JANUARY 2012
THE WAY I WORK
AJIT ANDHARE
SUCCESS AFTER THE BIG BANG CEO, COLOSCEUM MEDIA Page 52
Back to the Past
The Magazine for Growing Companies
Back to the Past
WHERE DO YOU HIRE FROM? Page 48
His company grew 6500 times in the first six years. Can Manoj Kumar Upadhyay recreate Acme Tele Power’s early magic? PAGE 26
The magazine for growing companies
January 2012 | `150 | Volume 02 | Issue 12 A 9.9 Media Publication
MAKE SMART BUSINESS RESOLUTIONS
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Photograph by name tk
JANUARY 2012 | INC. | 13
January 2012
contents
A Perfect Role Ajit Andhare found his calling in TV content. Now, he’s scripting ideas to redefine the space.
26 Cover Story The Intrepid Innovator
Manoj Kumar Upadhyay’s Acme Tele Power grew more than 6,500 times in its first six years. His innovative power management products for telecom did the trick. Can he repeat that business magic with solar power and other energy management solutions?
56 I Wish I Knew Then... S.N. Rai S.N. Rai, co-founder, Lava International might have got into business after two decades of corporate life, but that experience is coming in handy now.
52 The Way I Work
A bit of Red Bull, lots of coffee and tough deadlines keeps his team up all night. But Colosceum Media’s founder, Ajit Andhare, lives on a different tonic. His adrenaline rush comes from the buzz of ideas. as told to rohini banerjee
as told to ira swasti
by shreyasi singh
34 Company of the Year, Inc. Meet Your New Brain
Evernote’s Phil Libin has a few not-so-modest goals: to impact a billion people, to build a company that lasts 100 years, and to completely change the way we remember everything. So far, so good.
photograph by Jiten Gandhi
by david h. freedman
This edition of Inc. magazine is published under license from Mansueto Ventures LLC, New York, New York. Editorial items appearing on pages 12, 13, 22, 34-42 were all originally published in the United States edition of Inc. magazine and are the copyright property of Mansueto Ventures, LLC, which reserves all rights. Copyright © 2009 and 2010 Mansueto Ventures, LLC. The following are trademarks of Mansueto Ventures, LLC: Inc., Inc. 500.
on the cover
Manoj Kumar Upadhyay, founder, chairman & CEO, Acme Tele Power. Photographed by Subhojit Paul in Gurgaon. Cover design by Peterson.
january 2012 | INC. | 1
contents
January 2012
13
14
21 09
05 Editor’s Letter
06 Behind the Scenes Firms that got bookworms crawling to Bookaroo, a children’s literature festival
09 Launch
Tech venture trends that will dominate 2012 The Ticker CEO Knowledge Forum Research corner: How disaster-ready are you? The Inc. Data Bank Skimmer’s Guide to: Too Big to Know, by David Weinberger
13 Get Real
By Jason Fried Yes, there are better choices than cash when it comes to showing appreciation.
14 Passions
Gaurav Bhagat is an ace when it comes to the sleight of hand
16 The Dressing Room By Krishna Kumar It doesn’t have to be lonely at the top. Don’t hesitate to reach out.
18 Innovations
A small firefighter that saves many lives
21 The Goods
Get these mobile apps: Your business will thank you Headsets for tablets E-mail promos, reimagined Tech Wise, by Soham Raninga: The gadget universe will never be the same again. Things Yashish Dahiya Can’t Live Without
Guidebook, No. 12
How to make apt business resolutions, and stick to them. Following Page 24.
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Strategy 45 Managing Be feedback-hungry. Keeping your ears trained, and your mind open can lead to great products. 47 Sales & marketing What a rural holiday venture must-do to get its business itinerary buzzing with travellers. 48 hiring Got a signboard to your office? Let it do more than give directions. Use it to shout out your vacancies. 49 company culture Get more women on board. Achieve better results. 50 Elevator pitch MyGuestHouse helps you book affordable rooms online. Will investors check in with `5 crore?
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Photograph by name tk
JANUARY 2012 | INC. | 13
A great issue
My heartfelt compliments for a wonderful November issue and a fabulous cover story. The Sagars have been photographed so well and the article also carries mind-blowing pictures. These calm your nerves when you see them. The magic that you have created with words is awesome. — Venkatesh Ganapathy, General Manager, Firepro Systems, Bengaluru
A mirror to entrepreneurs Jugaad as it is called in Indian parlance defines the unstoppable entrepreneurs of India. This magazine brings that out in every aspect of an entrepreneur’s journey. Seeing their passion is really amazing. I also enjoy the Behind the Scenes section where you showcase companies that service theatres, bars or other public places. As an investment banker, it reminds me of the importance of observation—interesting companies are all around us.
Addictive reading I take this opportunity to congratulate you on creating a hardcore dynamite of a magazine on entrepreneurship. I just read your last eight issues at one go. mukul gupta, General Manager, Patrika Group
Good going Wanted to congratulate you for the editorial quality of Inc. India. It’s my favourite. kuldip nar, Managing Director, Aidmatrix
Foundation
priyesh karia, on e-mail
MANAGING DIRECTOR: Dr Pramath Raj Sinha Printer & Publisher: Anuradha Das Mathur Editorial managing Editor: shreyasi singh assistant features editor: rohini banerjee feature writer: ira swasti Copy Desk Managing Editor: Sangita Thakur Varma DEsign Sr Creative Director: Jayan K Narayanan Art Director: Anil VK Associate Art Director: PC Anoop Visualisers: Prasanth TR, Anil T & Shokeen Saifi Sr Designers: Sristi Maurya, NV Baiju & Chander Dange Designers: Suneesh K, Shigil N, Charu Dwivedi Raj Verma, Prince Antony, Binu MP & Peterson Chief Photographer: Subhojit Paul Photographer: Jiten Gandhi
4 | INC. | JANUARY 2012
community team product manager: mahesh ravi assistant product manager: Rajat gupta associate: deepika sharma Sales & Marketing senior vice president: krishna kumar (+91 98102 06034) business development Manager: arjun sawhney (+91 95822 20507) assistant regional manager (south & WEST) rajesh kandari (+91 98111 40424)
Production & Logistics Sr General manager (Operations) Shivshankar M Hiremath Manager Operations: Rakesh upadhyay Asst. Manager - Logistics: Vijay Menon Executive Logistics: Nilesh Shiravadekar Production Executive: Vilas Mhatre
A big fan I am a big fan of Inc. India. Columns like “I Wish I Knew Then” and “How I Did It” are such a joy to read. In a country that feeds on Bollywood and cricket, entrepreneurs are my heroes. And your magazine brings them closer to me. harshvardhan bhatkuly, on e-mail from Goa
To submit a letter, or alert us to an error, write to us at inc.india@9dot9.in Letters may be edited for space and style. Submission constitutes permission to use.
Logistics MP Singh, Mohd. Ansari OFFICE ADDRESS nine dot nine mediaworx Pvt Ltd A-262, Defence Colony, New Delhi–110 024 For any queries, please contact us at help@9dot9.in Published, Printed and Owned by Nine Dot Nine Mediaworx Private Limited. Published and printed on their behalf by Anuradha Das Mathur. Published at A-262, Defence Colony, New Delhi–110 024 printed at Tara Art Printers Pvt ltd. A-46-47, Sector-5, NOIDA (U.P.) 201301 Editor: Anuradha Das Mathur
editor’s letter
How Things Change Over a long weekend last month, I devoured Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs. At 630 pages, it’s a hefty tome. But Isaacson’s breezy style and the sheer force of Steve Jobs’ fascinating life makes it read like a potboiler. Like good books tend to do, it also throws up parallels. Certainly in my world, inhabited as it is by entrepreneurs, references to Steve Jobs come in thick and fast anyway. Not surprisingly, Manoj Kumar Upadhyay, the founder and CEO of Acme Tele Power, an energy management company, and this month’s cover story, is also deeply inspired by Jobs. Does he look up to the legendary Apple boss to make sense of his own business trajectory? In 2003, Upadhyay came from almost nowhere to introduce an industry-transforming power management system for telecom tower sites. He was 33. It was an explosive start. Within six years, Upadhyay’s Acme was roughly a `2,000-crore company—helping cliThings I Learnt ents like Bharti Airtel reduce their In This Issue diesel bills. The ramp up mirrored Keep at it. If you try the frenzy that defined telecom in 20 things, one of them will work. Point taken, the mid 2000s. Mr Upadhyay But Acme’s journey, much like Put more thought Apple’s, wasn’t going to be without into your new year twists and turns. Telecom’s hunger resolutions. Break them for expansion slowed. And over the up into achievable, monthly past four years, a restless Upadhyay goals, rather than setting wishful targets has been trying to come up with
another radical innovation. Relentlessly curious since childhood, he’s dabbled with a wastewater treatment plant and cold chain technology, none of which have proved to be the “next big thing”. Upadhyay is now 41. Does he worry about being an early peaker? Or does he take solace from the fact that even men like Jobs came up with products that didn’t go anywhere, only to revolutionise multiple industries later? Find out on Page 26. Interestingly, this issue seems to be about turning points. Our parent magazine, Inc., has named Evernote as its Company of the Year. Evernote has a cult following in places like Silicon Valley and Tokyo. Phil Libin, the company’s founder, wants a billion people to use its products. Yet, in late 2008, the company was in danger of going under, till a random e-mail from a Swedish entrepreneur turned things around. You don’t want to miss the story on Page 34. It’s a great way to begin your new year.
Shreyasi Singh shreyasi.singh@9dot9.in
january 2012 | INC. | 5
BEHIND THE SCENES
Companies at the Heart of Everyday Life
Organisation and promotions Roping in more than 50 authors, poets, storytellers and illustrators for three days is no mean feat. But, Teamwork Productions, an entertainment firm started by Sanjoy Roy, ensured that kids and the likes of Tapas Guha, Jerry Pinto and Devdutt Pattanaik, talked a lot at Bookaroo. Founded in 1989, Teamwork provides documentary filmmaking and event management services. Their 25-member team has undertaken several projects in India and abroad: the Hay Festival, Kerala, the Jaipur Literature festival, Jaipur, and the Perth International Arts Festival, Australia, are some of their most popular fests.
Books Moby Dick mingled with Harry Potter while Charles Dickens shared space with Roald Dahl. At Bookaroo, most of the paperbacks and hardbacks were provided by Delhi-based store Eureka!. Started in 2003 by media professionals-cumbibliophiles Swati Roy and M. Venkatesh, Eureka! provides an impressive collection of books from every genre—biographies, science fiction, poetry and fairy tales—for children. It lets people order from their online portal or visit their “shop around the corner” in Alaknanda, Delhi.
6 | INC. | JANUARY 2012
Bookaroo, Children’s Literature Festival, Delhi
26:11:2011, 2:30PM
Posters Don’t tell your kids to read more books, let Bageera do the dirty work instead! To get children into story telling sessions, literary quizzes and scriptwriting workshops, Picture Street, a Delhi-based design studio, designed animal-based posters for the festival. Picture Street usually handles print and exhibition work for its parent company—Frame Animation. Started in 2005, by Neeraj and Pallavi Sahai, the studio has worked for the National School of Drama, United Nations Development Programme and the Salaam Balak Trust among others. It has a core strength of five permanent workers and hires more during projects.
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY TEAMWORK PRODUCTIONS
reported by ira swasti
News, Ideas & Trends in Brief
launch
What’s the future like? Tech venture trends to watch out for in 2012 2011 was a significant year for the technology
venture ecosystem in India. There have been islands of exuberance—e-commerce for instance, accompanied by the continuing search by technology VC investors for a disruptive Indian clean-tech company. Products and services delivered on-the-cloud have definitely arrived, as have mobile applications as an integral go-to-market for both young companies and global giants. Tablets and smartphones have breached the sub $100 price point, cementing their future as devices of choice for customers in both developed and emerging markets. As of September 2011, there were 112 million claimed internet users in India, with close to 80 per cent of them being “active”. (Source: Report on Internet in India (I-Cube) 2011 by IAMAI). As technology venture investors strive to see the future and invest in it, the landillustration by Prince Antony
scape is bound to get more interesting. Here are some top trends one can expect to unfold in the coming year. 1.Existing e-commerce megastores will move towards becoming “differentiated horizontals”
Indian e-commerce took off by ventures looking to create market leadership in select consumer segments. For instance, while Flipkart focused on becoming the largest online retailer of books, Myntra differentiated itself by targeting customised apparel. These segments—books, apparel, accessories, shoes all have multi-billion dollar domestic market sizes, and the first wave of institutional investors in these companies took a bet on creating category leaders. The past year has been a watershed in Indian e-commerce with these early cat-
egory leaders raising multiple rounds of funding, aggressively acquiring customers through television advertising, and gradually turning into online megastores with multiple categories. Right now, there is immense clutter in the online megastore category itself. As these e-retailers grapple for consumer mind-share, they are expected to shift towards becoming “differentiated horizontals”. Pricing, catalogue range and advertising is no longer enough to create a winner. Each of these e-commerce companies will innovate to create differentiation. These could include fashion e-commerce ventures providing online design studios and value-added fashion tips and content to customers, book e-retailers creating social networking applications to connect enthusiasts, online travel companies providing highly customised holiday planning services and focusing on micro-niches such as wildlife and adventure sports. These innovations will target creating consumer stickiness and providing the proverbial ‘customer delight’. The strategy of creating category leaders will still exist but it will move on to the next layer of purchases like jewellery, home décor and grocery. 2. Rise of Indian Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) as a viable customer base for technology ventures
The Indian SME space has for long been the pot of gold in the distance—a space with immense potential but which few have been able to crack. The advent of cloud computing or software-as-a-service model has changed that. Cloud-based delivery of products and services allow pay-as-you-go pricing, eliminates need for upfront capex and allows vendors to do without face-to-face sales. These aspects are essential for cracking the potential customer base of more than 3 million Indian SMEs that are now moving from basic adoption of IT to advanced ERP and software platforms deployment. Exits of venture-backed Indian cloud companies in 2011 have further strengthened investor confidence in the space. continued on the next page
JANUARY 2012 | INC. | 9
launch
Going forward, SMEs will increasingly become key customers for Indian technology ventures, utilising cloud-based business models. According to Springboard Research, Indian SaaS market is expected to reach about $352 million in 2012, with enterprise cloud spending expected to grow at 60 per cent. 3. Education and vocational training to move out of classrooms and onto technology platforms
The skill-set shortage and lack of infrastructure in Indian education space is already well-talked about. As per a NASSCOM-McKinsey report, only about 25 per cent of technical graduates and 10-15 per cent of generalist graduates are fit for employment in the offshore IT and BPO industries. The situation is ironical, with millions competing for a few thousand seats in the prestigious IITs while tens of thousands of engineering seats in Tamil Nadu lie vacant. The situation can only be addressed by private sector intervention, and we already see examples of technology start-ups doing that. Young ventures are utilising tablets and online platforms to provide access to the best material for engineering and medical test preparation to students in Tier-II and III towns. A few have developed hands-on science kits and interactive simulations to make science and math education in schools more intuitive. Others are developing content to supplement college education by training fresh graduates in real-world technical and soft skills. The coming year will see several of these ventures raise fresh capital and scale up. 4. Business model innovations to take precedence in renewable energy applications
10 | INC. | JANUARY 2012
The technology-end of most renewable energy segments have become largely commoditised. Solar PV modules are available at all-time low prices due to oversupply in global markets, and biomass gasifiers can be bought off the shelf. Greenfield innovation at the laboratory level is mainly restricted to developed economies, with their mature R&D infrastructure. Instead, Indian technology startups are taking the lead in developing business model innovations that help create commercial and economic use cases for Indian enterprises and consumers. Innovative system integration ventures are developing customised off-grid solar solutions to replace diesel gensets in manufacturing industries. Others are developing pay-as-you-go business models for residential solar applications, using indigenously developed sensor and metering technologies. A new generation of Indian technology ventures is also working on BOOT (Build-OwnOperate-Transfer) based smart grid applications for energy management, remote asset monitoring and control. Soon, these business model innovations will take precedence over pure technology innovations in the Indian renewable energy space. The above trends point towards exciting times ahead for the Indian technology venture ecosystem. It could well be the much needed kicker for the overall Indian economy in times of global economic uncertainty. —Soumitra Sharma. (Sharma is part of the Investments Team at IDG Ventures India, a $150 million venture capital fund focused on technology and technology-enabled businesses. The views expressed are strictly personal.)
shetty
Bollywood and business, your lethal combo for 2012... actress Karisma Kapoor has invested an undisclosed amount in Babyoye.com, an kapoor e-commerce store for baby and mother care, becoming its largest individual shareholder…More investments continue with Matrix Partners (India) acquiring an undisclosed stake for `22 crore in Waterlife India, a Hyderabad-based water purification firm...Then, private equity firm Jacob Ballas Capital is expected to put in $150 million in India in 2012… Not just investments, it rained awards at the end of 2011. Naveen Tewari, founder of InMobi, won the Young Achiever of the investment money Year Award at the World Brand Congress 2011 for his firm’s role in mobile marketing and ads…The spree continued with Chetan Maini, co-founder of Reva Electric Car Company, the first to make battery-charged automobiles in India, won The Economist’s Innovation Award 2011 in the energy and environment category. Healthcare pioneer and founder of Narayana Hrudayalaya, Dr Devi Shetty, also won the same award in the business process category. —Inc. India
photograph by S. radhakrishna
The Ticker
“What’s the Future Like?” continued...
research corner
Are you prepared for disasters?
Lots of great conversations More than 150 founders of midsize entrepreneurs came together to discuss leadership and business strategy in Raipur, Aurangabad and Chandigarh.
A Great Platform Multi-city events take us beyond the big cities Over the last two months, together with ICICI Bank, Inc. India has organised a series of CEO Knowledge Forums across towns like Chandigarh, Raipur and Aurangabad. Conceived as platforms for founders of small and mid-sized enterprises, the events brought together entrepreneurs for freewheeling discussions on issues that confront them most—leadership, access to finance and marketing. This series got off to a great start with the Chandigarh event. K.B.S. Sidhu, principal secretary, government of Punjab, and the keynote speaker for the evening, said India’s mid-sized enterprises were going to lead economic growth. “They must be encouraged, and banks and funding agencies should respond to their needs to further their progress,” Sidhu said. At a panel discussion afterwards, lively discussions followed about whether the ecosystem had really changed for entrepreneurs. Vijay Deshwal, zonal head, commercial banking, ICICI
Bank, said events like these demonstrated the bank’s commitment to nurturing and understanding SME clients. “We want to be partners in their growth,” Deshwal asserted. Still, several entrepreneurs including Anupama Arya, who co-founded Mobera Systems, and is an angel investor as well, said banks and other funding agencies had yet to come of age in India. Devi Prasad Khandelia, President, Industrial Association of Chandigarh, agreed. Expectedly, there were many conversations in all the cities about global economic conditions, and how they would impact business in India. While there were worries about slowing reforms at the central government level in India, many people said Indian entreprenuers have it in them to withstand trouble. Little wonder then that the leadership and motivation sessions, conducted by OD Alternatives, an executive coaching and team building consultancy, were a big hit. Indian entrepreneurs are keen to sharpen all the weapons in their arsenal to forge ahead. —Inc. India
According to a recent study by Regus, a flexible workplace solutions provider, nearly half of all Indian businesses don’t have a disaster recovery plan in place for their IT infrastructure. Worse, six in 10 companies don’t have an alternate workplace for business continuity when a disaster strikes. Conducted in the aftermath of global events such as the tsunami in Japan, major floods in Australia and Hurricane Irene in the US, this study, conducted across 12,000 senior business people across multiple organisations in 85 countries, aims to draw attention to disaster management plans for businesses. Yet, the study found that close to 43.5 per cent of Indian companies believe the cost of disaster recovery prohibits their planning, and is the primary reason why undertaking disaster recovery plans did not seem viable. Which is why, a significant 63.5 per cent of enterprises in India said they were ready to buy a workplace disaster recovery facility if the option is priced affordably. Smaller organisations are credited for being more agile and adaptive. But size does indicate preparedness in this case, at least. This survey found that as companies become larger, they are more likely to have a solution in place both for their IT infrastructure and for their staff. Understandably, the sector most likely to have an IT disaster recovery plan in place is the financial services sector. JANUARY 2012 | INC. | 11
launch
inc. data bank
Crunching the numbers
A skimmer’s guide to the latest business books
IPos
211 The number of companies that, as of October,
had filed for an initial public offering but had not yet gone public, the most in more than a decade
Holiday Shopping
How consumers plan to spend this holiday season, compared with last year:
The book: Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren’t the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room, by David Weinberger; Basic Books.
Portion of venture capital–backed companies that went public within five years of receiving funding From 1991 to 2000: From 2001 to 2010:
18%
1%
299
5% 36% Will spend Will spend more
300
The IPO Pipeline
less
ipo filings
200
Portion of consumers who use coupons when holiday shopping:
223*
51
100
ipo filing withdrawals
55*
*as of october 26, 2011
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
The backstory: Weinberger, a senior researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard, has been a prescient cartographer of the new digital world since co-authoring the seminal Cluetrain Manifesto in 1999.
RenaissanceCapital.com; Scott Shane, Case Western Reserve University
2011
37%
2007
22%
EMPLOYEE SATISFACTION
Portion of employees who are searching for a new job:
Share of employees who say they feel unappreciated at work:
38%
39%
(up from 36% in February)
(up from 32% in February)
Employees’ top choices if allowed to make a few improvements to their offices: 44%
35%
eliminate office politics
improve office furniture
41%
34%
encourage telecommuting
provide private work areas
37%
34%
upgrade computers
The big idea: Knowledge—previously a finite body of expert opinion and accepted fact—is now, thanks to the internet, unbounded, protean, and impossible to master. Decision makers must get comfortable managing an abundance of information and reconciling diverse perspectives.
allow more flexible hours
All of us are smarter than any of us: As more brains contribute to the creation of knowledge online, Weinberger observes, more brains are required to wrest value from it. Consequently, leaders will start to rely on networks to make decisions. For instance, Jimmy Wales, cofounder of Wikipedia, devolves most decision-making to the Wikipedia community.
Globoforce Workforce Mood Tracker; Staples.com
How Americans spend time online when using mobile phones
42% e-mail 33% The portion of
Americans who say they have no spare cash this holiday season Nielsen
12 | INC. | JANUARY 2012
10% other 3% weather Nielsen
5% music and videos
19% search
engines and portals
11% social
networks
10% news, sports, and entertainment
—Compiled by Andrew Shafer
If you read nothing else: Chapter Two includes a fascinating history of facts as they evolved from scarce, isolated foundations of knowledge to abundant nodes on a network open to interpretation and dispute. Food for thought: As individual expertise is devalued, how will that affect consulting firms and other businesses that tout unparalleled mastery of a subject? —Leigh Buchanan
Kelly kollar
mobile internet
GET REAL BY JASON FRIED
A Gift that Keeps Giving
This holiday season, rethink the cash bonus It’s December, and that means it’s bonus, gift, and holiday-party time. So what’s a business owner to do? Before answering that question, it helps to ponder another: what do you want to communicate? Every end-of-year gesture says something different. A cash bonus might say, “Job well done.” A gift: “Here’s something we think you might like.” And the holiday party always seemed to say to me, “Look at all the money we are wasting that could have been better spent elsewhere.” For most of our 11 years here at 37signals, we’ve given employees cash bonuses. And why not? Everyone likes cash. But the message that cash bonuses convey always felt a bit empty to me. What’s more, because our company has been growing consistently each year, those bonuses came to be expected. They didn’t feel special any more. Last year, I decided to give a gift instead of cash. I thought about the best presents I had ever received. They were always those that I’d never buy myself and/or didn’t even know existed. Once, it was a biography of Nikola Tesla. Another year, a friend gave me tickets to the opera. Each of these gifts expanded my horizons and introduced me to something new. When I was thinking of what to give my employees last year, I decided I wanted it to be something that few people knew even existed; something beautifully crafted and handmade; a one-of-a-kind and fundamentally special object. And I wanted it to be a tool. That’s because at 37signals, we make tools. Basecamp is a tool that helps people collaborate on projects. Highrise helps users keep track of their business contacts and relationships. We make software but like to think of ourselves as craftspeople. We are every bit as obsessed with detail, beauty, utility, and integrity as a master Japanese bladesmith would be with his samurai swords. ILLUSTRATION by Prince Antony
That’s when it hit me: a sword. OK, maybe a sword wasn’t practical. But how about the most beautiful kitchen knife in the world? I remembered a video I had seen earlier that year about a fellow named Bob Kramer, a knifemaker in Olympia, Washington. Kramer’s knives are custom made, one knife at a time, and are absolutely gorgeous. (Check them out yourself at kramerknives.com.) I decided to ask Bob to make each of our 20 employees an 8-inch chef ’s knife. I believe that the quality of the products and tools that you use every day, both professionally and personally, can have a big impact on the quality of your own work and creativity. In other words, if you want to get better, surround yourself with better. Kramer’s knives, crafted from Damascus steel and a variety of hardwoods (we chose ironwood), are beyond better, which is exactly what I wanted for my employees. So I e-mailed Kramer, told him how much I admired his work, and ordered 20 knives. It took Bob a few months to fill the order, because each of our knives took three days to make, and Bob and his assistant are the only ones who make them. But finally, right around Christmas, we delivered the knives to everyone. We also watched a video Bob had sent along in which he thanked us for the order and expressed how much he enjoyed making this particular set of knives. Employees were thrilled, and so was I. I like to think that every time they chop an onion or mince a clove of garlic, they’ll appreciate the craft and affection that went into making the tool. And with any luck, that craft, dedication to quality, and attention to detail will seep into other areas of their lives—both in the workplace and beyond. And that’s way cooler than any holiday party I’ve ever been to. Jason Fried is co-founder of 37signals, a Chicago-based software firm, and co-author of the book Rework. Knives or cash—what do you think of Jason Fried’s decision? How do you plan to reward your employees this year? Let us know at www.inc.com/magazine/201112/ jason-fried-holiday-gifts.html january 2012 | INC. | 13
PASSIONS
Life Outside the Office
“Poker is about maths, body language and smart bluffing. Very few games are this realistic.”
14 | INC. | JANUARY 2012
Gaurav Bhagat
Poker
Losing is not always so bad. Gaurav Bhagat would agree. It was in 2009, during a work trip to China, that the founder of Consortium Gifts, a corporate gifts company, first laid eyes on a poker table. A card enthusiast, he sat down for a round. Although he was “positively thrashed”, he was immediately hooked. “It was intelligent and exciting, like business itself. You have to evaluate and strategise; read your opponent’s body language,” gushes Bhagat. Many people think of poker as gambling, like slot machines or flash. “But it’s a sport. In the next few years, it’ll be as popular as tennis or golf here.” Since 2009, Bhagat has been at it—honing his skill by “devouring” the handful of great books available, and practising his moves with his poker group. Last year, he travelled to Goa to play the India Poker Championship (IPC), and to Macau for the Asia Pacific Poker Tour. At the IPC in Goa in 2010, Bhagat was up against Indian champion Sameer Rottensay at the finals table. After fighting it out for a gruelling seven hours, a bad hand ended it for Bhagat. But his love for the game has only just begun.
Can’t wait to play here... His company keeps him firmly tied to the office. But Bhagat is hoping things will change soon. “Once the business is totally set up, I won’t be needed as much. I can then play more.” Here are the tournaments he wants to ace:
World Series of Poker, Las Vegas; Asia Pacific Poker Tour, Macau; India Poker Championship, Goa For beginners: Bhagat suggests reading a book written by Tom Schneider, a former CEO and now a professional poker
photograph by Manasa Madishetty
player. The book’s called OOPS! I Won Too Much Money: Winning Wisdom from the Boardroom to the Poker Table. Schneider draws 61 similarities between business and poker. Bhagat’s a fan— probably because like Schneider he’d spotted the shared traits.
reported by Rohini Banerjee
THE DRESSING ROOM BY KRISHNA KUMAR
It sure gets lonely at the top
Don’t hesitate to reach out. Much like in sports, working with a coach can help your performance peak in business too. Ancient wisdom had us believe that
the higher we climb, the harder would be the fall. Down the ages, this metaphor couldn’t curtail the human spirit of reaching out for the skies and beyond. The human race has continued its upward march relentlessly with the spirit of entrepreneurship and adventure often guiding us to dizzying levels, especially when this growth is looked at from down below. No wonder, the saying now has a different twist. There’s been a modernisation of the metaphor— the higher we climb, the lonelier we get! If you are a first-time entrepreneur building a business, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Certainly, if you’re the CEO of a business, the loneliness would be an incredibly familiar feeling for you. Tell me if I’m wrong. Isn’t it a feeling that seems to overpower you, especially when the going gets tough and the road to nowhere beckons? It’s at times like these when you desperately need a sounding board or a support mechanism that puts you back on the straight path. The age-old maxim of “when the going gets tough, the tough get going” might sound familiar, and is a great motivational tool, but often it doesn’t offer much cheer to those in the thick of action. For example, how does a CEO figure out that decisions he or she recently made are in tune with his or her business
16 | INC. | january 2012
goals? Worse still, how can the CEO be sure that he’s read the market right? Who can he turn to for help to decide that his business goals mirror the market requirements correctly? Mostly, the decisions taken by a company’s top management relate to growing the business. At least, that should be theoretically so. But, what is the reality? In my illustration by Anil T
THE DRESSING ROOM
experience, more CEOs than not tend to micro-manage their businesses. Paradoxically, the pursuit of growth ends up becoming the biggest obstacle to growth. How then can top-level managers ensure they do not end up missing the woods for the trees while taking decisions? As a leadership coach, it’s the biggest coaching conundrum I face. I call it the ‘growth paradox’. Interestingly, the problem is not restricted to the world of business. I unexpectedly discovered this one evening while talking to a lady golfer who has been professionally participating on the Indian golf circuit for several years. Her regular golf coach, a good friend of mine, suggested a meeting between us to overcome a mental block that was consistently making her perform below potential on the greens. And, the global downturn (the cause of many a good golf game going awry these days) had nothing to do with her fitness or technical expertise, I was told. When I met the lady golfer, she began the conversation by telling me her problem—her “short game” was falling apart. For those unfamiliar with the sport, this essentially means that she was losing confidence while preparing to putt, essentially getting the ball closer to the hole. I had worked with similar issues in the past, and was fairly certain that this one could be fixed too. But I was keen to do more. I thought she needed to simultaneously focus on the bigger goal of moving up the rankings in Asia. So, I decided to gently steer the conversation in that direction. Almost on cue, I sensed certain discomfiture on her part. She seemed pretty sure that she had it pat down—that fixing her short game was the panacea for all her problems. She was intent on focusing on that short-term goal. She was determined that getting that right would move her up the rankings. Similarly, I’d worked sometime back with the CEO of a mid-sized pharmaceutical company. Right off the bat, he told me he’d never faced failure in his life. I perceived his to be an extremely positive and optimistic frame of mind. So, I thought about starting him off on a goal-setting exercise that would help him broaden his
vision for the company. But that’s not why he needed me. To my surprise, he immediately dismissed my suggestions for the business goals exercise and started talking about a personal goal—to lose 20 kgs of body weight. He told me he’d been obese for the past many years. It’s not that I don’t believe maintaining decent levels of fitness and good health isn’t a laudable, worth-having objective. But I was perplexed. First, he had claimed to have never failed in life and almost immediately after, he had confessed a personal failure. It got me thinking—why was leadership for him focusing on a relatively simpler personal goal? And what made him think that his business goals were much easier to achieve by comparison?
Coaching in the world of business is a concept that has been borrowed from the world of sports. Top class sportspersons routinely go back to the drawing board and discuss their career path and progress with coaches whose sole purpose is to help them achieve their highest potential. In other words, coaches help them reach out for higher targets by jointly setting short-to-medium term goals for them. Can coaches resolve the problems one faces in business too? For starters, one must keep in mind that coaches do not offer solutions to problems. They perform the vital role of supporting the person’s efforts to unlock the answers that lie buried within. They help the person retain focus on some broader goals, thus providing indirect support towards meeting them.
More CEOs than not micromanage their businesses. And hence, the pursuit of growth becomes the biggest obstacle to growth. I began wondering why many hugely successful people get caught up in resolving smaller goals while the bigger picture often eludes them. What’s more, most times these people are ignorant that they’re even doing this, especially in their professional life. At the top, you often don’t have people to tell you such things. It does not have to be lonely on the top! A supportive coach or a mentor can be really handy here. That being the case, why are senior business executives and CEOs reluctant to seek services of a coach who can help them in their journey towards achieving peak performance in their business? Is it that seeking support from an external source perceived as a sign of weakness in itself, even if such help is sought behind closed doors and out of the glare of the media and peer attention?
Personally, to say that either the lady golfer or the pharmaceutical CEO benefited from my coaching is wishful thinking. But, at least, in one instance, I was able to get the person to refocus on the big picture. In the other case, I remain optimistic the change will happen sooner, rather than later.
M. Krishna Kumar is a master trainer and professional coach specialising in transformational leadership. An internationally-certified tennis coach, he’s also the founder of Kinesis Sports, India’s first ISO 9001-2008 certified tennis training institution. You can find him at www.isecindia.in. january 2012 | INC. | 17
innovation
Companies on the Cutting Edge
The firefighter
Every year more than 7,000 people die in India due to accidents caused by cylinder gas leakages. One such blast in Delhi’s Chandni Chowk in 2009 triggered three college friends-turnedentrepreneurs to develop a device that could warn of a gas leakage before it turns into a disaster. Suraksha is a mobile-sized gadget created by RoboticWares, a Bhubaneswar-based software solutions company, that sets off three alarms—a buzzer, a flashing LED light and an SMS—to inform people of a gas leak. “It can be kept anywhere in the kitchen. And it will warn you of a leakage even when you’re away,” says Gaurav Shrivastava, co-founder, RoboticWares. The buzzer remains activated till the LPG leakage comes down to safe levels. Also, five phone numbers can be registered on it for the SMS service. RoboticWares has sold around 50 units of the device, mostly to commercial hotels in Bhubaneswar. It now plans to market it as a consumer product. Affordable Safety The basic version that only sets off a buzzer is priced at `2,000. The model that also sends text messages is available for `4,500. A Saviour in Time Recently, Suraksha helped avert a big disaster in Bhubaneshwar’s Crown Hotel. The hotel has installed four such devices. One of them detected a gas leakage on a floor that was virtually empty. The timely warning alerted the staff in time. Specifications Power supply: 12 V DC Operating temperature: -10 degrees Celsius to 70 degrees Celsius
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Suraksha
RoboticWares
“It feels great to know that through this device, we are saving so many lives.” —Gaurav Shrivastava, co-founder, RoboticWares
Photograph by subhojit paul
reported by ira Swasti
Your Business Toolbox
The Goods
Now, do business on your phone Mobile apps that increase your productivity in and out of office Doing business gets easier with these smart mobile apps. No more sleepless nights over fixing meetings, arranging business trips or giving presentations while on the go. Check out these apps, and make your mobile a super efficient business tool. —Ira Swasti
eMeetMe
Trying to fix a meeting with multiple clients and tired of the secretarial back and forth to pin down a date? This app helps you coordinate with a number of users and figure out their availability by synchronising it with your iPhone calendar. Select potential dates for a meeting on your mobile, choose contacts you want to invite from your address book and the app will do the rest. It sends e-mails to all invitees (who don’t need to have an iPhone or this app) asking them which dates best suit them. Their responses are sent back to you. There, your meeting just got fixed!
Scan2PDF
You need to send an important business document to your legal team and the scanner in the office isn’t working. Don’t worry. Your phone can double up as a scanner if you have the Scan2PDF app installed. This app uses your phone’s camera to capture the document and converts it into PDF files. Several pages can be scanned and combined into one PDF file. What next? Mail it to the guy or keep it as a digital backup. It works on the iOS, Windows and Android platforms.
Snapdat
Did you forget to bring your visiting card to an important business dinner? Fret not. You can launch, create and send one right away through your iPhone. Snapdat lets you create lively digital business cards called Snapcard, complete with a profile picture, your company logo and links to your Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter page. You can make multiple cards from 40 custom designs to send to appropriate official and personal contacts. The app syncs itself with your address book and a new contact is automatically saved when you receive a Snapcard from someone else.
TripIt
Planning business trips for your clients and employees can be a headache, given the endless flight, hotel and car bookings to manage. Here’s an app that allows you to organise all your trip details into one master itinerary even if arrangements are booked on different travel sites. All you have to do is forward your booking confirmations to plans@tripit. com and personal itineraries for each travel will be created. The app automatically includes maps, directions and weather, and also gives you options to book restaurants, theatre tickets and other attractions the city offers. Travellers get a shared company calendar to view co-workers’ plans.
MightyMeeting
Be prepared for any meeting on the go with this cloud-based app. Just upload or e-mail your powerpoint presentations and they will be accessible on your mobile phone through this app. You can invite users to participate from their own phones or computers and voila! You can have a fullfledged meeting with employees or clients right there. You can also upload demo videos of your products to showcase them before potential customers. JANUARY 2012 | INC. | 2 1
Products + Services
A.
b.
Must-Haves
My favourite tool for tracking job applications alicia navarro co-founder and ceo skimlinks, san francisco
My company sells a content monetisation platform for online publishers. Last year, we were growing fast and hiring a lot of people, so my partner and I started looking for a streamlined way to recruit and track job applicants. That’s when we came across a web-based service called the Resumator. Now, we log on to our Resumator account to create and publish job listings on our company’s Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter accounts. (We found our financial controller on Twitter.) We also embedded a widget on our website that automatically updates our Careers page when we add positions on Resumator. We can also post listings on free job boards, including Simply Hired. For each job, we include a unique link that brings applicants to the posting on our company’s branded job board on the Resumator site, where they can fill out applications and submit resumés. Then, my partner, the HR director, and I can review everything online. We use the Resumator’s Grow plan, which costs $199 a month and gives us a branded job board, the ability to post up to 10 open positions at a time, and access to reports and analytics. It’s been a great way to organise job applications, wherever we advertise them. —As told to J.J. McCorvey
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c.
Before You Buy
If you’re a frequent traveller, consider using a wired headset because it doesn’t require charging.
Can You Hear Me Now? Testing out headsets for tablets
Tablet computers can be great for making Skype calls, watching movies, and listening to music, especially during business trips. But the right headset is key. We tested these three models, which also work with most smartphones, on an iPad 2. —J.B. A. Sennheiser
Circle SC 230
The Circle’s noise-canceling microphone did a good job of cutting out background noise during Skype calls. Our voice sounded clearer to the person on the other end than on other headsets. Music and movies sounded crisp as well, but because we were testing a half-headphone model, the audio was in mono, not stereo. (You can also buy a dualheadphone version.) The 6.4-ounce headset, which fits comfortably, connects to a tablet using a 3.5-mm cable or USB cable. cost: $104
B. Plantronics Voyager Pro HD
Skype calls sounded loud and clear on this 0.6-ounce mono headset, which fits comfortably over one ear. That said, background noise was a problem for us, and we sounded a bit squeaky and distorted to those on the other end. Music and movies sounded average. One cool feature: The Voyager Pro, which can connect to a tablet over Bluetooth from up to 33 feet away, turns on automatically when you place it on your ear. The headset’s battery lasts six hours, shorter than the eight-hour battery life of many tablets. cost: $99
C. Logitech
Wireless Headset
Like the Voyager Pro, this 11-ounce headset can connect to a tablet over Bluetooth from up to 33 feet away. Songs and movies sounded crisp on the stereo headphones, and Skype calls came in loud and clear. But the person we called said our voice sounded distorted at times. The headset’s soft earphones felt comfortable, even after several hours of use. We also liked the flexible, foldout microphone boom. The headset lasts about six hours on a full charge. cost: $70
Inboxes
A fresh approach to e-mail marketing
Looking for ways to stand out in a sea of e-mail promotions? A web-based service called Movable Ink offers several apps that can jazz up e-mails with real-time content. On the Movable Ink site, you can create a countdown timer to encourage customers to take action during a sale. Then, simply copy and paste the provided HTML code into the body of an e-mail. You can also add live posts from your company’s Twitter feed or include a map pinpointing your business. When people open the e-mail, the map will be centered on their current location. cost: Starting at $3 per app for every 1,000 opened e-mails —Abe Brown
From left: Courtesy Subject; courtesy Company (3)
the goods
Products + Services
slide shows
tech wise soham raninga
Tech 2012.0 Belt up for one hell of a ride! Tech wise, this year is going to be disruptive, aggressive and game-changing. Let’s see product categories that are set to change forever, if the new launches this year deliver all they promise. Wafer thin notebooks with an eighthour battery life
Simply called the “Air”, the Apple MacBook Air became the benchmark for thin and light notebooks in 2008. Cut to 2012. You are now spoilt for options to get almostfeather weight notebooks (under 1.5 kg) that don’t compromise on business utility, performance or battery life. No wonder there’s a lot of buzz about the new models on the horizon. For example, Intel’s Ultrabook is a super-thin laptop with gorgeous high-definition screens, solid state memory and quad-core processors along with a promise of an eight-hour battery backup. Already, Acer, Asus and Lenovo have introduced their firstgeneration ultrabooks. This year the action gets more exciting with as many as 50 ultrabook models ready for launch. Save up around `50,000 if you want to get your hands on one.
potos by photos.com
Smart phones with more firepower than laptops
If you have been pondering over a quadcore processor upgrade for your laptop or desktop PC, you might just have spent too much time dreaming about those four cores in your computer. The third quarter of 2012 will announce the arrival of smartphones with quad-core processors. No, these aren’t prototypes or proof-ofconcept models, we are talking about a lineup of smartphones hitting retail stores —boasting of quad-core processors, almost 2 GB of RAM and more than 100 GB of memory space. Think about it—is it possible that some of us will never use a laptop ever again?
the goods
Plug in and present Creating a great PowerPoint presentation is no easy feat. These new plug-ins can make the process a lot simpler. —A.B.
Brace yourself for the Tablet Invasion
2012 is likely to be the year of the tablet. Nokia is set to launch tablets running on Microsoft Windows 8, a defining moment for both Microsoft and Nokia as they take a shot at a market which has so far been dominated by Apple. Google’s Android platform did allow for a flurry of Android-based tablets in the last quarter of 2011 but most failed to make a serious impact because of the lackluster performance of Android’s honeycomb platform. Google has announced a brand-new platform for tablets called the ICS ( Ice Cream Sandwich). With ICS, expect more than a 100 new tablet options from a price range of `3,000–40,000 to choose from in the next few months. For India, it’s a particularly special tablet year. Aakash will hit the stores. The upgraded version of the Aakash tablet, the Ubislate 7 (dubbed Aakash 2), is already taking preorders online with a final price tag of `3,000. No conversation on tablets can be complete without mentioning Apple. Apple addicts, rest assured. The company is likely to launch its new version this year. There’s no way the king of tablets will relinquish its reign.
LiveLoop
This plug-in lets an unlimited number of people edit a slide show in PowerPoint at the same time. After installing it, click a button to upload a presentation to your company’s server or LiveLoop’s cloud server, then invite collaborators. You can see which people are editing slides and chat with them. Changes appear in real time. cost: Free for three saved presentations or $9 a month for unlimited presentations
3D Everywhere, Everytime
The sheer number of 3D movie releases in the last quarter of 2011 is proof that 3D has finally arrived. Whether you like it or not, 2012 will see “3D” flashing all over the place. Smartphones, tablets, televisions, even mainstream laptops will soon offer 3D screens. Gaming and movies are expected to be the biggest drivers for this segment. 3D content creation will enter the overdrive mode, offering exclusive titles to further push buyers into adopting the technology. Personally, I prefer to watch only a select few movies in 3D—ones that really lend themselves to a genuinely enthralling experience. But I’m keeping a close watch on 3D. Finally, “glasses-free” 3D is expected to become a reality this year.
VisualBee
Not a natural at slide-show design? VisualBee can help. After downloading the plug-in, create a PowerPoint presentation, adding text, photos, graphs, tables, and graphics. Then click the VisualBee icon in your PowerPoint ribbon to browse through a gallery of 150 templates. When you select one, VisualBee will style your slide show accordingly, placing things in the corresponding layout and adding the right colours and fonts. cost: Free for a choice of 50 templates, then starting at $9.90 a month for more design options JANUARY 2012 | INC. | 2 3
the goods
Beyond Business
Things I Cannot Live Without...
Apple MacBook Air This handy piece of wired metal acts as my mobile office, whether I am in the air or on the road.
ASICS running shoes I’ve been wearing this brand for the past 15 years. I always carry a pair in my car.
Volkswagen Vento It’s my faithful companion to work every day. Founder, Policybazaar.com
Yashish Dahiya
BlackBerry I need to see my mails and messages every minute.
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The 38-year-old founder of Policybazaar. com, an online comparison service for insurance policies, says he’s always on the go. His work requires him to fly to Mumbai three times a month and it takes him more than an hour to reach office every day from Noida to Gurgaon. With such a schedule, his wheels, a black Volkswagen Vento is his best friend. Never one to waste precious time, his Apple MacBook Air and BlackBerry phone keep him in sync with office, even while he’s travelling. And to cool off the previous day’s work steam, he goes for a long run every morning at 5. “If I don’t exercise within 48 hours, I become argumentative,” he says. —Ira Swasti
...and What I Covet
A Nikon DSLR camera. I’ve got my eyes set on buying one for long but never end up doing it.
Everything you need to know to run your business in today’s economy
: : : : : : : : : : : A monthly guide to policies, procedures and practices
Remove booklet along dotted Line
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Make apt Business Resolutions There can’t be a better time than a new year to infuse a burst of energy into your business. And to put greater resolve to key initiatives and efforts you know will make your company grow faster. So, start the new year by making a few business resolutions. They provide you an opportunity to press the restart button and get off to a fresh start (in case the last year wasn’t so good). But making ambitious yet achievable business resolutions is an art that doesn’t come easy. Many wheels motor a business which is why resolutions that focus too closely on one aspect might not make sense. Your resolutions should come together as a whole. Also, resolutions that are too daunting will not deliver results. Many a business owner has cast aside the wish-list a few weeks into January simply because the resolutions seemed too hard to get. Remember—the best business resolutions are realistic, positive, and inspire employees to reinvent themselves as well. Fret not if you haven’t made any yet. Read on to find out more about resolutions-that-stick. —Charu Bahri
Vol. 02 No. 12 | inc. guidebook
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make apt business resolutions : : : : : : : : : : : : :
Look Within Cut out pipedreams: Business resolutions can be set in a jiffy but it takes countless plans and hard work to achieve these aims. Meeting monthly sales targets, for instance, involves breaking down big numbers into more realistic weekly and daily goals. So, resolve to make minute planning a habit—this will go a long way in converting your wish list into reality. Planning more frequently is thus an essential business resolution in itself as well as a means to achieve more. Planning is about results, a method to take stock of what’s working and where to change course to achieve or adjust goals. Short-term plans help avoid expensive mistakes and ensure a business stays on track. Meeting them also keeps up motivation levels as well as the momentum.
Learn to innovate: Companies that do not embrace newness find it hard to achieve desired business results. Regular brainstorming sessions help throw up ideas for new offerings and innovative strategies to create more brand awareness among consumers. So, while pushing sales of bestseller products, consider tweaking your array of offerings or changing the way you work. Media agency Namaste Publications’ new year resolution is to outsource more non-core activities— such as the gathering of news and online
Institute financial controls: “Financial business resolutions focus on getting a tighter grip on cash flows and better financial planning,” says Santhosh Mogili, lead consultant, OptIT, an IT infrastructure consultancy. A better handle on cash flows would relieve business heads from worrying about meeting expenses. For this, don’t rely completely on finance staff. Make a conscious effort to comprehend financial statements and how to use these as a guide for future action. A better understanding of finance provides a sound base on which to draw up budgets. “Coming to your own conclusions gives you leeway to compare your analysis with the CFO’s or accountants,” adds Mogili. Also, resolve to listen more closely to sales heads and base annual sales targets on real inputs instead of wishful assumptions. The more realistic the targets, the higher the chances of meeting them.
delivery of content—so that it can focus on business development and expanding its delivery spectrum. Use the new year as an excuse to adopt novel productivity ideas. Amit Karia, founder and CEO of Sears Phytochem and Shinton Chemicals, plans to introduce his production team to better time management skills to increase efficiencies. “Time management skills will help reduce the cost per unit and increase profitability.” Innovation also implies reinventing yourself by learning new skills. Make time for this—take a good look at how you spend your time with the aim of focusing only on essential matters. Delegate wherever possible.
inc. guidebook | Vol. 02 No. 12
powerful tool for business growth, it also helps acquire and brainstorm new ideas. Contacts serve as references as well as open doors to new clients and win-win partnerships. Thus, they help revitalise your business. Follow a few do’s and don’ts to get the most out of networking. Mogili suggests, “Don’t network for immediate benefits. See it as a long-term investment. Also, don’t oversell yourself. If you promise someone the moon and fail to deliver when you are asked to keep up the promise, you could loose that contact (and associated connections) forever. Make promises after consulting the delivery team. Lastly, accept responsibility to keep alive connections. I set aside a few hours every week to network.” Networking is not only for business heads. Encourage the middle ranks to work on widening their circle of contacts. Explain that when the art of networking is practiced well, it can both act as a stepping stone for their careers, and improve business prospects.
Use the new year as an excuse to adopt novel productivity ideas.
Get Out More
Network more: Networking provides an opportunity to learn about others’ success strategies and mistakes. A
Gain visibility: “Make more money” is a popular business resolution. This hinges on higher sales from new clients as well as from the existing customer base. “Align marketing and sales goals to achieve this aim,” advises Vipin Balakrishnan, MD, Namaste Publication. Better marketing techniques create more visibility for a business. “Carry forward effective strategies from the last year. Add innovative new methods to strengthen your efforts,” suggests Sneha Chandrashekar, CEO, Black and White Tech Writing Solutions.
Namaste Publications, for instance, plans to use media relations, social media, award nominations, and partnerships to become more visible next year. In particular, social media can help build a following. “You can also never communicate enough with prospective clients,” adds Balakrishnan. Chase recurring business: Work on increasing recurring revenues from repeat order clients who are invaluable to long-term financial well-being. For this, Chandrashekar proposes analysing your audience to define clear strategies to draw clients back. For instance, calculations might show that offering a 10 per
cent discount and advertising on social media would increase sales by 20 per cent. Investing in strategy advertising can widen your reach and increase revenue capture. Mogili suggests introducing metrics to track the satisfaction levels of existing customers on an ongoing basis. Then, offer sales staff incentives based on customer feedback. Use this information to also formulate plans to eliminate existing pain points and deliver more value.
Create Strategies
Business resolutions must be realistic and match the situation of an organisation in the new year. As an example, Chandrashekar points out that start-
ups aged less than two years old should resolve to work on building powerful strategies to strengthen core business and meet sales targets. According to Balakrishnan, the fifth year of a business is the right time to consolidate. So, he has identified Namaste Publications’ best products to focus on, over the course of the next year, its fifth. Business resolutions should also focus on more than just business. Karia plans to spend more time understanding his employees’ challenges. “I can’t ignore the people who help turn our aims into reality. If you profit more, sharing the wealth will help ensure future success.” It isn’t enough to simply list out business resolutions. Creating a strategy (see box) to achieve these is a crucial step.
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make apt business resolutions: : : : : : : : : : : : :
Convert business resolutions into reality, step-by-step Follow these steps to see your business resolutions become a reality: Make plans: Making resolutions with no plans to backup the goals is
mere wishful thinking. Resolutions must be translated into clear actionable steps soon after you list out your aims. Since enthusiasm surrounding the new year usually fades away after the first week or two of January, harness your motivation by formulating appropriate plans during the narrow window of opportunity. Think long-term: Think of new year business resolutions as a starting
point towards a healthier business. Plans must be revisited from time to time to steer action in the right direction. Also, stay flexible. Accept that your plan and sometimes, even your goal will change when unexpected situations arise. Accept as well that achieving your goal is but an incremental success that should lead to bigger and better aims.
Notes:
Resolutions for 2012 I will be more considerate. I will push myself out of my comfort zone. I will proactively align business methods to prevailing market conditions. I will accept responsibility for making success strategies within the business environment I operate in. I will not work overtime unless it is absolutely needed. I will be more productive when I am in office. I will be more aggressive in pursuing new client leads. It’s easier to measure success against resolutions that quantify aims. I will invest one per cent of my annual income in improving my skills. I will answer all client e-mails within 24 hours. I will start a business blog/social media page and post to it at least twice a week. I will attend at least one networking event every fortnight. I will make sure the business website gets updated every month.
Resources
Practice time management: Use www.rescuetime.com for automated time tracking and management Get ideas: These are some actual business resolutions of business owners, http://under30ceo.com/what-are-your-2010business-resolutions/
Read more: Business resolutions for 2012, http://de.skillsportal. co.za/.../1088780-Resolve-towork-harder-and-smarterin-2012
inc. guidebook |  Vol. 02 No. 12
Wouldn’t your business benefit from more face to face communication?
Gutter Credit here
Telepresense Distance is no longer a barrier Now you can look them in the eye from half way around the world visit: www.polycom.co.in/telepresence New Delhi (Head Office) 4th Floor, GHCL Building, B-38, Sector-1, Noida - 201 301 Tel: 91 . 120 . 309 1600 | www.polycom.co.in
Photograph by name tk
Local Sales Offices: Banglore, Kolkata and Mumbai
JANUARY 2012 | INC. | 13
2 6 | INC. | january 2012
The
Intrepid Innovator Acme Tele Power’s business saga is unique. Unlike most start-ups, it grew like lightning thanks to a slew of blockbuster product innovations. Then it hit a wall—growth and revenues slowed dramatically. Can Manoj Kumar Upadhyay put the mojo back into the company? By Shreyasi Singh photograph BY Subhojit Paul
january 2012 | INC. | 2 7
THE Intrepid Innovator
Manoj Kumar Upadhyay blazed on to the business scene in 2003 with a Power Interface Unit (PIU).
This was an innovative energy management system for cell towers that dramatically altered the operational costs for telecom companies. It helped players like Bharti Airtel cut fuel bills for gensets, and contributed significantly in helping them execute their grand infrastructure expansion plans. It also ensured that Manoj Kumar Upadhyay befriended outlandish ideas Upadhyay’s company, Acme Tele Power, as a child. When he was just seven, he tried his hand at grew over 6,500 times in a span of six inventing a new family of medicines—combining allopayears, swelling from a `30-lakh turnover thy and homeopathy. “I used to wonder why we couldn’t mix the two, and make a medicine which had the benefits in 2003 to roughly `2,000 crore in 2009. of both,” he recalls. So he put his ingenious ideas to test. With telecom, Upadhyay defined what Alas, the formulation was a disaster. But young Upadhyay smart thinking and being in the right had spent his month’s pocket money on it. So, to cut his place at the right time could do for a losses, he tried to sell the concoction to cattle farmers in company. Today, that exponential growth Basti, his hometown, pitching to them the benefits of is a tough legacy to live up to. The “refined” human medicine. Unfortunately, the sales efforts came to a naught. Yet, the setback did nothing to dampen market has completely changed— Updadhyay’s curiosity. At 12, he dismantled a bicycle there’s little, if any new demand for because he believed the pull mechanism wasn’t perfect. He telecom infrastructure in India. Over the tried, but couldn’t reinvent a better system. Instead, he was last three years, Upadhyay has left with a heap of parts he couldn’t put back together. diversified his business. He knows it’s Most of his family and friends thought he was crazy, the only way to grow even half as fast as says 41-year-old Upadhyay. But they are easily forgiven now. After all, nobody could have forecast how far this he’s been used to. Today, Acme Tele precociousness would take Upadhyay. Today, as founder, Power is dabbling in solar energy, rural chairman and MD of Acme Telepower, he has to his credit electrification and energy management several patents in energy management and passive telecom to come up with radically new technology infrastructure. In less than eight years since he founded the solutions. But is Upadhyay anywhere company, its products have been installed at more than close to his “next-big-thing”? 1,50,000 telecom sites across India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, 2 8 | INC. | january 2012
THE Intrepid Innovator
A Range of Solutions (from top left) Green Shelter, their prefabricated units for cell sites; solar thermal plant in Bikaner, Rajasthan; photovoltaic solar panels at the plant in Gujarat
and a clutch of African nations. Acme is also a keenly-watched solar power player in India with 30 MW either commissioned or in the works. Its green energy solutions help generate carbon emission savings of nearly 2.2 million tonnes a year.
The Blockbuster Innovation
In 2003, telecom in India was beginning to enter its turbo charged phase. The government was allotting what in industry parlance is called “circles”—essentially licences for particular geographic regions to telecom companies. Bharti Airtel was a key player at the time. It had huge growth plans but was beset by anxieties on how it would ramp up its network of cell sites. Most of the infrastructure was imported from European manufacturers. But this equipment wasn’t able to withstand Indian conditions like erratic power supply and near-bipolar fluctuations. “Power generator sets in Bharti’s cell towers in Delhi were fraught with problems. When Delhi was like this, there were huge worries about what the situation would be in other places,” remembers Upadhyay, who Bharti Airtel had brought on as a consultant to figure out what to do about the problem. Upadhyay had just sold his entire stake in his first business venture, a lightning protection systems company, to his cofounder for `20 lakh. Bharti Airtel thought his experience with lightning and power protection systems could help them. Upad-
hyay put together a project report, and they approached GE for a solution. “What they suggested was not doable, or implementable. It’s then that I started thinking—can I do this? The customer is in trouble. Can I create something that has never been made before?” reminisces Upadhyay. It took him 17 days, 12 of which were spent without a wink of sleep, as he tried to come up with his innovation—the Power Interface Unit, a power management system that minimised diesel usage and maximised utilisations of mains power. Bharti lapped up the product because it upped cell tower uptime from an 80 to 90 per cent to close to 97 per cent. It also resulted in huge energy savings. “We did nearly 80 per cent of Bharti Airtel’s total roll-out from 20032009,” says Upadhyay. How important a role that was is evident from Bharti Airtel’s growth trajectory in those days. “We grew from 12,000 sites in 2005 to 1,50,000 in just six years,” adds S. Asokan, executive director, supply chain, Bharti Airtel.
photo Courtesy company
It took him 17 days, 12 of which were spent without a wink of sleep as he tried to come up with his innovation.
january 2012 | INC. | 2 9
THE Intrepid Innovator
Important milestones in Acme’s journey
2003
Acme Telepower founded
2003
2004
Launched product called Green Shelter, an energysaving system, which would eventually be installed in 60,00070,000 sites
2008
IPO plans abandoned because of turbulent market conditions
Power Interface Unit launched, which over the next six years would power nearly 80 per cent of all Bharti Airtel installations
The Twist
2007
Filed draft red herring prospectus
2009
Makes $30-million equity investment in eSolar, to use its technology to build solar power plants in India over the next 10 years
2010
Signs module supply agreement with First Solar for PV solar power projects
2011
Commissions 2.5 MW solar thermal power station in Bikaner, Rajasthan. It’s the first plant of its kind in Asia.
3 0 | INC. | january 2012
Asokan credits Acme for quickly identifying a “sweet spot”. “They saw the opportunity and used it. Basically, they combined many power conditioning equipments available back then to create the PIU,” elaborates Asokan. “I’m very good at putting things together to create new things. It’s not about being the smartest engineer. To create, you need to know what will make a useful product,” adds Upadhyay. The PIU, which was later patented, became a “household name”, says Upadhyay. It also brought him right to the centre of the kind of business he wanted to run—massive and scalable. “I had a huge vision. I’d left Adhunik Power Systems, my lightning company, because I knew it couldn’t scale up to `2,000 crore. That was my filter for a business-worth-doing,” Upadhyay says. Incredibly, he actually got there. Acme started with `20 lakh as seed capital, and by 2009, it was a `2,000-company. The early successes also helped Upadhyay secure a place in history. “I’ve played a critical role in the telecom revolution,” he says with pride. “By bringing down fuel costs, we brought down operational costs. We all know the benefits of the telecom revolution in India. It feels great that we’ve played a role in this, and left a social impact by the amount of diesel we helped cut down,” says Upadhyay. Acme followed up the PIU with a range of successful products such as the Green Shelter (a pre-fabricated, integrated energy management solution which houses the electronics and energy-efficient components at telecom sites), Phase Change Material (a solution for storing thermal energy in off-peak hours that reduces fuel consumption by more than 6,500 litres per annum per site) and Free Cooling Units (reduces AC running hours on telecom sites). “They didn’t stop at their first product. Every year, they kept widening the gap between them and their nearest competitor,” adds Bharti Airtel’s Asokan. Even now, roughly 70 per cent of all Bharti Airtel cell sites use one, or more of these products. Imitation is the best form of flattery, it’s often said. Acme got heaps of compliments in the guise of the many patent wars they had to fight as other telecom vendors copied their products. Within its first five years, Acme had become a comprehensive wireless telecom energy management company. Thanks to Upadhyay’s itch to constantly experiment, they had also begun to dabble in alternative energy solutions like solar power. In November 2007, the company filed a red herring prospectus to go public. CRISIL gave Acme’s keenly-anticipated IPO a 5/5 rating. Acme wanted to raise `1,000 crore from the market to invest in bolstering their manufacturing and research capacity. But that wasn’t going to be. With the global economic collapse in early 2008, Upadhyay had to abandon these plans. This unplanned turn of events was symbolic of the twists the company would have to begin negotiating. Bharti Airtel’s Asokan says Upadhyay always seemed to him to be more of a technology leader than a driven businessman. There may be a kernel of truth in that. Surely a wiser entrepreneur, especially one who is so technologically sharp, wouldn’t hoard all his eggs in one basket. In Acme’s case, this spelt double trouble. Not only did all the
THE Intrepid Innovator
“Nobody in my entire family was in business. I always wanted to do something different.” That contrarian streak prompted him to give up admission in an engineering college, and join a technical polytechnic in Shahajahanpur, Uttar Pradesh. “Somebody had told me that in a polytechnic, you actually did something with your own hands. It wasn’t about getting theoretical knowledge. I wanted to be both—a scientist and a labourer.” At this institute, Upadhyay quickly acquired a gravitas beyond his position. He began taking classes to fill in for teachers that never showed up. Although he was studying electronics engineering, he took classes in mechanical and production engineering as well. “It was great learning. I had to do lots of research to be able to teach.” Through the three years there, Upadhyay pushed himself hard. For the examinations, students were asked to answer five out of the 10 questions on paper. “I used to challenge myself—could I answer all 10?” recalls Upadhyay. He also led some “bizarre” —Manoj Kumar Upadhyay research projects, none of which saw the light of day (see box on next page). Yet, the overreaching wasn’t self-destructive. Upadhyay created academic history in the institute by becoming the state topper. “Nobody has managed to match those marks till today,” he says. with pride. With the benefit of hindsight, Manoj Kumar Upadhyay’s Although his big-business dreams remained constant, Upadhyay life makes perfect sense. Pieces of a larger puzzle were took up a job in a German engineering firm after getting his polytechstrewn across his early years—mirroring the pattern his nic diploma. He moved to Germany and within two years, was made life now follows. They also lend themselves to a drahead of a department despite being “totally wild”, he says. “I was full matic achiever story. of ideas. I’d keep giving feedback, asking questions, sometimes not realising I could be fired because of the suggestions I was giving.” Son of a jute factory worker, he spent his early years in The German firm soon moved him to India to lead the indigenisation Kolkata. His family had to move to their hometown in of their machines for the market here. He recounts a fun anecdote Basti, Uttar Pradesh, after the CPM movement gained from those days. “When I moved back to India, I told them I’ll leave strength in West Bengal in the late 70s, leading to the the company exactly three years later to start my own company. I closure of all industrial units. Upadhyay stood apart gave them a three-year notice period. They probably didn’t take me from his family. As others aspired to become bankers, seriously because they were all shocked the day I left,” laughs Upadteachers and engineers, Upadhyay remembers wanting hyay. And, thus began his entrepreneurial journey. 1999, first with to be a businessman ever since he was eight years old. Adhunik Power Systems, and then Acme Tele Pwower in 2003.
“I always wanted to do something different. I wanted to be both—a scientist and a labourer. ”
A Backstory: Fit for Bollywood
products cater to telecom, a lion’s share of the business was conducted with one client—Bharti Airtel. Once the frenzy of cell tower construction was over, Acme’s main business was in trouble. An R&D junkie by nature, it isn’t that Upadhyay wasn’t trying to come up with industry-transforming innovations even when things were going like a song with telecom. But the wastewater treatment plant he conceptualised that could recycle a household’s waste water, and produce clean, usable water, ran into choppy currents. After spending `30-40 crore on research, Acme wrapped up these plans. “To install these, every house would need two plumbing lines. Nobody was going to break their house to get that done,” explains Upadhyay.
Similarly, in 2007, Acme worked on a thermal cooling technology which could store and transport vegetables, ensuring they wouldn’t perish before reaching consumers. The lack of cold chain and refrigeration facility is responsible for a lot of produce going waste in India, says Upadhyay. So, they developed hawker carts that could keep the vegetables cool, and farmed a new company called Cold Chain. Although they managed to transport 210 tonnes of vegetables from many states, the company was eventually closed down. “We were too ahead in technology and time with this one. Also, we couldn’t manage the daily give and take of cash. We’d have to become an operational company from a technology company to do this,” explains Upadhyay. Again, they lost nearly january 2012 | INC. | 3 1
THE Intrepid Innovator
`60 crore. Upadhyay philosophises, “No success comes without
areas—coming up with innovative energy management solutions for the telecom sector, targeting Africa as a big export market for their products (compared to India’s 55 per cent, the continent has a tele density of just 33 per cent, says Sethi), and becoming a leading player in solar power, and other alternative energy areas. Going back to the drawing board has been great, adds Sandeep Kanwar, the company’s chief operating officer. “We have matured a lot in the last four years,” he says. “We’ve been able to take stock and zero in on long-haul, sustainable opportunities. The cornerThe Future stone of this evolution has been diversification,” he adds. Not surprisingly, Upadhyay is an impatient man today, as he waits Each of the opportunities they have laid out certainly has potenfor another innovation from his stable to storm the market. S.S. tial. “We see Africa as being seven years behind India in terms of Kohli, vice president of R&D at Acme uses a sports analogy to telecom maturity. In three years, we’ve grown our business there from describe the performance pressure. “It’s like asking Sachin Ten- $16 million to $80 million a year,” adds Sethi. With about 4,00,000 dulkar’s son to give us as many centuries,” he says jokingly. existing telecom sites, and energy costs amounting to 60 per cent of “It isn’t that we are not growing. We’re still growing 50 per cent the operating costs of a telecom operator, Sethi adds that energy year on year. But nobody wants to see a dip. Fifty per cent isn’t great management, operations and maintenance is about a `15,000-crore compared to the triple digits we were used to,” confesses Sandeep market, of which they currently have less than five per cent. Bharti Sethi, Acme’s CEO. Today, the company has a new set of priority Airtel’s Asokan agrees that there’s definite promise. “There can be efficiencies in generation, utilisation and monitoring. In their next birth, companies like Acme can cater to the very real need to manage these three fronts.” He cuts out the task for Acme, though. “What would make us happy is if they do this with speed. They have to come up with superior Meghalaya would get washed out. The Upadhyay knows coming up with brilproducts quickly, and make sure risk was bigger than the idea. liant solutions is a factor of constantly they’re easily adaptable.” trying, and not succeeding. Failure Upadhyay plays a key role in the isn’t a word that is part of his vocabuFoldable televisions, lary, he asserts. Over the last few Shahjahanpur Polytechnic, 1991: company’s new R&D initiatives. decades, first as a student, and later I always wondered if there could be a It’s part of his non-negotiable as a professional and entrepreneur, foldable television—could one fold the morning routine, in fact. “When I Upadhyay has always allowed his TV like a newspaper? This was before come into office, the first thing I do imagination to fly. “You have to keep LCD screens became popular. is spend an hour with the R&D trying. If you try 20 things, one will work.” Here are some of his efforts Wastewater Treatment, Acme team. That gives me the energy to that didn’t work out—some didn’t get Telepower, 2008: work throughout the day.” He worout of the science lab at all, others Because so many houses in India are ries that because he “doesn’t actucost him several crore rupees. not connected to sewage, I thought ally work with his own hands” on every house should have their own the technology, things don’t get wastewater treatment plant. We Hydroplant, Shahjahanpur developed through research a washPolytechnic, 1991: executed as well. “I need a model ing machine-like contraption that A bunch of us thought we could create where the wheels run faster like could be fitted in every house. It would a hydroplant that would collect the they used to. Our product pipeline treat all the waste water and give rain between the earth and the sky. must be robust.” back fresh water. We spent `30-40 The channelled water would then run Kohli, who heads the R&D crore on this research. But, to install the turbine. We identified the Khasi this machine, every house would need Garo Jayantia mountain range in function, deconstructs the morntwo different plumbing lines which Meghalaya for the project because it’s ing meetings. “We’re slowly learnmost houses didn’t have. And nobody large and it gets a lot of rain. This idea ing the culture of how he works. He would break their houses to rework travelled up the government fires away with a lot of ideas. We’re the plumbing. So we wound the idea departments. IIT Roorkee and IIT trying to build a culture of technolup although we still manufacture this Kanpur were brought in to see what for use in defence. they thought of this “bizarre” idea. ogy. Manoj wants to make R&D a Eventually, it was rejected because if process—how do we as a company the channel broke, all of Assam and make sure we think like that?” paying a price, especially when you try to work on disruptive technologies.” He continues, “For one thing to succeed, you have to try 20 other things. From the outside, people can only see the successes. They don’t know how many products we worked on that could never materialise. I was lucky that my first, second and third products were super successful. I had to work much harder for my fourth, and thereafter.”
Failed Innovations: Great ideas, alright. But they didn’t go anywhere.
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THE Intrepid Innovator
His Entrepreneurial Heroes Upadhyay does seem incredibly self-sufficient, admitting frankly that role models change. “Sometimes, you admire people with great awe at one stage. But it might not always carry on.” But he does credit these four superstar entrepreneurs for valuable lessons he always keeps in mind—in business and life.
Steve Jobs
I’ve always looked up to Steve Jobs as far as technology is concerned. There are many people smarter than him in Caltech or Stanford. But they remain core engineering or numbers people, they can’t understand how technology can be used.
Dhirubhai Ambani
I admire the entire company’s ability to manage huge projects. Now that we are working on solar, I understand the importance of that skill.
Sunil Bharti Mittal
I’ve seen him work up, close and personal. I really admire the way he built his team. He was totally hands on, always clued in.
Even as Acme tries to do all of that, you get the feeling that it’s solar power which gets Upadhyay most excited these days. In April 2011, Acme commissioned a 2.5 MW plant—which is connected to the grid—in Bikaner, Rajasthan. In Gujarat, their 15 MW plant is ready and is likely to be connected to the grid within a month. On the back of the Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission—which has mandated 20,000 MW of solar power in India by 2022, pledging $19-billion government funding—the solar power sector is abuzz with new plants and activity. A host of companies have entered the fray to capitalise on the policy push by state governments like Rajasthan, Gujarat and Punjab. Still, Anindya Das, industry manager, energy & power systems practice for South Asia, Middle East and North Africa, Frost & Sullivan, believes Acme already stands out from the pack. Their Bikaner plant, which works on solar thermal power plant, is the first of its kind in Asia, and only the fourth in the world. “Concentrated solar power (CSP) plants become viable if they’re larger than 15 MW. The technology is tough to adapt to smaller projects. Acme has been brave to do that,” says Das. Most solar projects in India work with photovoltaic (PV) modules—it’s an established technology, and therefore simpler to execute, adds Das. “Everybody is on to PV including large companies like Reliance and Tata. It’s too early to say how successful Acme will be, but with
N. R. Narayana Murthy He showed everybody how to make an Indian company thrive on transparency and good corporate governance practices.
solar thermal, they’ve again shown their intention to be niche, pioneering players.” Kanwar affirms these ambitions. “We want to be in the top three solar players wherever there’s any opportunity. We were the first movers in solar. When we started talking solar, at the end of 2008, the solar mission wasn’t formed. But solar at a MW-scale doesn’t happen overtime.” In March 2009, they signed an exclusive licensing agreement with eSolar, a leading US-based solar producer, to build 1,000 MW of solar thermal power plants over the next 10 years. In fact, Acme made a $30-million equity investment in eSolar, a rare move by an Indian player, says Frost & Sullivan’s Das. “They haven’t just become eSolar’s distributors. It’s a strategic initiative—to be part of the R&D itself.” COO Kanwar, who has been with the organisation through the last four years, says smart thinking like this, shows how much distance Upadhyay has covered as an entrepreneur. “When he began, this was a telecom company. The approach was one-size-fits-all even for the other business verticals that came up. Today, he looks at each business differently.” With solar power, though, project financing and access to debt capital is likely to be a pain point. Right now, Upadhya says, Acme is largely debt free. Can the warmth of solar power help the company reclaim its scorching past? january 2012 | INC. | 3 3
3 4 | INC. | JANUARY 2012
Evernote
Company of the Year
Say Hello to Your New Brain
How Evernote is rejecting industry trends, getting customers to pay for something that’s free, and reinventing the way we remember By David h.
Freedman
Illustration by PC Anoop
company of the year
Phil Libin remembers the moment he left childhood behind. It was nearly four years ago, when the funding for his internet start-up fell through. He was 35. It had all been so much fun until then. But at 3am, out of cash and having waited in vain for a venture capitalist or angel or CEO or anyone at all to return his increasingly desperate calls, Libin knew that he would have to pull the plug on Evernote, a software application that helps people remember things. “I realised I was going to have to wake up tomorrow and lay off everyone in the company,” he says. Exhausted and demoralised, he was reaching for the light switch when his e-mail dinged. A momentary blast of hope—but no, just a message from a fan, something he had been getting more and more of lately. This one was from some guy in Sweden, a fellow software entrepreneur, and it was the usual “Evernote has changed my life” sort of thing. Libin almost missed the last line: “If you ever need any money let me know.” Feeling more awake, Libin typed back: “It just so happens we could use some cash. How much did you have in mind?” The answer came right back: “Would half a million dollars be enough?” Today, the company is swimming in tens of millions of dollars in cash from both VCs and profits. Evernote is buying companies, tripling in size each year, and drawing 40,000 new users a day. If you live in Silicon Valley or Tokyo, where Evernote has reached cult status, none of this probably surprises you. Otherwise, you must be wondering: What the hell is Evernote? 3 6 | INC. | JANUARY 2012
Libin has different ways of explaining it: It’s your brain offloaded to a server. It’s Google for the web of your life. It’s a spotlight on the dark matter of your universe. It’s a tool for converting your smartphone from a time killer to a time saver. OK, so Evernote is a little hard to explain—you have to get to know it to appreciate how subversively effective it is. You could say pretty much the same about Libin, as well as about the team of fellow managers—many of whom have stuck together through multiple start-ups—and the company they have built around memory. It’s a company whose employees romp in spacious offices ringed with conference rooms named after video games. (So much for adulthood.) Whose customers are so dedicated that many eventually choose to pay for the service, even though they can use it for free. That’s starting to change the way children learn in schools. And that which has set its sights on affecting the lives of a billion people—a goal that’s looking less fanciful every day.
Such lofty ambitions might have seemed absurd when Libin’s family moved to the Bronx, New York, from the Soviet Union in 1979. Libin was eight years old. Fourteen years later, he had managed to effect a trifecta of ancestral shame when he left Boston University one course short of his bachelor’s degree, in a fit of pique over a questionable charge on a school bill. “I was the first one in my family for 200 years who had no degree, didn’t play an instrument, and wasn’t a chessmaster,” says Libin, who, whatever his limitations, has raised acerbic selfeffacement to an art form. Degree, schmegree—Libin could code. He had been a computer whiz at New York’s prestigious Bronx High School of Science and had been making good money at it on the side since age 16. After dropping out of college, Libin was snatched up by ATG, a company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with a corps of brilliant coders who were helping invent much of what would become standard e-commerce technology. “It was the first time I had ever felt average,” says Libin. After three years, in 1997, he left ATG along with a few of his fellow laid-back but hard-hacking pals and launched Engine 5, a company in Boston, developing e-commerce software. “I was the least productive programmer, so I got stuck with the management job,” Libin says. Knowing nothing about raising money, the group didn’t bother and simply started programming. In 2000, it sold the company for $26 million. The following year, Libin began pulling together the core Engine 5 team to launch another company. Joining up with MIT computer scientist Silvio Micali, Libin aimed the venture, called
They Go Way Back
Many of Evernote’s managers worked with Phil Libin at his previous companies, Engine 5 and CoreStreet.
Photo courtesy subject
The Loyal Leader
Phil Libin, whose second company, CoreStreet, at producing highLibin immediately started casting about for inspiraCoreStreet, made high-tech security tech security systems for tion for a third company. Given his experience with his systems for the government, decided to ditch the slow-moving world of government agencies and large first two ventures, Libin knew two things: He didn’t contracting. But he held on to his team. financial institutions. But want to be bored, and he didn’t want to merely make having cut his teeth on the money. “A billion dollars isn’t cool,” says Libin, contraMach-speed, make-it-up-as-you-go world of the web, Libin found dicting the speech Sean Parker supposedly delivered to Facebook’s the byzantine, multiyear cycles of government procurement Mark Zuckerberg. “What’s cool is impacting a billion people. maddeningly inefficient and—even worse—boring. In 2006, he left Whatever I ended up doing, I wanted people to get excited about the company, which was sold three years later for $20 million. it. I wanted long lines forming for it.” Though the experience wasn’t an entirely satisfying one, it had An idea had been brewing for some time in the back of his convinced Libin that his team and he were the perfect solution in mind: How do we remember something, like the name of a ressearch of the right problem. Micali, who returned to academia taurant? It’s largely through the associations we have with it in our after CoreStreet, thought the same. “It’s an incredibly talented heads. The trigger might be thinking about whom you were with when you heard about it, where you were, what else you were group, creative and fun to work with,” he says. “And you have to love Phil. He’s not only brilliantly original in his thinking; he can doing at the time, or a related word or image. From these bits and find humour in anything. You laugh all the time around him.” pieces, we can often dredge up a forgotten but important thought. JANUARY 2012 | INC. | 3 7
company of the year
How Evernote works
Here are some of the items Phil Libin added to his account in October. Evernote can store audio memos, webpages, e-mails, documents, and photos. Libin uses it to keep a log of meetings, company metrics, and online articles. He even takes photos of his meals when he travels, so he can remember what he ate.
web clippings By downloading a browser add-on, you can save webpages—like this snippet about a camera that caught Libin’s eye—with a single click. Evernote archives text and images.
3 8 | INC. | JANUARY 2012
Libin began to think about what a better electronic memory would be like. You could put in information in any form, be it a typed document, a handwritten note, a photo, a webpage, a spoken conversation. And you could instantly get the information into any of your devices on the fly without worrying about how to organise it. “When people want to capture a thought, they don’t want to stop what they’re doing,” he says. More important, you would be able to find whatever it is whenever you need it, as effortlessly and intuitively as we now dig up stuff via Google. “Google is great, but it only knows about public information,” says Libin. “We needed something that could handle your information.” It would be as if Google were indexing your life on an ongoing basis and putting it all at your fingertips. What’s more, you wouldn’t need to remember much about what exactly you were looking for. As with your brain, what you would need is only a vague clue, like a person, a place, a word, a time. How great would that be for productivity? Especially if it worked well on smartphones, which more of us are pulling out more often throughout the day. As we do an increasing amount of it’s Everywhere Evernote has apps for PC, Mac, iPad (seen here), and nearly every kind of smartphone. There’s also a Web-based application. You can even store information by forwarding e-mails to Evernote.
Searchable Scribbles Evernote reads and catalogues visible text in photos, including handwritten notes (provided you have decent penmanship). If you upload a photo of a whiteboard to Evernote, you can find the file again later by doing a search for one of the words on the board.
digital bread crumbs You can add labels and tags to make items easier to find in a search. Evernote automatically tracks when the note was created and where you were when you created it. You can also organise items into notebooks.
courtesy evernote (2)
But not always. Our brains have limited memory capacity, which is why no matter what you do, you still forget most things you come across. And that’s a growing problem in an age in which information in all forms comes flying at us at ever-faster rates and you’re not sure which of it will prove useful. Plus, aging baby boomers are finding themselves with less and less memory to work with. “No one is happy with their meat brain,” says Libin. “It’s overloaded by the time we’re in high school. It’s as universal a problem as you can get.” We try to compensate by storing data on our laptop computers and tablets and smartphones. But that works only if we trouble ourselves to enter the information in the right place in the right file in the right form, and even then it can be hard to track down where that crucial nugget of information is hiding. Is the name of that restaurant on my laptop or my phone? I could ask that guy from the conference who told me about it, but what did I do with his e-mail address?
An Affair to Remember
Many Evernote users, especially those in the tech industry, have become fanatics. Here are three of them.
Loic Le Meur Founder of Seesmic, a San Francisco–based maker of social-mediamanagement software How I use it To save lunch receipts (which I share with my accountant), business cards, meeting notes, and memos I speak into my iPhone Favourite trick When I’m handed a business card, I immediately take a photo of it with my phone to put it in Evernote. Then, just for fun, I hand the card back, unless it would be impolite. How it has come in handy Both my mobile phones are perfectly synchronised with all my latest information through Evernote. I have no paper in my life at all now.
courtesy subject (3)
our work outside of the office, realised Libin, there was a growing opportunity to make the bits of free time away from our computers count. But so far, says Libin, smartphone apps have been more time killers than productivity tools. “They’ve been great for wasting time on Facebook and Zynga when you have a couple of minutes,” he says. “I wanted to make smartphones great for getting work done in those minutes.” And, finally, Libin thought it was crucial that this memory tool be fun to use. “In the past five years, there’s been a huge emphasis in giving us great tools for entertaining diversions,” he says. “But no one has applied the same great user experience that we see on something like Facebook to productivity tools. Microsoft Office isn’t fun to use.” Put it all together, and you would get what Libin calls “a ubiquitous platform for lifetime productivity.” Now all he had to do was build it and get a billion people to use it. In 2006, Libin pulled the crew together again with the intention of starting a company called Ribbon, as in, tied around your finger. (As a big fan of Japan, Libin notes, it was a nice bonus for him that the name was similar to how people pronounce his name there.) But shortly after throwing himself into researching electronic memory aids, he discovered there was a tiny, twoyear-old stealth start-up in Silicon Valley called Evernote. It was creating tools for extracting text from photos so that you could
Adelle Charles Co-founder of Tinder, a San Francisco–based company that makes online publishing tools. She also co-founded Carbon Ads, an online advertising network. How I use it To keep track of honeymoon ideas, recipes, notes, e-mails, and shopping lists Favourite trick I treat Evernote as my other e-mail inbox. Everything that doesn’t require an immediate response goes there, so I can follow up later and keep my inbox clean. How it has come in handy I needed to match a paint colour in my home, so I searched Evernote and found a picture I had taken of the paint can.
Guy Kawasaki Author and co-founder of Alltop, an online news aggregator based in Palo Alto, California How I use it To keep track of passwords, travel itineraries, receipts, contracts, business cards, and webpage snippets for book research Favourite trick My Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500 scanner automatically sends everything straight to Evernote. How it has come in handy Several months ago, I flew to Los Angeles to do a commercial. In order to get reimbursed, I had to provide a copy of the receipt. But I bought the ticket at the airport, and the paper receipt was long gone. Thankfully, I had scanned it into Evernote.
take pictures of notes and make them searchable. “I had thought of that,” says Libin, “but these guys were already pretty far along with the technology.” In fact, this Evernote team had previously developed some of the key software for Apple’s visionary but ill-fated Newton personal information manager, a sort of primitive iPad that came out in the late 1980s. It was primarily a Russian crew of talented coders, not unlike Libin’s own team, and it was led by a brilliant techie named Stepan Pachikov. Libin flew out to meet Pachikov, liked what he heard, and suggested they merge the teams rather than compete. Libin became CEO of the company, which retained the name Evernote, while Pachikov gradually shifted his focus to other projects. Libin and his team moved from Boston to Silicon Valley, where Libin found the culture vastly more welcoming of his offbeat, high-tech entrepreneurial style than Boston had ever been. After the teams merged, the new company was left with enough money for a year or so. That would be long enough to get a product up and running, if everyone was focused. To that end, Libin cut loose most of the projects Pachikov’s team had been working on to concentrate on the key characteristics of his revolutionary memory aid: free-form capture of any type of information, simple associative retrieval, super-smartphone-friendly, fun to use. In 2008, the company launched a “private beta” version of the software intended mostly for Silicon Valley insiders. The night before, at JANUARY 2012 | INC. | 3 9
company of the year
Percentage of monthly return users
ing, and one add-on tool even 3am—apparently the time at which 50% allows for searching photos by he produces his key insights—Libin colour—if all you remember about realised that the team had forgotten a meeting was that the other fellow to put together any sort of tutorial. was wearing an orange sweater, you So Libin threw together and nar30% will be able to dig it up. “Evernote rated a quick demo and put it on finds the way your mind works and YouTube. “I’ve gotten death threats gives you more and more hooks over it,” he says. “I’ve been said to 10% into your memories,” says Andrew have the most annoying voice ever Sinkov, a childhood friend of Libin’s heard anywhere in the world.” That 1 year 2 years 3 years who worked at CoreStreet and now video would eventually get more heads up Evernote’s marketing. than a million hits. Length of time after customer registration No wonder the Silicon Valley Word started to get around crowd loves it—these are people who pockets of Silicon Valley about this Reason to Smile grew up navigating constant multicool new app that helped you A graph of how people use Evernote ple streams of information. “So remember stuff. It worked more or over time shows that customers who many things are happening in life less as Libin had envisioned. Most abandon the service often return. that make me end up with more types of information can be added data,” says early Evernote devotee to Evernote in a few seconds, from Jason Freedman, who co-founded any computer or smartphone. You FlightCaster, a Web-based travel-information service, and recently can type in a note, handwrite a note on a touchscreen, take a photo launched an online real estate start-up, 42Floors. “Evernote is the techwith your phone’s camera, record an audio conversation, put in a nology version of what the Container Store does for my bedroom,” he web address, save all or part of a webpage, or forward an e-mail to says. “It’s a simple solution that brings sanity to the situation.” Evernote. The software takes it from there, sucking the data into Despite the enthusiastic reception for Evernote’s beta version, Evernote’s servers, which are backed up religiously, as well as storing which went public in mid-2008, the company’s cash was running out it on your computer. The system also labels the incoming data with fast, and Libin struggled to raise more. VCs confronted him with a any information that could come in handy, including when it was host of concerns. For starters, Evernote didn’t play off social networks added and where you were when you added it. Thanks to the softat a time when Silicon Valley was looking for the next Facebook. Plus, ware developed by Pachikov’s team, any visible text in a photo Evernote eschewed the widespread wisdom that everything was becomes searchable. “Before I go to the supermarket, I take a snapmoving to the cloud. It relied on native apps—software that does shot of the list my wife has on the refrigerator,” says Daniel Kupermost of the work while running on your computer or smartphone man, CEO of Aprix Solutions, a Silicon Valley Web start-up focused on helping companies manage marketing efforts, and an instead of letting an internet server somewhere else handle the job. early user of Evernote. Though there’s a web version, Evernote is mostly intended to run as a You can add titles or tags to the notes, though you don’t have to. native app, because it runs a lot faster that way, and Libin was conYou can also file notes—any piece of information in Evernote is a vinced that a snappy response was critical to delivering a satisfying “note”—in different “notebooks,” and share these notebooks or memory-retrieval experience. individual notes with others. To find your note later, you need to There was one more concern, and it was a big one. Evernote was recall only one key point about it and then search on that. Want to being pitched as a so-called freemium service. In other words, people remember that restaurant you went to? Search on French toast, could either use it for free or upgrade to a paid premium version, because that’s what you had there, and you took a picture of the which is how the company would make money. So far, so good; the freemium model was seen as a smart one. The problem was that, menu. Or on Seattle, because that’s where you were. Or on Janet, unlike virtually all other entrepreneurs relying on that model, Libin because she was with you, and you took a picture of her. Or on black holes, because you remember clipping an online article about refused to cripple the free version, removing the incentive to upgrade them that day, and once you know the date, you can bring up other to the paid version. You could pay $5 a month and get additional file notes from that day. “It’s the electronic version of having something storage, but why would anyone do that? asked the VCs. The free version was full featured and offered generous storage. at the tip of your tongue,” says Libin. Libin explained his theory: The more stuff you put in Evernote, To the delight of Silicon Valleyites, the tool is a boon at meetings. You can type notes while recording audio and cap it off by taking a the more important the service would be to you. Who would picture of the whiteboard. And all of it winds up in Evernote, ready begrudge $5 a month to a company that was storing your memories for easy recall. By tying Evernote into other services, you can have and helping you retrieve them? “Your notes, your restaurants, your friends, a year of your life, then years of your life,” says Libin. “That’s even more ways of finding things: audio recordings can be tranworth thousands.” The danger wasn’t that people wouldn’t upgrade, he scribed (at extra cost) to allow searching by anything said at a meet4 0 | INC. | JANUARY 2012
Gutter Credit here
Photograph by name tk
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argued; it was that they wouldn’t try the service in the first place or wouldn’t stick with it because the free version was skimpy and failed to impress. Get them to fall in love with the service, and they would eventually pay, because they would be invested in its success. “I want to build a 100-year company, and I’m serious about that,” says Libin. “I don’t need to squeeze money out of you. I’ll have the rest of your life to take your money. It’s my long-term greedy strategy. Our slogan is, ‘We’d rather you stay than pay.’ Basically, I wanted a business model that rhymed.” The VCs were not impressed. “No one would touch us,” says Libin. In desperation, Libin turned to Europe and managed to cut a $10-million deal with an investment firm there. The deal was set to close in October 2008—smack in the middle of one of the worst crashes in the history of the stock market. The investor called the deal off the morning both parties were to sign. Libin, unable to find another investor or even anyone who would return his call in the postcrash chaos, realised that he would have to close the company. Then the Swedish guy wrote, offering half a million dollars. Libin now had maybe six months to try to prove that his stay-versus-pay strategy could work. “That’s when everything started happening,” he says.
features; if they don’t like it enough to upgrade, they tend to abandon the service altogether or use it lightly. But Libin showed that Evernote users became more likely to upgrade over time. For those users who had been using Evernote for a year, the upgrade rate was an impressive eight per cent. If Evernote could get to a million users, explained Libin, sales would be close to $4 million a year. And, at the current growth rate, Evernote would reach 10 million users within two years. Then Libin showed activity Libin explained rates, or, roughly, how often an his theory: average user was actually using Evernote over time. For many software companies, that curve runs relentlessly downward. Most people who try an app abandon it pretty quickly or use it less frequently as time goes on. But for Evernote, the curve was a smile. There was a slight drop-off in usage after the first few months, but then it went up again— not only because active users were finding the service more and more useful, but also because customers who had stopped using the service In mid-2009, Gary Little, a partner at Morgenthawere returning to it. People who left ler Ventures and an influential figure in Silicon Evernote missed it. Valley, received an e-mail from Guido AppenMorgenthaler invested. So did zeller, a Stanford professor who was working Sequoia Capital, another top Siliwith the VC firm to launch his second company. con Valley VC firm. So did other “Guido said I had to check out this hot new appliVCs. Altogether, Evernote has cation that was taking Stanford by storm,” recalls Little. Little checked the app out, was impressed, raised $95 million. “We didn’t and invited the CEO of the company, who hapneed most of the money,” says pened to be looking for funding, to come in and pitch the firm. The Libin. “But that’s when you can get it, so we took it.” Evernote CEO was relaxed, amiable, and humble, and he soon had the group didn’t need it because the company became profitable early in cracking up at his deadpan humour. The type of guy who says he 2011, not long before hitting 10 million users and reaching chose his business plan because it rhymed. And that his international annual sales of about $16 million. strategy was focused on Japan because he liked Japanese food. Today, the company is in a large, airy, colourful, storefront-like At a following meeting, Libin stunned the group with a series of space in Mountain View, California, whose layout has a random feelslides that Little calls “one of the best analytical dissections of a business ing to it. It’s cramped here, wide open there, toys and boxes scattered I’ve ever seen.” Libin showed the group that the rate at which Evernote around. There are 80 employees—15 of them from Russia—and users were upgrading to the paid version within a month of signing up there’s a development team in Moscow and an office in Tokyo. When was half a per cent. This was not good—and not surprising, given that Libin travels, he is represented at the office by a garish wheeled robot the free version worked fine. But then Libin showed the upgrade rates with a video camera and laser pointer, which Libin controls from his over longer periods of time. Normally, this would be an even grimmer laptop. When he is present, he looks like a coffee-shop poet trying to picture, because at almost all companies with freemium models, users appear respectable as he roams around sipping from a mug apparently glued to his hand. The features of his face seem designed to who upgrade tend to do so pretty quickly. They sample the hobbled free version, and if they like it, they upgrade right away to get all the showcase his formidable goatee. 4 2 | INC. | JANUARY 2012
The more stuff you put in Evernote, the more important the service would be to you. Who would begrudge $5 a month to a company that was storing your memories and helping you retrieve them?
company of the year
The company is passing 15 million users, Evernote is a with users signing up at the rate of more than a cult in Tokyo. million a month. And this for a company that doesn’t have any salespeople. Evernote doesn’t do anything to encourage people to pay it, which is one of the reasons it’s so popular. “When you eliminate trying to get people to pay you, your goals change,” says Sinkov. “Our role is educational, not promotional. All we need to do is tell people what Evernote does.” The irony and genius of that nonsales strategy, of course, are that so far, at least, it has resulted in terrific sales. The long-term conversion rate can now be tracked out to three years, and it turns out to be more than 15 per cent. Will new users keep upgrading at these rates? Kuperman, the entrepreneur and early Evernote user, thinks Evernote has adopted the right approach. “People end up feeling they need to pay as a thank-you for having such a great product,” he says. “And Evernote has the benefit of not having to spend much money marketing. Every time I use Evernote, someone asks me what I’m doing, and then they want to try it out. I’m doing their marketing.” One thing Libin says he refuses to worry about is competition. And there are, in fact, vaguely competitive products and services. Most notable among them is Microsoft’s OneNote, which has some of the same features and comes with Microsoft Office. But it doesn’t provide Evernote’s effortless toss-in-any-kind-of-note-onany-device environment and hasn’t achieved nearly the traction that Evernote has. Nevertheless, it’s inevitable that more and better competitors will emerge. When that happens, Evernote users will be able to painlessly take their memories and leave, because Libin has insisted that the information be made easy to export, so that no one feels locked in to the service. “We used to have a saying in the Soviet Union: ‘Any country that you’re free to leave, you’re free to live in,’ ” he says. “We want our users to feel free to leave.” Instead of defending the company’s flanks, Libin is forging ahead into new markets. “There are millions in Thailand who will be getting smartphones next year,” says Dave Engberg, the CTO and another CoreStreet alumnus. Japan has already been an unmitigated triumph for the company. It now accounts for 20 per cent of Evernote’s user base, compared with 35 per cent in the US, and Japanese users are on average twice as active as are US users. “There’s an archival culture there,” says Hitoshi Hokamura, who heads the company’s Japan efforts. Evernote is a cult in Tokyo. Bookstores have Evernote sections— there are 32 Japanese books on Evernote—and when Libin is there, he is sometimes stopped in the street by fans. NTT Docomo, the largest cell-phone service provider in Japan, provides Evernote’s premium service for free with its Android phones, a big draw. (And Docomo’s VC arm invested $2 million in Evernote.) Elsewhere in the world, the adoption of Evernote tends to parallel the growth in smartphones, which would suggest a pretty steep growth curve internationally over the next several years.
What’s more, a vast ecosystem of products and services has sprung up around Evernote. Computers, phones, tablets, printers, and scanners have Evernote compatibility built into them, in some cases via a physical, dedicated Evernote button. (It doesn’t hurt that many leading electronics vendors are based in Japan.) When you take your brand-new HTC tablet out of the box and turn it on, it immediately asks you to sign in to Evernote. Some 6,000 software developers have tied or are working on tying their apps and services into Evernote. And as an unusual tribute, Boston University has taken to listing Libin as a distinguished alumnus, even though he never graduated. Libin is being a good sport about it but with an ulterior motive. “I’d like to be the first person in history to get an honorary bachelor’s degree,” he says. It would be easier than mastering chess or the violin.
There are 32 Japanese books on Evernote, and when Libin is there, he is sometimes stopped in the street by fans.
For now, Libin, who is truly serious about the 100-year thing, is
thinking hard about how not to end up another flavour of the month in the fast-churning world of internet apps. Part of the answer, he believes, is to expand the company beyond simply being a way to remember stuff. “We want to go from being one app to being a family of apps, all of which have something to do with memory,” he says. “Our test for whether we should build something is: will 100 million people use it right away?” This year, the company released its second product, Evernote Peek, an iPad app that turns the tablet into a flash-card system for studying. It became the most popular educational iPad app virtually overnight. (K-12 schools are already going gaga over Evernote, and many that provide laptops to students are installing Evernote—it’s never too early to start recording those memories.) More products will be coming. The company announced in September that it’s opening a studio in Austin—the term studio is borrowed from the computer-game industry, which tends to set up fairly independent shops to develop new games. Libin says he wants to follow that model. “It will be a local team that can develop pride in what it does,” he says. Libin plans to open additional studios in Singapore and somewhere in Europe— presumably he will be trying out the food in different countries there to make his choice. In the long term, Libin wants to figure out how to do more to help people remember, learn, understand, and communicate. Noting that images can be more evocative than text, he would like to see Evernote be able to recognise objects and faces in photographs, and perhaps one day even recognise smells. “Your own brain,” says Libin, “might end up being the last place you search for information.” David H. Freedman is a contributing editor for Inc. He wrote for the October issue about doing business in China. JANUARY 2012 | INC. | 4 3
Managing How a technology start-up listens, and then does. this page Hiring NetAmbit smartly uses direction signboards as prime real estate to advertise vacancies page 48 Company Culture A recent book tells you why
Sales & Marketing
tors it’s worth the `5-crore fund tariff? page 50 The Way I Work Ajit Andhare knows creativity is the core of his
Experts on how a rural travel company can bring in more holiday seekers.
business. Which is why, he’s happy to let his team members design their own workspaces. page 52
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hiring more women is a canny business decision page 49 Elevator Pitch Can MyGuestHouse convince inves-
strategy
Ears to the Wall Paras Chopra (left) and Sparsh Gupta (right) have made active listening a business art.
photo Courtesy subject
In October 2009, Paras Chopra was biding time at a Noida-
Managing Listen Up! A technology start-up shows how to really use feedback
based technology firm—he was sure his days as an employee were limited. Barely a year out of Delhi College of Engineering, Chopra was too busy to care. His attention was on the reams of code he was writing for a product he called Wingify—one that he had devoted his after office hours and weekends to write. Wingify was a suite which could increase website conversion rates for companies. Chopra knew that the product would power his entrepreneurial flight—a feature-rich, jazzed-up platform which could give companies a one-stop repository for split testing, behavioural targeting, web analytics and visitor segmentation tool. “My research found that online marketers had to use five to six JANUARY 2012 | INC. | 4 5
strategy
tool kits for their website functions to drive traffic or increase conversion. Wingify could do all that. It was very comprehensive,” he says. An avid blogger, Chopra decided to showcase Wingify on an online open forum, Hacker News, where geeks converge. The reviews caught him by surprise. Contributors found the loaded product too confusing to navigate. As one reviewer put it, “It took me 14 page views and 1,738 seconds to find a product tour on page.” Plus, the product tour was heavy on technical jargon. For a tool that aimed to simplify matters and make website analytics easy to implement, this was particularly off-putting. “I had put zero thought in usability. I’d concentrated only on coding a plethora of features,” Chopra recalls. He’d also wasted up to six months of his time. “The feedback should have been taken while making the product, not after it was complete,” he confesses. Though it was hard to start over, Chopra couldn’t launch with a product that potential users didn’t get anyway. He decided to re-code Wingify, refining and revamping the site’s usability, design and paring down its features to create a more effective program. “I focused on what the feedback told me. I made myself a goal—to keep the user interface as simple as possible. Users shouldn’t need more than three to four clicks to get the features they want.” Five months later, a new and improved version—Visual Website Optimiser (VWO)—was born in its beta version. Sparsh Gupta, Chopra’s senior from college, and a Masters in computer science from Oxford, became an enthusiastic and keen sounding board through the re-work journey. Gupta also saw immense potential in the product. And the college buddies decided to become business partners. They called the firm Wingify Software and it went live as a paid product from May 2010. Since then , the Visual Website Optimiser has seeded a business to watch out 4 6 | INC. | JANUARY 2012
respond differently to a change depending on the day of the week—do responses differ from a Monday to a Friday, or a Tuesday to a Thursday? The idea found its way into the suite. “At the start-up level, the crowd approach has worked for us. We develop what our users want. Eventually, they are the ones that are going to use it,” explains Gupta. They typically solicit reviews on features-in-thepipeline from 10 per cent of their customers. Wingify was recently working on a feature that informed users Before and After On top, Wingify’s first product website. After feedback on forums like Hacker News, what they should be testing the product was tweaked into the current Visual Web on websites to gauge its Optimiser. effectiveness and impact. Nearly one in three users for. In the past year-and-a-half, Chopra came back with ideas and suggestions and Gupta have amassed more than 13,000 which were later incorporated. users, nearly 900 paying customers, and up Of course, sifting through the oftento 800,000 site visits. Wingify considers clashing views and debating over it in a some of the more famous tech firms globno-holds-barred environment is the key to ally as its clients such as Microsoft, GE judiciously using feedback. “People are Money and Groupon. usually resistant to change. When we redid And it has several successful case an interface a couple of months ago, users studies to its credit. CityCliq, a Floridadidn’t think it was great. But we stuck to it. based search engine for small businesses, At times, you have to keep faith in what registered a 90 per cent rise in conversion your gut tells you,” Chopra asserts. rates after Wingify stepped in. AquaSoft, a But for the most part, Chopra believes photo presentation software, saw a 20 per the feedback has been invaluable and spot cent increase in product sales after using on. And he confesses he’s sort of fanatical Visual Website Optimiser’s A/B Split Tests. about hoarding up on it. “If somebody Recently, Wingify was recognised as signs up for a product but doesn’t use it, I one of the top 10 product companies to will want to know why. We have created a watch out for, at the prestigious Nasscom very customer centric company—every Product Conclave in Bengaluru. It’s also support that we do, our customers are being courted by prominent VC firms and asked to rate it. We have personal blogspots angel investors. for them and we log their every move.” Yet instead of flying high, the partners Recently, even while hiring their US have their ears trained to the ground. They sales manager—their key geography now— continue to leverage feedback while adding Chopra, the avid blogger asked his readers, new tools or tweaking older ones. For several of them also entrepreneurs, their instance, while working on their traffic segopinion on what he calls “a hiring mentation feature recently, the eight-people experiment”. Judging from the GuptaWingify team had worked out various segChopra track record, they needn’t worry ment options. But their customers felt what about the new hire. After all, when they they really wanted was testing “by the day”. listen carefully, things usually go well. That is, to find out how visitors to a website —Shreyasi Singh
strategy
Sales & Marketing Exploring rural India Can a travel company make village holidays cool? How would you sell that?
How does a bullock cart ride through an orchard in a remote village sound for your next
holiday? If you’re tired of Goa or Manali, Travel Another India (TAI) offers several options to explore a ‘not-done’ India. Started by Gouthami in 2009, TAI organises unique rural holidays. “Every village is perfect for tourism,” says Gouthami. Simple joys like climbing a tree, exploring the wilderness or reading a book by the local stream are great ways to escape the city. Rural communities play host for TAI’s travellers, from cooking food to becoming their tour guides. Guests are charged between `900–3,000 per head per day. So far, 200 people have travelled with TAI to the two homestays they built from the ground up in Pranpur, Madhya Pradesh, and Ladakh. It also organises trips to six other destinations like Hodka in Gujarat and Greenstay in Mysore. TAI has already amassed more than 45,000 fans on Facebook. Experts give her some ideas on how to welcome more guests. —Ira Swasti PITCH NO. 3: Call out to urbanites Sunil Gupta, CEO, Avis India, a car rental service The idea of a rural sojourn is very powerful. It would be a good idea to contact the HR and administrative heads of large multinationals to give their employees and visitors a glimpse of rural India, albeit a sanitised version. Companies are also looking for locations where their employees can carry out voluntary work and the areas around these sites would be great. They could also tap colleges and schools in metropolitan cities to give urban children a rural experience.
PITCH NO. 1: Go viral Peeyush Dayal, CEO, OnSumaye, a web solutions provider They should directly target their large Facebook following. I didn’t see any promotions or travel packages on their page. I would recommend they solicit quotes from their guests and post it on their website. They have a guest speak section but it only has a few quotes. Encourage and provide incentives for guests to post comments and pictures on Facebook. This would lead to viral marketing and friends of guests would come to know about Travel Another India. PITCH NO. 2: Target backpackers Ajay Chaturvedi, founder, HarVa, a rural enterprise They could target backpackers who are cash-strapped and are looking for exotic locales to get away from their daily humdrum. They can market TAI as a venture that takes you back to the roots, in nature’s lap and provides a getaway for natural cures to illnesses and diseases, from maybe herbs found there. Also urban travellers have this misconception that food and water in villages is not healthy or safe. So it would help if they could highlight and give information on their website that eatables are safe to consume.
Pure Bliss Can TAI convince travellers that India’s villages can offer them the trip-of-a-lifetime?
Feedback on the Feedback While our guests are willing to give us feedback, only a handful of them are willing to be quoted. Yes, we need to rework our entire positioning on Ladakh. We are slowly reaching out to the overseas market. So far, backpackers have found our prices too high. We will put an FAQ prominently on the website to highlight the hygiene aspects of the stay. The school market is a different game with a different set of rules altogether. There are huge numbers involved and our guest houses are ideal for groups of upto 20 people.
PITCH NO. 4: Tell stories well Deepak Goel, founder, Drizzlin, a social media marketing firm An interesting addition to the Facebook content could be a series of stories about the various places covered by TAI. Most of these places have interesting history or trivia that would create a stronger connect with the chosen sites. A crowd sourced model to create “suggest a location, help us grow” kind of a program will bring a sense of belonging among guests. Also, their website has an interesting Indian feel to it that can be accentuated through comic books, cartoon strips and short stories.
JANUARY 2012 | INC. | 47
strategy
Hiring Net the right employee A wide hunt for talent
It isn’t often that one comes across a signboard that also doubles up as an advertisement for jobs. That is why the bright-blue boards with a hard-to-miss “We are hiring” message placed along the Noida and Greater Noida Expressway instantly draw attention. The boards take you to the sprawling corporate office of NetAmbit, a financial products distribution company, and right to the centre of their many innovative hiring techniques. Girish Batra, the company’s founder and MD, says because they hire in large numbers, using every possible opportunity for visibility is important to them. The message must get across to as many people as possible, and thus utilising the signboards was almost natural. “This idea just came about. Somebody from my team suggested it, and it made perfect sense,” says Batra. The need is certainly there. NetAmbit, which has been offering a bouquet of financial products to customers since 2003, currently employs more than 4,000 people to staff their 150 branches, and six call centres across India. The company uses the direct marketing model to sell products like insurance schemes,
4 8 | INC. | JANUARY 2012
home loans and corporate fixed deposits. Each month, 3,000 to 4,000 candidates walk into their office. Because the churn is so intense in a customer services-oriented company like this, NetAmbit hires up to 700 people each month. Amitabh Kapoor, the company’s head of human resources, says it’s tough to determine the impact of the board-advertising— how many people have actually been recruited as a direct consequence of the campaign. “We don’t have a way of knowing how many candidates have applied after seeing those particular ads. We get to know that informally later on after they join.” This isn’t NetAmbit’s first innovative take on hiring. Because financial products was (and remains) an under-penetrated market when they started out, Batra knew he had to use a comprehensive outreach campaign— one that leveraged the internet, television, ground sales staff and call centres. The latter two necessitated the need for a vast pool of talent. Beyond using job sites, newspaper classifieds and employee referrals, NetAmbit also roped in NGOs to help them find employees.
They partnered with NGOs such as Sarthak and Etasha to recruit young people from the slums. Batra says doing so has had multiple benefits. First, it fulfils their philosophy of creating jobs for the underprivileged. Second, these recruits have shown to be better, more committed employees, though some of them are barely high school graduates. “It’s best to hire people who genuinely need the job. The more we go to the weaker sections, the higher is our success rate,” says Batra. Their job advertising campaigns in smaller towns, or semi-urban areas on the fringes of metropolitan cities have been very successful. “We manage to get a lot of candidates who otherwise don’t get jobs because of their poor command on English. We don’t mind hiring people who know just Hindi or the local language in any of the states we operate in,” explains Kapoor. This has proved to be a hiring masterstroke of sorts. Many people who joined them from these campaigns as tele-service operators (TSO) have risen through the ranks to become heads of divisions. Amit Chugh, who joined in 2007 as a TSO, confesses he never thought he’d stay in the company this long. Four years later, he heads an entire centre, and has no plans to go anywhere. “I’ve grown a lot as an individual here. I don’t think I would have got this opportunity anywhere else,” he says. Another recent initiative NetAmbit has come up with, is to invite potential candidates to undergo a day-long workshop. The workshop gives them an insight into the highs and lows of the job, thus providing them with a clear picture of what to expect. It’s worked out well. Forty per cent of those who have attended the workshops have been recruited. Batra knows such innovations will have to be bettered, and newer ones introduced, as the company grows at a robust 80 per cent. For NetAmbit, the hunt for the right employees is far from over. —Meenakshi Kumar
strategy
Company Culture Greater diversity, better results Are there enough women workers? Gender Dividend Muriel de Saint Sauveur says companies with more women workers are more in sync with the market’s pulse.
Q. You statistically prove that companies that hire as many female managers as male managers show better financial results. How?
The results of the study showed that companies with at least 35 per cent of their workforce as women performed better. These companies are also more open-minded. Greater diversity leads to better strategy because men and women think differently, and you get a variety of ideas and perspectives on the table. Also, a lot of products today are bought by women, so it’s good to have more of them on board to know how women think and what they would like to buy. Q. What are other advantages of having more women? They’re good managers but do they make great business leaders too?
As organisations go global, they need to rethink their HR policies to accommodate a diversity of talent in the workforce, says Muriel de Saint Sauveur, author of A Women’s World, A Better World? Sauveur, a former communications director at Mazars, an international audit and consultancy firm, argues companies must be more open to women to achieve better results. Inc. India’s Ira Swasti recently met her for a chat. Q. What is the inspiration for the book? I have been with Mazars for 23 years. In my last role as the diversity director, I discovered that at our entry positions, we have an equal number of men and women. But only 14 per cent women are remaining as we analysed our top level. In our office, women were leaving the organisation as they turned 30 or 35, to take care of their families. When hard-to-find talented people leave your company, after you invest your time and resources in them, you lose money. It does not make good business sense. It got me thinking. I wanted to see if this was happening elsewhere. This book has emerged from interviews with 100 women across 33 countries.
Women don’t work the way men do. They are more people and teamoriented which is why they are good managers. But yes, to run a business, you need to be more strategic, anticipate the future and take risks. I did find some women don’t like to take risks. But that’s a benefit too. It’s not by chance that the more ‘feminised’ companies were capable of withstanding the 2008 financial crisis better. And as the global economy continues to move fast towards a services-based market, from a product-based one, the quality a company needs to deliver requires both emotions and brain. Women can ‘humanise’ a corporate environment quite well in that manner. Q. What can companies do to get more women?
A firm’s organisational model needs to be more in sync with humanity’s life cycle. HR policies must take into account gender differences. Flexible hours and sharing of family and household concerns will help too. Historically, men have focused on their work, creating an impenetrable barrier between their private and work lives. That needs to change. In Germany, for instance, because of the lack of day-care options, women are discouraged from applying to executive positions. Creating private and government-endorsed child care systems will be useful. Today, thanks to the communications revolution, office work can be taken home, thus reducing the time spent in office. The government could also provide tax incentives to companies with greater diversity. Quotas for women aren’t preferred but some companies have used them well. JANUARY 2012 | INC. | 49
Budget Boys Arora, Chawla and Chauhan help travellers find the perfect guesthouse.
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Photograph by subhojit paul
strategy
Founders
Jitendra Arora (backround) Varun Chawla (left foreground) Prashant Chauhan (right foreground) Location
Delhi
Launched
2010
Revenue (2011)
`5 crore
Projections (2016)
`500 crore
Revenue Model
Fixed amount per booking and additional ad revenues Funding sought
`5 crore
Funds Sought for
Acquire more budget hotels and invest in technology
Elevator Pitch With MyGuestHouse, budget rooms are a click away. Will investors check in with `5 crore? The Pitch “Not only is it difficult to find a budget hotel or guesthouse online,
it’s also impossible to figure out if they are any good. MyGuestHouse offers an e-commerce platform to bridge the gap between good budget hotels and price-conscious travellers. We are the only portal focused completely on budget guesthouses and hotels—other players offer accommodation within their bouquet of services. With 10,000 rooms available on our site, users can simply click to book. Hoteliers can update their room inventory in real time and travellers can check out the services, using the room inventory management system. Because we are present in 11 cities, consumers have access to multiple services and price points. In the next couple of years, we should be in 30 cities. The current budget hotel market is pegged at $1.1 billion. Budget hotels charge approx $100 per day. We charge `1,500 from hotels for every booking they get through our website.” —As told to Inc. India
Investors Weigh In Build relationships
Build trust with customers
Do more groundwork
Building real-time look-and-book capabilities in Tier-II and Tier-III towns and providing budget accommodation is challenging. But if done right, it represents a large portion of the travel expenditure. Travel continues to be a lucrative segment for the investor community. Especially with businesses transacting more and more online. The key is to create long-term relationships with hotel properties, so that MyGuestHouse can distribute this inventory both in a direct to consumer and third party channels. The firm’s flat fee per booking seems to be a little high. Also, acquiring customers online is expensive— they should use third parties.
Typically, auto and rickshaw guys are the ones who guide new travellers to budget hotels or guesthouses. If MyGuestHouse can organise that system, it will be a great business. Marketing and distribution is a challenge though, and the company needs to build trust among customers—maybe by opening retail outlets across strategic locations such as railway stations and bus terminals across India’s tourist cities. They can also start their own hotel rating system and crowdsource ratings based on customers’ feedback and reviews. The team has shown great promise, and is at the right stage to grow the business to the next level.
MyGuestHouse seems similar to hostelworld.com which was acquired by a private equity house for more than €200 million in 2009. Hostelworld dominates the hostel booking space with over 23,000 properties in 180 countries. The key to its success has been developing a proprietary booking system given away for free to hostels that powers online search and SEO or SEM prowess. MyGuestHouse is taking the hostelworld playbook and adapting it to the Indian market. They will need a lot more people on the ground. They should try managing the process of signing up guesthouses quickly and bringing in appropriate traffic.
Rahul Khanna, managing director, Canaan India, New Delhi
Amit Grover, angel investor, Mumbai
Faisal Galaria, angel investor, United Kingdom JANUARY 2012 | INC. | 51
strategy
The way i work | Ajit Andhare, Colosceum Media
“In our job, creativity is the currency” Ajit Andhare, founder and CEO of Colosceum Media, spent the first 12 years of his professional life deriving a new meaning from his marketing job—creativity. He admired the way ad people could come up with new ideas constantly. Although he loved his job, he always found something amiss. So he gave up his posh corporate career to plunge straight into entrepreneurship, prompted by “an insistent inner voice”. That voice has been all-important since. It helped Andhare decide on a career in television content and visualise his first programme—Wheel Shrimati—which is in its fifth successful season today. He didn't worry about being new to television. From his own experience, he knew a stress on technical skill or domain knowledge could kill a passion. It took away his love for the tabla, for sure. No wonder, Andhare stays true to his inner voice—in things big and small—as he takes the `52-crore Colosceum Media to greater creative heights.
As told to rohini banerjee | Photograph by Jiten Gandhi
A media CEO’s life follows a markedly different routine. I realised that as soon as I started building
Colosceum Media four years ago. My company is not built on capital alone. A lot of emotional and physical investment goes into this. Sports and exercise are my answers to the stress. I knew both Colosceum Media, and Mumbai, where we are based, would cost me my life, routine and physical health—and if I was not on the top of things I wouldn’t be able to make it. Interestingly, I
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strategy In Tinsel Town Ajit Andhare stays away but keeps a finger on his company's pulse.
JANUARY 2012 | INC. | 5 3
strategy
discovered a love for squash and exercise almost simultaneously, as I started building Colosceum Media. Every morning, I’m up by 6.30am. Depending on what day of the week it is, there is either squash or a rigorous exercise session to finish. For business, Mumbai is the place to be—but it’s a tough city. You can never feel in control here. Especially, when you have to deal with its harrowing traffic every day—no wonder I feel most “out of control” when I am driving. Which is why my morning routine gives me some sense of control. It prepares me to not cow down to the challenges that the city and a typical work day throw at me. I recharge my body, mind and soul in the morning. By 8.30am, I’m done with my exercise. Once home, I have breakfast with my family as I scan the day’s newspapers. A priority for me in the morning is to spend time with my two daughters—one of them is four, and the other is eight years old. I try to get them ready for school everyday. However immersed I may be in the familial duties, work or thoughts of work, is never far away. Richard Branson once said that he sees no distinction between work and play. I too live in a similar state: work’s life for me. Colosceum Media is not my job, it’s my third baby. In fact, the company was founded around the same time my second daughter was born. At night, even though I may switch off my BlackBerry, I never switch off from work. My BlackBerry’s on from early morning—its a good time to start conversations. When I’m commuting, I’m constantly on the phone, especially during the nearly hour-long drive from home to office. Our company is really about the business of ideas. In our job, creativity is the main currency. We need to be thinking ahead. We need to ask— what’s next for us, and therefore, for the viewers—constantly. How can we be different from the rest of our ilk? Now that we have an idea, how can we execute it successfully? So from the moment I step into office, around 10.30am, I start talking to five key cogs of Colosceum’s operations. These are my go-to guys from the creative, production and finance teams. In meetings we take stock of our live projects. Then the best part of the day—brainstorming and bouncing off new ideas. Some of us pitch in the ideas, others trash them. At the end of the day, we are our worst critics. One of the unique challenges in this job is that we need to think out-of-the-box constantly. In fact, when I quit my corporate life, it was this energy and excitement of content television that drove me towards it. I was in the marketing sector and often worked along side the advertising and creative teams. When we were brainstorming and developing marketing plans for my previous brand—Wheel—we came up with the idea of Wheel Smart 5 4 | INC. | JANUARY 2012
Shrimati. I sort of conceptualised the whole idea and thought of making it into a television show. When I got the chance to interact with the creative and advertising team, up-close, I sort of audaciously thought, “I might actually have a creative bent of mind.” ill today, it’s the brainstorming bit that
keeps my team and me on our toes—it keeps us happy. Because of these discussions, mornings are usually an intense time in office. These aren’t your typical corporate office mornings of hushed quiet and shuffling feet. In the media world, we’re all up till quite late in the night. My creative team may well have been in a shoot or in the edit room till 2am to 3am—so it’s unfair to expect them to be up and running by nine. But when they are up and about, they are a dynamic set of people. Most people saunter in between 10:3011 in the morning. But only in a few minutes, the office energy is electric and buzzing. Mornings are like the early phase of a company: energy levels are really high. Once the creativity starts, and people get into the “zone”, things start moving almost automatically. On a lighter note, the caffeine and Red Bulls the teams guzzle down also keep people on their toes. My high comes from the ideas and discussions. Those are my “tonic”. Ideas are essential for our well-being. If we are not always stoking the creative fire, we’ll be in trouble. I have “in” and “out” days in office: client meetings and shoots are the out days. At the client meetings, pitching in new ideas and arguing the cases, teams are usually full of enthusiasm and excitement. But nothing beats the shoots—those are the craziest of times. We sort of travel across the globe for them—we flew to Brazil for a season of MTV Roadies. We shot Splitsvilla (again for MTV) at Dubai, and in 2012, we will be taking it to Ibiza. The first season shoot for MasterChef India happened in Jaipur. There’s no knowing where our job will take us next. I have shot in grandiose sets built in ramshackle Mumbai studios, in the palaces of Udaipur and Jaipur, and in camps of the Border Security Force. We have shot high up north, south and in the west. I do travel extensively for the shows, however, I try to balance the in and out days. Between my assistant and me, we have the shoot and office days planned out in detail. I usually try to concentrate on the task at hand. If I’m not in office, I try not to be anxious about what’s happening there. Unlike regular corporate offices where a lot depends on numbers being generated and analytics constantly happening, this is a different business. Unlike my corporate days, there’s a sense of freedom that being an entrepreneur offers. I don’t feel slotted to a chair or a role. Similarly, if I am not there at a shoot,
strategy
“The start of a firm resembles the Big Bang, all heat and intensity.” I don’t hyperventilate. Cameras don’t stop if I am not there. Being on spot, however, helps us understand how a show is shaping up. When we travel, we have a tendency to do so as a pack. We’re a very close-knit team. If we’re all in office, we try to do lunch between 1-1.15pm, sit down together to talk of everything apart from shop. This is the time when we catch up with each other. I know a lot about my team’s personal lives, I talk to them about it. I work with creative people. It’s imperative that I treat them with respect, compassion and empathy. Managing people is the biggest aspect of running a business. The other things keep evolving irrespective of close attention. The start of a company resembles the Big Bang: it’s all heat and intensity. As you go along, you start putting systems in place to cool things down a bit. To assume the role of a strategist, as a founder, I had to delegate work. It wasn’t tough. I didn’t feel the separation pangs that a lot of people talk about. After all, my immediate team comprises the operational experts—these guys are supposed to be good at what they are doing. I always try to remember that I am the generalist among them. As their leader, my work is to designate responsibilities and deliverables that also link up to the overall vision of Colosceum. Let’s take a simple example: a firm’s vision is like an image in a colouring book. How you decide to colour the pages is up to each team. I think that’s why the experts find it harder to delegate work than I do. I understand that I am basically asking people to perform a contrary role: stay away for a bit but be on the job 24/7. However, to be fair, my role is somewhat similar: let go to stay plugged in. I intervene only when I am asked to. At the same time, I have to be at a distant yet conscious, focused and always “right there”. I try to make sure that our office is a creative den. At 38, I’m possibly the oldest person here. Our people have stamped the space with their individuality. The
head of the fiction team has done up his workspace in a theme of his choice. The head of the non-fiction team has a completely different theme and space. Our edit rooms are called Adda and Den. The office walls are covered with animated posters and photographs—of Phantom from the Indrajaal Comics and of show posters. There’s no bigger “yahoo moment” than entering through the office doors and staring straight at a poster of a show that you’ve helped create, ideate and produce. The office is a pleasure to be in—it’s vibrant. Now that I think of it, there is a theme of black and red repeated in some sections of the office. Only the area that we call the “idea room” is less vibrant. It’s more a sanctuary— done up in soft furnishings and bean bags. While the space that looks remotely formal or corporate-like is the conference room. ctivities continue unabated till 8pm. Then, it’s time to wrap up for some of us. Those in charge of production and post-production often stay back well into the night. I like to wrap things up early so I can be home by 9pm to tuck in my daughters. Though, to be honest I do miss doing that if I am attending calls or get stuck in traffic. After the babies are safely in bed, it’s television time for me and my wife. TV is like homework in this profession—there’s a lot of idiot box viewing through the day for me. Evenings, I surf channels again to gauge the content that’s the trend. Often, I discuss themes with my wife. She’s one audience I can’t ignore even if I want to! I also read a lot of popular magazines to see what people like to know about. But, these activities are less relaxing for me than it is for others. Real relaxation is listening to Kishore Kumar and Mohammad Rafi songs—melodies from vintage Bollywood. Sometimes, I also take a walk around the neighbourhood before I hit the sack. Most often my mind is screaming pack up before my body. JANUARY 2012 | INC. | 5 5
I wish I knew then...
Shailendra Nath Rai, co-founder, Lava International Born into a middle-class family, S. N. Rai was conditioned to lead a “financially secure” life. So he worked for over 20 years as an engineer before taking the plunge into business. In 2007, he co-founded Movico Technologies, a video content provider for the web and mobile. And in 2009, he co-founded Lava International, a mobile handset provider. Within a year, Lava has acquired four per cent of India’s total mobile market and established its presence in 50,000 retail outlets pan-India. For as long as I can remember, starting out on my own was on the top of my wish list. But financial security and stability were greatly valued in my family. It was only after working for more than two decades that I finally dared to take the plunge along with two other friends. We put together our job savings and started Movico. We didn’t know how to raise money. We were driven by pure enthusiasm. It was while working in the mobile service business in Movico, that I realised there was a big opportunity in handsets as well. My travels had shown me that areas which were mobile-enabled witnessed greater progress. Mobile phones had become tools of empowerment. I wanted to speed up the process. That’s how Lava came into being. Many of our pricecompetitive models like the KK-1, KKT-11 and KKT-22 targeted the rural populaces with features like a torch, a 30-day battery backup and radio. Both Movico and Lava taught me two key lessons, albeit the hard way. We didn’t put much thought into choosing our partners—distributors, supply partners, CSM and retailers. Looking back, it was immature and unwise not to realise the value of selecting the right partners. We often went
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within a year. We achieved that target within four months! We were fools to not have studied the market properly before entering it. I’m sure we missed a lot of opportunities we could have cashed into if we were better prepared. We are way more aggressive now. We’ve made multiple investments in R&D and distribution—our aim is to take our retail presence to 1.5 lakh outlets and add 700 distributors to our existing 1,000 in the next one year. Lava already has considerable presence in Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Nigeria. Our plan is to enter 40 more countries by 2012. Gut feeling Shailendra Nath Rai has always followed his instincts to lead his businesses. Even though the decades spent working in the telecom sector proved invaluable in in with those who were most readily and Lava’s early years, I regret having worked easily available. Soon, we ended up having for so long and not getting into business to scout for new partners. Our earlier part- earlier. When you’re an engineer, science ners couldn’t stay with us for the longdictates your life. But business is not just term. Now we make sure we don’t do science, it’s an art. If it was all about the business with those who don’t share our numbers, a genius mathematician would vision and values, irrespective of how big have become Bill Gates or Mark Zuckeror small the company is. berg by now. —As told to Ira Swasti When we started out, we were also very conservative, especially with Lava. Our target was to clock in around `150 crore
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