Monthly Archives: November 2011

Exploring the role of Entrepreneurship in the Social Sector

Posted on
Reply

The troika of books that I am reading now for the startup stuff is Lean Start up by Eric Ries, The 4 steps to the Epiphany by Steve Blank and Business Model Generation lead by Alex Osterwalder.

I have started out with the business model innovation stuff and best of all I am using the iPad app to create the business model for Family by Family. Like I said, I am entering the digital era and moving out from pre-digital.

As I was reading the Lean StartUp, Eric starts with defining entrepreneurship as “The concept of entrepreneurship includes anyone who works within my definition of a startup: a human institution designed to create new products and services under conditions of extreme uncertainty.” This definitely makes sense and does not restrict first to tech only startups but to go beyond start ups. As he explains his work at Intuit, large and mature organisations and the managers who work there are extremely in the same situation as a start up, especially if they have read the Innovators Dilemma.

Eric clarifies,

“Anyone who is creating a new product or business under conditions of extreme uncertainty is an entrepreneur whether he or she knows it or not and whether working in a government agency, a venture-backed company, a nonprofit, or a decidedly for-profit company with financial investors”

When I write about business in this blog, I always mean entrepreneurship. In the about pages, I talked about business by providing the definition of the entrepreneur that Drucker used. I discuss startups, write about them, read about them, started a couple and failed in them and am totally energized to work in one now. However, what I have done from the almost my early working days is trying to “to create new products and services under conditions of extreme uncertainty”.

My first job was to sell the services of my organisation which was to design webpages on the internet. Year – 1998. Place – Hyderabad, India. This was before Hyderabad was a powerhouse with Google India HQ, the Indian School of Business etc. Ofcourse, this was when internet connections where 56kbps and the go to browser was Netscape. The challenge was so great that we had to actually ship a computer to a customer’s office to show a mock up web page on a 5 1/2 in floppy in monochrome colour. Don’t laugh!

My next area of work was in financial services and investment banking outsourcing for investment banks like Goldman Sachs in ADP Wilco. The most exciting part for me was when we were setting up a new project. After 4 years, I left to work for Deeshaa. A real social enterprise trying to make a difference in rural India. And it continued into the government here, two failed startups, and now in Families SA and TACSI I have always worked and thrived in areas when I was creating new products and services under conditions of extreme uncertainty.

Reading this I had the epiphany about my entrepreneurship journey as I saw my last 13 years of working life and decided that will be the tag line for this blog, the headline in LinkedIn and clearly what I am doing now and will continue to do for the foreseeable future.

Pre-Digital

Posted on
1

Seth as ever has written a quite obvious but interesting observation.(Via Modern Digital Business)

A brief visit to the emergency room last month reminded me of what an organization that’s pre-digital is like. Six people doing bureaucratic tasks and screening that are artifacts of a paper universe, all in the service of one doctor (and the need to get paid and not get sued). A 90-minute experience so we could see a doctor for ninety seconds.
[...]
School is pre-digital. Elections. Most of what you do in your job. Even shopping. The vestiges of a reliance on geography, lack of information, poor interpersonal connections and group connection (all hallmarks of the pre-digital age) are everywhere.

Perhaps the most critical thing you can say of a typical institution: “That place is pre-digital.”

This is so true. I have been trying to digitize my work for such a long time. Mails in one place, documents to access, my online stuff, things that I work at home, articles I find on the bus reading on the iPhone, the various books and the ideas that I want to share. And don’t even get me started on meetings at work.

The online services for docs (dropbox, sugarsync, icloud), Kindle books and sharing options, Pinboard for bookmarks but more importantly time shifting software for articles link Read It Later and Instapaper are making a great difference to this. All of this still needs to fit into a workflow and we did not figure out the meetings part of it. And the various bits of paper we use everyday.

Into this world entered the iPad for me. In less than a week it has become my go to computer for most of the things. Always on, 10 hour battery, fast, but connected to everything. Most importantly with software like Note Taker HD (written by Dan Bricklin, the creator of VisiCalc, the original spreadsheet software) is just amazing. I do not take any notebooks now. A stylus, iPad and Notetaker HD. With this complete, I actually feel like I have entered the digital world. Lots more to do but I can experience the digital world now.

More importantly we need to figure out a way for our businesses to go digital. Not just in the use of softwares (like we use Paycycle for Payroll and moving to Xero for Accounting at TACSI) but to be able to build a workflow around it.

Should your start up hire MBAs?

Posted on
Reply

A good take on the value of MBAs (like me) to a start up by Sheel from FeeFighters. Check out the entire post.

Why qualities could an MBA possibly possess to make them valuable to your startup? MBA’s are…

1)Driven / Ambitious – This is not to say that others aren’t… but MBAs are generally a particularly driven bunch. Some people think the opposite, but I think it actually takes balls to quit your existing job, take a couple of years off, move to a new city (usually) and go into debt for a piece of paper.

2)Extroverted / Outgoing – Yes, there are lots of counter-examples… but on the whole, the MBA folks are going to be more outgoing than the techies… and like it or not, you need some extroverts in your company. There are a bunch of d-bags at bschool too, though.

3)Well Networked – On the bizdev/sales/fundraising/marketing side of things, knowing people helps, and aside from possessing #2 above, we generally have fantastic networks to tap into, and aren’t afraid of tapping into them. One advantage is that we have networks not just in the startup bubble that we live in, but also the “normal” world that we need to partner with and/or eventually take over/dominate.

4)More Polished – MBA’s are really sometimes just finishing school for nerds. They teach you how to speak, negotiate, and write emails. If you were terrible at those things before, you won’t be amazing after, but you probably will have improved.

5)Highly Analytical – We have a different approach than some other people. In bschool, you’re constantly analyzing cases to see how other companies have succeeded or failed and making a recommendation based on all that you’ve learned. Some say it doesn’t apply to startups, but I’d beg to differ. I’m constantly thinking of cases I studied in school when making decisions at FeeFighters.

Scientists and Engineers: innovation and entrepreneurship

Posted on
Reply

Yet when venture capital got involved they brought all the processes to administer existing companies they learned in business school – how to write a business plan, accounting, organizational behavior, managerial skills, marketing, operations, etc. This set up a conflict with the learning, discovery and experimentation style of the original valley founders.
Yet because of the Golden Rule, the VC’s got to set how startups were built and managed (those who have the gold set the rules.)

Fifty years later we now know the engineers were right. Business plans are fine for large companies where there is an existing market, product and customers, but in a startup all of these elements are unknown and the process of discovering them is filled with rapidly changing assumptions.

Startups are not smaller versions of large companies. Large companies execute known business models. In the real world a startup is about the search for a business model or more accurately, startups are a temporary organization designed to search for a scalable and repeatable business model.

Yet for the last 40 years, while technical founders knew that no business plan survived first contact with customers, they lacked a management tool set for learning, discovery and experimentation.

From Steve Blank

How to lead a creative life?

Posted on
Reply

From Fast Company. Check out the articles and a good one on Scorcese.

The director has achieved the trifecta of a fulfilling, creative life: enough money to do only what truly interests him, enough freedom to attack those projects in a way that is satisfying, and enough appreciation from his peers to tame–just slightly, just ever so slightly–the neurotic beast of self-doubt. After 22 movies, five commercials, 13 documentaries, a handful of music videos, three children, five wives, and 25 studios; after insolvency and misery, after box-office failures and years of going unappreciated; after the one Oscar and all the others he should have won, Marty Scorsese has earned the right that every creative person dreams of: the right never to be bored. And what all this adds up to in his case, what this really means to this particular man, is that he has earned the right to continue to fret every little detail in the world well into the next decade and for as long as he cares to make movies

20111124-203230.jpg

The next Steve Jobs will totally be a chick

Posted on
Reply

From Fast Company (via John Gruber):

Overall, I think it’s a good time to have a girl in the 21st century because things are changing, with more opportunities for women. But girls are still the underdog, which means they’ll work harder, and everybody loves an underdog. The next Steve Jobs will totally be a chick, because girls are No. 2–and No. 2 always wins in America. Apple was a No. 2 company for years, and Apple embodies a lot of what have been defined as feminine traits: an emphasis on intuitive design, intellect, a strong sense of creativity, and that striving to always make the greatest version of something. Traditionally, men are more like Microsoft, where they’ll just make a fake version of what that chick made, then beat the shit out of her and try to intimidate everybody into using their product.

Wait a second–why am I trying to persuade someone to have a girl? It’s backward. The fact that people have kids because they want something from them is bizarre. As soon as you have a child, that script gets flipped for the rest of your life anyway. It’s not about you anymore. I say this so when you have a girl, you don’t ask yourself: What am I going to get out of this girl? You’re supposed to focus on: What does this girl need from me and what kind of parent do I need to be to her? That’s the question you should be asking yourself right now, not whether or not you’ll be missing some boy’s stupid Little League game.

That’s my question: what kind of a parent do I need to be for my daughter.