This may sound very trivial but if you look at the OCC and Headstart mailing lists, there are more people looking for Office space in Bangalore/Mumbai/NCR then people looking for co-founders and early employees. It took me over a month to find our office space after putting this as almost the first priority.
Here are my learnings about What kind of office space you should take, where to take and when to take it. We are based in Bangalore but the points should be valid at any other city too.
When is the time to take an office space
Right now.
For startups with salaried employees, work from home will not work. There is too much idea and strategy sharing involved in a startup so you have to take an office.
Where to Take Office Space ?
Where you are most comfortable in.
Don’t take where everyone is but do your calculation. We took our office in a place where there were no startups but I was most comfortable with this area of Bangalore and knew lot of locals. I tried to take an office in Koramangala and Jayanagar but had no idea about the areas even though lot of startups are there. At the end of the day, it is all about YOU, not about others.
My Tips and Suggestions about startup Office in India
1. Invest in good office space, you will be spending more time here then anywhere for next 12 months atleast. If possible go with a newly painted office and spend some good money on buying furniture and chair. Never buy anything second hand or rented. Though we got some chairs for free from the landlord, they were brand new so we happily took it.
2. Make sure it is not too noisy.
3. Avoid ground floor or first floor houses, (we are on 3rd floor of a big building) as they get too much dust and noise and have poor ventilation and sunlight.
4. Do not go to outskirts of the city just because rent is cheap. You will be wasting lot of time traveling and will have to search for food and smaller things, follow #1. We are based at the center of the bangalore which is well connected by city buses
5. Ample sunlight is a must. There is should be big windows in every room of the office. Do I really need to talk about importance of proper ventilation here ?
6. Make sure you solve the lunch problem at day 1. There are tiffin services available everywhere in Bangalore (and other metros too) so you should be fine. Avoid cooking any food in office premise (We have lunch services here in office though employees do like to bring their own lunch too as people have different taste)
7. What about tea/coffee and Snacks ? Luckily our building is semi-commercial and it already had 5 offices running so the person who delivers them tea/coffee delivers it to us too. Avoid making tea/coffee in the office, you are better of going out for 15 mins to have your tea and a walk instead. You can get some tea in the thermos too for later drinking.
8. Right now we are avoiding it but having an office boy is a must. We will have it from next month for sure though right now the person who cleans other offices also cleans our office for Rs 1500 per month.
9. Shared office space don’t work. Don’t waste your time unless you are running a courier company. As a startup, you have to have your own office. Take a flat or house, doesn’t matter though ideally for early stage startup, you probably want to go with a flat as they are well maintained, normally have power backup and provides security.
11. The moment you move to office, make sure you get a min 3 hour power backup in the office. (we have APC Inverter). Also invest in good quality batteries too.
12. Get a good water filter, has to be electric. Avoid those Rs 40 daily water bottles. We have small office with few people hence we drink packaged water only though we do have water filter too.
I hope this helps, if anyone of you have anything to add, please add it in comments.
This is the email I got today (I get 3 such emails daily)
Hello,
I am Priyanka Marketing Executive. (what?)
We have a SEO discount offer going for the following package: -
**Long list of some random stuff**
Our Best rates for this: – USD XXX per month per project at beginning of every month.
This Discount is Valid till August 31th 2011 (well but today is 5th September, Do’h)
Please let us know in case you are interested.
Warm Regards,
Priyanka
So Priyanka just copy/pasted the email without even reading it whether it is even making any sense. now since the email was sent from priyankaseoxx@gmail.com, I am assuming priyanka (or priyank) is sending these mails manually which is such a huge waste of time considering I can bet s(h)e is not going to get a single reply with these emails. This is not even spray and prey, this is just “begging and prey”
So the question is, what such people and such micro companies of India can do to look more presentable and acceptable to potential client ? The answer is simple, Think from the Clients Point of View (it is common sense but everyone fails to do this as we think we are smarter then the client and knows best for him). If you see the above mail, the person is just hard selling it without even realizing what he is selling and whether the recipients even need it ? the price also seems to be ridiculous (you should never mention the price in such emails, nor should write such lengthy unsolicited emails). And last but not the least, never send a business mail from gmail id, you are not running an online B2B business if you are using free service providers.
My facebook wall is filled with Anna Hazare supporters (who on facebook is supporting government?) so I just did some search to find out what are the stance of both, government and Anna Hazare camp.
It will be impossible to get it passed in the current format but if both sides (specially government) can compromise, it can do wonders to reduce high level corruption in India. The good thing is, it seems this time, the common man is determined to make something happen. Lets hope it ends in best possible way for Indians.
Yesterday I had a 1.5 hour long discussion with Sumit Datta, he has tremendous knowledge about startups, he himself ran a startup and currently works in a VC funded company in Bangalore. Half of our conversation was about “How to find Best (read as Rockstar, I don’t know what it really means but it looks to be the “hip” word looking at hasgeek job board) Developers” and we both agreed that in India, As a startup company, it is almost impossible to find 5-6 really good developer. The logic is very simple, no one with 3+ years of experience want to work in a startup unless he really knows the founders. People who are married have different priorities and Indians in general are risk averse people and working in a startup leaving your 12+ lakh job sounds (and indeed it is) very high risk decision.
So this means, you can only hire people with < 3 years of experience, preferably freshers. This is where, it gets even more tougher. India's best engineering talent (from IITs/NITs/BITS/IIITs/DCE/NSIT) eventually land up in US for their masters/PhD, the rest lands up in IIMs just after graduation, and those amazing developers who don't chose to do MBA or Masters gets hired by Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Adobe (and dozen more) companies for 12 to 15 lakh salaries with perks and as a startup, you just can't convince those people to leave their Mon to Fri job in Fortune 500 companies.
This brings us to the point why I am writing this post, How many Rockstar developers are there in India who really want to work in a statup ? I know, every startup wants few rockstar developer who can work for peanuts, get some esop and help the founders make millions but how many Rockstars in India are really there who wants to work in a startup ? My answer is, not more than 200.
There are over 1000+ startups looking to hire these 200 people which reminds me of “Rakhi ka Swayamvar”. As per Sumit, this is also a reason why India is not able to build a billion dollar product company. There is absolutely no talent available for startup and desi companies. What scares me is, as a startup founder, there is nothing you can do to change this situation, just keep on trying and struggling against time and hope to find few good people, as the other 1000 startup founders are doing.
Btw, WorkMonk is also looking for an excellent developer (no, NO rockstars, but it will be nice if you can sing and dance) who wants to work with an excellent team, mentors and investors. Please drop me an email to “jobs at workmonk dot in” and we can talk. Make sure you do read this Blog Post too.
Brief snippet of an article I had read and clipped it, it is an amazing summary of how stratup founders need to work, there is no initial glory, money or fame even after running the startup for 3+ years and raising funding. Also he worked without salary for 3+ years too and kept on doing another job (the original article is a must read).
Well, for the first three years, my wife was in Nestle and the company couldn’t pay me. The next two years, the company could pay me and my wife was still in Nestle so we were okay. She quit in 1995 and around 1996 I became the Consulting Editor of The Pioneer’s career supplement called Avenues. That gave me a monthly cheque; we were not well-off but we got by.
By that time my reference group had changed, so I was not seeing what my batch mates were getting. In 2000 when we got venture capital from ICICI, I had been through the second round of not taking salary for three years — 1997 to 2000. That was tough.
During that time my wife was not working, so I had to do a second job. I got up at 6.00 in the morning, dropped her to the bus stop, was in the office by 7.00, worked till 12.00 then would go to The Pioneer come back and work till midnight again. This went on for three years.
That was tough, but the thing about doing your own business is that you are probably very happy even though you are not making money, for the simple reason that you are in control of your life and priorities and that is important to me.
Do you want to work in a Promising Startup in Bangalore ?
Do you want to have ownership of the work and want to play multiple roles in Challenging environment ?
Do you have “I will do it” and “We can do it” attitude ?
WorkMonk is looking for 3 Profiles
1. Developer who is Technically very sound
2. Workforce Manager, someone who can play multiple roles, manage people and also technically good
3. Business Developer, who can take care of sales part, talk to clients, can wear multiple hats and manage people.
Please read the above post and it has all the info.
I wanted to write a big long post about how Awesome Pluggd 3 was but due to time constrains, will stick to only writing few lines. Pluggd 3 turn out to be a great event personally considering I met over 30+ people and it looks like I am going to have some serious long term relationship with most of them. I hope the next unpluggd 4 also happens in 2011 only.
Here is a quick review good vs bad of Unpluggd 3
Good
* Great people, great audience, great hosts.
* Great for networking, this time, plenty of time was given for networking and there was good space to meet people one after one
* This time, I stayed till the end (since I knew half of the startup companies showcasing already so wanted to see their way of giving presentation + met some really good ppl too even when presentations were going on)
* food, though not as good as in unpluggd 1 and unpluggd 2, was good enough.
* Goodies, yay, T-shirt + pen drive was itself over Rs 650. Ashish certainly knows how to Roll!
Bad (not that bad actually…)
There were no Bad’s really, just two minor problems,
* It was not easy to find that place, luckily I left early and found it with relative comfort but there were many who couldn’t found it that easily, specially people coming from outside. But we made that up by starting late.
* I felt the hall was little small (the hall for unpluggd 2 was too big, but the honeywell office for unpluggd 1 was perfect, I hope we again book that for next unpluggd) as many were standing at the end (including me)
“Our assets walk out of the door each evening. We have to make sure that they come back the next morning.”
“Performance leads to recognition. Recognition brings respect. Respect enhances power. Humility and grace in one’s moments of power enhances dignity of an organisation,”
“The real power of money is the power to give it away.”
“In God we trust, everybody else bring data to the table.”
“Progress is often equal to the difference between mind and mindset.”
“I want Infosys to be a place where people of different genders, nationalities, races and religious beliefs work together in an environment of intense competition but utmost harmony, courtesy and dignity to add more and more value to our customers day after day.”
“A clear conscience is the softest pillow in the world.”
“A plausible impossibility is better than a convincing possibility.”
“When in doubt, disclose.”
and looking at Sudha Murthy’s profile and achievements, I think she certainly don’t get enough credit like NR Murthy and other founders get.
On some dreadful not so perfect day, I create my profile on futurebazaar, I never purchased anything but apparently filled my correct mobile number and from then onwards, FB (not facebook, futurebazaar) is sending me spam sms and emails as generously as laxman siviramakrishnan (sp?) says “karbon kamal catch” or “citi moment of success”
so I checked my FB account and tried to disable both the services
the problem is, even you OFF the services, there is no save option and it doesn’t save the details automatically which means your settings by default, will always be ON! This is something which justdial was doing something back when the unsubscribe link in their spam messages was leading to 404 page not found! Anyway I am still trying to figure it out what to do before I complaint to Airtel
Edit – as per Internet, you have to send “DEALZ NO” on to 575758 to unsubscribe for the promotion (spam) SMS from futurebazaar
Hi, I am Pushkar Gaikwad, Founder of WorkMonk. Through WorkMonk, we are looking to change the way people are working, and we proudly believes that we are not only just building a platform or product but building a complete new Industry
