I had the pleasure of speaking to a batch of about 130 students, startup aspirants, product developers last week at the Innovate Delhi event. I was teamed up with Rajat Garg, of SocialappsHQ, and a heavy-weight with facts, numbers, trends, valley companies and slides. We were to cover “opportunity hypothesis’ broadly – how does a startup get an idea; validate the idea; build a demo/prototype and...
In 1986, when I graduated from IIT Kharagpur as a Computer Science major, I had picked up an obsession with building products. Soon after college, I had joined DCM Data Products. DCM like other players in the Indian market, were very focussed on product development, as the product culture for designing computers, or writing compilers, etc was prevalent in that era. We as any other product company...
This is a true story – one that taught me a very useful lesson. I hope you will find it useful on your journey as well. In 2000, Adobe launched InDesign 1.0 to critical acclaim. With its modern code-base, fresh UI, transparency and powerful text engine, finally here was a challenger to the dominant Quark Xpress. Though it was late by over a year (which v1.0 product is not lateJ) and it was not...
Polaroid Corp was a great company. Its instant photography technology ruled the world for 70 years. It served presidents, leaders, businessmen and even common people – it was the only way to take an instant picture (a position taken over by the mobile phone post 2007). It had some of the best talent, great chemical engineering skills, manufacturing plants, distribution and experience in...
