Archives for posts with tag: startups

Immigration

August 7, 2012 //
1

Enough has been said about the war for talent in the valley. It’s definitely hard to hire good engineers and it’s just ending up in a zero sum game where Google tries to poach from Facebook, Facebook from Twitter, Twitter from … and so on. And then there are a few engineers in these companies who’d like to work for a startup mostly because they’d want to do one in the near future. In fact, someone built a site for that.

It’s getting increasingly easy for good hackers to start companies. Startups are becoming almost risk-free because even if you fail, a team of good developers might be worth  $1M * no. of hackers, going by the recent acqui-hires.

Background
I’m one of the founders of Interviewstreet and we conduct programming contests to match programmers with companies. [1] Over the last year we conducted a lof of contests and what surprised us most was, out of the 40-50 developers who were hired through us, 85% were international candidates. The companies which hired weren’t large enterprises but really good tech companies like Quora, PocketGems, Evernote, RocketFuel, etc. They got some of the best hackers to work for them.

Sweet spot
There’s a cap on the number of H-1b’s that can be issued, primarily because the US govt. fears that immigrants are going to eat away local jobs. This is SO wrong. Increasing the cap will make the world much better or at least the US economy. Here’s why:

Talented hackers are everywhere and since it’s so easy to know about different technologies, the geographical limitations don’t come into play.[2] The odds of finding a good hacker in India might just be about the same as finding one here. And talented hackers want to move to the valley because they love building things and valley is the epicenter of it.[3] They’d love to get plugged into the ecosystem, work for a great startup and eventually build something on their own. This almost sounds like a biopic of  some of my friends who’re doing fantastic right now creating more jobs. I personally know people who’ve rejected offers from Google & Amazon in India to work for lesser-known startups in the valley because it’s worth in the long term. This is a sweet spot for both the companies to get great talent and hackers to work on the path breaking companies.

We conducted a contest for all the IIT’s in India. The top rankers are going to join Facebook this fall. Increasing the cap will only help creating more companies or greater value in a much faster pace. It’s sad that the H-1b cap for this year is already full and if you make an offer to someone right now, she can join only in Oct 2013. It’ll be fantastic if the immigration policies and rules can be relaxed or more favorable. It’s only going to create a much better place.

Notes
[1] Lets not debate whether ACM style programming contests are the right way to judge a programmer. There needs to be some starting point and this seems to work best at least for programmers from 0-2 years of experience.
[2] It’s not true for designers. I don’t know why, but the odds of finding a good one here is much higher than India.
[3] Why can’t hackers build stuff wherever they are? or why is Silicon valley a better place?

a. Access to investors (money) is higher. Web startups aren’t cheap to build, servers are. To hire one developer + a designer, you’ll need to spend at least $200k/year.
b. There are no technology limitations here. For eg: you can assume a large number of people have iPhones and a good majority are always connected to internet. This leads to identifying a lot of interesting ideas to work on.

Shameless plug
We’re conducting a series of monthly programming contests starting October to hire the best international candidates before the larger companies take them on board. If your company is interested to participate, e-mail me: vivek [at] interviewstreet

 

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Categories startups

Point

June 29, 2012 //
2

If you notice, there is one point in a startup journey after which the growth skyrockets and you start to define/influence the market in a big way.

Many of the successful startups started very differently (sometimes radically different) than what they’re doing now.  Youtube started as a dating site, Instagram originally started as Burbn, an HTML-5 mobile check in app which didn’t go anywhere for about a year. Guess how many users Pinterest had in the first year?  Just 10k.

One takeaway from the above examples and a lot of successful startups in general is, the founders were persistent enough to keep trying new things till the inflexion point was reached, because it’s so hard to figure out and build what users want. The cost of building on the internet is getting cheaper and technology startups have an unfair advantage over other businesses to reach that point faster.

Probably  ”success” of a tech startup comes down to –  Can you iterate fast based on user feedback and stay determined long enough to reach that point? If you surround yourself with people (co-founder, team, investors) who are at least as motivated as you are and flexible at every stage, it doesn’t seem too hard.

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Categories startups

Chase

June 19, 2012 //
1

Q. When do you know if you’re really passionate about what you’re building?

When you can go to the extent of even working for free for a company that’s already doing it. Sure, you can start off on your own, but the excitement of starting up with people you know will supersede the idea itself, especially for first time entrepreneurs.

Work hard, sleepless nights, highs & lows, blah..blah.. have all been there but there is something different this time around – a chase to get to that point which I can see so clearly even at such a large distance. I’ve always loved working for Interviewstreet but the last couple of weeks have been something special.

The closest analogy I can think of is a comparison between arranged and loved marriages. While I don’t have any experience in either of them, I guess I’ve been living my startup life like an arranged marriage guy – the scenario where you like the idea of marriage (startup), more than the girl you were introduced to (idea) before marrying. It’s akin to the way startups are born in the valley. A lot of successful companies have been built this way.

But for the very first time, I’m completely kicked about building this than the thought of building a massive company even though that’s the state you might want to reach. It’s definitely like love where you are in chase of the girl than the idea of marriage itself even though you want to get there.

I’ve always been in a sprint mode – wake up, iron out bugs, ship a feature and iterate. I’ve been trapped in a myopic view. For the first time, I zoomed out to see the bigger picture and wasn’t that fascinating! It changed my outlook. I’m focused so much on the product including the tiniest details of it.  I can see the goal which enables me to take bolder decisions that’ll have a higher impact on the company, defying a lot of norms, just to get there.

I don’t care if I don’t become rich or the company isn’t worth a billion dollars or whether I work as an employee/founder, etc. (which used to run in my mind). All I want now is to just see it grow.

It’s a very ambitious hard goal that I’m chasing but it’ll be one of the most valuable thing EVER created on the web if done well. Imagine if I were to say that you’ll be able to control the pace at which the world will advance if we built this. That’s the sort of potential this product has. It’s a superset of what we are currently on.

It’s okay to try and fail climbing a Mount Everest than be happy climbing a 500ft hill. And I’m up for the long journey and hopefully will reach the top. Stay on for the launch. And if you’re interested in joining a great team in the expedition, let me know [vivek AT interviewstreet] or you can drop by at our office.

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Categories life, startups

Bootstrapping

March 25, 2012 //
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Bootstrapping in early days has indirect advantages that are hard to spot during the time. Ironically the learnings help a lot after funding or during the growth phase. We started Interviewstreet with our own money in 2009 and for over two years ran it without any external funding (our first funding was from YC in mid 2011).

We struggled a lot with three failed ideas and were on the verge of bankruptcy by the end of 2010. I remember how sometimes I used to curse the startup life because nothing really was working, but it taught us two great lessons.

a) Trust in co-founder(s): You know whether the person is a coal or diamond only when subjected to stress, and bootstrapping provides a lot of opportunities for that. When you’ve a viral product or backed by a big investor with lots of money in the bank, it’s a great situation to be in and everyone’s happy. The real character is hardly known because every thing is going well and everyone’s happy. It’s when the boat is about to sink, the real person comes out and you instantly know whether you want to continue to work or not. This is a critical decision that can almost make/break the company.

b) How to use money: When you bootstrap, firstly it’s your hard-earned money that’s being invested and secondly it’s limited. This intrinsically gives you the habit of using it wisely and frugally. Even after being funded, we’ve never done anything outrageous. We’re a little better now with a beautiful office space, in-house cook, etc. but haven’t done anything extravagant or lavish. The frugal lifestyle always keeps a check on us.

Bootstrapping gives you the strength to handle anything that comes your way.

We were a 2-member team, went up to 6 people and then back to just the two of us all within a short span of 3-4 months. All our first hires left us to do something on their own. CodeSprint-2 was round the corner and we had invested quite a lot in marketing with companies like Apple participating in it. We had made big plans during the contest with the team and suddenly you find none around except your co-founder. I still remember the dreadful night but we continued working and CodeSprint-2 was a massive success with lots of job offers made, some being international as well. The only reason why we were able to put the situation behind and continue was the strength and confidence that the early bootstrapping days gave us. We were in similar/worse situations earlier. Hari is much better than me in handling such situations but I don’t want to talk about him here in fear of making this post border on cheesiness or embarrassing him.

That episode is over and we’re now a strong engineering team comprising of Shiv, Akshay, Sushil, Rohan, Chakra, Mike (2 more guys and a girl in the final stages) and enjoying every bit of it.

I remember PG telling about how not to die as a startup where he mentions two key points – founders split and/or running out of money. Bootstrapping is a magical hack that if not prevents, at least gives the strength to overcome both of them.

Nothing has really changed in our attitude towards Interviewstreet. We’re still scared of losing a customer (big/small), we still want to provide them the best and many more things that we started with have remained the same irrespective of the changes and the hype in the external environment. And so, I found out that it’s just a new chapter with different parameters but with the same highs & lows testing the strength of the founding team and the bank balance.

This post actually makes me think if the probability of startups succeeding is higher if they are able to bootstrap long enough till they actually need external funding rather than going in chase of money right at the start.

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Six ideas

March 21, 2012 //
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There are many unsolved problems in the web. Here are six ideas that I’d love to see in action for which I’ll definitely be a paying customer. Some of them might exist and would love to know if they do, but most of them seem frighteningly ambitious.

[1] Smarter e-mail

E-mail is hell and it sucks away a lot of productive time. As you grow higher up the ladder, it’s almost poisonous since you tend to be always on and not much of “real work” gets done. This e-mail system should be intelligent. For now it can just be a plugin but it should have the ability to

a) Pause e-mail: I should be able to set a timeframe where I don’t want to get any mail on my inbox unless it’s from a really important person. What constitutes a really important person is the AI logic that needs to be coded. It can be a combination of how frequently I mail the person, linkedin connect degree, importance of the person at this moment (for eg: if we’re doing a Quora CodeSprint that week, any mail from @quora.com is high priority that week), etc.

This helps me allocate a chunk of time that I can spend on “real work” and once done, I can batch process the mails.

b) Auto-send canned replies: Things like ‘What’s your office address?‘ or ‘What’s your phone number?‘, etc. don’t necessarily need my intervention. The e-mail system should be able to automatically send those responses.

As you go higher up the ladder, scheduling meetings is a big pain and normally the assistant looks up the calendar, suggests a couple of time slots for you to pick. Again, the effort of an assistant is not needed. The e-mail system should be able to fetch my calendar schedule and automatically suggest times during which I’m free to meet.

There are many more processes that don’t need the my intervention at all and can save a lot of time (and task switch most importantly!)

[2] CEO dashboard

However easy, analytics tool might be, there’s always a need to use at least two of them (eg: chart.io and mixpanel) This has in fact been a common topic in the YC groups and most of them have resorted to building custom dashboards. This analytics tool or the CEO dashboard should work at the apache/logs level (lower abstraction).

Once this tool is installed, it automatically categorizes similar links/actions which I can tag. For eg: if this link is accessed then a payment has been successfully made or if this SQL query is executed (from the logs), a user has been activated the account. Since *all* the activities (web + DB) are recorded in the requests/logs, having a hook there to analyze all the data will be more accurate and gives the flexibility to measure whatever I want easily.

[3] Summarize a video/blog to a few sentences.

Videos are long and none has the patience to watch a 50-min talk unless it’s really inspiring. This tool should have the ability to summarize the video in the form of a text or a mind map or any understandable format to humans. Instead of watching a 50-min video talk, I should just see the output of this tool and gain the essence and important aspects of the talk in just 10 minutes.The same can apply to long blog posts/articles as well.

[4] CRM inside e-mail

When e-mail has become the default way to communicate between teams, it makes sense to integrate things as much as possible within e-mail. Bug-tracking, task assigning, support tickets and many more, tangentially rely on e-mail but we all use individual products for each of the things mentioned which becomes cumbersome.

Since everything can be tracked via e-mail and labels, this tool should be generic enough for me to plugin anything I need. For eg: assigning labels to users means it’s their responsibility to fix the bug or respond to the customer request.

[5] Dating site for geeks

There’s a common notion that geeks or nerds can’t talk to girls. Ironically, in my friends circle it’s them who’ve been able to have sustained and successful relationships. However a common pattern amongst them was, it took them a long time to take the initial step of asking her out. So, if we build a site that overcomes the initial hiccup, it should give them a good start to take off.

Here’s a site where a girl posts a gig related to computers/programming. It can be as basic as ‘Help me move my posterous blog to tumblr’ to ‘Help me code my lab assignment‘. Once the task is done, since the guy has put quite a bit of effort she agrees to meet him in person for a coffee/lunch. Even though this might not be explicitly put up as a conditional thing, I’m guessing this is a natural extension once the gig is done. After all, there should’ve been quite a few conversations in the process.

PS: I just assumed geeks generally refer to guys, it can be vice-versa also, no chauvinist comments please.

[6] Web language

Every programmer has a language that he/she is comfortable with. I know a lot of programmers who’ve declined job offers (even though they loved the company) because the company was primarily using a different technology stack (Python vs Ruby) This happens vice-versa as well which is pretty sad because bumping onto a good hacker is getting harder and it’s definitely stupid to rewrite a large codebase in another language.

There should be a “web language” which all the interpreted languages get converted (and vice-versa) to, making it language agnostic. The ideal case is where a Python hacker and a Ruby hacker are able to add features on the website with the language of their choice.

I can see several problems here in terms of limitations of different languages and many more but after all these are frighteningly ambitious ideas that will make life simple.

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[Mistake] Everyone is right

January 20, 2012 //
0

The feeling of insecurity crops up quite a number of times when starting up, especially in the early days. It’s both exciting and scary, like how an 8-year old kid feels when left home alone the first time, for a couple of hours. This fear sometimes affects the self-confidence which makes everyone around you appear to be bigger in stature.

Once this mindset is in, everything what the other person says sounds like gold. Naturally, when you meet 20 people in an event, you get a feeling as though you just got access to 20 pots of gold and you want to try out everything that was told to you. The truth is most of them might not apply to you or can even be plain stupid.

I remember an incident where a very senior marketing manager of an MNC asked me to advertise interviewstreet on radio channels. It might sound really stupid now, but not then when I seriously considered. Thankfully, I was bootstrapping so didn’t have enough money to spend on it.

With this mindset, you tend to sort the ideas by the people who advised rather than the ideas themselves which can lead to disasters if the person doesn’t understand your position. What worked for X doesn’t need to work for Y even though both X & Y might be operating in the same space, environment, etc. The potential of founders, co-incidental meetings (eg: Zuck with Sean Parker) and a bunch of other factors play in which aren’t accounted for when providing advice.

You (and your co-founder) are the only one in the world who understands completely about what’s going on in your startup and things that can/can’t be done. This is not to say don’t talk/listen to anyone around, that’s the most terrible thing one can ever do. This is a a heads-up on “executing” the suggestions you received.

How to execute suggestions/advice?
Talk to a lot of people, read blogs, brainstorm with your mentors, discuss with fellow entrepreneurs, experienced people in your field, etc. Assimilate all the suggestions in your whiteboard without associating any source. Analyze each one of them deeply and see which ones make the most sense for your startup.

One interesting correlation I’ve found with the suggestions I implement is they’ve always come from people I deeply respect/admire because their suggestions seems to carry a reasoning behind it and not something blind. But that’s just me, it might not be the case for you.

Every startup is unique. Derive inspiration, talk to a lot of people but execute/experiment what you think makes sense.

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Mistakes

January 10, 2012 //
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I’ve made (still continue to) a lot of mistakes while building Interviewstreet – bad product decisions, terrible demos, wrong hires, screwed up relationships and many more. Morale of founders is probably the biggest determinant of how long a startup will sail. Every failure dents the morale a little bit and when it hits zero, the startup dies.

Mentoring programs like YC, Morpheus, etc. are primarily built to guide founders so that they make fewer mistakes on the way thus keeping their morale level in place. Obviously, there can never be a program nor a mentor who can predict everymistake that a founder might do beforehand. If there was one such place, building startups would be really easy.

I’m glad to have wonderful mentors around me who’ve ensured the number of mistakes I make is less. But I’ve made many more and this is my attempt to share it with the rest of the ecosystem in the hope that it would help some entrepreneur(s).

It’s a warm fuzzy feeling to know that you’re making mistakes. It either means you’re experimenting a lot or you’re dumb, but let’s ignore the latter case for now. I promise to write blog posts about the mistakes I make in this journey.

The journey never ends

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What’s this valley about?

December 11, 2011 //
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Everyone talks about this magical place called ‘valley’ to start a company, so what does this magical place contain?

#1 Focus

Startups are lonely, tough and very hard to build. It’s also highly unlikely that you might hit off with your very first product/idea. I’ve seen a lot of YC companies that have pivoted 2-3 times from start to demo day. In such a harsh state, the only way to maximize your chances of succeeding is to spend most (all) your waking hours focusing on the product to get to market fit. In other words, it means you shouldn’t worry about things like

a. Incorporating a company: It takes roughly 90 days to get a Pvt Ltd done (vs) 4 days in the US to register as an Inc.
b. Integrating payment gateway: I had to fill up a zillion forms, get attestations from branch managers, etc. to get my CCAvenue account up (vs) inserting a 2-line javascript at your footer and you can start accepting payments.
c. Snail mail hard copy of invoices to approve it (vs) everything being done completely online and many more..

Though these may sound trivial, the fact that these miscellaneous tasks still remain on your whiteboard makes that thread silently run in the background all the time. There should be nothing in your head apart from your product & the metrics to see if things are actually working.

#2 Funding

“Building web Software is cheap in this era” whoever said that, I’d love to meet him because he doesn’t understand the difference between a server and a software. Servers are cheap, yes, softwares aren’t. Ironically, building a good software is a function of programmers & designers which are possibly the most expensive resources (I hate calling people as resources, still) today. Building a good web product is very expensive.

One thing I’ve noticed about investors in the valley is their decision to invest on is a function of team, product & traction in the same order with the highest weightage given to the team. Because, everything that changes in a startup (competition, traction, etc.) is fixable but founders aren’t. When you’ve investors betting on you more than the idea, it helps you to raise money at an early stage as well as gives the comfort that it’s you who’s being backed and not the idea. Hence, building a product becomes more enjoyable and you focus on the right things instead of worrying about infrastructure costs, the extra $100 spent on travel (which saved you 6 hrs), etc. You begin to optimize for the right things. And again, building a goodweb product is expensive.

#3 Equity

Building a team is hard and the early employees really set the culture and the DNA of the company. They’ve to be in to build a wonderful company and should ideally optimize more for the equity they own/hold than the pay. It’s a great feeling to have people around you like that who own a part of the company and want to make it big. Agreed, not a lot of people have made money in India with the stocks they’ve held, because of which the term ‘equity’ itself is extremely underrated, but there needs to be some starting point.

#4 Advisors
This is critical too, but the fact that you’d find great advisors only in valley, etc is exaggerated. If you really want to, you can find great advisors everywhere.

Please don’t start a hate-India/hate-me thread, the reason I wrote this article was we often blame/ask ourselves ‘Why can’t we create more Zuckerbergs or Steve Jobs?’ and then immediately resort the blame to our education system (btw, they were dropouts) or the general attitude of Indians being conservative, etc. BS. The programmers working/worked at Interviewstreet are every bit capable of getting a job in Dropbox or Quora, so it’s really has nothing to do with the education system and one of the guys dropped out of college to work with us temporarily, so it has nothing to with being conservative as well – the problem is something else. I’m definitely not ruining the possibility of building a great global startup, in fact I’m a huge fan of VWO and Paras, but you’ve to accept it’s very hard and is an exception. If we get awed by billion dollar valuations happening in the US, we should also track how many startups actually come out every year (most of them fail) to get a few startups valued $Bn.

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Deprivation and Pain

November 1, 2011 //
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The title might sound sober but ironically these two are strongly tied to happiness and achieving goals at a later stage. I’m reading an amazing book on psychology of humans, love, etc. which also somewhat states the above. Here’s an interesting snippet from the book

“A 30-year old financial analyst complained she’s procrastinating a lot despite the fact that she gets a good pay, perks, etc. Analyzing, there was no particular problem with the work environment/family, etc. On one particular meeting, the psychologist casually observed the way she eats a cake. She firsts eats the frosting and then the others. Digging further, he examined her work-habits. As expected, on a given day she’d devote the 1st hour to the more gratifying work and the remaining to the objectionable reminder. Consequently, nothing in the remaining hours would get done and the work gets postponed. He suggested instead of 1 hour of pleasure and remaining hours of pain, she can try 1 hour of pain and remaining hours of pleasure. Being a strong-willed person, she switched modes and no longer procrastinates”

This is so much like a startup mode. The cake, procrastination, etc. are all parameters that can be substituted. The overall idea is – suffer pain now for a greater pleasure later. I’m sure you’d have seen the marshmallow experiment performed on young kids, the kid with the highest resistance (consequently greatest pain) gets to eat two marshmallows at the end.

When I look back, it’s the deprivation (money, lifestyle and many more) that has helped us survive and led us to the current stage. The thought process has always been ‘let’s undergo the pain now, there’s something big waiting‘. We were even approached by top MNC’s for an above the market salary during our early startup days. It’s so easy to ‘eat the frosting’ but we resisted for something bigger.

I think this is either a born quality or happens when you have an extremely ambitious goal, something close to conquering the world. After a while, when the internal functioning is built to accept pain, you enjoy it, sometimes even induce it, the goals get grander and bigger and consequently you become very powerful. Being deprived of something at every stage always keep you up to achieve something big. It’s probably the only way to rule the world.

I used to wonder how a funded startup can ever lose a battle with a bootstrapped one. More money, more resources, backing, etc. seems logical that they’d beat them, but no. One reason can be loss of focus after investment, but I tend to think it’s got to do more with not having the deprived feeling anymore. The moment you think you’re safe and comfortable, the aspiration drops down and you gradually shift to the losing side.

Even though you might be more comfortable, real animals would induce pain because they’ve not conquered the world yet. They continue to do this in search of a much bigger vision and goal and a true leader rises.

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Categories life, startups

What drives founders?

July 22, 2011 //
0

A vast majority of web entrepreneurs want to be millionnaires. It would be a lie and even economically bad if it wasn’t so. But, is money the driving force for the founders? I don’t think so.

Early stage – when you start building the product.

Making money from the startup is either a secondary motive or doesn’t exist at all. Work all night (&day), demo to users, iterate till you arrive at something people want. The trick is to reach this state before the founders get demoralized. Clearly the make-or-break factor is not money, it’s building something before dying out on morale.

Pivoted – the pain point for a set of customers is identified.

The hunger to get more such customers to try out the product and get feedback is the primary motive. Let’s first get x beta users and then we can monetize. It’s an unparalleled feeling interacting with initial users, probably the best way to get high. Again, making money isn’t the primary motive

Paying customers

Let’s see if the beta users are actually “real” customers. You get to know how many “real” users are present only when they’re willing to pay. Even here you want your startup to become rich and not you.We’re currently at this stage and there should be many more stages in the startup journey.

We started off with a product that did mock interviews, tried different things for over a year, didn’t go anywhere. We then built a tool that helps companies screen programmers – we went through all the stages mentioned above, but the driving force hasn’t changed

Quoting Hari (co-founder) who said this yesterday: “I get scared when I get a phone call, I so hope it’s not someone who reports a bug”. This is exactly what I go through. I hate it when a customer finds a bug, doesn’t matter how big / small he is. It’s a combination of passion, fear of failure / losing the customer and may be a few others.

What surprises me is, even though the external environment has changed dramatically,  (we’ve gone from a bootstrapped startup to ramen profitable, now funded by an amazing set of angel investors, moved to the valley) our drive hasn’t – it’s still to make the best recruitment tool and get a lot of paying customers – make the startup rich. Taking home a big pay check is a secondary motive. I’m not dismissing it, it’s important but it’s never been the top thing on our mind.

To sum up, we’ll be happier if we become rich but would be downright upset and somber if the startup doesn’t.

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