Silicon Valley, what you'll see are buildings. But it's the people that make it Silicon Valley, not the buildings. I read occasionally about attempts to set up "technology parks" in other places, as if the active ingredient of Silicon Valley were the office space.

Building office buildings for technology companies won't get you a silicon valley, because the key stage in the life of a startup happens before they want that kind of space. The key stage is when they're three guys operating out of an apartment.

So if you want to reproduce Silicon Valley, what you need to reproduce is those two or three founders sitting around a kitchen table deciding to start a company. And to reproduce that you need those people.

Universities
The exciting thing is, [if] all you need are the people, If you could attract a critical mass of nerds and investors to live somewhere, you could reproduce Silicon Valley. And both groups are highly mobile. They'll go where life is good. So what makes a place good to them?

What nerds like is other nerds. Smart people will go wherever other smart people are. And in particular, to great universities. In theory there could be other ways to attract them, but so far universities seem to be indispensable. Within the US, there are no technology hubs without first-rate universities-- or at least, first-rate computer science departments.

Personality
… merely creating a new university would not be enough to start a silicon valley. To spawn startups, your university has to be in a town ... where investors want to live, and students want to stay after they graduate.

Most nerds like quieter pleasures. They like cafes instead of clubs; used bookshops instead of fashionable clothing shops; hiking instead of dancing; sunlight instead of tall buildings. ... they like well-preserved old neighborhoods instead of cookie-cutter suburbs, and locally-owned shops and restaurants instead of national chains. Like the rest of the creative class, they want to live somewhere with personality.

One reason why Bangalore could rise - though it is nothing close to Silicon Valley - is because it contains many elements described above. Bangalore when it started growing into an IT hub was a town of HAL, DRDO and other quasi-academic research institutions; it had a decent presence of educational institutions, and most importantly it was a city with Personality as described by Paul above.

The Bangalore of today (or the new Bengaluru) however does not continue to be the same city as it used to be in the 80s-early 90s. Its like any other Metropolis - Mumbai or Delhi. So while new businesses will continue to be incubated in Bangalore, so will they be in Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Kolkata and Chennai - I doubt if we will see game changers coming from here. Pune is a possible opportunity, but it has also been saddled with a huge IT Park in Hinjewadi and may soon loose the window of being the 'town of product startups'.

But what Paul has described in the elements of a 'Silicon Valley Ecosystem' is precisely what the PSU Townships of 70s-80s were - calm, quite, decent infrastructure and most of them also have good colleges / universities around them. In fact, one thing which I have observed personally is that a good number of corporate professionals in India today have had an upbringing in such townships - several corporate honchos and MBA's today are wards of PSU employees.

However, the major difference between an Indian 'Valley' (aka PSU town) and The Silicon Valley is - a risk taking culture and unbridled optimism. Most erstwhile PSU towns are shrinking or giving way to commercial cities as Government's investments reduce to a trickle, employee attrition combined with outsourcing reduce the number of people - the infrastructure in these towns is crippling for the want to maintenance. The 'optimism' is definitely going away , if at all it existed all these years.

So here's what I propose!

The location

Lets pick up one or more PSU towns in India with decent infrastructure and a University close by. Request the PSU / govt to lease out its ailing/dilapidated buildings, land, amenities for a cheap rental to build a startup park. These start up parks will offer cheap office spaces and infrastructure say using WiMaX to provide cheap internet. May be a few old employee quarters could be thrown in as residential suppliments as well.

Location Options: Bhopal (BHEL), Bhilai (SAIL), Rourkela (SAIL), Durgapur (SAIL), Tiruchirapalli (BHEL), Panvel (ONGC / JNPT), Korba (NTPC), Vadodara (IOCL / ONGC), Dona Paula - Goa (NIO), Noida (NTPC)

The operating model

Techcrunch has a mention of Freeman Murray's Y-combinator style venture funding model. I propose a group of industrialists, former entrepreneurs and some Govt funding could be used to kick start such a Y-combinator style fund (I know this is a tough part - but getting the Govt to agree to part with its PSU's assets would be harder!)

The Final Mix

The final mix to induce product companies needs to worked out with presence of efficient partners - entrepreneurs, technologists, visionaries - who will need to join an evangelization effort; who will also be out venture funding company's mentors. As techCrunch puts it:

The truth is India’s dream of building the next big fast-growing powerhouses will have less to do with angel money or Western venture money and more to do with getting around that ingrained fear of risk-taking.

Walking away from a prestigious and high-paying multinational job when you don’t have an angel to catch you isn’t easy, especially in a year when India has seen some of the first corporate layoffs.

Criticism invited!

Why doesn’t Indian startup ecosystem churn out product companies?

Look at most successful Indian startups or look at a broader area of ventures (including initiatives by large businesses) in general; Tech or non-tech - what is clearly evident is the abundance of success stories in the services sector and an equivalent dearth of product based businesses.

In fact, if I were to think up successful product venture from India - only 2 names come to my mind: PureIt from HUL in the consumer products space and Slideshare in the web space. (I am counting out Zoho here because the company is based out of the US and use India only as a ODC - essentially turning India operations as mere services arm.)

A quick Google Search on the subject will reveal few reasons for this; for example:

• Lack of deep pockets of Indian VC's to fund serious research and hence Indian entrepreneurs can’t afford to take big bets
• Failures are not welcome in India
• Lack of 'optimism' in the Indian consumer - hence very sluggish adoption of new 'products'
• Aping the west culture where only 're-engineering' of already successful products in the west are welcome in India

I believe there is one more reason which is not highlighted anywhere [except here] - the meteoric rise of Indian IT Services industry. Yes - a mushrooming services industry in India is a bane for 'product innovation'.

Product startups have a higher risk associated than services who are much more agile in changing their offerings to suit the market. If you are working on a product, you first need more time to reach the markets and you may have to wait for several years till its usage picks up.

Services are much easier to plug and play - you innovate on a services model, launch it quicker, if it doesn't work, you switch it off - but you can switch it on again quickly if ever the market re-emerges. This also makes services a much lower budget investment than products.

Now as services startups started growing more and more aggregate investment is going the services way. Even large business houses like the Tata's have concentrated on building a software services business and have hardly invested in 'building products' (TCS B@NCS - the core banking product was actually acquired post development from an Australian company FNS).

Now the causality is being tilted on its head and people (even successful entrepreneurs) are arguing that “small” budget investments are what are needed for Indian ventures. This perspective is literally a killing blow to product businesses in India.

Small budget funding is required for Indian ventures – agreed. Especially service based or those requiring only ‘local innovations’ like new delivery channels or new ways of using new technologies. Case in point are customized T-shirt websites which are sprouting in every city and town in India.

But these should just be (in an ideal scenario) 50% of the venture ecosystem. There are other kind of ventures, especially those which trigger sweeping changes in the way we work – Google for example! Or CISCO or Nortel - they require years of incubation and untiring commitment – high power brains – and sometimes expensive equipment too. All these need money – lots of it!

The other side of the story is the Indian domestic market being extremely price sensitive. So what do you do to spark a ‘product innovation’ revolution in India?

Will try to explore some thoughts in the next post ...

Update: Related Post http://www.livemint.com/2009/12/09230031/In-India-a-developing-case-of.html

Some thoughts on University Education in India

Recently Sam Pitroda recently mentioned that - "too much focus on engineering and medical education has created a situation in India where liberal arts really did not get the kind of attention it deserved." He said:

"A good liberal arts education is important to produce leaders. India has now begun to recognizse that we need not only world class engineering education, we also need world-class liberal arts education. And, we agree that the model we have in (University of) Chicago or Harvard is a model that we need to look at, but it needs to be Indianised - it has to be of a local context."

Clearly, Pitroda is talking about the skewed model of having competitive exams for professional courses only which has created a void in liberal arts education in India.

Unlike US system, Indian universities do not have a uniform SAT for admission across disciplines – so while for entry to professional courses like engineering and medicine we rely on AIEEE/SEEE and PMT/CPMT’s but for non-professional courses we rely on class 12th scores. This creates an imbalance in the evaluation criteria for non-professional courses because class 12th is a qualifying exam and not a competitive exam. It is a measure of one’s qualification in a particular subject and not his/her aptitude in general.

What is the result of this skewed mis-representation? The result is that, in India academic subjects are ranked in terms of the kind of people who opt for them. So Engineering and Medicine seem to come first, then would come other professional courses like Management and Sciences (especially Computer Science which nowadays ensures a good job in an IT company) and then come humanities like Economics and History, pure arts coming the last.

But is it that there are no great jobs in the field of history or economics? Certainly not, not in a country headed by an Economist! However, due to the socio-hierarchal status accorded to our study courses often people with high levels of aptitude are qualified only in engineering or medicine and not in humanities and arts. So you end up finding engineers heading economic/commercial institutions (For example S.B. Bhave who heads the SEBI) or educational boards.

Even worse, you may find people qualified but not with great aptitude heading institutions for want of properly qualified individuals with high aptitude (I confess this statement is a little controversial but its not a generic one I am making – this may happen only in specific cases).

This cycle is created because people with high aptitude are being forced by a flawed system to take up a certain type of qualifications and certain type qualifications being shunned by the society at large. It in fact takes a lot of personal daring to choose a subject of humanities even if you are a great student - and then too hear several noises of discontent from the society as to “why you are destroying your career!” - which is quite unfortunate!!

What needs to be done to solve this cycle.

1. A common aptitude test needs to be set up for entry to any course in any university in India
2. People need to be encouraged to take up all kinds of subjects
3. Corporate need to be influenced to recruit people with proper of qualifications for suitable jobs than with high aptitude only

However, recognizing the size of our population we also need to restructure our non-professional courses in order to ensure that talented individuals can find good ‘placements’ even without opting for professional courses.

One idea is to run every course in 2 modes: Basic and Advanced. People with high SAT scores can take up the advanced mode so as to ensure better “placements” and job offers on completion. This may be a bit unfair in the short run, but can be dismantled in the long run once the system has self-corrected itself and we have people with good aptitude choosing qualifications unabashedly.

Case Studies

The above ideas may look to be preposterous to most of us accustomed to live in a world where most of our peers choose engineering / medicine over commerce or arts. However, the corrective trend has been seen in the microcosm of the IT industry.

In the early years of the IT boom when most IT companies were recruiting heavily, they started recruiting students from all streams (from Mechnical to Civil engrs) of IITs/NITs for IT / Software jobs. However, as number of qualified people in the computer science, IT electronics engineering streams increased, this trend tapered. Now, mechanical engineers from an IIT are more likely to take up jobs which require their aptitude in their own stream than join an IT company which recruit them only to be retrained to code software.

Another case is that of the Armed Forces which ensure that all regiments of the Army are staffed with equally skilled officers by ensuring that IMA graduates are assigned regiments not merely by merit but by dividing them into different blocks by aptitude and distributing students from each block to different regiments.

.

Demise of a Bank*

"It was his child - the bank, how could he let it die?" - these were the thoughts which reverberated in Gopaldas's mind on that cold winter morning as he sipped his morning tea before readying himself for office .... for the last time, he thought.

But had it not been for him, the Bank would have been sold out long ago. Samaj Uday Cooperative Bank was an ailing bank and so small in its operations that apart from its own depositors and borrowers, hardly anyone knew about the Bank. Started in the early years of Indian independence by a group of small traders along Gandhian principles - the Bank's main aim was to provide credit to small traders and businessmen.

Gopaldas had joined the Bank in September 1962, the month he remembered so precisely because it was the month India went to war with China. He had joined as a junior clerk but his diligence in the early years saw him rise fast and become an officer by the time he got married.

By 1984 he was among the senior management of the small Bank, also thanks to many senior officers who quit to join some newly Nationalized banks. He also by then had a small stake in the Bank itself, thanks to a policy set by the original founders of transferring ownership to upcoming management who were in due course to replace the older trustees.

But that was as good as it got. When the Bank was set up, its borrowers were from the same circles as the trustees and the founders - Gandhian in thought, they started businesses for the benevolent reasons like benefit of public, generation of jobs, proliferation of swadeshi etc. More importantly, they were also worthy creditors, paying their dues in time.

In time, while the Bank remained Gandhian, its customers did not - there were defaults by many creditors. Not only did the Bank's profits dwindle, it was becoming increasingly difficult to manage its deposits and keep paying high interest rates. The Bank's term deposits became increasingly uncompetitive and depositors too started moving away. By 1992 the Bank's balance sheet had shrunk to a third of its size at its peak in 1984.

By now, Gopaldas was a full time trustee of the Bank and also one of the executive directors. Had he had any children, they would have been grown up by now. And had they been privy to the state of affairs at the Bank, they would have suggested liquidation or sell off of the Bank long ago. At least this was what the other 3 trustees told him about the opinion of their children.

While all trustees rejected the proposals of sell offs, Gopaldas alone worked hard to prevent it. Even though he was no more an employee of the Bank, he worked with the employees to identify and weed out defaulting customers, bring back enthusiasm into customer service, and prodded the management to come up with attractive deposit schemes.

But just as things started turning around in the early 90s, several private banks started rising who took away business from smaller cooperative banks like Samaj Uday. The Bank now had only few depositors - most of them small traders and shopkeepers who had their offices and shops in the same street as the Bank's only remaining branch.

Gopaldas was no more in the pink of his health to work harder for a second lap. More so as he grew old, his logical and strategic abilities were replaced by emotional outflows. He now felt that it was the Bank's responsibility towards its depositors - those small shopkeepers - to keep working and keep providing them with Banking services. The thought that these customers too could move away from the Bank in the next 2-3 years never occurred to him. After the death of his wife, the Bank - its depositors included were the only family he had.

But today, as he put on his Safari suit, he thought not in terms of fiscal prudence or even customer service - for him the Bank was his child and he could not let it be sold to a profit making entity who would take over the Bank's liabilities but also bump off all the relationships the bank had with its customers in a matter of weeks.

It hit then, a slight nausea and a sense of weakness, he called out to his servant as he sat down on his chair ... and then his hand fell lifelessly. Shri Gopaldas Mukadam, trustee and chairman of Samaj Uday Cooperative Bank died of a mild heart attack just the day when the Bank signed off its last balance sheet before being amalgamated into what was now the largest private Bank in the region.

*Disclaimer: All entities and characters in this story are fictional and any resemblance to real entities and people is purely coincidental.

Is personalized news a mirage?

Having been personally associated with an attempt to create a 'personalized' news reader, it was amusing to read views of Eric Schmidt on the subject. Bang on target – Eric steered clear of what a personalized news reader should be, and just highlighted that the increase in the personalized (also mobile) devices which we use to consume info will automatically lead to need for personalizing the content itself.

However, looking at personalized news from someone else's eyes, I for the first time am realizing that for all the good efforts of the geek world – humans may not need personalized news after all!

By personalized news I mean, the news which I as an individual am interested in. For example some ways to determine the classifications for such news are:

• All News from sources chosen by me
• Any News related to the topics which I am interested in (Sports / tech etc)
• News being read by people in my network (colleagues, friends, family)
• News which relates to any entity in my life (my school / qualification, my city, my company etc)

But consider this – when you open the newspaper everyday, do you expect to see what's happening round the world or what's just happening in the limited span of your 'personalized world'? You may be a tech enthusiast or sports buff, yet you would want to know about what's the biggest news of the day, only then would you turn to your areas of interest.

Second, not everyone is a die hard sports buff or geek! There are people who read the newspaper just to read about interesting stuff. They possibly can't define their interests if you ask them, but would end up reading the Sunday Times back to back which talks about everything from politics, spirituality etc to cooking and travel.

This makes me feel that the more information (news) is available in the world, the more the need for good human editors. Machines can probably create filters or 'personalized' news but only for those who are:

1. professionals looking for updates on their field of interest (like Web programmers looking for tech news)
2. Editors themselves, looking for what could be a part of the next edition of their journal, magazine or website's homepage.

But definitely, personalized news cannot replace the traditional magazine / newspaper (print or online - any news source supported by a news editing organization as in reporters, editors etc).

So I guess all the 'personalized news engine' makers out there (Reddit, AideRSS, Me-Zine, even newsrivers like TwitMeme and TechMeme), need to rethink their goals, target audiences and appeal. Probably a combination of an automated news-filtering engine with a human editorial team is indeed the ideal choice.

That's my take! What do you think?

---

*Personalized news reader was one of our aims for Bloozle though we wanted to limit our sources to blogging world than include generic news sites also

Rise of Indian economy - Groundswell or Reactionary?

Continuing the chain of thought from my previous post, I got thinking as to whether the changes in the Indian economy since 1990's have been top down and visionary or merely reactionary and ad-hoc. The conclusion which I have reached has been that they are a combination, but above all - they are based on a Groundswell from the masses.

While multiple sectors - IT, Retail, Financial Services and even manufacturing - have contributed to rise of the Indian Tiger; to illustrate my point, I would concentrate on the Financial Sector [related post].

Pre-liberalization, there were many shackles, like license raj, on the Indian financial services sector. But more gruesome were the factors of immature or absent regulatory supervision and resulting power of large investors to manipulate the free markets. The Banking sector meanwhile was dominated by PSU banks which were slow, bureaucratic and customer unfriendly.

Starting the 90s there were many top down reforms starting like Dematerialization of scrips, setting up if a fully automated National Stock Exchange (NSE), and complete eletronification of the Taxation system with the entry of PAN Cards and Tax Information Network (TIN). These were preceded by strengthening of regulators like SEBI setting up of others like IRDA. (The success of regulators in Financial Services also paved way for setting up regulators in other domains like TRAI in Telecom).

How did these reforms come into place? The strenthening up of SEBI and dematerialization of securities was a direct consequence of the scams in the Indian securities markets such as the Harshad Mehta Scam. These changes were actually demanded by the common people who lost their savings in such scams, rather than any government reforms dreamed by bureaucrats.

The next was the electronification of the stock exchanges - again, while the SEBI set up the NSE, it was the large scale movement of small investors to NSE which prompted the BSE also to modernize and match the NSE's transparent operations.

Similarly, the rise of private banks has been aided by migration of customers in hoards from the old PSU banks to private banks. As a result, PSU banks in India too have been forced to modernize themselves technologically and convert their operations from bureaucratic to commercialized.

On the outset, many of these reforms look as if they were pushed by regulators, but occasional public uproar and gradual but constant demand and preference for transparent and efficient systems has been the primary driver why these reforms have taken root in India.

While we may still seem to lament the lack of control we have on our own economic fate (ex. "I did not bring the recession - nor can I end it!") , but our intense aspiration to control our own economic / financial fate has brought about several changes which are keeping the Indian economy afloat in these recessionary times.

I believe the rise of the Indian economy today while seemingly reactionary is actually based on a groundswell of people demanding improvements in the system - which keeps me hopeful that we are not done yet and we may soon lead the world in further improvements to create the most efficient norms to govern the global Financial Systems. What do you think?

Atanu Dey is not always right

I have previously pointed a lot of links [1][2][3]to Atanu Dey's blog, also praising his RISC model for development of Indian rural/semi-urban areas. However, this comment on his blog (by someone with an alias Human Blasphemy) sets out some very pertinent doubts on this model - reproducing it here:

Dear Atanu,

I heard you during your session on RISC at XIMB. One of the members asked you a question whether Rural Infrastructure can be developed through people’s participation and through microfinance. Which according to you is not possible, because large infrastructure projects have to be completed at one go. But the problem is that why will any private company invest in rural infrastructure? You only said that i dont know how it will be possible.

I believe you will agree that in future Microfinance will not remain microfinance it will become SM-finance [Small and medium finance. We have already seen the examples of increased limits of credit in Andhra Pradesh, where Mf loans have reached upto Rs5lakhs. Through Microfinance, we can go for rural infrastructure development through following 4 measures:

1. Framework for expanding contours of MFI roles and financial limits
2. Modification of Regulatory Framework
3. Integrating Private Institutions with MFI’s and Community [venture cap n equity]
[SKS Microfinance is attracting VC, which can also be applied to RID]

=======================================
According to the theory of economic developement you suggested, the innovation has to be done at top level, then later on when competition will grow, it will be affordable to the masses. You also gave the example of Mobile phones.

I believe that this theory is successful for the technology sectors.When we talk about growth, we are also concerned with people’s development. YouR example can be negated by the fact that if we allow big companies to grow and capture the markets, the small and medium enterprises will never be able to grow. Big companies will not ALLOW them to grow once they see them as a threat. In that case the open markets will not become open markets, they will actually be the oligopolistic or monopolistic. And in the developing countries where large chunk of industries consist of small industries, the top down approach will not be helpful.

We have to allow small companies to grow and them many of them will become large companies. So the bottom up approach is successful if implemented properly. The reason of failure of this approach is not that it is flawed, but because it is not supported by those who are able to invest in it.

The example of Orissa can be given, where government is encouraging industrilization at large pace, but not able to develop people at the same pace. The result is the improper usage of resources [Economics deals with optimal usage of resources] and there are no rules or regulations in the state. If people are not ready and they are not able to use the resources the industries are generating, what is the use of industrialization. At the later stage the economy will be in a chaos and government will not be able to implement any regulations. People are already opposing such practices. Because they are not ready, or you can say they dont know that it will be beneficial. In such case first Bottom should be developed and not the top.

If you read Nandan Nilekani's Imagining India, one gets a feeling that most changes in India today were brought about by common people from the masses rather than a top down reform from the top. (While top-down reform was done, it usually followed some courageous and pathbreaking demands from the masses). I guess the commenter on Atanu's blog is hence quite right in his theory.