Jewels from startup founders

There was a great event which was conducted by the Pune Open Coffee Club (POCC) held in the Thought Works cafeteria on Saturday 19th April. It had a great lineup of panelists. The moderator too was awesome and very senior. Details of the event can be found here.
There was a lot of experience talking there! All the panelists and the moderator had been through thick and thin and were openly sharing their thoughts and viewpoints. I have noted down a few points which might be of interest to all. I'm not putting who said what, but only what I perceived from the topics.
1. Co-founders - pick a fight with the person who is a potential co-founder. If you shake hands at the end of the fight - go for him/her. Finding people is the toughest challenge any startup faces. Some say you need luck, some say you need selling skills to get the people you want. I believe that you need to have selling skills to get the people you want. You are going to spend more time with your co-founder than your girlfriend or wife - so choose carefully!
2. Bootstrapping - bootstrap as much as possible. Don't go to a financer. Financers will come to you. Don't run after money - money comes running to you. Hard to believe, but true. It's the initial difficult times that sometimes you question yourself. Holding on is the most plausible solution.
3. Equity sharing: There were two views to equity sharing: One - don't share. Second - share, but sensibly to people who can bring in tons of value to the company. Not investors, but people who bring in value to the company. I particularly liked the second approach, but it has its pitfalls. It relies too much on the fact that you have a good judgement of people. Well, *everybody* thinks that they have a good judgement, but sadly only time tells whether you really do, or don't! So, need to be cautious on that front.
4. Change business strategy - all the time. Suit the needs of the market. I think this is one of the most important things that a startup can do. Change.
5. Data driven growth - keep tab of users using your product and service. Change fast. Studying user data, like why users are not using your product or service, why are they dropping out halfway etc, will give you good insights into what you should do to tweak your product and create a great experience for your users, and make them come back. Getting users to come back and use your product or service is a good way of validating your product or service.
6. User acquisition vs revenue - user acquisition. Revenue comes. I believe that we need to focus on both equally. It is not an either-or scenario.
7. When do you say enough is enough?
Ans: When that thought comes to you - leap ahead. Because, most people give up at that point of time. Real entrepreneurs do not. This was I think a very motivational answer which should be remembered by all entrepreneurs.
8. Come up with creative strategies for getting customers to pay - India is a particularly tough market for that. Customers don't pay. Skip percentages. Talk flat amounts. You cannot give up on getting payment for something that you have done. Appoint a person just to follow up. In the initial times, that person will have to be you.
9. Follow your gut feel. Take advise, but in the end, follow your gut feel. This matters, as no one knows your business best, other than you (and maybe your co-founder). People might have the best intentions for you and your business, but it finally *has* to be your call. Even if it displeases the people giving advise.
10. An entrepreneurs journey is awfully lonely. They are given a celebrity status, but it is a lonely journey. So, try to keep family and friends abreast of what you are doing. They are the ones who will finally understand you, and provide you financial and emotional help if needed.
11. You can work for 18-20 hours a day, 7 days a week, if you are truly inspired by the vision that you are taking forward.
12. Start as early as possible. Least liabilities can help tremendously. If starting out with family, children and liabilities, factor them in your decision to start in the first place.
13. If people around you think you are crazy, you are ahead of the curve. If they think the idea is great, then you are most likely with them on the curve, and your idea might not be tomorrow ready.
14. VCs either say yes, or anything other than no. they never say no. So, don't go by what they say!

Can leaders be nice?

After reading a couple of books and magazines on traits of leaders, I am left wondering... can leaders be nice? It is always mentioned that leaders take a had stance of "my way or the highway". They are driven by a dream and align people to what the dream is. They run an organization to make sure that it is ahead of its times, and functioning smoothly at all times. They pay attention to little things (aesthetics, appearance etc.) of their organization. They know when to say what.
This now points me to the question - can leaders be nice to the employees of an organization? Employees are almost always in the firing line. Being a hard-ass is almost an inherent capability of a leader. Does being a hard-ass necessarily mean that they cannot afford to let down their weapons?

Personally, I believe that leaders can be nice. They can treat employees with respect, they can mingle with them like they are peers - we have innumerable examples for this. But, there is a thing or two to note here. From a leaders perspective, she should know where to draw the lines. When the question of aligning to the objectives of the dream, or challenging core values arises, leaders are expected to take a hard stand. They must make sure that while it is very important to maintain good relationships with the team members, it is equally important that no compromises happen on the core values of the dream. They must know where they need to be soft, and where they need to be snotty.
From the employees perspective, it is equally important to draw the line too. They must know their limits, and they must realize that even though they are all working hard to achieve a common goal, there is always that "something extra" that their leader has. It's like a chef in a hotel, who finally adds in a magic touch to anything that she makes. There is always a secret sauce which the leader carries. Not that it is a "secret secret", but there is always some thing which the employees have not thought about, which the leader has. Not realizing this generally leads to a lot of issues. Right from assuming equality at all stages - responsibility and pay-wise, to assuming superiority over the leader. Note that good leaders always hire people better than them in a specific vertical - so it is natural for employees to feel superior than the leader - but it should be in their own vertical. The boss always has collective knowledge of a ton of things and that is why they are where they are.
I believe that the collective result of mutual respect and co-existence of employees and leaders makes the leader a nice person in general. It is not a single person's responsibility. Would like to know your insights too.

The good times are back!

I have again started to get in touch with my musical side. This time, not with drums, but with the guitar! Yeah - just like Slais (a.k.a known as Slash of GnR :)) For now, I only know how to play the C chord, and haven;t cut my fingers yet - so a complete novice.
The better part is that Aanasa, my daughter, is now learning to play the drums. And boy - has she picked up quickly. She knows to play the basic beats, and can now play Waka Waka of Shakira. Oh, and a lot of Nothing Else Matters of Metallica. Co-incidentally, that was the first rock song I heard, thanks to Mandar Amdekar, my guitar-wala cousin. And the next one was Cemetery Gates by Pantera. A little extreme you might say, but I was pretty cool back then. Coming back to Aanasa, I really hope that continues to play and prosper. She is great at creative elements, so percussion might be just the thing for her. Here's hoping to see her play DT one day!
Oh, by the way, Mayur Darda is teaching me to play the guitar, and Aneeket Kate is teaching Aanasa to play the drums. Aneeket has introduced Aanasa and me to the Cajon box, which sounds very cool and is excellent to learn basic beats. Actually, it sounds like the table top drum which I used to play in the engineering college canteen when singing songs with the gang. Only better. Thanks guys! Feels good to be around music and musicians again.

Woken up

Phew! It's been two and a half years since my last update. Many things have changed since then, personally and professionally.
On the personal front. I was once a naive geek, and have now changed to a more broad minded, multi-skilled and much more aware geek. Heck, you can't get the geek out of me! I've interacted with a whole bunch of different people, and have gained a bucketful of knowledge of human behaviour and emotions. On the way, I've made some really good friends, who have seen me through thick and thin and have stayed on as my friends. Kudos to you folks for bearing with me! I've seen the ups and downs of what life can dish out at you, and have stuck on, thanks to tremendous support from Arpita. Together, we make a good team - she with brains, and me with beauty. No seriously, she is the guiding light, and I am the person who gets things done where the light beam is pointed to. Our children have grown up, and for the past year, due to a variety of professional bindings, I could hardly spend time with them. I missed seeing my daughter turn into a big girl, from a little girl. I missed seeing my son grow from a toddler to a little boy. Maybe I can make it up to them now...
Professionally, I have grown leaps and bounds on my view of the education industry - have interacted with the government, with parents, with children, with other educationists, and technology specialists. Putting down my experiences in words is going to be impossible, but I now have a 360 degree view of K-12 education - what it takes to start / re-start and run a school - finances, infrastructure, technology, administration, catering, transport, liasoning and HR. What is missing? Academics! Now what sense does that make? Shouldn't I know most about academics since I am "involved" in K-12 education? Heck, no! I beg to differ. And the people who know me from childhood would be thankful for that.  Academics is best left to Arpita. There is no one who can challenge her on that. She can kick some serious a** in education. She can win arguments about education hands down. For the past many years that she has been involved with education in Millennium National School, she has created waves in education. K-12 academics and organization = Arpita. Simple. Back to me.
Along the way, I have realized that people management is the most crucial of all the roles that anyone ever plays in any industry. Other qualities that are required in the education space are self-realization, emotional intelligence, stick-to-it-ivity and patience. All the things that I have learnt in the past two years, I will put up in separate posts.
Anyway, to sum up, I am now going to be actively posting stuff here. Not that I have any followers, but it would be good to get frank feedback on what I write.

Creating a LiveCD using UCK of Ubuntu 10.10

I needed to create a live CD which will have PPPoE, Flash and Adobe AIR, OpenSSH and Vino.

Here are the steps to configure a LiveCD using UCK on Ubuntu 10.10
1. Install UCK (apt-get install uck). Install gfxboot-dev similarly.
2. Run uck-gui
3. Go through the steps till it launches the package manager.
4. Choose the following packages: vino, openssh-server, openssh-client, kernel sources, kernel headers, pppoe*.
5. Then add all the repositories available from Settings of the package manager.
6. Choose to install adobe flashplugin
7. Choose Apply to install the selected packages.
8. Launch the console and edit the /etc/apt/sources.list file and add the following lines:
deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu/ lucid partner
deb-src http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu/ lucid partner
9. Run apt-get update
10. Run apt-get install adobeair, to install AIR.

Fedora Core 9 woes

Far from over, my Fedora Core 9 woes continue. This time its on a Celeron 1.7 GHz cpu. And its the brand new Firefox and Adobe Flash releases giving me the headache.
FC9 yum now distributes 3.0-0.60.beta5.fc9.
Adobe, since my last writeup, has started shipping Version 10 of its Flash Player.

The issue is this: When I accessed any flash content, and then moved away to any non-flash content page, and by chance moved my mouse, Firefox crashed with a SEGV - segmentation fault with some weird error in run-mozilla.sh which contained something like $prog{$1+"$@"}. I spent almost 6-7 days trying to figure out who's problem it was - Firefox's, Flash's or the site's. I came upon people mentioning problems of locale (which I had started believing looking at some random messages in my strace log of firefox), xlib, fontconfig, and even setting RAM speed to match the CPU speed! Well, finally, I read up that the nspluginwrapper was needed in some older version of firefox, for the Flash plugin not to crash, and had been apparently solved in the latest version. Yeah right.

Looks like nspluginwrapper IS the culprit. Once I installed the package, things seem to be working. For now.

Damn you Mozilla guys.

One more interesting thing I have observed is why yum lists firefox-3.0-0.60.beta5.fc9 as stable? Is beta stuff stable nowadays? I might have missed something in the software engineering trend, but AFAIK, beta is NOT for general use. Hmm...

Linux and Load shedding

This is amusing... I went to install Fedora Core 9 on on Celeron D CPU that I have... and couldn't because of load shedding. The thing was that it took so long for Fedora to install, that by the time the thing was nearing completion, I used to lose electricity. And I hadn't put the machine on my n-hour UPS.
One weird condition arose when Fedora DID install successfully, and on the first boot, I lost power and the machine shut down. When the power came up, the file system got mounted read-only for some reason and then the firstboot service couldn't write to disk. I tried doing an fsck, but that didn't do any wonders. The weird part is that I couldn't access the console tty's from the firstboot screen by doing a Ctrl-Alt-F1 etc. I had to murder the X screen by Ctrl-Alt-Bksp and that gave me prefdm errors by the ton. I could then access the console tty's. Weird.
Anyhow, I reinstalled the system again, and now its running good.
So who's to blame... Fedora for taking long to install, or MSEB, for keeping power on for short durations? I think we will all agree to blame MSEB. :-)