Category : entrepreneurship

Inspired by real life events.

Every book on entrepreneurship seems to follow the same template. Research your market Do some Excel modelling Raise some money Start the business $$$ These are no longer relevant to the current environment, at least not relevant if you are looking to start a small business or a startup. A better book (or video, or a course) would be along these lines: How to get a business idea.

Recently, I was invited to share my experiences with my alma-mater. I chose to talk about how fresh graduates can maximize their career success. While several people will ascribe their success or success of others to luck; it is also silently agreed that success is much more than luck. Therefore I prefer Roman philosopher Seneca’s definition of luck. Luck is what happens when opportunity meets preparation. Seneca Therefore I focused on how one can increase their luck by working on creating opportunities and being prepared.

Does a company, be it a start-up or not, need to make their employee sign bonds that state that the employee has to serve the company for at least for a period of X years or will be penalized $Y? I find them to be neither ethical nor legal or even enforceable in a country like India. At INSORCE we have replaced the stick with a carrot and it is working great for us.

Admin + Vendor Management + Accounts + Sys Admin + Customer Support + HR + Trainer + Product Manager + Project Manager + Architect + Full Stack Developer = Full Stack CTO

INSORCE is built on a combination of technologies that are considered safe by bank’s for their data center, yet cutting edge to deliver performance that is superior to a desktop application. We are building on Microsoft stack for 2 reasons Banks find it easy to deploy and manage Availability of competent professionals The key parts of INSORCE are: ASP.Net MVC, where the views are mostly returning JSON results.

It’s a log of my experiences being a technical co-founder at INSORCE. Its here that I realized that being a CTO at a start-up is much more than either the traditional role of a CTO or that of a full stack developer or lead programmer. Therefore I coined the term Full Stack CTO to describe what the role entails. A traditional CTO will focus on the defining, communicating and managing the execution of the technical strategy of the organisation.

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. - Antoine de Saint-Exupery The story of Maven is a journey towards perfection. What started as common sense, slowly evolved into a way of doing things – the Artha Shastra way. The ad-hoc, piece meal approach gave way to a structured and systematic approach to problem-solving. This was step one of removing the cruft and starting on the path to perfection.

Get started… Those were my thoughts when I took up the challenge of building Maven (then known as Project Andromeda). There were so many reasons not to do it, unfinished and continuously evolving specs, unknown complexity, several dependencies, no development team in place, no clear target user, unproven market, extremely aggressive deadlines, fear of running out of money etc. But there was one important reason to do it: it hasn’t been done before.

While visiting rediff.com today, I was intrigued by the home page promotion of ‘Biz Solutions’. Clicking through, I was surprised to see an unbelievable price for .in domains. This sent me hunting for the fine print, but I found none. Here is a screenshot of the offer. [caption id="" align=“alignnone” width=“606” caption=".in - Rs. 125 for one year"][/caption] Not ready to give up, I decided to test the offer by trying to purchase a dummy domain.

A short post about interesting business ideas, I came across in the last week or so. Lost-key drop service A service, that sells numbered key chains, which has something like this written on it: When the key is lost, the owner will contact the service hotline to ascertain if the key, with id number 123654789 in the above example, has been returned. If yes, he can pick it up or have it mailed for a fee.

Thanks to the company I keep, online and offline, the only entrepreneurial ventures I see are tech related. Everyone wants to be the next viral sensation and make pots of money. Hardly anyone wants to add real value to the life of others and improve the community as a whole. Rant aside, I recently came across a very interesting piece from Vivek Wadhwa titled Replicators, Innovators, and Bill Gates. The form of ventures I described above might be of innovative type, but there is no harm in starting a replicating venture.

Introduction Q. In your own words, who are you and what is your business? I am just a young creative mind, who feels that everyone can sell anything; but the only reason why everyone doesn’t become a businessman, is that they don’t have a product to sell. Since they don’t have anything to sell they sell somebody else’s product. All one needs is to be creative, a little passionate and definitely risk taking.

Ever since the iPad was announced, the internet is clogged with updates, analysis and impressions on iPad. But I saw very little talked about what this means, or how this could affect the way we do business. The guys with the biggest megaphones are either reporters or tech gurus, who are far removed from the trenches of enterprise application development. Full disclosure The only Apple product I own is the iPod touch.

I am surprised that I haven’t come across a voice based classifieds system. Well creating one from scratch and reaching critical mass is difficult, but leveraging social media and Craig’s list should not be difficult at all. So, here’s the idea. User calls a premium number and speaks the advert. The server processes the voice and tries to understand the message. If the message is correctly understood, it will post an appropriate ad on Craig’s list, with the user’s phone number and an auto generated email id.

With Copenhagen behind us, it makes me wonder is there something we as individuals do to help the climate? On one such thought tangent I wondered if it possible to teach kids about climate using a simulation game like Civilisation? On cursory search I could not find anything that could entertain and educate kids. What would it be? An empire building game that needs to balance technology, way of life and climate to achieve sustainable conditions.

Every micro ISV needs several standard things to get started. Few of them are: A web host A web site, including a blog A store front Email Customer support infrastructure like forums, CRM, Chat, etc. Bug tracker Source Control Build environment Apart from these, some software related bits Common controls / Custom controls Framework things like: Installer Auto updater And if your software is not open source, then

In the second interview, I get to interview Mr. Sudhir of vfreshers.com. He runs a website that provides info about fresher jobs. Introduction Q. In your own words, who are you and what is your business? A. I am an IT Professional having worked in Software industry in India & USA for 4-5 years. I have been working on Vfreshers.com along with my wife who is a law graduate and left her career to pursue my dream.

In a planned series of interviews with Indian entrepreneurs, here is the first one. I got in touch with Kishore, an old friend and associate, and talked to him about his venture fullhyd.com. Introduction In your own words, who are you and what is your business? fullhyd.com is a local content and local search company, currently focusing on Hyderabad, India, and planning to scale to all Indian cities soon. We help people find comprehensive details about various businesses and services in their neighbourhood, and help them interact with the businesses, and with each other about the businesses.

Hi, this is Hitesh. I am here to talk about stuff I like. How do I know what I like? Well I asked myself the same question and like any true geek looked at the data at hand to decide. So I analysed my bookmarks at delicious and the three areas that interest me way beyond others are programming, education and entrepreneurship. Thus the focus of this blog will remain these three areas of my interest.