Pick Teams, Place Bets

I posted this first on iAccelerator.org. 

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.” Antoine de Saint-Exupéry via Marc Hedlund

That has been a favorite quote of mine since I read it on Marc’s blog a couple of years ago. I’ve known Marc since his days with Popular Power. When he and my college friend Jason Knight founded WeSabe I came in as a small angel investor.

Marc has also been a guest speaker at the YCombinator weekly meetings, and as I’m preparing for the teams coming in to the iAccelerator, I called him this morning to ask for some advice on how he has dealt with startups, and his recommendations for me.

Some VC running a venture training program at Stanford said that most of what he does is pick teams and place bets. They add value by making connections, and getting involved a bit. But, they’re very explicitly not trying to run the companies. Marc told me this when I asked how to train teams to run board meetings. Marc’s main point was that the information founders share with investors at a board meeting should be the same information they already collect just to run their company. “What do we really need to know about our business to know if we’re succeeding or failing”

Much of Marc’s advice felt like this. When I asked whether he recommended having teams give tech talks he said that he had tried it a couple of times at different startups with varying results. The first time an engineer suggested it and the culture embraced it. Another time he mandated it, and the team rejected it. Asked whether I should train people in a specific development methodology such as Agile, he recommended that instead I bring people in to talk about their experience with different development practices and help teams evolve one that fits them. On whether there were standard tools all teams should use he mentioned that at WeSabe they use CampFire extensively for company collaboration, but they’ve tried BaseCamp a few times and hadn’t really got traction with it until recently.

Ultimately, Marc’s advice comes down to ‘listen’ understand whats actually happening, collect and present information. Advocate rather than mandate the changes you want to see.

Sometimes I describe my vision for the iAccelerator as a ‘Startup Factory’ where all the companies coming thru abide by ’standard’ processes and use common tools. I imagine multi-colored story cards marching accross Kanban boards behind each of our teams. And that we’re all using Salesforce, Basecamp, Trac, Git / SVN, etc. which allows teams to track their own progress, and us as external stakeholders to quickly and uniformly monitor the different companies we’re engaged with. The combination of all these things gives us a consistent brand of what it means to be an iAccelerator team.

And honestly, I feel there maybe times when this is appropriate. But, Marc and the VC seem to argue heavily in the direction of picking really great people and then giving them the latitude to express their brilliance in the ways which are comfortable for them.

From this quote on the YCombinator ‘about‘ page, it seems Paul Graham takes this position too.

We try to interfere as little as possible in the startups we fund. We don’t want board seats, rights to participate in future rounds, vetoes over strategic decisions, or any of the other powers investors sometimes require. We offer lots of advice, but we can’t force anyone to take it. We realize that independence is one of the reasons people want to start startups in the first place. And frankly, it’s also one of the reasons startups succeed. Investors who try to control the companies they fund often end up destroying them.

LA Community Space Redux

I'm collaborating with Archana down in Bangalore about the idea of creating a large temporary structure as community exhibition space for the artists there. She asked me to write about my experiences with community spaces in Los Angeles.

In 2003 I became interested in helping the independent film community in Los Angeles take advantage of internet distribution to introduce their work to the world at Large. At Burningman I had seen a large school bus with 'The Los Angeles Filmmakers Coop' spray painted across its side in full Graffiti style. Tao Ruspoli, the owner of the bus, had been operating a mobile film studio and training center out of the bus in Venice Beach, but was eager to move into a larger fixed space.

After some search we rented a beautiful old powerhouse in Venice beach which was just one large 1500 sq ft. space with 20 ft ceilings. We needed a way to separate the space into studios where people could work on their projects, while leaving the space open for exhibitions, parties, performances, trainings, etc. Since we had a short term lease on the space we could not make fixed changes to the space. The solution we found was to build a second story out of warehouse shelving called pallet racks. This way we installed 6 elevated studio areas and one chill-out section while leaving the ground floor open for more public gatherings.

We operated the space for 6 months and a vital community of artists, performers and filmmakers came to spend alot of time there. While individuals had personal areas to work from there was no visual or sound barriers separating the different sections of the space. So, everyone got sucked into any drama happening anywhere. Looking back on it, we all felt like it was a wonderful space for socializing and connecting with people, but not particularly conducive to work.

Determined to fix the shortcomings of the Lafco space in 2004 I rented a large loft in The Brewery, a large colony of artist lofts in downtown Los Angeles. Here I built a large 3 story structure out of pallet racks which provided 20 private areas with internet and power which people could work from. I deemphasized the role of events in this space, and restricted the units to people actively working on projects. Unfortunately, it seemed that people who were functional enough to meet my criteria, had no interest in moving their work onto a large jungle gym.

After some time I recognized that the experiment wasn't working, so rather than waste the opportunity, I opened it up to the more fringe artist community and allowed people to live there as well. The remaining months were fun, but predictably chaotic, and in the fall of 2004 I shut the place down and moved to India.

Conversations with Scott Beibin

I've got like 20 tabs open after hanging out with Scott for a couple hours. He's running Evil Twin Booking Agency for a bunch of super interesting people in the modern progressive radical activist scene.

I was telling him about my idea for Radical Change 2012. He pointed me to the reality sandwich website and told me to watch for evolver

He told me a bit about each of the artists he represents. Mitchell Joachim designed these awesome stackable cars and has a bunch of cool designs for green buildings

We talked about a bunch of festivals that got me excited about that scene again.
Gadget Off is a hacker festival with some connection to the 2600 zine community.

Creative Capital finances a variety of art projects and performances.

The Last Hope another hacker conference.

Rothbury Festival in Michigan.

Bonaroo in Tenessee.

Lightning in a bottle festival in Santa Barbara. This came up in a bunch of conversations. These people appear to be awesome -Do Lab. I saw them rehearsing for a dance performance this weekend. It looked amazing and fun.

Solar Saucer solar powered dj boothe.

On a completely different note, Scott does marketing for a variety of 'green' companies and was talking about how great these Icel battery guys were.

TED

Its 7am and I'm early for events today. Every morning so far there have been a variety of unpublished breakfasts on a wide variety of topics that you were supposed to RSVP for.

Lunch operates the same way. There's one 'community lunch' and then a number of sponsored public lunches, and other unpublished ones. It gives me the sense that within TED there remain layers of exclusivity.

I'm cool with it, and happy to be invited to the party at all.

The vertical lunches and breakfasts serve a nice purpose getting people interested in specific areas together for extended social interaction.

I love the diversity of the presentations at TED. Having a mix of live music, dance performances, technology demonstrations and permaculture presentations brings together a wide range of people and encourages cross disciplinary thinking. The breakfast and lunches provide a more focused counter point to that.

The organizers put effort into facilitating connections between participants. Before the confernce they send a bunch of emails encouraging people to fill out their profiles. They suggest people you might want to interact with at the event, and provide a book with pictures of all the attendees and their profiles as part of the bag of schwag they hand out during registration. As much as connecting me with specific people, reading thru the profiles helped convince me of the power of the community and to take the interactions seriously.

Its definitely been a great conference, and there's alot to learn from it in how to conduct events.

I'm looking forward to TED India Nov 5-7 in Mysore.

DIY Church

I just spent a day with my mom up in Paso Robles. My mom has been a dedicated Christian for 30+ years. On a very practical level she spends at least an hour a day in prayer and often much more. Sometimes she'll get the guitar out and sing praise and worship songs by herself.

My personal belief is that God is neither Christian, Hindu, Buddhist or Muslim. But that each tradition has something to offer. I grew up going to church with my mom, so I learned to sing and pray with the Christians. All else being the same I might even call myself a Christian. But most of my conversations with Christians get disagreeable when we start talking about Jesus as the only way to know God, the nature of sin, and hell, and a bunch of other stuff. In the end I figure the Christian moniker doesn't win me friends with Christians or non-Christians, so I don't use it.

Hanging out with my mom is always good though, because I have so much respect for her spiritual path that I can't just write off the entire Christian community.

In Goa talking to a fellow who had been traveling the better part of the last decade. He described his experience interacting with Missionaries in different communities around the world. He said that they try to fit in, but then they start talking about the devil and stuff whenever they can, and everyone gets weirded out and wonders why they can't just be normal.

I remember this aspect of children's church when I was a kid. The youth pastor used to tell us how if we didn't tell our friends about Jesus they would go to hell, and when they were burning in hell they would know that we could have saved them if we had had the courage to tell them about Jesus in school. It's like using fear and guilt to train people to be unnatural, to not pay attention to the situation but to plow through and give a pitch even if ones whole body was screaming not to.

My mom used to run a church with her second husband. He was a preacher and she pretty much did everything else. My whole life she has been totally dedicated to ministry. And while it hasn't all been fun, I've definitely seen miracles play out in her life that make me believe in some magic that goes beyond physics and statistics.

I love the praise and worship part of church. If we could just sing for an hour or two I would give gladly, hug everyone warmly, come with anticipation and leave feeling high. Occasionally I still go to church, get elevated during worship and then become depressed when the pastor starts talking about how Mary had to have a virgin birth because if she had had sex then Jesus would have been born in sin like the rest of us.

My mom gets antsy in church too. Sometimes she finds these super out-there movements within the church that feel totally tapped into the spirit. I went to a couple of services with her where there was no sermon just people spontaneously singing, and praying in tounges. I think there's a whole 'spirit' movement for people like this. But, its hard to scale a 'spirit' movement if being in the spirit means having a very personal direct experience of god.

My mom is excited about home churches right now. I sense its something of a movement, possibly a reaction away from the mega churches that grew up in the last decade. From my point of view much of the evil perpetrated on the world during the Bush administration drew power by communicating very effectively with the established Christian leadership network.

Talking with progressive friends with no particular spiritual views other than a uniform dismay at much of the rhetoric that comes from the Christian Right, we bemoan the fact that we don't have any similar community gathering. Wherever you go across this whole country, the expectation is that you can show up as a total stranger at the local church and people will shake your hand, smile and welcome you into their community. How precious is that ? Its almost worth nodding along with the pastor while he talks about whatever, just to feel the human warmth of sitting next to other people.

Home churches seem like a DIY way of getting this. Without the ambition that comes from striving for more members or a larger building there is the simple joy of hanging out with other people searching for God's presence. It requires a personal faith in ones direct connection though. Regular church has an expert who can channel Gods word. It's easier to hear a man speak than to put in the time in prayer, worship and studying that genuine direct connection requires. But with the home church, maybe there's no man, there's just a group of people who like to hang out together while they pray, worship, study and seek god.

iAccelerator.org

Its pretty much official. Together with people at the IIM Ahmedabad incubation center (CIIE) I'll be running this years iAccelerator program. I'm stoked ! Last year we all had a great time and learned alot. This year we're going to blow it out :) To make it even better my friend Satish Dharmaraj is helping me out with the program as both an advisor and co-investor.

Program is May thru to September. Check out the website for more info.

goa restaurant suggestions

I had some amazing food in Goa while I was there.
Thought I'd write down some of my favorites.

jam connection
This is just next to the Anjuna side of the Anjuna Baga shortcut. At first I thought it was a dance studio, but was stoked to find it a very relaxed very good restaurant.

German Bakery - I spent Christmas eve at a party here. Its a super large place that makes me appreciate the spaciousness of goa. You can get a table with maybe 200 sq. ft.

KU - Someone from my yoga class recommended this restaurnt. Its a pretty amazing place up in Asvem with giant sorta japanese zen architecture and nice views of the area.

Bean Me Up - In Vagator, this place has nice ambient music, good juices, and healthy food.

Tahasa - I had a wonderful evening here before leaving. Its on the cliffs in lower Vagator just south of 9 bar. We had wonderful food and enjoyed the general atmosphere.

SantaBush.com

I really like these videos by brave new films. I feel he gets the internet video medium more than anyone else I've seen to make short, funny, to the point videos that have the potential to really spread.

India Travel Scene

This came out of an email to a friend
considering coming out to India.

---

im in goa right now
digging the yoga scene here (Brahmani, Dunes
also doing some volunteer work with
videovolunteers.org

ive spent most of the last 4 years in pune
the osho ashram / resort is there
is a good albeit somewhat expensive scene
lots of meditation, swimming and dancing.

i haven't spent so much time in the north yet
but alittle bit in Dharmasala and Leh, Ladakh.
Everyone I met in Leh was either into trekking
or meditation. All the time I've spent in Dharmasala
has been with airjaldi so I dont have as good
a feel for the traveller scene there, tho it seems
to be pretty active with yoga, meditation, hiking
stuff as well.

Everyone I met in Varanasi is studying classical
Indian instraments, vedic astrology, kriya yoga, etc.
i dig that vibe, and its the most overtly spiritual of
the places in India I have spent time.

The traveler scene in Calcutta is oriented around
hardcore service. Hardcore service in Calcutta is
working with Mother Theresa's mission to take care
of the truly destitute. Sutter st. is down town and
has a good traveler scene. In the evening sipping
tea with random strangers, I find that people who
spend their days cleaning shit and feeding the very
weak and needy have a special glow about them.

Another place I really enjoy spending time is
Krishna McKenzie's Solitude Farm in Auroville,
Auroville has alot going on, and working at Solitude
is very grounding.

Blog Demo

Showing off blogger at the internet advocacy workshop in goa

TechStart.in

We're starting a series of technology clubs to help create a supportive environment
for people to develop their technical skills and connect with other people people in
the community in a meaningful way.

The basic idea is to find people with practical industry experience
willing to spend some time each month creating or identifying useful exercises
people interested in their field could do to develop their skills and posting them
on a blog or mailing list. Additionally they spend time each week facilitating a
discussion of the participants on a mailing list.

The intension is not to compete with existing online resources for technical
training and support, but to provide some more human support and mentorship
for people on the path. Mentors can and should encourage participants to
engage in the existing online communities surrounding their technologies.
Their guidance as to what communities to engage, and how to engage could
still be invaluable.

In this way, over time people can develop significant skills in fields where they
don't have formal training while they continue their studies or working full time.

We all crib about the quality of technical education, but with the Internet we
have the opportunity to do something about it. We can help eager young and
the motivated who want to get into high-tech but are over whelmed at
the amount of information available on the internet, or get blocked because
of elementary problems.

It shouldn't take much time, for mentors just a couple hours
a month to research the monthly activities and post links to learning resources
participants should look into, and then a couple hours each week responding
to questions and facilitating discussion on the mailing list. For participants,
activities should take 5 - 10 hours of effort each month, plus some additional
time sharing with the community thru the blog and the mailing lists.

If there's a field you are passionate about and feel more people should get into,
please think about setting up a small club for it on the techstart wiki. If you see
a club where people are exploring a technology you've been curious, by all means
join the community.

The initial clubs we have are in blogging, advanced java and open source technology.
Amit is also mentoring a group to write some automatic deployment scripts in php.

Find out more on the wiki - http://techstart.in

Bloggers Club

I'm launching The Bloggers Club as part of the techstart.in initiative I announced this weekend at BarcampPune5.

The idea here is to create a forum where people who write on the Internet can get and give constructive feedback on the writing that we do. I care far more about the quality of my writing now than I ever did in school when I had professionals reviewing it for me but the product was landfill from the beginning.

I figure this can be pretty organic. Who ever is interested can submit writing they would like feedback on, and whoever wants can feedback. Like everything else on the internet the utility will be purely a function of the community that develops and the voluntary effort we put into it.

So, If you like the English language, would like to improve your own writing and are willing help other people with their writing please join our club and encourage other like minded souls to do so as well.

The Google group: The Bloggers Club

Freedom

By one definition, freedom is the space / ability to do what you want.

Orca Starbuck explained Aldus Huxley to me saying that he recommended that people do what they want. Apparently people are generally too removed from themselves for this to be practical, so he recommended that if you thought you might want something, go ahead and act on it.

It sounds like crazy talk, but in the absence of constraints, doing what you want seems like a better methodology than either of the alternatives 'doing what you don't want' or 'not doing what you want'. In my experience Huxley's warning proves true, and just understanding what I want turns out to be a challenge.

One reason for this is that 'wanting' isn't as dimensional one dimensional as your parents like to think when they ask questions like 'don't you want good grades?'. Sure I want good grades. That plus I'd like to be the Paul Graham of India by running a successful hightech incubator, plus I'd really like to come up with an answer to how we're supposed to live on the planet. This list goes on.

But, right now I want to respond to the people trying to chat with me in gmail, and later I'm thinking I want to watch HellBoy 2. I don't particularly want to work on a budget for upstart. Powering over the lower desires in favor of the higher goals may be a sign of discipline and an effective personality. It also seems like a recipe for being miserable.

In college I remember my friends studying literature grappling with reading lists which were humanly impossible to get thru in the alotted time. Many were well trained and spent all waking hours doing coursework, thereby developing a profound hatred of literature which lasted many years after their last force fed masterpiece.

The question for me is whether I can strategically create mental spaces which are more inclined to 'want' to do the hard work - budgets, marketing plans, presentations, code ... necessary to bring the dreams into being. I have by no means nailed this, but a few things seem apparent. Good health, adequate sleep, adequate preparation, passionate colleagues, quickly achievable objectives and consistency all seem to contribute towards a mental space in which I 'want' to do 'hard' work in the moment.

While I'm thinking about how to manage time and priorities effectively I thought I'd plug my cousin Dana Rayburn's blog on adult ADD.

Dinner at the 'O'

The 0 Hotel in Koregaon Park

I had dinner with Satish Dharmaraj the other night at the O Hotel in Koregaon Park. I've been wanting to check that place out since it opened, I was suitably impressed - especially the rooftop restaurant.

Satish and I worked together at Sun. He was the server lead after Pavni and I took off to work on a labs project called 'Persona' where we were trying to create a cute low cost personal web server that would effectively replace the answering machine.

About the Same time Pavni and I did Kendara, Satish left with some heavy hitters and joined onebox.com. And, just before Kendara sold to Excite@Home Onebox sold to Phone.com for $700 million. His comment on our 9 digit price tag was 'why did you sell for so less?'. Those were strange and wonderful times :)

Coincidently at Onebox he worked with Adarbad Master the founder and CTO of Mixercast.com which I helped set up and worked with for a year and a half here in Pune. Meanwhile Satish did Zimbra.com which Yahoo acquired last year.

We met for Pizza on my last trip in California and he was into the YCombinator for India idea. So, now we're discussing the best way to pull it off.Dinner with Satish

Video Volunteers, Goa, etc

Its time for a general update.

I've started talking with people up at IIMA again about being a part of the next iAccelerator, so I'm slowing down alittle on upstart.in until that conversation plays out.

In the meantime VideoVolunteers.org moved from Ahmedabad down to Goa and I've been volunteering with them a bit to help with their online strategy, and to teach video and online marketing workshops. I wrote the last couple of posts on their blog


Hanging out in Goa is a big perk. My high school friend Kyra is there for awhile after spending the last year traveling around the Middle East and Asia.


She just finished a month long yoga teachers training, so she was able to clue me into the yoga scene down there which is pretty hardcore. So, I spent last week doing Ashtanga with Ken at the Dunes, doing ecstatic dance with this 5 rythms teacher from LA, and generally being healthy and productive.

Dec 6 & 7, I'm organizing an online marketing workshop at the media center we are setting up in Baga.

Come on by.

The Startup Village

I initially thought I would live in Calcutta when I first came to India. A guy a friend met on elance met me at the airport and booked me into a hotel with paan stains in the halls (which I thought was dried blood) and a whole coven of crows picking thru a massive pile of garbage outside. It was a hard landing, but when I found Sutter street and the Blue Sky cafe things turned around.

In my initial hardcore backbacker tour I experimented with how cheap could survive. In calcutta I got a room in a hotel for 100 rps / night and found several food places where I could get a meal of subji and roti for under 15 rps. Including internet time I figured I could live on $100 / month which validated the $200 my friend was paying developers over here which seemed absurdly low.

Downtown Calcutta was great, the people I met there were smart and passionate - "Calcutta is the heart of India" they would say. I still believe if you multiply the two functions of educated work force and low cost of living they may have their minimum in Calcutta.

But I got sick. To be fair it wasn't entirely Calcutta's fault. Traveling by Tuk Tuk thru Bangkok probably got me started. But after a few weeks with a chronic cough that would rack my lungs for several hours before I could sleep, I decided that no amount of professional ambition merited destroying my health.

I added 'nice lifestyle' to the equation and found my way to Pune which when seen from the tree canopied lanes of Koregoan Park seemed to have the best life style - high tech professional opportunity - low cost of living. Its undeniably an awesome place to live - especially for the urban jet set that can take advantage of the 5 designer bars offering 400 rps martini's that have sprung up less than 1 km from my apartment in the last few years.

But, it maybe alittle too Manhattan now for the average Indian bootstrapping startup.
A 2 bhk is now in the 25 - 30k range, and worse than just the price is simply that they are hard to find.

With the dream of getting upstart.in underway, and some other conversations I'm having about 2bhk training I'm looking around again for where those curves come together but with one more parameter - capacity. As I picture my ideal scenario its a massively over built housing society on the edge of town a few km past Koregoan Park where rent is cheap and there is 20% vacancies in a society of 300 units.

Some very new construction fits this description like Sun City and Margapata with rents around 8k, I'm guessing we can find something slightly older at 8k. Assuming we shared a cook I estimate for a startup working from home would cost
rent 8k
food 8k
electricity 1k
internet 1k
misc. 2k
~ 20k / month or 1 lakh ($2000) for a startup of 4 guys to operate for 5 months.
How hard would it be for even a very junior team of 4 guys to pull in 20k / mo just bottom feeding on rentacoder ? The exciting thing about this for me isn't that its possible to pull off once, its that if there's a model here that works, if a team of 4 junior engineers earning $500 a month is easy, then I maintain there are an almost infinite number of 4 man teams available, and the 2 bhks to house them, in one medium large housing society on outskirts.

The possible drawback to making this move for me is the lack of culture and more importantly Il Fungo Magico green salads that exist further down Nagar Rd. But, if we can make a movement, and coordinate a decent number of cool startup kids all moving together, we can quickly create a new tech center, with a high density of interesting people to support each other and at least one cook who really knows how to make a good salad.

Web Services Track

I've been playing with setting up Drupal for a website to manage the cyborg boyscouts - techstart.in

This was one idea for a series of exercises which would help students develop their online profile and familiarize themselves with web services.

Goal:
Create familiarity of the different web services freely available. By using web services regularly we can come to understand what the current trends are and what makes a web service useful, easy to use, nice to look at and popular. By systematically using the different publicly available web services we will also develop a rich internet profile.

Initial Assignment:
- create an account on otherinbox.com
- create an account on blogger.com
- upload a profile photo to blogger and write a short profile description
- create an account on Google Analytics:
- add the javascript to your blog template html
- create an account on twitter.com

Ongoing:
- every month we'll all look at a new web service. specific instuctions for what to do with the service will be provided, and we'll have a mailing list / forum which we can use to talk about the service.
- when signing up with a new web service give them your otherinbox email id.
- when evaluating a new service at least twitter about it with your initial reaction, and if you like it or find it interesting write a longer blog entry about it.
- for each web service, on the profile page link back to your blog
- when possible and attractive add a badge of the web service to your blog sidebar.

YouTube:
- favorite 15 videos
- comment on 2 videos
- subscribe to 2 channels
- create a playlist

Social Networking:
- Create accounts on the major social networks Facebook, Orkut, MySpace, Ryze.
- Upload a profile photo into each service
- Fill out at least 3 profile questions on each service
- Add 5 friends on each service
- Upload 5 pictures on one service

MicroBlogging twitter & friendfeed:
- find 30 people to follow, make sure this includes at least 10 people you know, and 10 people who are famous / popular
- twitter twice a week on either what you are doing, some website that looks cool, or some current event
- set up the twitter to sms connection and twitter once from your mobile phone
- create an account on FriendFeed
- add all the services you use to it.
- follow 10 people on FriendFeed

LinkedIn:
- Create your profile on LinkedIn + photo
- Enter work history on LinkedIn
- Recommend 2 people on LinkedIn
- Get 1 recommendation on LinkedIn

UpComing.com:
- create an account
- select 5 events you're 'interested' in
- upload 2 events that are happening in your city that aren't yet listed

Blogging:
- think of what you feel the most serious issue facing the world or your community is and write a short blog entry about it ~300 words. Include links to 3 websites which deal with this issue. Embed a photo which conveys some part of what you are saying.
- add a links to 5 of your favorite sites to the permanent side bar of your blog

Mailing Lists:
- create a mailing list on Google Groups called 'friends-of-myname' make it announce only
- add all your friends to it
- at the next big holiday send a mail to everyone wishing them a happy Diwali, letting them know how you're doing, and inviting them to look at your blog.

more to come ...

Cyborg BoyScout Workout Handbook

In order to fully assimilate the fleshy beings into the global super organism proper neural pathways must be deeply established.

With insufficient neural trenching recruits forget their duties and start reading email or xkcd - this is often referred to as ADD.

Repeated time bound exercises providing quick 'wins' while challenging subjects helps establish proper ...

I give up. In more normal talk -

There has been a bit of talk about this in programming circles. Pragmatic Dave coined the term Code Kata. Steve Yegge has his own suggested exercises, and Coding Horror also recommends 'Teach Yourself Programming in 10 Years'

What I'm looking for are simple exercises that could be given to students interested in programming every week or every month which would over time help to establish in them good programming practices.

The BoyScouts of CyberSpace

I like the way the boyscouts provides an extracurricular structure to train its members in skills outside the scope of the traditional schooling system and encourages leadership and community involvement at the same time.

The main mechanisms they use are:
Merit Badges
Service Projects
Rank Advancement
Boy Scout Advancement

Merit Badges typically have both a knowledge assessment component
and an activity component.
ie.
Explain to your counselor the following:
a. The major parts of a computer system
b. How the types of files used to store text, sound, pictures, and
video are stored in a computer's memor

Do THREE of the following:
a. Use a database manager to create a troop roster that includes the name, rank, patrol, and telephone number of each Scout. Show your counselor that you can sort the register by each of the following categories: rank, patrol, and alphabetically by name.
b. Use a spreadsheet program to develop a food budget for a patrol weekend campout.

From my memory of being a boy scout I remember our scout meetings primarily orienting around studying or doing activities necessary for the merit badges. The merit badge requirements were always relatively small, but several were required for a given merit badge. Then we'd study for the test and felt some sense of accomplishment when we had done each of the activities, passed the test and received our badge at awards ceremony.

Startup Season

HeadStart.in Bangalore Jan 9 & 10. Submissions by Oct 30
Proto.in Bangalore, December sometime
TiECon Delhi Oct 22 - 24
Innovations Pune Jan 10 & 11. Submissions technically closed but form is still working, so submit soon.

These are the major startup showcases I'm aware of. Any others ?
Interesting that of these 4 events. 2 are in Bangalore, Innovations Pune,and TieCon is in Delhi. Mumbai, Hyderabad & Chennai all lack a major event at the moment, tho Proto cycles thru Chennai regularly.

Web Services for Startups

I asked the pune startups mailing list what web services they use.
Here are some of the responses.

business planning and board management
PlanHQ

Project / Task Management
BaseCamp
HiveMinder

Web Conferenceing / Screensharing
DimDim
GotoMeeting

Bug Tracking / Issue Mgmt
Atlassian hosted Jira
Assembla
RedMine
LightHouse Apps

BackUps
DropBox
BackBlaze

Hosted Version Control
myversioncontrol.com

Mailing List Management
PHPList - mailing list manager

Misc.
Google Analytics
Google Alerts
Google Docs
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I'm alittle suprised not to see any entries for CRM. Do real people use it ?

FairSoftware.net

FairSoftware.net
I am fascinated by this company.

Handling money is one of the biggest problems with small businesses of any kind. As an angel investor getting some of that money to flow back to you is like making water run uphill.

People have this notion that legal contracts behave like code since they look like code with lots of conditional statements and obscure jargon. Unfortunately they don't execute like code. Its actually very difficult to get them on the control path at all. It takes going to court and hiring lawyers who sorta execute the code in front of a judge who gives some binary outcome.

But that binary outcome doesn't really hit the control flow either. You have to take that to someone else, likely more lawyers and more judges who will munge on the data and give you more bits. This can go on for a long time to everyone's detriment but the lawyers.

The overhead involved with mangaging collections and distributions of revenue is one of the reasons why there's a certain minimum size for many business endeavors.

FairSoftware.net seems to move in the right direction. Its a web service where the founders, investors and any other stakeholders fill out forms agreeing on revenue distribution percentages. They generate all the legal documents, but more importantly, they set up a payment processing gateway (thru paypal) which automatically distributes all incoming payments made to the group to each of the stakeholders according to the percentages defined.

This could enable a whole ecosystem of micro tech investments. Some additional features that would make it even more useful for tech angels :
- escrow service that could hold ip assets of the collective
- equity mangagement that could handle the concept of an acquisition
- more complex algorithms for defining payout schemes that could account for things like vesting, cliffs, and bonuses tied to revenue objectives

Chat Culture

Google revolutionized the chat business - or at least the chat social network. With Yahoo and AIM I consciously added everyone to my chat list. Google skipped that step and put everyone I've ever communicated with in there. Generally its a good thing, but it gives people access to me who I haven't spent enough time with to share the same vision of how online communication works.

I find that when people have something important to say, they often start with extra hi.. how are you.. style smalltalk. Unfortunately this is the exact chat signature of people who simply want to pass time chatting.

There's no insult in just walking away from the computer, or not being at a computer at all. The green dot doesn't mean anything other than that it is possible to attempt to chat at this moment. The 'real world' takes precedent. I'm not going to ignore someone in real life.

I don't use chat as a way of getting to know people in the same small talk kind of way I would if I randomly met someone at a conference or a party. Unless we're really close either come to the point quickly in chat or send me email.

There's a certain protocol many people use in chat where there's lots of back and forth pings and acks before any real talking happens. Sometimes it feels like spoofing SMTP for its predictability. For me a simple 'hey' is good enough to determine presence, and then we can immediately talk about whatever.

Ideas and Partners

Yesterday I had a great conversation with an old friend Jason Knight. We worked together at Kendara and recently he was the founder and CEO of Wesabe.com . I told him about my plans for upStart.in as an incubator modeled loosely around the YCombinator concepts.

He was super supportive and as our conversation developed he talked at some length about some of the opportunities he sees in software for the retail segment based on his experience helping his wife run a chain of woman's clothing stores called Sway. While he has some vision for how a business in this direction could unfold, how it would develop a sales channel, who potential partners could be, and what the product might look like, this isn't a business he is interested in running. Jane and Jason recently had a second son and between family and helping with Sway his plate is full. Still, if I was incubating a company in this space he might be able to provide investment and advice.

This is indicative of many successful founders I've met who have more ideas than time. It kills them not to be able to express the creativity they feel, and often these are exactly the people you would want involved in a startup were you to do something in their field of interest. It could be a good niche for me to fill with upStart - matchmaking between successful time constrained entrepreneurs on the west coast and teams of eager young entrepreneurs in India excited about the same ideas.

While there's enough magnetic potential between these two populations to make the effort worth while, there are some serious risks. The primary one deals with the concept of entrepreneurship. Jason is clear that he doesn't want to run a company. He has lots of opinions: how the software should look, how the business model would look, what partners to go after..., but these are just opinions, an entrepreneur needs to validate them and ultimately come up with opinions of her own.

So, that seems to be the trick. We know we want to do something in a specific area. We have some vision for how it might look. But really, we need to find entrepreneurs who have similar vision and are willing to dedicate themselves to it. This is the difference between upStart and oDesk. Identifying these kinds of teams and structuring these deals will be a large part of the work I do with upStart.

I guess this isn't so unique. Paul Graham recently posted a long list of ideas he would like to fund.

Soon after I sold Kendara I went to Jon Feiber at MDV with the idea of starting an incubator. His point was that if he was interested in a space X he wouldn't start a company, he would go find an expert in the field of X and back him to start a company.

Incubation Centers & Academic Institutions

This morning I met with a business school in Pune to discuss the incubation center they are planning. I attended and talked at a workshop at SINE IITB a couple months ago. The sentiments I expressed on both occasions were similar, so I thought I'd share them here.

Hire a Professional.
By definition incubation involves working with less experienced entrepreneurs who need more non-financial guidance and support than business people who have successfully built and sold businesses before. By involving an experienced entrepreneur the incubator can provide this kind of support. I don't know if there's another way.

Focus on the exit.
After having a number of investments hang out in the 'living dead' category, I am totally convinced investors need to have some vision for how they are going to exit their investments before going in. This seems obvious, but its easy to ignore
since its much easier to find an entrepreneur with an idea and a need for money, than a corporate development executive who's willing to spend significant cash for that entrepreneur, his idea and the code he was able to produce with the investor's help. My feeling is this is one of many factors which skews the industry towards "professionals". Professionals can afford to develop relationships with those organizations that have the wherewithal to make these kinds of acquisitions, individual first time entrepreneurs and small time angels don't. An incubation center can develop these relationships, but it takes effort, and most don't even try.

Make it up in volume
India seems to have a variety of funding sources and financial incentives available to academic institutions who set up incubators. The funding doesn't appear to be tied to the number of companies incubated or their success. From an academic point of view having a smaller number of companies occupy the available offices for a longer period of time is the easiest way to fill the requirements. Its also possibly the worst algorithm for have Google type successes. In contract the YCombinator works a large number of companies for a very finite about of time ~4 months, and then everybody 'graduates' some fail, some succeed, and the YCombinator focuses on finding another group of companies to work with. Its indicative of a 'fail fast' mentality which is more prevalent in the Silicon Valley and needs to take root here in India if the culture of technical innovation is to thrive.

Encourage Inter-Department Dating
Most of the entrepreneurial teams I've seen so far consist entirely of engineers. Occasionally I meet business students who have aspirations of starting their own companies. These groups don't seem to have any social overlap. I would include marketing people and designers in this mix as well. We know a successful startup will have elements from all these groups, but the petri dish we're coming out of appears very segregated at this stage. Its one reason startup 'mixers' are so
important. Its a place where potential founders from varied backgrounds can meet. Facilitating these interactions and events can be an important role for an incubation center. The trick is how to make it interesting for a wide range of people whose only commonality is a desire to start a business.

Critical Mass
There seems to be a pervasive desire in B-Schools to imbibe a sense of entrepreneurship in their student populations. In Palo Alto in the late 90s it seemed everyone you met had start-up aspirations, and at some point it just wasn't hip to cool your heals in a big company indefinitely. My sense is to get the same culture established at a b-school, you might need to import entrepreneurs so that you could make sure the start-up perspective was being represented and defended in the cafeteria and at parties. Co-hosting an incubation center at the university could do this, but there would need to be an openness to accepting outsiders. Manifesting a cultural shift with people from within will be difficult.

Vipassana

Markha Valley Pics
Leh Pics

A couple days after finishing the Markha Valley trek in Ladakh I boarded a bus with a bunch of other travelers and headed out to a remote meditation center in Tamisgame 4 hours from Leh.

I rode on the roof of the bus with a few locals most of the way. It is by far the most fun way to travel. Apricots are in season and we grabbed large handfuls of them from low hanging branches we drove under. The local guys on the roof with me had some kind of repoire with everyone we drove past, and a couple of girls threw a big bucket of water at us.

fun fun.

I'd been nervous about the course because my knees start to hurt sitting still for even one hour and I had always thought that in 10 hours of seated meditation I would irreparably damage them.

In Varanasi I had a couple occasions to sit cross legged for long periods listening to a yogi expound on the tantric wisdom of the universe. During the discourses my knees hurt, but I got clear that it was more of a muscle thing than a joint thing, and somehow that made me feel better about it.

The meditation center just up valley from the Maha Bodhi School in Tamisgame was simple and gorgeous. Boys and Girls dorms were on opposite sides of the valley. The kitchen was at the bottom and the meditation hall at the top. Towering Himalayan mountains surrounded us on all sides.

The meditation vibe was more relaxed than I had anticipated. For the first few days there were no strong instructions keeping us from changing our sitting position, so whenever we were uncomphortable we shifted. Easy. Some of the meditations were longer than I expected from 4:30 - 6:30 am all in one go. The other sessions were 3 and 4 hours in total, but 5 - 15 minute breaks were given every 60 - 90 minutes.

On the fourth day the concept of 'Strong Determination' was introduced with which we were instructed to make every effort to sit completely still and not change position for the 3 one hour "group" sittings. I found that I could handle 1 hour ok. A few times I tried to remain absolutely still for the 90 minute sits, but I found that my knees ached significantly after.

A large part of the technique deals with observing sensations and learning how to deal with them without instantly reacting. There's an aspect to this that I really appreciate. When I'm working I feel I frequently lose focus by following some small sensation 'I'm thirsty, I have to pee, I'd like to take a walk ...' where I feel some benefit to simply observing the thought / sensation and then getting back to work.

There was (for me) a slightly strange emphasis on not doing other exercises. Particularly forbidden were yoga and Tai Chi. The point seemed to be to concentrate on the Vipassana technique and not cloud it with other practices. For me, I felt that my yoga practice enabled me to gain the confidence to sit still for long periods of time. And I was desperate to stretch during the 10 day course simply to alleviate the aches in my legs and back. As it was I sorta sheepishly stretched without doing 'assana' but felt I was neither completely obeying the spirit of what was being asked for or completely caring for my body the way I would have liked.

That said, I felt very healthy for the whole time. The aches were relatively minor. The food was good. I didn't miss having a real dinner, and waking up at 4am proved a non issue. While there are only 3 longish breaks during the day, I took naps during them, so didn't feel short on sleep at all.

On the eighth day around lunch I felt some sort of epiphany along the lines of:
"I don't need to think at all, just be aware of my body and whats going on around me"
Shortly after that my ability to meditate took a strong turn for the worse, and I struggled through the remaining day having difficulty focusing.

The kinds of thoughts I had surprised me. I had the expected thoughts about the future, getting an incubator going and different things I could do to help that process forward. The other types of thoughts were tended towards obsessing about stupid things I did when I was a kid I feel guilty about.

Unlike more 'spiritual' traditions Vipassana doesn't really address sin and forgiveness. Its more about observing whatever sensations you have and realizing that it will pass.

Talking later with an Israeli girl I mentioned that a large part of the Christian tradition is based on dealing with issues of guilt "Christ died for your sins"
Buddha clearly had other issues. "There is suffering, There is a way out of suffering" definitely a different vibe.

All together it was a good experience. While on day 8 my mind felt very clear, by the last day my mind felt cluttered again. Some benefits appear lasting tho. Previously I had rarely been able to sit on my own more than a few minutes before getting distracted. Now sitting is easier. I see the distractions come up, but its easier for me not to immediately react to them.

I also notice an increased tendency to pause and look into how I'm feeling when I'm feeling stressed or unhappy.

The crew doing the course was solid, and we had a good time chatting afterwards. A major storm blew thru the last few days and washed out a bridge. So we had a bit more of an adventure getting back into Leh. The last wisps of that storm canceled my flight back to Pune thereby postponing some meetings and changing my plans for returning to the states.

Anitcha, everything is changing.

Murray Freeman

Recently I got a random email from someone
who had (almost) the same name as me
and happened to be visiting pune

Yesterday I had tea with Murray Freeman
and his friend Rishi. Turns out
they're deep wifi geeks and that Rishi has also been involved in a
number of social project around Pune including at the Vigyan Ashram
where I have also spent considerable time.

Incidently, order matters in Google search results.
The top 5 hits on "Freeman Murray" are of me, while
my new friend Murray Freeman gets the top spot for
searches for "Murray Freeman"

Down from the Mountain

Today we finished our 6 day trek thru the mountains of Ladok. About 5 of those days we hiked for 7 or so hours thru gorgeous river mountain valleys.

My phone / camera is on the fritz since I dove into the river to save my friends shoes which I had failed to toss accross.

My time in Leh, as with my time in Varanasi makes me feel I should be spending more time exploring India while I am here. It's such a varied and beautiful country.

Now I'm looking into 10 day Vipassana meditation courses for early August. Then I'll be meeting with Jim Forrester to discuss some of his plans for doing community wireless networking in India.

Then Burningman

Then TechCrunch50

Fun Fun

Ladok - Delhi - Varanasi - Update

Tomorrow we're starting a trek. Its the Maka valley trek or something like that, and we'll be walking 6 or 7 hours a day for 6 days.

Today we hiked around Leh. Walked up to some old monestaries over looking the city, and ate momo's. I feel alittle silly that I haven't spent more time in the mountains in the 3+ years I've been in India.

Bummed that my camera has this proprietary nokia connector instead of std usb.

Proto was good. Before I left Varanasi I got business cards made and put a simple static site up (upstart.in). It was a good exercise too in getting precise with my description of who I intend to work with and what I do.

Before proto we hung out at the Yoga Mandir in Varanasi (Asi Ghat) for almost a week.
I highly recommend that place if anyone is trying to figure out where to stay over there. The river is flooded so the main walk along the ghats is a no go.

Open Hand cafe is a nice little wifi hot spot in Asi, makes me think I could live there for awhile.

I sent in an email application for the August 10 Vipasana, but haven't heard back.
So its probably a no go. Right now Looks like I'll probably chill in Pune for the first 10 days of August and then go home (usa) for a month.

Bought tickets to techcrunch50.com. Gearing up for a fall launch of upstart(.in)

Just saw that YCombinator is listing ideas they'd like to see. Maybe I'll do that too.

Some thoughts on technical mentorship, what I have done with the iAccelerator teams, and how I would like to handle this moving forward.

First, this has been a great experience. Over 80 applicants applied, and the 5 teams we selected to be a part of the program have been universally wonderful. In the selection process the CIIE team first narrowed down the list to about 20 applicants who we then had a phone interview with. During the phone call I was able to establish whether we could communicate well and learn enough about the idea to form an opinion about whether it was doable. One of the main factors I filtered for was the level of partnership necessary to make the system successful. Ideas which required deep integration with banks and hospitals were non starters.

Once the teams came to campus I had conversations with most of them about what they were doing and made suggestions about how to the refine the ideas into something I considered more practical, achievable and marketable. About three of the teams changed significantly but still within the same general category they applied to the program with. Others already had significant code developed or were focused on their original idea and didn't want to deviate. This is perfect.

On an ongoing basis we do engineering reviews every week. My feeling is this is really important as it keeps everyone informed of the progress being made. It also provides weekly milestones for people to work towards, which has been useful to me in the development I have done.

With one team I spent alot of time working on their database design and explaining the MVC design pattern and helping them architect their app into packages and classes from the very beginning. I did a code review with another team much later in the program where we discussed different design decisions they had made and we looked at what could be refactored to reduce complexity.

Some teams were senior enough or working with technologies I was less familiar with such that I wasn't able to provide as much technical support during their development.

There's been some more subtle stuff I've been able to do such as encouraging
people to stick with their current idea when their confidence was shaking, and introducing them to potential partners and advisers.

One aspect of the program I have enjoyed, but wasn't responsible for, has been regular meetings with successful entrepreneurs who have come to talk to us about the process they went thru in starting their companies, picking an idea, finding partners, going to market, etc. These speakers have been first rate and have helped stimulate thinking in important areas that perhaps we hadn't spent enough time with.

***

So its been a great experience both for what I've been able to do, and showing me what I would like to do more of with future groups.

Going forward I think I'd like to engage with teams even more deeply in setting up their engineering and business processes. To the extent that an incubator is a startup factory the same issues of quality assurance, consistency, branding and sales come up that traditional businesses face.

We got really lucky with the level of entrepreneurs that came in. Doing this again I would spend more time during the interview / selection process. Basically, I need to feel that each person on a team could work for Google, if not now, with one or two years of aggressive experience. If I can manage to filter this reliably, then I'll have a portfolio of companies that could get acquired by Google (or anyone else) and they will come to know that most of my teams meet that level which makes my sales process easier. Identifying these people reliably will take more than a phone call. It will take a set of interviews and tests similar to what Google puts people through.

This process needs to be deep both for selecting the people I want to work with, and for informing the 'incubation' process in which I attempt to address the shortcomings teams may have. This may include looking out for other employees / partners / advisers that can help complete the team. On a technical level it will show how much effort I need to spend helping a team with its software design and developing its skills in specific technical areas bringing in outside trainers / consultants as necessary.

By selecting, monitoring and improving the teams we should be able to consistently create fundable / acquireable startups. Should be fun.

Blu Grafitti Animation

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

blublu.org

Devil's Advocate

This is a great term. I wish people would feel it more deeply when they succumb to the temptation of criticizing friends and colleagues who are trying to create something. Giving birth to a new idea has to be one of the most fragile psychological processes we go through as adults. When you talk to someone who is starting up, I encourage you to stretch your imagination to find those aspects of the venture which hold the most promise, and then to concentrate your attention and words in praise of that.

The devil will come, we need more angels.

Active Investors

When we were raising money for Kendara we had a number of conversations with David Cowan of Bessemer ventures. He had funded Visto which was cofounded by a number of our friends from the Java group. One point I remember him making was that we were 'Assuming Success' which meant that the value of the system would be most apparent when it had achieved critical mass, but that it would be difficult to get this traction without already having it. I didn't agree with him in our case, but I have seen several startups making that mistake.

He was very busy, and said he couldn't be a primary investor on our deal, but that he would be interested in being a passive second investor. This sounded great to me as we already had very active interest from a couple of investors including Jon Feiber at MDV. In conversation with Jon, I mentioned the idea of a passive second investor, and he basically said, "yeah, I'd like to be passive too". But he wasn't and said that if we were going to get a second investor it needed to be someone very engaged in the business. We ended up working with him and Tim Haley of RedPoint Ventures.

Its a slight contrast with Paul Graham's philosophy. From YCombinator About
We try to interfere as little as possible in the startups we fund. We don't want board seats, rights to participate in future rounds, vetoes over strategic decisions, or any of the other powers investors sometimes require. We offer lots of advice, but we can't force anyone to take it. We realize that independence is one of the reasons people want to start startups in the first place. And frankly, it's also one of the reasons startups succeed. Investors who try to control the companies they fund often end up destroying them.

Both Tim and Jon had seats on the board and more than influenced certain actions like bringing on a CEO.

Paul et. all clearly contribute and I'm sure heavily influence a variety of decisions the founders make. Its interesting that they don't wire this kind of power into the terms. Maybe, with the small equity they have (2 - 10%), and the number of teams they process, they simply don't have time or incentive to fight, or take on the real (time consuming) responsibilities sitting on the board entails.

It works out right for the entrepreneurs too. Nevermind legal action, pissing off PG isn't going to be in the best interests of any founders career objectives. The equity is too small to get too worried about, and not having to worry about board approval or meetings is definitely a significant burden very small companies may be better off without, if they can get input in other ways.

EIR (Entrepreneur In Residence) programs at VCs seem to work on similar terms. Small amounts of money, lots of interaction and advice. Without specific legal restrictions prohibiting EIRs from working with other companies, the goodwill generated from the program creates a strong bias towards that VC. And again, its very reputation oriented.

cost of living India

One fascinating aspect of living in India is how economically diverse the population is and how the different classes coexist relatively harmoniously. When I first came to India I was on the full back packer path spending $4 / day for a nice room with attached bath on Sutter St. in Calcutta.

Then I moved to Pondichery and worked 6 hours a day for free food and lodging on the Solitude Farm inside Auroville.

In Delhi I spent $50 / night for a hotel, and in Bombay I paid about $1000 month for
an apartment in Bandra.

When I moved to Pune, initially rent was just $75 / month for a room in a gorgeous old bungalow on Lane 4. Since then I got one 2 bedroom place with Soum that was $200 / month, and later moved into a large 2BHK that overlooks the park that is cheap at $450.

Now, if I sold my 2 bedroom apartment on the water in San Mateo, I couldn't get something I liked as much in Koregoan Park for the same price.

A friend is running an NGO out of a 2bhk on Nagar Rd. ~5 km from Koregoan Park where rent is 6-8k rps ($150 - $200). Nagar Rd. is interesting because its a very wide road connecting it to Koregoan Park, and there is a huge amount of new construction there. The society my friend is in has about 9 buildings of about 15 stories each, and it is just one of several societies in the area.

***

Decent, reportedly 512k (really, Im lucky if I get 300k), unlimited broadband internet from Tata is $50 / mo.

***

Food at all the Thali places around KP is around $1 / meal for a full Thali. Breakfast of Idli, or paratha, or poha is generally less than 50 cents. A Salad, Pizza and a Beer at Il Fungo Magico is about $10. Cocktails at Mauve, Kiva, North Main, Unaki are $5k - $8 each.

***

I think electricity is about $20 / mo. unless you run an AC.

***

Rickshaw transportation is one of the biggest wins on the price parity index. In Pune its around 6 rps (10cents) / km. Tho the equation is much more complicated (# of kilometers * 6 + * of km tenths / 2 + 2)

***

Computer equipment tends to be about the same price as in the states, tho service is between 5 and 10 times cheaper.

***

Im not a heavy mobile user, my total costs are less than $12 /mo

**********

Estimated Monthly expenses
at a variety of lifestyles

Koregoan Park
-------------
$450 rent
$200 food
$70 entertainment
$70 transportation (not counting air travel)
$100 travel
$100 misc.
----------
$1000 / mo


Nagar Rd.
---------
$200 rent
$80 food
$50 entertainment
$70 transportation
$60 travel
$40 misc.
---------
$500 / mo


Yerwada
-------
$100 rent
$50 food
$30 entertainment
$40 transportation
$30 travel
$50 misc.
---------
$300

Slums
-----
~$100


* These numbers are high as they assume single occupancy which is almost never the case. Having groups of 4 or more friends sharing a 2bhk is common. This reduces rent and some of the other costs as well. Another data point is that many call centers pay about $300 / mo.

Mentors

Predictably, the people most instrumental to our success at Kendara were a part of the process from the beginning until we sold.

Our lawyer, Scott Dettmer explained all the elements of structuring companies, and more importantly, set up our fund raising process and coached us through it. He advised us to resist talking to the VCs who had sought us out and wanted to have early conversations about what we were doing. Instead he encouraged us to wait until we were solid with what we were doing and our pitch, and then to line up as many meetings with the top tier VCs as we could manage. He set up many of these meetings himself. When we were actually having these conversations. We would meet in the morning and he would tell us both what the VCs would ask, like "how much are you looking for", and "whats your valuation". And how to answer, "$5 million" and "we don't know". The conversations went exactly how he said they would, and I give him much of the credit for our handling them well.

Mike Sheridan was our 5th board, "neutral", board member. Mike was remarkable for being personal friends with us and Jon Feiber of MDV so neutral is not really the right word. Conversations with Mike calmed the giant emotional waves that characterize that experience for me. Most of what I remember of his advice was that it was 'ok', we were doing 'fine', what we were experiencing was 'normal'. We trusted him alot. We knew he wouldn't be afraid to tell us we were screwing up, and that he knew enough about the scene to know. So this was great. I'll always be grateful.

MDV gave us Donna Novitsky as an interim VP of marketing. A number of people passing thru gave us marketing advice, but we didn't know how to assimilate it. Donna, met with us once or twice a week and was able to drive. Our meetings had action items, and since she was coming back, that meant something. She also had access to the MDV address book. When we were going thru our ICard phase many of these marketing meetings resulted in wild requirements like, "we need to talk to AAA, we need to talk to AARP, we need to talk to VISA". Today I hear startups say stuff like that, and I roll my eyes. Then, Donna would say, "ok, I'll take that" and we would get contact info mailed to us in a few days. Really, the revolution of the moment is that we can launch large scale successful businesses without engaging massive companies. If your plan involves selling or partnering with public companies, get a good VC.


When we got funding our VCs helped us by sending us a stream of people who had experience running, growing or selling businesses. Part of this was probably their way of playing the dating game as they had in mind that we would need a CEO. The conversations were often interesting. We spent an hour with Geoffrey Moore where he explained his way of breaking down problems, and in real time we tried to apply his advice to our work. I don't remember any of the other names that came thru. Some were remarkable, and I saw them on the cover of wired, but with all the craziness it was hard process and put into effect the advice of people like this. Basically, once we had money, we were too busy and stressed running to really adjust our course radically.

Prefunding this kind of advice was more useful. Arthur Van Hoff talked with us a bit about what we were doing, and what areas he thought would be big. At the time he was worth about a billion $ on paper, and Pavni and I were struggling a bit to define exactly what we were doing, so his thoughts were valuable. His support also affirmed our credibility with a number of VCs, and probably got us the conversation with Vinod Khosla. Another way of looking at this is we had one major course correction in the years post funding when I presented the iCard idea and Jon Feiber said, "great work, don't do it again". In the four months prefunding we had a fairly major change of direction every month or so. So, we were definitely more open to ideas then.

Define the Designer

AIGA and Adobe have launched an initiative to define the professional characteristics of the designers of 2015 so that we can prepare designers for the skills and roles that will be expected of them.

We need to do this for the software development community.

About YCombinator

* The title is actually a link to the about ycombinator page. Like all of PG's writing I think it reads extremely well, and describes what I would like to do in India.

Survivability & the 2bhk startup

Paul Graham has a whole essay on how to succeed as a startup.
It's called not dying. How Not to Die.

He mentions their success rate being close to 50% which is astonishing.

His teams are unusually good at not dying. This is perhaps not so surprising since YC companies begin their lives super frugal style with founders living together and working from their apartment. This means that to continue beyond the $20k YC invests, they just need to cover living expenses a little while longer.

A supporting argument may come from 37Signals and Marc Hedlund who write that 3 is the perfect # of people to develop version 1.0.

Not only is keeping the initial team small useful for keeping costs low and not dying, it may be optimal for a variety of reasons.

If this works so well in Boston and San Francisco, how about India ? Whats price parity on the $5k +$5k*(numFounders) ? Who would come, and what level would they be ?
In his article Paul Graham talks about how the ego factor often keeps founders from quitting. Would that be more or less of a factor here ?

Where's the best place Pune . Bangalore ... ?

China Dinner

Snakes, Scorpions, Song and Dance

Negotiating India

I just spent 6k rps getting the camera on my n93i fixed. The first thing anyone here asks me when I tell them I did something is how much I paid. When I told a friend here he asked me if I went to the shop alone. I did, and he told me not to do that any more.

After 3 years in India I don't think I'm such a doofus at negotiating any more. At the cell phone shop I also bought a charger. At first he said (or I thought he said) 400 rps, and I was like, 'eh, come on baba, what are you saying, 400 for a no name charger ??' To which he said, 'what are you talking about, I said 100' who knows.

The camera guy spent some time with the camera, made a phone call I didn't understand, and then told me some cable was damaged and it would cost 6k to replace and repair. Where as with the charger I knew it shouldn't cost more than 100 rps, with the camera I had no base to compare too, so the quick math I did was simply whether fixing it was worth the money to me - which it was, or whether the discount I might get for comparing prices at other shops was worth spending several hours wandering around ahmedabad to get another price - which it wasn't.

So, 6k down, I have my n93i back with more buttons functioning than before. Some of plastic didn't recover from the surgery so its even more hoopty than before, which sorta fits my beat-up luxury style.

Wow, I don't think I have any pics of the beamer ...