Bangalore – Silicon Valley of India, Seriously ?

First thing first, it is indeed THE best city among delhi, mumbai and Kolkata (I have a soft corner for hyderabad so won’t compare to it) to live in, it has great weather and is fairly cheap (minus the food and rent) but really, it is having some serious infrastructural problems, the roads are way too narrow and too crowded and there are multiple power cuts every day as well as severe water problem in many areas. Now most of the people being “neo uber rich” can afford power backups, can drink mineral water and when you are inside your AC car, you probably won’t care about the traffic jams but really, for a city which carries the tag of silicon valley of India and which has so many foreigners living, it is very surprising to see it lacking such basic amenities.

By the way, the number of stray dogs in Bangalore should easily outnumber stray dogs of mumbai or delhi, I am surprised why nothing has been done to stop them. The less we say about the cows, the better it is.

It is just disappointing that such a wonderful city with so many intelligent people and money around, a very big part of it still looks like some tier II city of India.

Businessman or Entrepreneur ?

I often think of this thing, I always call myself as an Entrepreneur (it sounds cool, right?) but how much of an Entrepreneur I am ? I am running a company, makes very decent money but this certainly doesn’t make me an Entrepreneur, this just makes me a businessman.

I see lot of people starting companies who are very bright and call themselves Entrepreneurs but unfortunately most of them like me are just businessman, they are doing it for the money (sad but true). I bet, 98% people who are starting the startups are doing it for money. If you tell them that you have a great product and service, why not make it free and non profit, no will do it as everyone wants to make millions of dollars.

There is absolutely nothing wrong in it, as I am also just like the other 98%, I comes from typical middle class Indian family, in life have struggled a lot (and thanks to my stupidity, I have made things look more tough they what they were, I will talk about it some other time) and have fought for limited resources (engineering seats/CGPA/Campus placement/railway tickets) at numerous moments just like millions of others in the country. Because of this struggle at every moment, there is a strong desire in Indian youth who comes from middle class families to do something bigger and because Indians give so much value to money (money == success), everyone wants to make lot of money as people feels this is what success is all about and to large extent it is true as lot of money means you are getting everything easily for which you had to struggle in life which result in happiness.

Now I can write a lot on happiness, money, dreams, ambition but this post is not about them. This post is about, how the “founders” are not able to differentiate between being a businessman and an Entrepreneur. I strongly feels that there has to be a balance between the founders being both businessman and Entrepreneur, as if you are just a businessman then you become a “dukaan wala”, you are not building something big and awesome and are not looking to make change in the world and making it a better living place, you are putting yourself at the center of eveything and will avoid any kind of risk, which may make you money but that is it. And if you are an entrepreneur only, who is least bothered about the market, clients and profit, you may have to shut down your company after 18 months when you run out of money.

I hope this post don’t sound like random incoherent rambling (which I often do), the gist of the post is, keep a balance between being a businessman and an Entrepreneur

Bangalore – I love you

It is over three weeks now that I am in bangalore (yes,it will always remain bangalore) and well, I have to say, I am in total love with the city. I mean the city infrastructure hasn’t scaled as well as the growth of the population but it has the most awesome weather you can (as an Indian) ever imagine, I have spent few weeks in Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai too in the last 4 months but they don’t even come close to bangalore. Not to mention, it is not that costly as earlier I had imagine. I am very seriously thinking of staying here permanently,

Here is a quick look at where bangalore scores over other cities

1. Mumbai – too costly, too crowded, too mechanical. It is not easy to start your life in mumbai and it will certainly take lot of effort to get adjusted there. Office space and getting a room can cost you a fortune. Though by weather wise, it seems to be alright.

2. Delhi – NCR/Gurgaon is the most happening place right now in India, and even if it is not, builders will make sure to convince you it is. Every third guy in delhi seems to be a property broker, and though the city is not that costly (you can find cheap places to stay and food is alright too), It has extreme temperature in summer and winter, I mean in January when I had went there, it was 4 C and in march it was touching 40 C.

I also feels the bangalore culture is better as compared to delhi as at every moment, someone in delhi was trying to rip me off, I guess people in delhi are too business minded.

3. Kolkata – too laid back, not a good place for IT crowd really, some parts are certainly developed (like salt lake) but the rest hasn’t gone anywhere.

As compared to all the three, bangalore has awesome weather, not too costly, little crowded but not discomforting, people are not trying to rip you off and a great culture and people, so guys, I am sold.

Sunscreen

I had watched this a long long time back, found it again today and was totally worth it watching again.

Internet Should be Free in India

I have always thought about this and wondered why can’t Internet be free in India ? Broadband companies are already offering Rs 250 minimum plan and they can easily make it free by offering some value added services to the plan like installing their own browsing software which can show ads or they can show their own products as advertisement, like Airtel can push their mobile services or their set top box, infact Airtel can offer free internet if people buy their set top box or take their mobile connection.

I don’t see why this can not be done, the problem is lack of will from the big companies of India. They are like to follow rather then lead and unfortunately innovation takes the backseat when it comes to growth.

Back in 2000, when the mobile war started, all the companies focussed on mobiles as compared to broadband because it had the real money and growth potential, and they were right, but the problem now is you can’t go any cheaper then what they are offering, Mobiles have very much become a commodity now and mobile companies can’t play with the price. All the growth is now organic and the market growth saturated.

I think its a great time to start a broadband war to do something what reliance did in 2000 with their Monsoon Hungama offer, they started offering mobiles for Rs 500 which made people go crazy for it, now only if Airtel or Reliance can start offering Internet for free (BSNL is hopeless), they can offer a package like 256kbps speed + 1 GB for free per month and you have to install their software to browse the net. For bigger plans, they can also cut the prices to half and look to play the “volume” game which they know really well.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure it out, once people get used to internet like buying train tickets online and seeing online exam results, there is no way they will be going back and if the bigger plans are going to cost Rs 250 (512 kbps + 5 GB), they will happily opt for it.

But the problem is, as usual, companies don’t know the depth of water and everyone will wait for some one else to make the move and in this “you first” “you first” attitude, the train will be “gone”

IRCTC selling Air Tickets now ???

So now IRCTC has spread its wings and have decided to sell air tickets which is all nice and fine, but shouldn’t they be focusing on their rail site which doesn’t work 25% of the time ? On average, it takes me 3 attempt to book a ticket as IRCTC doesn’t even store the session, meaning if the transaction fails, you have to redo everything from selecting the destination city. IRCTC is still using old fashioned popups on their site when the whole world has moved to ajax some 8 years back.

I know IRCTC gets lot of traffic but then there are hundreds of other sites too which get more traffic then it and they work fine without breaking in every 10 minutes. So wouldn’t it be nice if they spend their “resources” on fixing the main site which is used by millions of people rather then building another mediocre site for air ticket booking which will be used by thousands at most!

So basically IRCTC is offering a poor version of something whose better version already exist in hope of people using it because they have the traffic. Well Good Luck to them.

By the way, IRCTC seriously need a forum where people can write there complaints online. A forum can be a great place to bring transparency in the way Indian Railways works and people can also share information with each other much faster.

Want to Be an Entrepreneur ? Great tips from Naval Ravikant

Some nicely put thoughts from Naval

Why don’t Indian startups put combined effort rather then working alone ?

In the past 4 month, I must have met like 40+ startup founder(s) and one thing which as always bothered me was, why Indian startup founders like to work on their own (alone is may be too stronger word here). I mean there many examples where 3-4 different teams are working on same concept, some in Delhi/NCR, some in Bangalore, some in some other city, they know that others are also working on same thing and still they keeps on pursuing that idea knowing (or probably not knowing) that in India, starting a company, running a company and making profit from that company are 3 totally different things.

Most of the guys who are starting companies are software engineers so writing code, building sites and developing software is not a big deal, it is exciting for the founders but once they finish building the product, they hit a block asking themselves, now what! Most of them don’t understand marketing and have no money for it so they can’t hire others to do marketing and to do other part of the company (other means anything and everything other then building and maintaining code), so why not all these startups join hands and work together ?

For example, lets take groupon idea, it got a huge success in USA and as expected, now India has half dozen similar sites offering exact same service, none of them has got great traction because the idea hasn’t picked up, now assuming some 20 people are working on 6 of these companies, why don’t they all join hands and form a single company ? people may say that having 20 cofounders will never work but then people also said that the earth is flat till someone showed that it is not.

Also 100 percent of Nothing is Nothing so having total ownership of a company whose valuation is zero is not something which any founder want, instead if you have a company with 20 people and a idea which is “clicking”, you will get instant 10x valuation of your company (which now has 20 employees, none taking any salary). IMO 5% of a million dollar company is always better than 100% of zero dollar company

Joining hands will also cut down the cost of expenses and increase the life of the company in case if it don’t get any revenue, infact such companies probably don’t even need any outside funding as they can make profit on their own. Now the thing is, who will roll the ball first ?

The singlemost biggest Problem with these Retail Chains in India is -

Horrible and Unprofessional Staff

It seems all these Vishal Mega Mart and Big Bazaar find the most incompetent people who have no desire to help customers/shoppers and put them to manage everything. I know they are underpaid (probably 3k to 6k per month) and that their work do not require any skill but this doesn’t mean they don’t have to do anything. Most of the time when I go to nearby vishal mega mart, I never get straight answer from anyone, most of the answers are like “mujhe nahi pata” (I don’t know) or “ask someone else”.

This is where local shop score over these big retailers, there is personalization. The local shopwala knows his customers, call them by name, doesn’t mind getting paid later and suggests you new products.

Another problem with these big retail chains is that they are looking to grow way too fast without really too much thinking about the existing customers, ideally they should be focusing 80% time/resources on what they have currently and to make it better and stronger and the rest 20% time/resources on starting new stores and doing new thing but I think it is otheway around.

Why can’t the staff of retail marts act like staff of mcdonalds, they are also not that well paid but they are told to help their customers and talk to them nicely which do it pretty well.

Justdial – Where is the unsubscibe option ?

I often get unsolicited mails from justdial like asking me to join their facebook group or to forward justdial to friends to make money, since I get lot of such emails from many companies, I don’t mind such mails as normally I click on unsubscribe (bottom link) the first time I get them to remove my email ID from mailing list (it is mandatory to have an unsubscribe link for such emails)

Now the problem with justdial is, though they have the unsubscribe link, it just don’t work!

Here is what my unsubscribe link shows

It is hard to believe that justdial programmers can make such basic error of using $variable = $variable in their code, I am seeing this for the last 4 months now and the problem hasn’t’ been corrected so I am going to assume that justdial don’t want me (and anyone else) to unsubscribe from their list. And the biggest disappointment was, I had never even subscribed to their mailing list, I never filled any form where I checked any checkbox saying that justdial can contact me with their offers, it seems they are working on an opt out model with the optout option not working.