Ashish’s World!

My last post was written on August 31st, 2007 and it’s April 10th today - so it’s been almost 7.5 months since I blogged. I did contribute a few articles in the press / magazines in the meanwhile but didn’t write here and I honestly don’t know if I have readers left (I haven’t checked the web stats in over 6 months).

So, what really happened? Did I get too busy? Did I get bored of blogging? Did I find some other way to unwind and share my thoughts? The answer is a combination of all this, however the real fact is that too many things happened in my life in these last few months - both professionally and personally. The words may not do justice to all that happened, so I will take the help of pictures in the interest of writing less.

Tekriti has a new website and now we do talk publicly about the different businesses we are in and different things we have been building over the last few years. We also moved into a new office where the entire building is occupied by us - it’s a good feeling to have a personal cabin which is bigger than our entire first office meant for 7 of the initial Tekriti employees.

It’s worth a look if you haven’t visited the site in a while.

The 2nd update is much bigger, actually much much bigger. I GOT MARRIED. Paavani and I, after a courtship of almost 3 years, finally got married on 13th March and had a good vacation after that. I came back to work only late last week and, I guess, still am not very attentive at work. Life is good, so far  

It doesn’t take a lot to figure out that Entrepreneurship is my favorite subject and I have written numerous posts on the subject. There are a few institutions which has been pretty active in talking about it and organizing events around that. National Entrepreneurship Network (NEN), backed by Wadhwani foundation, is one such institute that I have known for more than a year now and have also spoken in events organized by them.

Babit from NEN informed me a couple of weeks back about the re-design of the site that they had launched - which is essentially a very complete online resource for entrepreneurs in India. I have been refraining from writing about it for some time but the more I go through it, the more I think that this is an awesomely well done site and acts as a complete resource for the Indian entrepreneurs - particularly the first timers. Having spent more than a couple of years running Tekriti, I wish that this existed earlier for me to have easy access to certain things that I learnt the hard way.

All in all - highly recommended for all entrepreneurs in India to bookmark this. They have articles / answers from VCs, have a weekly coverage on various startups and tons of articles / presentations on various things that a first time entrepreneur wants access to.

What I see missing is a link to their RSS feed that I could just subscribe in my blog aggregator that doesn’t force me to go to their website all the time to read the contents.

I am not somebody who is into books and can really count how many books have I read. So, I am not really an authority on providing recommendations for the books but a few people sent me the books they authored over the last few months and I wanted to explicitly mention 2 of them here.

Book 1 - Give me back my Guitar

The author is Ravindra Potharaju, who is the founder and CEO of Bangalore-based PEM Training Solutions. It’s written in a very simple and sweet language and is a collection of age-old stories in a new light where Ravi has emphasized that managing the personal energy is what defines the quality of life and success associated with it. If you are like me who doesn’t exactly read a book only for its literary values, you will like this book. It makes for a good and light bed-time reading material. The Hindu has a 1-page write up on the same. For more details, go to the book website at http://www.givemebackmyguitar.com/

Book 2 - How Innovators Connect

Rohit Agarwal from TechTribe is one of the 2 authors of this book and is about the entrepreneurial experiences of several innovators in Silicon Valley and India. It attempts to showcase innovation through experiences of more than 40 successful innovators in the 2 geographies. This is a nice book to keep as a reference and not necessarily finish reading in its entirety. If you are in a similar space, it always is useful to learn from the experiences of somebody who has ‘done that, been there’. Go to http://www.howinnovatorsconnect.com/ for more details.

Do let me know if you decide to follow my recommendation and read these.

Lately I have been talking to a lot of people who are starting up or have started in the last few months. It’s always good to talk to people who have the courage to ‘move out of their comfort zone’ and do something creative. This is not to say that I don’t like to talk to people who are happy in their comfort zone

One question that I almost always get asked is “How can I trust my clients, customers, business partners, lawyers, accountants, employees and who not?”.

That is a very valid question. And this is something everybody faces - and I can relate it with my experiences. But let me turn around the question and ask you - what option do you have other than to trust? When you are small, you neither have the bandwidth or resources to hire ‘experts’ or expensive lawyers for documenting everything. At the same time, for the lack of experience, it’s almost impossible to think about a list of situations that one could run into - and hence it’s rather foolishness to even attempt doing it in its entirety. But here are certain things that one should do:

1. Spend money on the legal contracts: When you are small, it is very common to sign contracts without seeking legal opinions - as it helps save you a lot of money. Don’t do that - absolutely don’t do that. If you are signing a similar 2nd contract, it is still OK to not get it whetted by the lawyers but do engage the lawyers the first time you are creating a particular kind of contract. You wouldn’t realize the importance of it until you become a little bigger and then know the potential downsides of not doing that.
2. Spend time and keep an eye on all the major aspects of business: It’s good to follow the policy of ‘Divide and conquer’ with different heads for different aspects of business. But have regular meetings with the different heads and open all books (including yours) for scrutiny by all major stakeholders from time to time.
3. Create a Shareholders Agreement: This is probably much more crucial than what it seems initially. You could survive even if your biggest customer leaves you stranded / cheats you or your accountant did something to maximize their benefits. What will hurt the most is if you or your business partners lose trust in each other. Remember that we all are humans - there will be times when the misunderstandings will creep in. So, it’s important to create a shareholders’ agreement soon enough which exactly talks about what are the authorities of each person and the team as a whole. A good analogy is that if you keep the money lying on the floor with nobody watching, many people will turn ‘thief’ and steal but very few of them would actually do it if they know that somebody could be watching.
4. Communicate regularly with the stakeholders, customers, team-members and others important for your business: Yeah - follow all processes, have the legal systems in place and sign the right contracts but there is nothing to replace the regular communication with all the parties involved. Most people wont do anything bad with somebody they really treat as their ‘friend’. Communicate with people and be their ‘friend’ and you will mostly be in good shape. 

In spite of all this, trust people. As long as you exercise a bit of caution, you will be much better off by trusting people rather than spending your time and energy thinking about what can go wrong and who can do wrong. This is not to say that people will not cheat you - THEY WILL - most of the times unintentionally but sometimes (sad) intentionally. And if it happens, just increase the level of caution that you exercise but dont get too paranoid. Try your best to forgive and forget it and worry about the common long-term goal. But, yes, don’t hesitate in making your concerns very clear to the offending party and / or severing your ties if you absolutely cannot withstand what has happened. No loss will be as big as losing out when you become bigger.

Whatever you do, please remember that you should forgive me for being really irregular with blogging BUT dont forget even if you can’t necessarily find a common goal Instead, keep visiting the blog. I do intend to be regular, though not necessarily frequent.

I am sure this is not a news but I wanted to write a post telling explicitly that we are in need of smart people and are conducting interviews aggressively. Though we are looking to hire all kind of people (the commonality being - everybody needs to be smart ), the stress is more on hiring people who are ambitious enough to see themselves as growing into a role of great significance soon enough. And the vacancies are not only for Tekriti but also for other ‘not talked about’ ventures that Tekriti has gotten into as partners with other respectable organizations (more on that when you talk to us).

Following are the brief Job Description of a few positions that we are trying to fill:

1. Product Managers: You will be responsible for the product management of an ambitious Tekriti product that is in the pre-alpha mode. You will be responsible for all aspects of a product development including, but not limited to, brainstorming on the product roadmap with the management team, participating in technical architecture sessions, interacting with the Information Architects and the front-end team for the prototyping as well as creating / tracking the product schedules for the team members. Somebody with a technical background, particularly in .NET architecture, is a big plus.
2. Project Manager / Group Project Manager: You will be responsible for the project management of one or more Tekriti projects being carried out for clients. An ideal person should be a multitasker, process-oriented and a great team builder. You will spend a lot of time on talking to the clients, creating business proposals, creating / tracking schedules, interviewing candidates and generally think about team building. Strong communication skills is highly desired. You should be a good user of technology, and be curious enough to try out various web applications in the web 2.0 space.
3. Interface Designer / Information Architect: Your responsibility will be to coordinate the content, navigation and design for a variety of Internet business solutions. A strong ability to conceptualize and develop all aspects of software interface designs is required, with special emphasis on handling the project single-handedly without much of a supervision. Good communication skills (written and verbal) is important.
4. HR Manager / Training specialist: If you are an exceptional HR manager who is looking for a challenging task of refining the HR processes of a fast growing company with a strong belief in the “people are our greatest assets”, we are very interested in talking to you. You should also be prepared to conduct soft skills training, refine the New Hire Induction programs as well as training need assessment for other trainings and help organize it, potentially with the help of external trainers.
5. .NET Developers - If you are passionate about building world class products (doesn’t everybody say the same!), that has the potential to change the way certain businesses happen and have expertise / experience in .NET / C#, we are very keen on talking to you.
6. PHP Developers - If you live and breath open source and have expertise in applications created usign PHP language, we are continuously on the lookout. At Tekriti, you will find some of the best PHP developers in the region.

You can continue to look at our careers page (to be updated soon) for job-openings, but I will make sure that I am personally involved in most of the hiring for the above positions for the next few weeks. Apart from the fact that we are a group of passionate people working towards a goal, have way too many parties / outings, have high energy with a great work environment - another advantage of joining us / helping out with forwarding the job descriptions is that you will help me find more time to blog

To apply, either send an email to careers@tekritisoftware.com or personally to me at ashish@tekritisoftware.com

Today is 2 year birthday (or should I call it Anniversary) of our company ‘Tekriti‘ as well as my blog ‘LatestInIndia‘.

Warmest wishes to all Teknokrats and thanks to all the well-wishers, friends and family. A ’surprise’ cake cutting ceremony happened in the morning - the big party is due sometime in the next month.

Update: Manish just blogged about the Tekriti T-shirts distributed on the occasion. Here is the design of the t-shirt:

One of the slides in the presentation deck that I use during a talk on Entrepreneurship is that ‘there has to be a higher purpose for creating companies than the acquisition of wealth’ for any entrepreneur. Before Tekriti happened, I never imagined how powerful can the ‘creation of a company’ be. As is the common wisdom, it affects not only your life but also affects the lives of people attached with it and their families. I didn’t have to wait 2 years to ‘know’ this but I guess I couldn’t have ’felt’ it if Tekriti hadn’t happened.

Let me ponder more of my thoughts here. In the last couple of months, I have gone in the introspection mode more than a few times - either because I was doing a lot of things but not able to focus enough on one or because I had to continue learning the art of ‘losing control’ as Tekriti grows or because I was not able to spend enough time on blogging, or may be because I was plain agitated at my incapability to increase the speed at which we were making progress. Don’t get me wrong - we are making enough progress and that will be evident by some announcements we make this year but, knowing where we want to reach eventually, no speed is really great.

Introspection is beautiful - it forces you to think about ‘Why’ and not just the ‘Hows’. So - I did ask myself again - why? Why am I doing this? Is it for one of the things: Name / Fame / Reputation / Money - what? Of course, I am not a saint to not think about these ‘earthly’ things - so it is not just because I want to benefit the mankind (it’s another discussion how Tekriti will even visibly help the mankind!) or whatever!!

Quite honestly - I don’t know the answer. I don’t know what keeps me in the office till quite late or forces me to continuously aspire to give my best or want to see not only myself but everybody at Tekriti successful. I don’t know why, for the first time in life, I am happy to see my name second to something - Tekriti. I really don’t know what gives me kick but what I know is money isn’t that. Money is important, lucrative and nice but just doesn’t have that power. Money just doesn’t give the kick!

Reminds me of something that somebody very wise told me once - I dont want money because I need it; I want to make money because I want to be considered ’successful’.

Let me begin with thanking everybody who wrote to me while I was not blogging and encouraged me to come back and blog. This probably has been the biggest break I took from blogging and for the right reasons. I have definitely gotten a lot of work done in the last couple of months, have got time to think about my priorities (other than work), and even took 4 days off to go out of Delhi and travel to Belgaum on the Maharashtra-Karnataka border to meet my sister and brother-in-law.

Now that I am reaching back Delhi tomorrow, I am all geared up again for work, blogging and all the other activities that I indulge in while at Delhi. Funny that even a one day of official leave is so refreshing at times. So - before you start reading more posts from me - I just wanted to thank you for writing to me, leaving comments and keeping me in your blog reader list.

Now - just make sure that you start visiting this blog more frequently than you have done over the past few weeks

Let me start with wishing everybody a very Happy and Prosperous New Year ahead. I have been very inconsistent with blogging over the last 1 month and I feel bad about that. But the reality is that I have been busy with more than a few things on the professional front (that my company board doesn’t allow me to talk about yet). Once we make sufficient progress and get the product in the ‘talkable’ state, I will write about the entire experience but, for now, I will just write my random thoughts here.

Random Thought 1: Tekriti had further expansion and rented out another office in the same building. There was a week when I didn’t have an official seat in the previous office because the new office was still getting furnished - so I kept moving from one conference room to the other with my laptop. And I used to get happy if somebody was on leave - I had a seat that way. Anyways, the new office has got a lot more corporate look - and I guess I got to change that with putting up posters and other funky things. 

Random Thought 2: I am losing interest in blogging. Seriously! I hate to be doing things that I don’t want and I have realized that I am pretty bad at things that I dont like. So, even though I was very busy, I didn’t miss blogging that much - and I did notice a little decline in my blog page views over this period (and that bothered me a bit). I also think that I have received lesser number of emails through my blog in the last 1 month. At the same time, I do think that this is just a passing phase and I will get back to my same old frequency. My blog has been fruitful in more than many ways, but I am reserving those comments for the 2 year anniversary.

Random Thought 3: I need to get more involved in the Delhi’s business circle. One disadvantage of doing a business only with overseas companies is that you don’t develop a lot of business contacts in your country. You do have mentors, appreciators, friends but business-contacts are someone that you don’t have. I believe that I need to be a little more active there. We have started to do some work in the Indian Business space (though pretty selectively) - so I do see that changing a bit over time.

Random Thought 4: I need to get more involved in the Delhi’s social circle. This is actually a continuation of Thought 3, and a more important one. Quite frankly, I think that the nature of my work is making me really boring. And I have started to get scared because of that. There are actually times when I get a little uncomfortable when I am in a place where I need to talk something apart from business, technology. That has never been my style of living and I got to maintain it that way. Oh - and if you are one of the readers who is deep into the Delhi social circle - I will appreciate you contacting me. I promise I will try not to bore you

More later…

Many of us have the complaint of not getting enough work done because of distraction during the normal work hours - through the meetings, small events, coffee breaks or just because of the fact that a colleague has lot of questions. I typically solve these by either working for a couple of hours in the morning from home and/or working late nights, when not many are around.

But it looks that those are all old-fashioned way of doing things. Based on the routine delays of flights to / from the Delhi airport (read here, and here), it looks that taking a flight is the latest cool way to get work done. You still have to reach the airport fairly early because 1) you wouldn’t know about the exact delay until you reach the airport and 2) you also wouldn’t rememeber how many marriages (36,000? 18,000?) are happening in Delhi on that day - potentially increasing your travel time to the airport by 4 times. At least I am careful - after my parents missed their flight last week. 

So - if you haven’t already - it’s time now to prepare yourself to spend some time on the airport and get the work done when there isn’t enough (forced) distraction. I did that yesterday when I spent over 6 hours at the Chennai airport waiting for my Indian Airlines flight to Delhi. And since many people were trying to do the same, I had to sit on the floor with my laptop cable plugged to the power-point. It was funny this time - not sure if I will find it funny next time!

By the way - it did appear to me that I was more efficient at the airport than I have been in the office for the last few days