There is too much cynicism in this eco-system and frankly makes me feel quite sick.

— Mayank Sharma (@mayanks) February 9, 2012

People who have done it, never done it, have no plans of doing a startup, all together are calling a wolf in this deal.

This is the venture eco-system, this is how it is played. Companies are built, bought and sometimes brought down. Tejit, my previous startup went through two two (sic.) successive acquisitions in less than three years…and I’m still working. I am still below my quota of Fuck You money. Irrespective of what the end-game is, which seldom is a stalemate, the Silicon valley eco-system is built on two simple things:

1. Every startup is a success
2. No startup is a failure

This is exactly what needs to happen to India and this deal is one of the threads in arriving at that goal.

After the previous exits, the reason I was able to raise my hand and fill a gap in the Indian startup ecosystem because the startup experience gave me enough confidence to do another one, though Morpheus was on the other side of the fence and helping people getting started.

The current consolidation of Flipkart buying Letsbuy, irrespective of the dilapidated state of the latter is a good thing. Why?

1. It gives a necessary boost to the eco-system that bets can be paid off, when the vision is right but the markets are tough. If VCs are forced to write these deals off, it brings a black mark in their report card to their investors (LPs or Limited Partners). However, we as entrepreneurs need to keep the funding cycle alive and rotating every few years.
2. Venture Capital is an between food chain of money flowing from people who have it. Why have a spock mark when you can avoid it? While getting a degree, it’s okay to get a summer (or suppli) as long as you come out in that 4 years. Some of the startups are like that failed exam but the venture eco-system allows for “exits”. Would you want the annotation of “suppli” in your degree? Nor do they.
3. Entrepreneurs who did “okay” in the current startup become capable of taking even bolder bets. If the start-up simply fails, not that there are no learnings from the same, but parking an almost out of gas car securely is much better than leaving it in the middle of the road.
4. For the uninitiated who do not understand the intricacies of the deals, it’s a positive story and brings more people to take the plunge and start their own venture.

Yes, it’s a good PR. Can be written in bold in the resume and can even make you a VC, irrespective of the nature of the exit. That’s how sweet these exits are.

Off-topic: The most worry-some part of the current cynicism is not just the angst against the deals but the so called keepers of the ecosystem advising entrepreneurs to keep away from investors and also advising them to bootstrap their startups to death. They are at total loss to understand that these are venture startups and not a “baniya ki dukaan.”

Only 15? That’s how reacted when I saw Pluggd.in’s list of the most promising consumer Internet startups out of India. Why not 50 to watch? or even 25! India has plenty of raw talent, desire to not fail and kick-butts. What’s lacking is a light which shows them that entrepreneurship is yet another career option.

A quick analysis of VCCircle puts the count of angel deals this year to less than twenty-five. Let’s double the number to account for un-announced deals, that brings this to fifty. Freaking 50. That’s it. I’m sure Indian Angel Network alone has more than 100 members!

That’s my wish to Santa for India’s tech venture entrepreneur ecosystem–We need more angels who are ballsy and do ballsy deals. Another wish, we need more investors who really are worthy of being called angels. For me an angel is someone who does a) at least 5-6 deals every year or at least $100K in investments and b) Leads at least 25% of his investments. Hopefully, Indian angels who interacted with Geeks On a Plane travellers, follow up on their word and start closing. Rest are investors looking to double/triple the money in 18 months.

Merry Christmas.

You know what is exciting? Creation of a category, creation of demand. The fact that my dad calls me from a dusty little town of Dhanbad, after hearing about Flipkart. Adding to his belief that he is ready to shop online all by himself.

Nitty-gritty of the valuation is for fund managers, analysts, think-tanks and people who are not associated with the company or the deal, to take pot-shot at. I think they are plain wrong if they look at Flipkart with a single eye.

It’s easy to create a web-store online. Give me 10 minutes and I’ll get you started. But, it may take you a week to a month to collect payments online. Shipping & logistics is a much bigger challenge than accepting payments in India. If you are a mom-pop operator you can pack, ship, drop on your own. Think about shipping 5 books every minute. No courier company in India is efficient to track delivery and return with guarantees.

Amazon.com was a technology play and they moved faster than people were adopting newer browsers and advancements to the web technology. Infact, the first version of Amazon did not use cookies!  Amazon got the shipping, logistics and payments infrastructure out-of-the-box, sans the web integration part — without worrying about theft, delivery guarantees and failed service-agreements.

People expect that a company in India, of Amazon scale, including it’s loyalty, personalization, great price and customer service can be built in thin air and without lots of money.

If history is any fortune teller, all bubbles/booms created long term markets and large categories. The Gold Rush created California; the semiconductor, networking and internet bubble in succession (re)created silicon valley multiple times. India’s OTA created air-travel for the masses. The Y2K bubble created Indian IT. And so on.

Hence, this is business as usual, which will lead to creation of large markets, giving people access to many items for the first time and killing inefficient distribution methods of yester-years. It’s a space to watch, participate. The forces of nature use elasticity to keep the bubble in check. IMO, the choice is easy and you can’t run around with pins. When there are bubbles, be like a kid or have the bubble gun.

Disclaimer: I don’t work at Flipkart nor have any direct stock holding nor the founders/management team have picked up my beer tab in the past.

Image lazily lifted from Wikipedia.

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Recently, a friend of mine moved back to India from the US, where he was working as a group product manager of a large accounting software company. Unaware of his recent move, when I called him after several months, it turned out he was working on a startup which was developing software to manage customer sales for Indian retailers.

Software products for sales, customer relationship management, managing loyalty programs, e-mail marketing, recruitment software, patient records management, etc. are common and used by large and small companies in developed countries. They have been used since the days of Visual Foxpro, dBase, Cobol, Powerbuilder, etc, and have gradually matured in both business processes and technical capabilities.

The question I posed to my friend was, “Why wouldn’t the retailers use more established, mature tools which have been around for many years?” I got the reply, “Many years.”

Indian businesses are relatively new to the Internet. A lot of them have been using e-mail as the primary tool for collaboration and communication. They have used it for “automating” various business functions. Apart from e-mail, most businesses have processes which are automated by combining humans and paper-record keeping. However, things are changing. Thanks to a recent push by various agencies, and visibility of such processes in multi-national organizations, Indian businesses have woken up to realize the benefits of technology and how it could boost efficiency. Slowly, these companies have started adopting local software vendors and have been automating pieces of their business processes. Leading to organic growth in the domestic tools supporting them.

The added benefit is the price-tag. Tools from large software companies are not priced right for the developing markets, and are expensive as both on-premise and Software-as-a-Service models. They look more like a premium product to most. Moreover, the complexities of local governance, complicated tax regime, rules and duties are vastly different from what’s offered in most out-of-the-box offerings.

Pick a vertical such as loyalty management; I can count at least 5 companies right away who are serving various niches in this segment. Pick another one, say, CRM, there are many young software companies working on it. A founder of one such (Bangalore-based) startup tells me, “Why do I need to go global? In India, nobody knows about CRM!” No wonder, in 3 years his website now lists marquee mid-size manufacturing companies as his customers.

This is tell-tale and beckons the growing usage of internet in the urban areas of the country. With an impending boom in e-commerce — the day is not far when there will be online shops peddling ‘Musli power’ (the Indian equivalent of Viagra) through spam messages.

India has an umbrella law called the IT Act which governs data privacy, cyber-terrorism, cyber-security and the likes. However, there are a lot of open areas related to personal privacy, sharing of data, personally identifiable information, sharing with consent, etc. The current law talks about penalties related to hardware damages, “insertion” of virus, peddling of porn, etc. But, nothing around annoying marketing messages.

What we need is an Indian version of CAN-SPAM Act which precisely talks about (a) Content compliance (b) Unsubscribe compliance (c) Penalties for sending unsolicited spam (d) Local abuse.net (e) Civil & Criminal enforcement.

A well crafted anti-spam law/act:

• Allows legitimate businesses to send legitimate messages
• Prevents harassment of businesses from customers, ISPs, law enforcement
• Allows businesses to do generate leads and control electronic communications with their customers
• Creates a compliance guide for businesses for connecting with their customers through e-mail & SMS

Gmail has solved spam issues to a large extent for it’s users, other email providers are still struggling with spam.

More than spam, it’s missing of legit emails which is bothersome.

We at Morpheus have some ideas and are looking for a few smart techies to solve a few problems around reducing the email overload.

Do you think you can solve a few? Then apply to The Morpheus program. You must be a guru in all of the following POP, IMAP, Hypertable/BigTable, Javascript, Java, PHP, and you walk on HTTP, web security standards, Firefox/Chrome Plugins, REST-ful APIs in your dream. Send some cool code of problems you have solved in the past and your vision around solving some of the issues related to user experience, information overload, organization, closing the loop, etc. and we may work with you in the next 4 months (and also put some money) to bring the product to life for the global technology market.

Are you game? Come discuss with us.

Update: It is the company we help you build. You are the founder/CEO whatever.  Thought we should clarify that we are not looking for someone to just “code”.

Kabirdas-ji says:

तारा मंडल वैसि करि, चंद बड़ाई खाई |

उदए भया जब सूर का, स्यूं तारां छिपि जाई ||

Shall update with the translation sometime later. Why don’t you attempt translating this in the comment section?

The Sales 1:1 101 begins with an email you send to someone — be it the pitch about the company, a proposal for partnership, or looking for some help.

So you send an email and then … days pass and the email silently gets buried down under. As an entrepreneur what do you do? You have two choices (a) Assume the recipient is not interested and never follow up and move on (b) Do a soft reminder and follow up.

People are distracted. Your customers are distracted. Your potential investors are distracted. There is an overdose. Marketing messages. Sales pitches. Attention is short. It is okay to remind. It is okay to do 2-3 follow ups before getting an answer or giving it up (for 6 months!). You double the interval between each follow up. 1st contact –> 7 days –> 14 days –> 28 days.

Which option you choose makes the kind of entrepreneur you will become! (a) The entrepreneur who follows up; who tries to get his attention and makes an attempt to close the deal OR (b) someone who makes an assumption that customer is not interested in “buying”.

Update: Updated the title…dunno why I wrote 101 as 1:1. Ha.

Like everybody else, I also get a fair share of daily dose in our inbox; some get labelled, others get instant attention, some are read/unread. I wish if emails followed the sentence strategy. This is the reality of information overload and the reason for change in our normal behavior of answering the phone on few rings.

The bird is the Downy woodpecker. Pic courtesy

1. A traditional media company or a telco acquires a 3-year young technology start up in the INR 100 crore range
2. A mobile telco launches a domestic anywhere to anywhere unlimited talk time plan (long shot: for INR 3999/month)
3. Indian internet users climbs up to be in the Top 5 spot in their share of online piracy. Positive is the surge in Internet usage.
4. Infosys/TCS/Wipro launch initiatives to align their interest with the startup ecosystem in India (the offering may be on the lines of Microsoft Bizspark, Sun ‘Startup Essentials‘)
5. Amazon CloudFront Content delivery network (CDN) launches an Edge location in India
6. Government of India passes the legislation to legalize Voice Over IP (VOIP) traffic originating within the country and terminating to a local telephone
7. The Indian Advertising community tries to block sales of Tata Sky Plus (DTH Recorder/Indian Tivo) as they realize that people are skipping ads
8. 2 kids from an engineering college launch a brand new search engine and get international investments/coverage
9. Amazon.in starts their online commerce operations, whereas Techcrunch kick-starts their Indian operations with a post on how they acquired their squatted techcrunch.in domain
10. Reserve Bank of India launches a parallel payment network for credit and debit transactions; takes Visa & Mastercard head-on

The thumbnail is of Orion Nebula, favorite amongst amateur astronomers and casual sky watchers. It is one of the closest star formation regions from Earth at a distance of 1,500 light years.

Amongst this I attended the annual National Educators Day — to which I fondly christened it as NED to make it more marketable. While NED had 2000 educators and students putting their best brains to solve some interesting issues like Robotics for masses, triple-powered Reva, a Traffic violation system, etc etc. On the other hand the best brains were showcasing personal power plants, raising the livelihood of rickshaw pullers to advancement in neuroscience to raising the bar of education in disconnected villages of India at the TED event.

Bewildered by the fact that on one side educators, innovators & think-tanks are pushing the envelope to take the country forward, while on the other the likes of Reddys, Yeddys, Kodas are taking the country backwards.

Do we think that the advancement in technology, media, innovation are automatically going to fix the larger issues of corruption which touch our daily lives in an infamous way? Or we simply ignore this like we ignore the garbage outside our own homes?

The corruption is especially high in the states as multiple regional parties clamor for power and the national parties “support” them to get the favor back for the national parliament. It flows all the way up from the policemen at the local region to the capital.

The big question is how do we cleanse the system — or does it flush out like a bad meal automatically? Boils my blood seeing all this but I have the same genetic defect like rest of the Indians — a nonchalant attitude until my pants are on fire.

PS. Huh, it does not even hurt anymore; Madhu Koda has already dropped to page 5 in the majority of national media papers.