Networking is not an extracurricular activity when you are building a product startup company! It is one of the most important things that could enable you to line up angel investor, venture or expansion capital for your startup! It can help you recruit excellent people to your startup and excellent people are absolutely essential, especially in the initial years! It can help you identify...
I started writing about Thinking Big and it is turning out to be a serial topic! As Indians, technical stuff comes naturally, business thinking comes naturally, but creativity is a touch-feely subject that many of us are not that comfortable with! We usually give it lip service and move on to more important stuff like coding or making sales calls! You ask most Software Product Entrepreneurs about...
Sometime ago I wrote two posts in this forum: Expect a Microsoft, Google or facebook out of India? Won’t happen unless we THINK BIG! and How to Think Big in Software Products? . This post is a continuation of this thought process. What are the advantages for me in Thinking Big if I am a product startup? Again, thinking big does not mean abandoning what you are doing currently for something...
Sometime ago, I wrote another post in this forum – Expect a Microsoft, Google or facebook out of India? Won’t happen unless we THINK BIG! . Thinking Big is a process with definite and specific benefits, about which I will write in a future post. But this post is about How to Think Big? Again, some disclaimers! This is only for entrepreneurs and people in the software product ecosystem who...
When VCs from the US flooded into India about 5 to 10 years ago, they were expecting to invest and make happen, a number of Microsofts, Google and facebooks! They ended up buying shares of existing public companies and became more of Private Equity investors rather than VCs who could put in a 1$ in 100 companies and have 5 block-busters like facebook or Google that returned $100 each...
In 2006, folks at the company Odeo were brainstorming ideas for a new software product that they wanted to develop. They came up with the idea for “Twtr” for sending SMS-like messages to groups of people who may be interested in receiving it. Then they hit upon the word “Twitter” that stood for chirps from birds that also stood for “spreading inconsequential...
Guess what’s the #1 Business Intelligence Tool in the world is? Oracle BI? Microsoft BI? Informatica? Cognos? None of the above! The ugly and the real truth is that the #1 Business Intelligence tool in the world today is….. …… The Spreadsheet! Yes! The lowly spreadsheet is the most used BI tool in the world, including every Indian IT company that we have come in contact...
When we think of Software Product Innovation, we imagine getting “Eureka!” moments 3 am in the morning, getting up and writing down inspired thoughts and coding them the next morning! Reality is much more mundane and is more of evolution rather than sudden insprirations from the sky! Yahoo started because Jerry Yang and Filo just wanted to create a searchable directory of information...
There is a reason, Mark Zuckerberg sits right next to the Summer Intern from University of Waterloo (True Story – Daughter of an Indian friend of mine!). No separate office, no glass windows to look out of! Sergei Brin and Larry Page are worried sick of “Not Enough Innovation” out of Google! They all focus on building the right culture for their people so that they can out...
Today was the second time I am hearing that the future of applications in enterprises are thousands of small apps instead a hundred or two applications! I was listening to the CTO of Computer Associates who forecasts the future of applications in enterprises as stringing together lots of small apps that do something very well rather than developing something from scratch fully! Here is the...
