Recently I met with parents of the founder of one of our portfolio companies. They asked me about their son’s venture , how do I think its doing and what will be  the outcome etc. Here was my answer to them:

• Your son worked for 1 year as a SW engineer with a big company before starting his venture
• Now the venture is 4 months old and is already seeing some good traction
• Lets say he works on this venture for 2-3 years, at the end of it one of the two outcomes will be seen
  • Good case outcome: He continues with the venture. It has become successful – not necessarily an IPO but at the minimum its growing steadily and makes enough money to sustain itself and pay him a salary
  • Worst case outcome: The venture shuts down
• When your son started this venture he auto promoted himself from SW engineer to the CEO / CXO
  • A level he may have never achieved or achieved after a very long time period in a regular career with big SW companies
• Since he is  CEO / CXO – he would need to work  & network  with CEOs / Founders / Owners / Senior management folks of other companies
  • As a matter of fact this person I am talking about has already met CEOs / owners of more than 10 established / funded companies which are from the similar domain as his own company
• In case of shutdown of his venture it is certain that with the right efforts your son will:
  • Find a senior management position – VP / AVP / Director / Head of department with a company in the same domain
  • Get very good salary to go with these positions
  • And he would have switched from writing code to a domain of his choice
  • And if he has another venture in him, he can save enough to start it
• This will happen because 2-3 years as an entrepreneur will give the two things needed to get a senior position:
  • Network of decision makers at good companies who have seen him run his own company
  • 3 years of intense learning you get as as a start up founder, is worth more than 10 – 12 years in regular job
• These days people in the industry are very happy to hire X-entrepreneurs, since they know these guys can get work done
• Not all companies would be open to hiring him. But there are lot of funded, growing, young, dynamic companies who would be happy to consider him seriously
• Your son will be way ahead, both in salary and position, as compared to most of his classmates / colleagues who will never go out of the SW industry and become Senior SW engineer or at best a team lead in these 2-3 years. Some of these guys may have gone to top B-Schools to do MBAs and after 2 years will be doing entry level jobs in companies
• So if in the worst case spending two years passionately working on your startup can him chance to switch his job profile and domain, a very good jump in both and salary, and in good case he may be running a successful venture – doing a start up is a great investment in career, and not at all a risk
• They understood my point since it was quite logical, but still did not seem fully convinced . I don’t blame them. They are from a different generation

I also shared with them my personal example:

• In August 2004, when I left my job to start madhouse, I was Principal SW engineer in a telecom startup in California, two levels below a manager
• I started madhouse and promoted myself to be the CEO
• During my three years with madhouse I worked and networked with lot of other CEOs / VPs / Owners / Partners of other companies
• After three years madhouse was acquired by Seventymm and I joined as Vice President – Corporate Strategy
• So in three years I went from being two level below manager to the topmost layer of a well known company and with quite a good salary package
• Now while I was at Seventymm I had access to senior management jobs across domains like retail, consumer products, media. I had an offer to join as president of strategy at one of the leading public entertainment companies in India and the annual package was more than 50L
• But I turned that offer down and decided to start the next stint of entrepreneurship – MVP
• Other two founders of madhouse (Ankur and Nandini) saw a similar result as well. Nandini became AVP @ Seventymm and Ankur joined as VP @ Travelguru
• I am aware of many more similar cases

Business Ideas may fail, but Entrepreneurship is risk free

No opportunity comes with surety.  Even an MBA from a top B-School might not get the best returns. There are lots of bright ideas which never reap fruits. What is important is that you should be able to separate failure of your idea from your personal failure. Its very clear, if you choose to become an entrepreneur for the right reasons, have the right approach and are determined to give it your best shot for 2-3 years and create value in your venture, chances of failure are near zero. You will learn so much and get to know so many people that even in case of the worst outcome, you will come out way ahead and will be a much wanted resource.h

The journey of entrepreneurship is the real value add for the entrepreneur. The result is a by product.

So where is the risk in entrepreneurship?

Note: Thanks for Robin Moses, AshutoshUpadhyay, Ankit Maheswari, Nandini Hirianniah and Sunil for reviewing the post.

Dead poets anthem

Recently I watched the movie Dead poets society. The movie hit me hard,  I had tears in my eyes during the last 20-25 minutes. After the movie got over I was numb for sometime and my mind wouldn’t get away from it.  Its been 3 days since I watched it but the movie is with me. I can close my eyes and play the whole movie for myself.  So I guess its not a bad idea to write a post about it.

It teaches some of the most important lessons of life and delivers them in quite a hard hitting way.

• Be a free thinker
• Don’t conform; create your own identity
• Suck out all the marrow of life
• View things from a different perspective
• Be loyal
• (Most important) Carpe diem – Seize the day

Most institutions and influencers around us discourage us from following these lessons and sometimes even force us,  “to conform, to follow, to accept established views & methods, and to be safe”. These include – schools, colleges, parents, govt., relatives & more.

The movie is set in Welton Academy, shown as USAs most prestigious preparatory school, after finishing the school 90% of students  get into Ivy League. The school is run by a headmaster (and management) who is proud to continue the traditional, conformist ways of learning and wants to maintain absolute discipline. Mr. Keating (played by Robin Williams), an graduate of the same Welton Academy, comes into the school to teach English Literature – which is given pretty much a step-motherly treatment since the school wants to only produce – Doctors, Lawyers, Engineers, MBAs.

Keating on other hand has different ideas. He starts his first class with “Carpe Diem” – a latin word that means “Seize the day” and Carpe Diem is the central philosophy of his teachings. He wants the students to be free thinkers, to create their own identities – he wants to them to “Seize the day” – Carpe Diem.

As per him English poetry has all the things we stay alive for – beauty, love, romance. His style of teaching is very fresh and totally out-of-the-box. Some of the boys go look up the yearbook for the year in which Keating had graduated from Welton and among other things they find the mention of Dead Poet Society. They ask Keating about it, at first he doesn’t want to talk about it. But when the boys push him he tells them about it but asks them to keep it a secret. During his school days, members of Dead Poet Society met in the Indian Cave which was away in the jungle by the river after dinners, read poetry and sucked the marrow of life. A group of boys lead by Neil like the idea, re-form the Dead Poet’s Society and start the meetings. These boys also start becoming free thinkers and start to create their own identities. One track of the movie is about the teaching methods of Keating – where he uses poetry to teach them some important lessons of life. Second track shows stories of  all current members of Dead Poets Society who are influenced by Keating’s teachings and decide to “be thinkers and find there own destiny”, instead of just doing what their parents and headmasters are telling them to do. As expected the school management does not appreciate his endeavor of making real thinking citizens out of the students and they decide to throw him out. The movie has an amazing ending, but I wont spoil the movie for you by telling the end. But let me tell you – it is the ending that is the most hard hitting. Watch the movie – you will enjoy it.

One of the reasons India has not realized its entrepreneurial potential and not produced the googles is that our kids continue to grow up in a conformist environment, risk averse society, surrounded by schools, colleges, parents and other influencing forces telling the kids to just follow, to conform and not to try new things. All of us admire and respect people like – JRD, Dhirubhai, Sunil Mittal, LN Mittal, Sanjiv Bhikchandani, Subhash Chandra, Narayan Murthy and many more, the entrepreneurs who have made a difference. Ironically, these guys were anything but conformist, all of them traveled the ‘road less traveled’, took the risk , trusted their guts and pursued opportunities which looked stupid to others. When Nandan Nikeleni decided to join Infosys as a young engineer from IIT Mumbai – his friends and family thought he was crazy and today he is one of the most respected guys in India.

The lessons of Dead Poet Society are cardinal to the success of an entreprenuer and I would strongly urge all entrepreneurs (current and would be) to watch the movie and internalize the lessons.  Get your parents to watch the movie as well.

Lessons once more:

• Be a free thinker
• Don’t conform; create your own identity
• Suck out all the marrow of life
• View things from a different perspective
• Be loyal
• and

Carpe Diem – Seize The Day

Credit: The image was taken from a blog post about Dead poets society

Continuing the good news for start-up folks, Fountainhead School of Business is organizing BarCamp Chandigarh – an extreme popular unconference, on 22 November. It will be a day long event that provides you the opportunity to attend some interesting sessions, meet like-minded folks, network and peek into the startup scene here.  Barcamp Chandigarh is also inviting folks who would like to conduct a session. Go ahead and signup to attend the event or to conduct a session at the Barcamp.

MVP is a supporting partner for the the event and we are doing our bit to make the event a good one.

I have signed up to do a session @ Barcamp, but have not decided on what all should I cover in the session. I am looking for some good suggestions from you on that, please leave your thoughts in comments or send a message to me on twitter @guglanisam.

What would you like me to cover during my session at the BarCamp Chandigarh?

I am right now at Haranahalli in Karnataka, 200 km from Bangalore. This is the ancestral village of my father- in-law. We reached here today morning via car, started from Bangalore around 0600 am, arrived 1130 am – after a small breakfast stop on way.

We have come here to witness a religious ocassion, which happens in a place called Amanhalla, few miles from Haranahalli. The villagers from 28 villages in his area perform a puja every year on the banks of  a small stream which is considered very sacred. Uniqueness of this puja is that it’s performed without any idol, the stream is considered the deity.  Since no particular deity is being worshipped people from all faiths and casts get together to participate in this puja.

Homa (sacred fire offerings)  is setup on the banks of the river and final part of puja is perfomed by steping into the stream. In this step the head priest, a lady and few other folks enter the river chanting the sacred hymns, give offerrings to the river : flowers, colors , rice and clothes. The lady performs main parts of the final ritual and at the end they say that the goddess enters the body of the lady.

I saw that the lady started behaving as if something has taken over her body, she started to dip her body in the water and came back out multiple times. Priest and other people who were with her helped her come out of the river and during that time they were also asking her questions – which they belive the goddess is answering through the lady.

As she was coming out of the river other ladies gathered to worship her and take her blessings and soon the ritual was over. People took a final look at the homa and climbed the stairs towards the area in which community lunch was being served to all.

The story of this ritual goes as fellows….

800 years ago, a Muslim boy of the region liked a Hindu girl. She used to go to the river bank every morning to perform puja and the boy used to follow her. On one such day, to avoid the boy,  she went and hid in a “deep ditch” in the stream, planning to come out when the boy left. The boy kept waiting and the girl died in the ditch. Villagers believe that after a few days of that incident, the girl re-emerged as a lake a few miles away. And so she was given the status of “devi” (goddess). Since then, every year, the villagers perform the puja on the river banks – where the final offerings are put into the “ditch” in which she had hidden.

Personally I am an atheist and don’t believe in existence of any super natural forces. But I am enjoying being a part of this ocassion, as its given me a chance to come close to rural India. This part of India is still green, non-polluted, people here are simple & hospitable. And of course I am already dying with hunger while I wait for my turn to eat. The food smells yummy…

“Mediocrities I absolve you” – these are the last lines in the master piece movie Amadeus. The movie tells the life-story of  the prolific and influential composer of the Classical era- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The story is narrated from the point of view of a mediocre Italian composer Antonio Salieri – who also lived and worked in Vienna during Mozart’s Vienna years. (The story of the movie is part truth & part fiction, do watch it)

Story of Amadeus

Mozart was a gifted musician, the best of his time and one of the best mankind has produced. But during his lifetime he never really achieved financial success.  In the movie, the story is narrated by Salieri – who is a mediocre composer but was quite a success in Vienna before Mozart arrived from Salzburg.  Salieri hates Mozart, only because Mozart is a far better composer than him. From the time Mozart appears on the scene – Salieri sphttp://sameer.madhouse.in/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=763ends all his life trying to defame, destroy, derail, humiliate and kill Mozart. But in the process he himself stays mediocre – he makes no attempt to improve his composing skills, to collaborate with Mozart or to discover another art in which he can excel and be the best. He choose to stay mediocre and became saint of all mediocrities and hence the last lines of the movie “Mediocrities I absolve you”.

Observe the difference – once he discovered his calling, Mozart chose to stay true to his music, gave all his life to it, he never compromised, always fought for his music – for his operas, he didn’t do things to please people, didn’t do politics – even though he stayed financially challenged most of his life.

Salieri on the other hand also discovered that music was his calling, worked for it, reached a certain level, joined the Emperor’s services at first given chance, became rich and stopped working on his music or his composing skills. He saw that he had enough skills to make the emperor happy. He chose to stay mediocre, chose to stop growing musically. And later he chose to hate Mozart. Why? Because Mozart did not stop at mediocrity, he went on to achieve mastery – he was the best, he was everything Salieri wanted to become – but without the efforts and without the sacrifices.

Discover your calling

“Find a job you love and you will never spend a day working” – its a old cliche, but still relevant. One can only excel in things they absolutely love to do. So the first step towards achieving excellence and not becoming or staying mediocre is to discover your calling. What is that you can do for hours and never get tired? What is that job in which quality of work matters far more to you than the money you get paid?

If you are one of the few lucky ones you will stumble upon your calling early in your life and after that the job will be to stay on course. But if you are like most of us, the answer wont be obvious, it is there – but it just needs to be discovered.  The problem is that for most of us even the fact that we should be looking for the answer is not obvious.  If you are one of those who is looking for the answer or wants to look – the only way is to keep trying new things – be restless, be fearless. Give-up things if you don’t like doing them and use that learning intelligently to start afresh. You must keep looking – you will automatically know when you find it. Something will click inside you. That is what happened with me.

I was restless all my life – moving from one thing to another, getting bored, moving again – never settled for something I did not love to do – made efforts to get out, took my chances. In August 2004, I moved to India to from San Francisco and had to find a new job. I thought why not try doing something on my own for 3 months and if it doesnt workout I will go find a job. That’s how I started madhouse; accidentally. But the day I became an entrepreneur – something clicked inside me.  I had discovered my calling.  Just that I had spent 27 years looking for it  and tried quite a large number of things.

Everyone has a calling (infact a person can have more than one calling!) – but we have to look for it – either consciously or unconsciously. Most people fall short when it comes to leave what they are doing right now and start again from zero – they want to keep clinging to what they are doing, safety of job, big salary, the home town comforts, etc. The ability to start from zero is the most crucial element. You must have this ability or  develop it if you want to complete the  journey to your calling.  Give yourself a chance, start that company, take that trip, quit that job, make that movie – whatever it is, do it. If you are not doing what you love to do – YOU ARE AN IDIOT.

At the end of the day if you do not discover your calling – you are assured mediocrity.

Staying on the course to mastery

The next step, after you have discovered your calling, is to get on the path to mastery and to stay on course. It could be music , entrepreneurship, sports, belly dancing or something entirely different. It takes many long years to simply be on the path to mastery. These years are sometimes dark, years filled with hard work,  where many mediocres around you are trying to make you one of them, and they will make you some tempting offers.

But if you want to achieve excellence you have to turn down these offers; continue to learn and grow. With every hurdle you cross, the terrain becomes more difficult , but going thru tough times and solving tough problems is the only way to grow.

Remember:

• You will fail
• You will face problems
• You will fall
• You will run out of resources
• You will reach dead-ends
• People will leave your side
• Many people will hate your guts
• People will humiliate you
• At times things will not move at all
• People will break their promises
• You will fight, get hurt, lose morale and fight again

Amongst all of this, you have to stay true to your journey and be on the path to mastery. Nothing worthy of achieving is easy. So hang in there!

Credits: Thanks to Indus and Nandini for helping me refine the article

Personally I am very excited with this new batch, already been learning a lot of stuff.

• How are high-quality designers t-shirts made? Starting right from the thread (Scopial)
• How do you help a second hand car buyer make his decision? (veriCAR)
• Insider’s view on how do doctors manage their clinics (Naabo)
• How to create measurable out of home media? (AdScoot)
• How can you apply the Easy Cab model to the real estate industry? (EasySquareFeet)
• How good is the “customer experience” at Food & Grocery departmental stores with special focus on juices section? (Retail Vector)
• Is India going to see a Robotics Revolution? How hip are the girls of NID (Robots Alive – they are incubated @ National Institute of Design. We visited them last month)
• What do final year students need to prepare well for campus interviews? (InterviewStreet)
• The only reason Small business Owners in India file tax returns is to get bank loans. (ReachTax)

I tried to pin point the missing part.  But even after thinking hard, I was stuck and wasn’t able to figure out what was missing.  So I let it go from my conscious mind & assigned the task to my unconscious mind, so that if there is a good answer it will bubble up.  Here is my post on the same – hope you will enjoy it.

Problem solving is the single most important skill you should have as an entrepreneur or a start-up founder

Just like we break down materials to elements, elements to atoms and atoms to electrons & protons. If we break down the work of an entrepreneur, go to  the most basic level and ask

• What’s the job of an entrepreneur? What does  he do?
• Answer:  He solves problems

That’s what an entrepreneur is continuously doing. Solving problems is what moves things forward.

• You are in STATE A, you come across a problem, you start working on solving the problem, if the problem is solved you move forward to STATE B
• If you don’t solve the problem – you will be standing still
• And if you solve a problem in a wrong way, you will move backwards
• Good problem solvers keep navigating from state to state and the progress keeps happening

Some common problem statements:

• How do i get featured in techcrunch?
• How much of seed capital do we need? How can we minimize the requirement?
• How to find contacts of the right angels?
• How to in launch next 1 week?
• How do i make money?
• How can I define my target customer?
• How can I make the website load faster?
• How can I negotiate the rent of my apartment?
• How can get the damn coffee machine to work?

Problem solving has two aspects to it:

• Quality of solution
• Speed of problem solving

Assuming that quality is constant, the speed of solving the problems – that’s what will you give you an edge. It will allow you to be ahead of your customer’s requirements. In case the speed is constant – a better quality solution will make the difference.

But at the end of the day its not an either-or game. To be an exceptionally good problem solver you have to do a good job on both aspects – quality and speed, and you have to do it consistently for all kind of creative problems that a start-up will come across – from technology – to – finance, legal, UI, people, funding, partnerships, sales and the list can really go on.

How to get better at problem solving?

An entrepreneur must be exceptionally good at problem solving in order for their venture to succeed. This skill can be learnt by someone with good aptitude and a discipline to learn. Also one can keep getting better at it, so keep working on it.

Here are some fundamental approaches to problem solving. Use of each of these can make you a better problem solver.

• The Scientific Method Of Problem Solving
  • Come up with a clear “Problem Statement”  – A problem can’t be solved if it isn’t understood
  • Form a Hypothesis – Hypothesis are reached at after gathering enough information about the problem
    • Hypothesis can be a possible solution to the problem, so if its tested its true you will arrive at the solution
    • Hypothesis can define potential reason for the problem. So if its tested true you would have identified the cause of the problem and can build a solution around that knowledge
  • Test the Hypothesis – For each hypothesis an experiment/ test is performed to determine if the hypothesis is true or false. Experiments are done to gather data.  It is very important that good observations and records are made during an experiment / test
  • Collect the Data – This is where you record your observations, measurements, or information from experiment / test
  • Analyze the Data – Just what does all that data indicate about answering the problem you are solving?
  • Draw Conclusions – After examining the data from the experiment, conclusions can be drawn. In it’s simplest form, the conclusion will be “yes” the hypothesis was correct, or “no” the hypothesis was not correct
    • Yes means – you have the possible answer
    • No means – this was not a correct hypothesis and you cross it out. Based on the current information you should come up with the next hypothesis and test it all over again
  • Repeating the above will normally take you to the solution

• Increase your collection of “Mental models”
  • Google founders used the citation analysis as a model to solve the “search ranking problem” and created the page-rank algo based on that. This only happened because they knew the  citation analysis and had it in their mind as a mental model
  • Whenever you are solving a problem your mind does pattern matching or looks for similar mental models which can be applied to the current problem you are working on
  • You take a mental model – modify it as per the problem at hand and apply it
  • So the more mental models you are aware of – specially the ones that are used in the context of start-ups – the better it is
  • Here are some ways to increase your collection of relevant startup mental model:
    • Read biographies
    • Read good books: business books and books that have nothing to do with business but can teach you something about life
    • Blogs
    • Info on internet : text, videos on youtube, ted.com, slideshare, fachak
    • Meet lots of people

• Use the white board and ask four Questions
  
  • Where are we?
  • How did we get here?
  • Where do we want to go?
  • How can we get there?

I have found this one to be the most useful starting point in problem solving. I have found that this is also the one which most people miss out on. I suggest you put it on paper and paste in your office. The way it works is; bring the team in a room , put the four question on a whiteboard and start putting answers to the questions on the board. Most likely by the time you get to the last question you will see the answer.

• Networking and relationships
  • Have a network of people who may have faced similar problems and can help you solve it
  • Knowing them well will give you access to the mental models that these folks have collected
• Focus! Focus! Focus
  • While solving a problem, keep a laser sharp focus on the problem at hand. Don’t go into tangents. Don’t get distracted.
  • If you get some ideas in between, write them down and worry about them later
• Practice! Practice! Practice!
  • The more you practice the better you will get at it
• [Updated]  Create your own road maps without a prior set of rules
  • Dipankar made an excellent point in comments, end of the day its about you figuring out your own rules and not be constrained by any lists.

• Good proposal documents are like paintings
  • Writing a good proposal document is an art
  • It has to come from within, you need a deep understanding of “what does the proposal document stand for, what is it trying to accomplish, who is my audience, what do I need to communicate”
  • Once thats done just let your self loose and a good document will emerge
  • Review the document a couple of times to De-text and make it crisp and professional
  • Identify a few folks whose proposal reviewing skills are good and get them to give you critical feedback
  • Don’t ignore the feedback or parts of the feedback. Work on each point meticulously
• Overall Goals
  • Clearly document the goals of the proposal
  • What are you trying to achieve via this proposal ?
    • Make sure every word & every sentence in the proposal contributes to that
    • Dont get carried away and write stuff which is not directly related to the goal
  • Example Goals
    • Convince Westside to do a pilot in mumbai
    • Pilot should start in next 1-2 months
    • Get Westside to purchase stock against advance payment
• Communication goals
  • Document what are you trying to communicate through the proposal and ensure that of it (and not more than that) is communicated
    • Example communication goals
      • Who are we
      • What do we make
      • What are we selling to the customer and why should the customer buy it
      • What is a simple initial pilot we can get started with (initially try to get into a pilot which is simple and easy to get started with for both sides, you can get into deeper more elaborate partnerships later)
      • What are the mechanics of the initial pilot
        
      • What are the commercials
      • Other terms & conditions
        
      • How can we get started
• Audience
  • Define who is the audience, who will read it?
  • Step into heads of your audience and think what do they want to see so that they will make decision that you want them to make
• Overall structure and format
  • Create a document structure to accomplish goals listed above with the stated audience in mind
  • Fill in the content in the structure
• De-text
  • De-texting means going through the written text and removing unnecessary words / sentences that don’t all value to the content or don’t contribute towards the goals of the document / section
  • De-texting is an art and it takes patience to do it but once you practice enough you will become good at it
• Have just enough
  • You should have “just enough” content in the document
  • Every word / sentence / section in the document competes for attention of the reader
  • Hence every extra sentence takes away attention from existing sentences
  • So be careful and sure about every word / sentence / section – that its required to complete the document
  • Removal of every unwanted less wanted section will increase the chances of rest of the document being understand better by the reader

Please share your experiences / views in comments about the proposals. I plan to update the post based on feedback from readers.

PS: After reading this post again I realized that its equally applicable to other forms of written communications like presentations, agreements, e-mails, requirement documents etc .