Tag Archives: startups

Google Docs Follow-up – We Are Sticking With It

A few days before our Content Analysts started joining, we revisited our Google Docs decision (finally!) and agreed that it made sense to continue with it. Here was our rationale:

It’s free. (Yeah, I can’t emphasize that enough.) The alternative is expensive.
In the few weeks that we used Google Docs, we felt that it could do almost everything we wanted. The one thing we couldn’t do – merge cells vertically. (Horizontal merges are allowed).
We did have the option of getting a couple of MS Office licenses when we enrolled into Microsoft’s BizSpark program but we decided not to use it. We didn’t want our folks to get used to the goodness of MS Office!
We really like the Google Apps integration. In a few browser tabs, we have easy access to Docs, Email, Calendar, etc and collaboration is a breeze.
We like the fact that we do not have to invest in a file server or even an extra desktop to store our documents centrally. We understand that this comes with the risk of being completely dependent on our internet connection. We plan to offset this risk by exporting our key documents to the desktop on a regular basis. Also, we are trusting Google Docs to roll out offline support soon like they promised.

Mavrix Monthly Update January-2011

Hired four Content Analysts. I am really excited to have such awesome talent on board! I will introduce them over the next few weeks as they join.
Made offer to Technical Architect. As I have mentioned in the past, getting an able and willing person for this role has been challenging. We may have finally found the right person for the job but we are waiting for our offer to be accepted. Fingers crossed! Regardless, we are looking at some portion of our work getting outsourced.
Created the 2011 list of holidays…the day before the first holiday of the year – Jan 26^th! Another item in a long list of things that you don’t think about unless you simply can’t postpone them.
Finally decided to get professional help to design our company logo. Will update our website hopefully next week.

Dilemmas In HR Management

I read two very interesting articles recently that made me think about HR management. Given our size, the topic is not immediately relevant to us but I do want to mull about these over time to figure out our HR approach:

1. Fire fast – The first article is about a quarterback, Ben Roethlisberger, whose past bad behavior (he has been accused twice of sexual assault) is being glossed over, given his good performance in the current season. Big Ben is no exception – all of us have come across Big Ben’s in our lives (I saw my fair share in the corporate world), and either turned a blind eye or given them another chance and another and another…. till something really bad happened. Everyone talks about “hire slow, fire fast” but most of tend to look for excuses to not fire people. One of our favorite excuses, specially in India, tends to be “Oh, but he is getting the job done”.

2. Help people excel – In a recent post, Seth Godin talks about various ways to promote excellence in your team. I totally agree with him that we should not

Bully people to do better – This can work in the short term but the moment the bullying stops, people stop performing
Pit people against each other – People who can game the system tend to “win” in this approach – the rest are left disillusioned and de-motivated. Worse, competition trumps co-operation so that the combined effort suffers even as individuals excel.

So what’s the right way to help people excel? Seth offers this – a) Give people the right opportunities – opportunities that challenge them and let them contribute to their fullest potential, b) Set goals for them to aspire to, c) Be there to help, but only if asked.

I can see these non-traditional approaches work in a small company. But will they scale in larger organizations?

Startups – Be Prepared For Spam After Registration

Since we registered, we have been hit by spam from various national banks congratulating us on the registration and imploring us to open an account with them. (Oh, the gap between aggressive sales and lazy servicing!)

But the latest spam we received was outrageous and, I would contend, unethical. It was a package of books (mug shot above) arriving as VPP or Cash on Delivery. At a price of Rs 2088 payable by cash, we were offered by United Book Company, a company I had never heard of till today, three books telling us how to fire employees (and here we are trying to figure out how to hire people!). I don’t know if United Book Company is trying to squeeze money out of gullible newbies or if they’re just dumb. Assuming the latter (a charitable assumption), here is what’s wrong about this method of sales:

It is unsolicited
It causes disruption and confusion at the recipient’s end. (Where did this come from? What is it? Did any of us place an order?)
It puts the burden on the recipients to refuse something they never asked for (which is what we did).

Something tells me the United Book Company does not really care. All I can say is – Startups, beware.

Mavrix Monthly Update Dec-2010

Company registered. We finally registered as Mavrix Infotech Private Limited. The process took 4 weeks after we decided to switch from LLP to company registration.
Enrolled into Microsoft’s BizSpark program. It is a fantastic program which makes a whole lot of Microsoft goodies available to startups at NO COST. There is no reason why a startup would not join this program. Thanks to friend/advisor, Praveen Srivatsa, who told us about this program.
Interviewed a number of candidates for the Technical Architect position. With the IT outsourcing industry picking up, we always knew it would be difficult to fill this position but we were not prepared for such a long and arduous process. We did like some of the candidates we interviewed and hope to select the best person for this role soon.

New Member In The Mavrix Family

In the last (and the first!) Mavrix Monthly Update, I had talked about the first Mavrix employee. Now that he has served out his notice period, I can reveal the identity of the mystery man.

Santosh Patil was the first person I interviewed for the Content Manager role and my assessment of his fit with our company values looked something like this:

Value	Fitment
Love for music	√√√√√!!!!√√√√√!!!!√√√√√!!!!√√√√√!!!!
Honesty	√√√√√!!!!
Courage to be different	√√√√√!!!!
Humility	√√√√√!!!!
Positive outlook	√√√√√!!!!

I was like a person who buys a lottery ticket for the first time in his life and ends up winning the jackpot. My excitement was soon replaced by dilemma. Should I recruit the first person I interview or should I interview a few more people before deciding? I recruited Santosh without interviewing anybody else. Having interacted with him over the last few weeks, I am really glad that I followed my instinct! I am convinced that I would not have found a better person than him even if I had interviewed a dozen more people.

A quick introduction: Santosh has about 5 years of experience with Infosys BPO (no, I did not know him from my Infosys days) where he was helping a Fortune 500 client with its back-office functions. He has a proven track-record of consistent performance throughout his career. Music is his passion and some friends believe that he can listen to music 18 hours a day (he dreams of music the other 6 hours!). He is married and lives in Bangalore.

Santosh – Welcome aboard!

PS: Check out the updated About page.

Why Google Docs Makes Sense For Startups

A startup has to select its office software (documents, spreadsheets, etc) early on. We picked ours based a quick and dirty assessment (is there any other kind for a startup?). Here goes:

	Microsoft Office	Zoho Docs	OpenOffice.org	Google Docs
USP	1. The best office suite 2. Everybody uses it	1. Online, feature rich office suite 2. Great customer service	1. Free (yes, free) 2. Open-source office product for offline use	1. Collaborate on the web 2. It's by Google
Cost	1. Most expensive 2. Rs. 1000/user to Rs. 17000 /user depending on the edition	1. Pay as you go monthly subscription 2. Rs 7200 per year for 5 users and 15 GB space	Free (yes, free)	Free up to 50 users (Limits - 7GB/user for email, 1GB/user for docs)
Feature	The best. No question.	Very cool interface and surprisingly feature rich. They release updates frequently so the product is getting better rapidly.	Not assessed	Functional
Ease of use	Almost everybody has used MS Office. It is intuitive and there is little or no learning curve for most people.	Very intuitive. Still, there will be some learning to do since a browser-based office software is new to many people.	Not assessed	Google Docs itself may require a little learning but what makes it easy to use is that it is part of the Google Apps suite.

In the end, we selected Google Docs because:

It’s free.
It’s not the best office product but our needs aren’t very sophisticated.
Collaboration and version control is easy. The only risk is that it depends on availability of internet which is still not predictable in India. Google’s introduction of offline editing in 2011 should mitigate this risk.
It’s part of Google Apps. We had already signed up for it because, for a startup, there is nothing to beat Google Apps when it comes to Email and Calendar. Deciding to use Google Docs keeps things simple for us.

Of course, we will know for sure that it works for us only once we start using it seriously. We will re-visit our decision in a month and report our findings.

Company Setup Is Better Than LLP For Indian Startups

As any startup, one of the first things I did was to try and figure out what kind of a legal entity my company should be. Ruling out proprietorship and a partnership was a no-brainer due to liability issues. It then became a choice between a company (Private Limited) and an LLP (Limited Liability Partnership).

LLP seemed like a great choice. It had the benefit that really mattered – limited liability – and it had none of the baggage (at least from a startup’s perspective) that came with a company – constituting a board, conducting prescribed board meetings along with necessary paperwork and audit. An LLP sounded great because I felt like we would have fewer distractions and we could just focus on building a great product.

The catch – creating an LLP in India is not easy – not at the time of writing this post, at least. Three months passed and I had no clue how much more time the LLP registration process would take. My sense of the situation – The LLP entity was introduced in India only recently (in 2009) and the process for setting it up is relatively new. As a result, the various stakeholders involved in this process – MCA (Ministry of Corporate Affairs) as well as the CAs who typically facilitate this process are still figuring their way around the process. It also appears that while the process is mostly online for both companies and LLPs, in the case of companies, the regional ROCs (Registrar of Companies) help move the process along while in the case of LLPs, ROCs are not engaged and the process is mostly run from a centralized black box.

My DIN approval got done a week after I asked my accountant to switch over to a company registration. I understand the company incorporation will be done in another week. Based on my experience, I would recommend a company for Indian startups:

The process is super fast
The overheads (meeting paperwork, audits) can be easily be outsourced
An LLP cannot be converted to a Private Limited. If you plan on growing big (that’s kinda the point, right?!), you will anyway have to form a Private Limited some day.
You need to be a company if you are looking to be funded.

Startup Interview Tips

I had a very disappointing Saturday. I had four interviews scheduled and only one of the candidates showed up. When I asked the HR firm I was using, they said that it happens a lot because techies get “hundreds of offers”. I get the demand-supply dynamic but not turning up for a scheduled interview is just plain unprofessional. Also, remember the high-handedness of your employer when the job scene was bad? Do to others, as you want them do to you.

In order to streamline the interview process a little bit, I thought I would offer some tips to the folks who are looking at this website before interviewing with us:

Explore the website a little. It’s not just about preparation; it’s also about trying to figure out if this job is right for you. If absolutely nothing interests you, this job may not be for you.
If you schedule an interview, please show up. Not just to avoid ticking me off (very important!) but because small actions like this help your development as a professional.
Be on time. Actually, you have a better chance of being on time if you aim to be early than if you aim to be on time. It’s better to be early and wait for your interview slot, than be late. If you are going to be late, please call ahead and give me a heads up.
Show some interest in the job during the interview. Better still, show me what you are passionate about – technology, entrepreneurship, startups, music, problem solving…. We are not a big XO (X=IT, BP, etc., O=outsourcing) company with campus, gyms, cafeteria, etc to help you get through work you do not enjoy. If your passion and the job are not aligned, the interview would be a great time for both of us to discover it.
Be curious. Ask me what the heck I am doing. If you are not curious, I can only draw unflattering conclusions about you. On the other hand, you will score big if you ask me the right questions.

Whether you interview with us or not, I hope you find these tips handy.

Lean (But Not Mean) Is The Way To Go

Corporations are not very popular these days:

A documentary, The Corporation, is getting a lot of buzz. It’s based on the book “The Corporations: The Pathological Pursuit Of Power” by Joel Bakan, a Canadian law professor. The book/documentary questions the right of individuals granted to corporations in the US. It asks – “If the corporation is really a person, what kind of a person is it?”. According to Bakan – not a very nice person – a psycopath.
In a brilliant analysis of Radiagate in The Hindu, P. Sainath says this:

If the Radia tapes show us anything, they show us again who runs this country. Corporates. Not even the lobbyists who do their bidding — but would have much less clout without their backing. Not journalists who crave access to corporate titans or seek to advise them on how to fix the courts. It wasn’t long ago that a whole session of Parliament went by in just debating the dispute between the Ambani brothers. A private spat over a public-owned resource called natural gas. Oddly enough, Parliament has never had a whole session focussed on agriculture. Not even through the sector’s worst crisis in the past decade.

The optimist in me, would like to disbelieve these bleak conclusions, but with every new corporate scandal, my optimism is tested. I don’t know what the future holds for Mavrix but I certainly do not want it to become anything like the corporations described above. I am all for profitable growth but I want it while being lean (but not mean), nimble and a lot of fun.