Stay ConnectedA podcast about the ones who chose to take the road not taken often. It’s about the crazy and the curious. Those that dared to stand out, and stand alone. It’s about their journey through hope and disillusionment, failures and pitfalls, joy and success, pain and bliss. It’s a candid exploration of experiences and ideas that have driven some of the shining stars, told as is.
Produced by Anand Murali
Copyright: © All rights reserved
After quitting his job as Microsoft India chairman, Ravi Venkatesan spent few months working with a core team of former colleagues on a startup idea. Just before an investor was about to write a cheque, he realized he wasn’t passionate enough and backed out. It was the second time he was bitten by the startup bug in his career. “Let’s say I had gone ahead and flamed out, so what, what’s the big deal? In the cosmic scheme of things, these don’t matter. What matters is you live a fulfilling life, you figure out the way you’re really going to make a difference,” he says. Ability to learn new things, to lead and not just manage and the ability to manage self, are three timeless skills and traits that can help ride through the disruption, according to Venkatesan. “The biggest obstacle to your success is you. If you look at what has been happening around the world, the number of amazing people who’ve crashed and burned because they did something incredibly stupid ranging from Rajat Gupta at Mckinsey to many others.” Venkatesan is the chairman of a state-owned bank (Bank of Baroda), a philanthropist with his Social Venture Partners (SVP) and was a board member at India’s second largest software company Infosys until last week. “The reason we were born on earth is not to have a job; most of us are searching for the reason as to why we were put on the earth. The job is only a means to that bigger end.” There’s a raging debate going on in India’s intellectual networks and among those seeking employment about the future of jobs and new skills required to earn a living. With his experience across different sectors, Ravi offers some great insights that could help in navigating the disruption better. Do listen in. P.S. we will make the transcript of this podcast available next week.
At 59, Uday Kotak banks on his over three-day decades old business acumen in the financial services world for building the future, and keeps awake at night wondering if he will have his bank the next morning. For incumbent entrepreneurs such as Kotak, the forces of technology disruption are not science fiction anymore. In this episode of Outliers, i sit down with Kotak, who combines the old world business acumen with a sense of paranoia for the future in a way that very few leaders do. What makes him an outlier is his hunger to learn the new, new thing and still keep the faith in the core principles of financial services based on trust and risk management. Here are edited (and abridged) excerpts from the conversation. Please do tune in and enjoy the full podcast.
The first time I heard about Gourav Jaswal was some time in 2003-2004 when I was early in my career and working with technology media group, Jasubhai Digital Media. “You must meet him,” Maulik Jasubhai, the group’s CEO had told me while hiring me. And then there were legends about how Jaswal would turn obscure ideas and aimless pursuits into meaningful and impactful journeys. Finally, I met him few weeks ago when he walked into FactorDaily office one afternoon. Over past few years, he’s been running Prototyze, a new age business incubator. Jaswal is not on WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter, you name it. But he still manages to stay ahead of the information clutter, thanks to “the human and interpersonal networks” he so passionately curates. For me, I believe more of us should learn from the way Jaswal has built and evolved with his own “human networks”, far from the clutter and pretentious worlds of Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
Manav Garg is clearly an outlier in the Indian startup ecosystem. Coming from Moga, a town in Punjab, Garg conquered his inability to speak English and fear of failure to set a launchpad for himself. Also, he never went to an IIT. After finishing his graduation from the Indian Institute of Foreign Trade, Garg joined G Premjee Trading on its commodities desk starting with coffee in 1998. From around $50 million worth of trading, he became part of the team that scaled it to over half a billion dollars in three years. Later, in 2001, Garg started building Eka. He’s among a bunch of rare few entrepreneurs who come from core business backgrounds to build a software company. “A lot of time my wife and family ask me why I’m going to work all the time, working so hard. It’s not really about work, but it’s the mission for me,” he says. “For me, it’s a mission. You’ll always have enough to survive. I want to change the entire agricultural space in India.” Garg has also learned to use meetings over a cup of coffee as a negotiation and persuasion tool. From getting his first $1 million customer for Eka in 2001 to hiring his head of sales, Garg’s coffee meetings have delivered. “This Singapore customer called us after reading our responses to his RFP, said he will never ever work with us. I persuaded him to have a coffee with me the next day. I flew overnight to be there,” he recalls. Ditto with Rick Nelson who Manav hired as the head of sales in New York in March 2009
Deepak Shenoy was one of the early professionals to start algorithmic trading in India, way back in 2009. It required sifting through patterns of data and using software-based decision-making systems to trade and make stock calls. While I have been following his Twitter handle @deepakshenoy for past couple of years, some of his recent writings have clearly been outliers, especially in terms of fresh perspective and incisive analysis. “How The 11,400 cr. Import Ponzi Scam at PNB Unfolded” published in February is an example of that. Shenoy, a computer science graduate from the National Institute of Technology, Karnataka, started his career as a coder maintaining mainframe computer systems during 1996-1997. Before formally launching Capitalmind in 2010, Shenoy launched two startups--Moneyoga and Agni Software. “When you are in a job, it’s difficult to harness opportunities. It’s not just being your own boss,” he says. “At some point, you start getting tempted to take up a job because of the cash flow. And around 2012, I had started getting job offers and I didn’t want that,” he adds. It’s important to have targets about how long will you give your startup before calling it quits. “I decided to work on making Capitalmind into a company and give it one year. “ “The first business I ran, we had a 4 months target. It was 1998 and we were making 15,000 every month. We actually did it. We wanted the company to make enough money to help the four of us buy Tata Safari for each of us,” says Shenoy. “If you don’t have a business vision, the danger is of becoming a zombie company. You would always have enough to survive, but without growth, nothing matters. Every company is supposed to be geared for growth. “
In the mad, mad world of tech, discovering the next big thing is a holy grail for everyone – from investors to startup founders looking for their next pivot and even large tech companies hunting for the disruption in their core markets. From a small email list launched in November 2013 by Ryan Hoover, ProductHunt has now helped discover over 100 million products with more than 100,000 new product launches on its platform. In this week’s Outliers, we have for you a conversation with Hoover who talks about the ProductHunt journey, its $20 million acquisition by AngelList in 2016, and some deep lessons in building communities and keeping them alive. Hoover, 31, eats, breathes and lives the ProductHunt community. “I still love what I am doing and I still see so many opportunities to experiment and grow,” he says. “I am really weird when I wake up in the morning, far too early like 4.45 am today. My mind starts turning on and truthfully, I want to get back to the bed, but my mind gets excited, starts working. Now, this is still stressful and I get frustrated... for me and my awesome girlfriend.” P.S. How AngelList works? Look out for a set of deep conversations with folks at AngelList to be published on FactorDaily as an audio story soon. image credit: (cc) Ken Yeung -- www.thelettertwo.com
Every time we spot a hugely successful entrepreneur (either multi-billion dollar exit or an IPO), there’s a rush to analyse what went behind the success and whether there’s a playbook that can be replicated to create more successful exits for startups. Everyone from investors to existing and wannabe entrepreneurs are looking for “deep insights” that will catapult their idea into the big league. If you read some of the top learnings shared by Jyoti Bansal and even listen to the entire podcast, I bet you will get a feeling that none of this is something you haven’t heard before. However, if you can learn from Bansal’s insights by contextualising everything he says against his startup journey, the AppDynamics story, and so on, there’s a lot to learn. One of the things that stayed with me since I had this conversation with him, for instance, is what he said about the kind of people he will hire for his next startups. “I will try and avoid hiring people who have been part of big exits.” This is because exits and startup wealth creation also brings a certain comfort, risk averse nature. So whenever Bansal builds his next, he wants people with a lot more hunger than those who have already drank the nectar.
K Vaitheeswaran’s entrepreneurial journey lacks all the fanfare, glory and gyaan that make some of the most visible startup journeys of today, including Flipkart and Ola. It’s a story that underscores how lonely it’s to be a startup founder and how ugly the lows in the journey can get. On the midnight of December 31, 2012, Vaitheeswaran opened the door of his house to find a bunch of drunk and abusive guys demanding monies his company Indiaplaza owed to several vendors. “One of the reasons we all enjoy December 31 and look forward to January is because we believe it’s going to start something new and great,” he tells me. “That day was the most depressing because all sorts of thoughts crossed my mind. I have no shame in saying the thoughts (of ending my life) did cross my mind. I didn’t even want to see January 2nd.” “How much can you really take after you expose your family to all the abuse?” “You realize then that perhaps becoming an entrepreneur is not worth anything,” he tells me. I’ve always wanted to sit down with Vaithee, as people around him address him, for this conversation, especially after reading this brilliant story titled “Indiaplaza.com: How an Indian e-commerce firm ran out of cash” by Ashish K. Mishra. Vaithee’s book ‘Failing to Succeed’ is equally riveting. Do listen and stay grounded, fellow entrepreneurs.
The first time I heard of LoveDoctor, a SnapChat-based counselling service for teenagers, women and even pre-teen kids seeking sex advice, I was blown away. Not just because it’s rare to find a savvy SnapChat user in my peer group, but the whole idea of serving such a real world need, unaddressed largely, fascinated me. Few days ago, I emailed Avani Parekh asking for updates about LoveDoctor and checking if she would help me explore a deeper narrative on its evolution and the road ahead. “Well, it’s not alive anymore,” she told me. Parekh who joined Sheroes last year, is now back in that discomforting zone where many startup ideas are born. She wants to revive LoveDoctor. But this podcast is not just about LoveDoctor’s future. It’s about some hard entrepreneurial lessons on building a community on a new social platform and watching it fail to take off.
Anand Deshpande, 55, and the founder of Pune-based Persistent Systems has been an outlier for nearly three decades. Since he founded Persistent in 1990, he has watched lucrative opportunities in low-end software services come and go across different cycles. Over years, he’s steered Persistent away from low-end outsourcing business towards high-end software product development work for the likes of IBM and so on. With revenues of nearly $500 million in 2017, it’s been a long, slow journey for Persistent and Deshpande, a former Hewlett Packard engineer. “It’s not so much about founders. What everybody needs to learn is how to delegate, and that’s a very tricky part for the founders because by mentality all of us believe we know how to do things, and we find it difficult to believe somebody else could do the same thing,” he says. “There’s a little bit of arrogance that most founders have, including me. How to delegate is the biggest challenge.” As I sat down with him for this episode of Outliers, I listened to some great insights about building a startup, failing, creating a culture of ownership, and finally, the need to let go the founder’s mentality when required. And, more importantly, the founding team keeps changing with every cycle. “Every transition is traumatic, but you have to stay on. When a company starts to taper down because of either incumbency of business model or other reasons, you must find a new model. We are in the fourth phase right now at Persistent.”
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