Tag Archives: startups

Jerk Clones Are Worse Than Jerks

There was an interesting comment posted in a TechCrunch story about Oracle’s Larry Ellison:

“I used to work there and can tell you that there were many ‘mini-me’ versions of Ellison running around talking like him, and even dressing up like him. Rest of us used to laugh at them and make fun of them being bozo’s and total losers. They did make lot of money, but still losers in our eyes. I hope Oracle get’s a real leader who can be a good role model.”

The corporate world has many jerks – individuals who proudly think of themselves as ‘Type A’ (hate that phrase). Some of these jerks deliver results, and are tolerated by people around them and their bosses. The combination of their bad behavior and the rewards they get for delivering results, make them more visible in the organization than people who just deliver results. In any organization, especially large organizations, visibility is good (sounds like the DecorMyEyes story?). The visibility results in better opportunities and more rewards. Suddenly, being a jerk starts looking like a good career path. This spawns a number of jerk clones. Many of these jerk clones have none of the intellect and/or capability of the original jerk. Their career strategy backfires – they become the butt of jokes and their career takes a downward spiral.

Being a jerk is never good, even if it makes some people successful. Being a jerk clone is just pathetic.

 

Mavrix Monthly Update Nov-2010

  • Office furnished. Discovered that the best ‘value for money’ furniture (i.e. cheap stuff for startups) in Bangalore can be found in a strip of shops on Infantry Road. Be prepared to shop-hop and haggle like crazy.
  • Office puja performed. Lord Ganesha invoked for an auspicious start and Goddess Lakshmi to help meet our revenue projections (again, the focus on money)!
  • Electrical and network wiring done.
  • Company blog launched. Ahem, you’re looking it. For everyone who has been thinking about setting up a blog but not sure what it takes – All you need is 1-3 days (depending on the content and structure), access to internet, a blog platform (I use WordPress) and ability to follow instructions. If you want your own domain, throw in about Rs. 300/month for hosting (I use Bluehost) and Rs. 100 upwards for registering a domain (I used GoDaddy) and you are all set.
  • Internet and telephone setup completed. In this day and age, I could find only one provider who had the infrastructure to get me connected. Disappointing. The silver lining – the decision-making was easy.
  • And the most exciting update – Offer made to the first employee … and accepted! Yoohoo!

Why we focus on money as a reason to work

  1. To fulfill our material aspirations
  2. To secure our future and our children’s future
  3. We do not find anything else in our job to motivate us
  4. We are too tired or too complacent to find out ways to make our work exciting and meaningful
  5. We are too afraid to quit and find work that offers more than just money
  6. We have forgotten that there is more to work than money
  7. We think all other reasons to work are for people who have already made money
  8. Everybody else focusses on money

This is a rejoinder to this Seth Godin post.

Jugaad vs Dishonesty

Jugaad is a vital element of Indian entrepreneurship. Depending on whom you ask, you get different definitions of jugaad. Improvisation. Making do. Resourcefulness. I like Ratan Tata’s definition of “frugal innovation” because jugaad arises from constraints, scarcity and competition. Tata Nano might be tacky to some but there is no denying the ingenuity involved in building world’s cheapest car. Confronted by limited budget, mouthshut.com came up with the strategy of using auto rickshaws for advertising. There are many such admirable examples of jugaad. However, at times, dishonest acts are justified, even glorified, as being in the spirit of jugaad.

Here is another way to look at it. Everything isn’t black or white, right or wrong – sometimes there shades of gray. It’s just that the gray area is very narrow for the honest and very broad for the corrupt. Many acts that appear black to the honest appear gray to the corrupt (my attempt at a schematic below). Jugaad is one of the labels the corrupt use to stretch the gray band. (Other labels used for this purpose are “Ends justify means” and variations of the word “Shrewd”.)

Let us hand out applause for jugaad after careful consideration. We do not want to encourage disguised dishonesty.

What does it mean to be an entrepreneur?

I saw The Social Network recently. It’s sharp, smart, funny and very entertaining. One fascinating scene in the movie got me thinking about what it means to be an entrepreneur. The scene involves Sean Parker, who is like the sidekick in this movie but could easily be the hero in another movie. Sean Parker is the co-founder of Napster and played a key role during the early days of Facebook. Vanity Fair ran this profile of him recently.

Coming back to the scene. Sean Parker is talking to a girl, Amy:

Amy: So what do you do?

Sean: I am an entrepreneur.

Amy: You are unemployed.

Sean: I wouldn’t say that.

Amy: What would you say?

Sean: That I’m an entrepreneur.

Amy: Well, what was your latest preneur?

A couple of observations:

  1. The scene nails the fact that there is a stigma of unemployment associated with entrepreneurship. I am not sure why that is. Is it because entrepreneurs don’t have typical 9 to 5 jobs? Or is it because many unemployed people find it easy to pass themselves off as entrepreneurs? Amy may just have been kidding, but in India, a lot of people think “Nothing better to do” when you tell them you are an entrepreneur.
  2. Some entrepreneurs tend to be self-deprecating, even insecure, till they have achieved some measure of success. They feel that calling themselves entrepreneurs would be cheating unless they have something to show for it. I went through that phase but finally decided that the textbook definition – “someone who organizes a business venture and assumes the risk for it” – works quite well.

So chill. And if you are wondering if you are an entrepreneur, you are. Don’t let a label hold you back.

[You can watch the scene here.]

6 questions for NRIs considering returning to India – The Questions

[Part 2 of a 3 part post. Part 1 is here.]

While the choice of returning to India or staying is personal and depends on each family’s unique circumstances, the answers to the following questions lead us to a decision we can live with.

  1. How important are your Indian roots to you? How important is assimilating in the US? Will you and your family members be able to assimilate in the US while retaining your Indian roots?
  2. Will you and your family be able to adjust in today’s India? The India you will live in is very different from the India you see during your vacations, so don’t answer this question based on your vacation experience. Instead, think of what living in India was before you moved to the US. Add more crowd, more chaos and more pollution (use a multiplication factor based on the number of years you have been away and depending on how sensitive a person you are). Now temper it with slightly better infrastructure and more consumer choice (we get avocado, peanut butter and our favorite breakfast cereal here). This is the India of today. Talk to friends and family to get more insights. A friend of mine stayed in India for a few months on a trial basis before he made his “go, no-go decision” (he stayed back in the US).
  3. Where do you think your children will have a better future, better upbringing, better education? If you have older kids, you will have to talk to them about what moving to India means to them and get their feedback. Don’t worry about younger kids – you’ll be surprised how adaptable they are.
  4. Where will you have a better social life? Which place gives you a better support structure from friends and/or extended family?
  5. Do you have any obligations/responsibilities in India/in US? Old/ailing parents, mortgage, children with special needs, etc. Which location gives you a better shot at fulfilling these obligations?
  6. Mother of all questions – Picture yourself and your family in each country when you are 40, 50, 60. Which pictures do you like more?

[Note:

  1. I do not include career related questions in the list because I believe they are irrelevant in this context and only cloud the decision-making. First decide, then figure out how to align your career with the decision. In a recent TechCrunch post, Vivek Wadhwa says “Sadly for my Indian friends in Silicon Valley who are looking to return home, returnees—formerly in high demand and treated like rock stars—are out of vogue and now treated like rocks.” I do not quote this to discourage folks from returning but to illustrate that job markets are fickle and you cannot pin a big decision on something that’s transitory.
  2. Sorry, I cheated in the title. There are more than six questions but “question sets” does not sound half as good.]

The Big Leap

Till December 2009, I had a nice job in a big company. I had a beautiful home in a quiet Chicago suburb, two cars and was living the American dream. And one fine day I lost my head – I quit my job, sold my house, returned to India and bootstrapped a startup. Or so it seemed to some of my acquaintances. To many of my friends and relatives, the decision to change my career and home seemed abrupt. Some suggested (only half-jokingly) that I was going through a mid-life crisis. Here is what actually happened:

  • I took nine months to make up my mind. There was nothing abrupt about my decision.
  • A big part of my decision was to do with aligning life and career goals. Should we fit our life around our career or the other way round? Most of us end up doing the former. A lot of times, it is a matter of necessity – typically financial needs or personal constraints. Sometimes though, it’s because we lose sight of what we really want to do in life. It’s important to consider that as we grow as individuals, what we want from our lives change. A career that may have met our life aspirations five years ago may not align with our current aspirations.
  • I really did not have a choice. My decision practically made itself. I couldn’t express this point more eloquently than this post by Seth Godin.

Throughout the nine month period, I consumed an enormous amount of content related to life and career changes and startups. I had it easy because many had undertaken this exciting journey before me:

  • Movies – Clerks, High Fidelity, Notting Hill, Departures (a Japanese movie), Rocket Singh – Salesman of the Year

The long and deliberate process I went through is probably not right for everyone who is assessing a life/career change, but it held me in good stead. The day I finally put in my papers, I felt as if a huge weight had been lifted off me. For the first time in many years, I was the master of my destiny.