Pranav Bhasin

I am a cyclist and an entrepreneur. It was 6 months back, on this very day that I started cycling and its been slightly over 3 years that I ventured into the world of entrepreneurship.

And every time I mount on the saddle and gently push the paddles, somehow I can’t ignore the unmistakable similarity between cycling and entrepreneurship. This thought has occurred to me so many times that I finally decided to sit down and write about it.

So what is the similarity, you may ask? And I’ll say there is not one, but several of them. Lets start by listing them down here:

1 ) Its a state of mind

You can’t teach people to become entrepreneurs. Similarly, you can’t ask people to start cycling. Yes, you may get influenced by others and you may get inspired by hearing stories of others, but both of these activities require you to overcome a lot of inertia before you dive in.

One fine day, you hear an inner voice calling and you leave everything else and get started. And yes, cyclists and entrepreneurs are eternal optimists and you need all the positive energy you can amass just to get started.

2 ) The going is tough, especially when you start

The first few days are really hard. When you move out of the comfort of your AC car and mount on a cycle for the first time, the reality and magnitude of your decision dawns upon you. Its seems like you are a rebel and everyone around has their eyes on you. For the first few kilometers of your ride, you enjoy the breeze and the freedom, but soon you start getting tired and you are wondering if you made the right decision.

With entrepreneurship, its more so because the day you leave your fat pay-check, you know you have to figure out a way to survive.

3 ) Follow the uncharted territory, sometimes the forbidden path

One thing about cycling that you do not get to know until you start, is the joy of discovering new trails and taking roads that others do not ( or can not by virtue of their huge vehicles ) take. This is very akin to a startup where you can quickly go and experiment in areas where big companies would take months to venture. This joy, that you get out of exploring the uncharted territory is the hallmark of entrepreneurship and cycling.

And sometimes, you do get adventurous and try out something crazy that you would dare not think of in a big organization. That ability to take the forbidden path is what forms the basis of innovation.

4 ) The resources are scarce

You can’t carry a ton of stuff on a cycle. Every time I go on a long trip, I have to make a hard call on what is absolutely essential to carry and what is not. And once you get on the road, you are the guy who owns it, the guy who runs it and the guy who fixes the puncture. Similarly, in a startup, you are everything from the owner, the marketing guy and the janitor.

5 ) There climb is steep, with several hurdles on the way

One thing you notice the moment you get on a cycle is that the roads that earlier seemed flat now seem to have a gradient. Infact, you wonder if there is any road in this city that has been built straight. Every time there is a uphill climb, your progress slows down and then, as if magically, you get a stretch that goes downhill and you rejoice.

Similarly, as an entrepreneur, most of the things that you try to do seem very hard. The harder you try, the harder they seem to get over. But sometimes, luck is in your favor and you may land a deal that you weren’t even thinking about.

6 ) Its not about how fast you can go, but how long you can last

This beats my common sense, but until I started riding a cycle, I did not ever think that the primary purpose of gears could be to help you save energy, rather than go fast. When you are out for a long ride, your goal is not to get there fast, but to finish the ride. And if you push too hard in the beginning, you lose your energy and risk cramping up before your ride is finished. So your goal is to save as much energy as you can and last as long as possible.

As a startup, the counterpart of energy is the cash you have in the bank. You need to be very miserly in spending the cash because that is your biggest asset. If you burn your cash too fast, your startup may not live long enough to complete the journey you set it for.

7 ) Discipline is paramount to success

One thing that I hear from good cyclists is the importance of cadence in cycling. For the uninitiated, cadence is the number of cycles your feet make every minute as you cycle and once you have a discipline built around it, your body gets accustomed to riding a long way at that cadence without getting tired. Ideally, you should maintain the same cadence throughout the route, but its often very tempting to let the cycle coast on downhills thereby losing the discipline of the cadence.

Similarly in a startup, you are the boss and you do not have a boss who is sitting on your head and setting goals for you. It is extremely important to have a disciplined way of approaching those goals otherwise procrastination sets in and before you realize, you are way behind where you wanted to be.

8 ) You have to be prepared for the worst

When you get on a cycle for a long ride, you need to prepare for the worst. What if you run out of water? What if there is a puncture? What if you meet with an accident? There are several things that could go wrong and you need adequate preparation to address all of these. However, even with all the preparation, things do go wrong all the time, leaving you stranded on the side of the road with no help in sight. You just have to be prepared to deal with situations like this and drag yourself to a place where you can find some help.

In a startup too, things seldom go as planned. As you get into the business, you learn more about the market and your B-Plan literally changes every 6 months ( if not every quarter ). You just need to keep an open mind, take things as they come, take your best decision with the available information at that point in time and move on.

9 ) You ride with your team

When you think of a long trip, the first thought that comes to mind is the fellows you will be riding with. You do make short rides in the city alone, but it is hard to contemplate a full day ride without other people around you. Going out together as a team not only inspires you to do better, it also provides the necessary support system when something goes wrong.

Similarly in a startup, it is very important to have a good team that is with you in good and bad times. The true test of a team is when the chips are down, everything seems to be going against the startup and the team sticks together and sees it through.

10 ) When you finish your ride, its very satisfying

It doesn’t matter how hard it is, but when you finish a long ride, you have accomplished something and you are a very satisfied person. All the hard work, all the effort that went into it was properly channeled towards achieving a goal and finally you achieved it. You had to go through numerous hurdles, at several points you were tempted to turn back, but your will power made you go on and on to achieve it.

Its a tremendous feeling and its the same feeling you get when you have seen your startup through the hard times and turned it into a revenue generating business. The story doesn’t end there, there are new goals to meet, new mountains to cross, but the feeling of having met a milestone that previously looked momentous is certainly exhilarating and extremely satisfying.

That was my experience, what about yours?

I hope that this post inspires more entrepreneurs to start cycling and more cyclists to become entrepreneurs . If you have had similar experiences about cycling or entrepreneurship or both, please do share them in the comments for the benefit of everyone.

Last week, I was at the NASSCOM BPO summit and I couldn’t help but notice that quite a few of the sponsors were government agencies or information technology representatives of other countries:

a) Royal Government of Bhutan
b) UK Trade and Investment
c) Information and Technology Association of Jordan
d) Scottish Development International
e) IT Enabled Services Secretariat Ghana

Of these, the one that caught my eye was Jordan, primarily because this was the first time I was seeing a middle east country projecting itself as an outsourcing destination. Apparently, the Middle East and North Africa ( MENA ) region has been slower than others in capitalizing on the growing wave of outsourcing, but is fast catching up now.

Rejo Sam, whose company Global Equations is helping Jordan build business relations in India mentions that outsourcing business in Jordan is expected to reach about $250 million in the next 3 years under a new programme “Turn to Jordan… your Smart Shore Destination”, a joint public-private sector venture that seeks to attract investments to the sector in the Kingdom and promote privileges and factors that encourage opening business in the outsourcing sector in the Kingdom.

Later in the evening, I happened to meet Kofi Worlanyo from Ghana, and as I joked about having an equivalent of NASSCOM in Ghana, I was really in for a surprise when he handed me his card. His card said:

Kofi Worlanyo
CEO
GASSCOM ( Ghana Association of Software and IT Service Companies )

What more can I say after that, but it does look like the MENA countries are now beginning to position themselves very strongly as an outsourcing destination and the existing players in the market will have no other option but to move up the value chain and find newer niches for themselves.

And the world continues to get flatter, with each passing day!

A picture is worth a thousand words and this one says it all

Chetan Bhagat was a valedictory speaker at the NASSCOM BPO Summit and we had the opportunity to have a few words with him after he finished his insightful and inspirational talk.

And in case you did not notice, what he is holding in his hand is the live photo gift that we created for him during the summit. We hope he likes it and it finds a permanent spot on his table, among all his other trophies.

[ Click on the image below to see a bigger version ]

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Two days ago, Mashable reported that facebook is testing out a new feature called “Related Photos”. Read their coverage here: http://mashable.com/2010/05/28/facebook-related-photos/.

With this supposed innovation, facebook will now start showing other photos of people who are face-tagged in a photo next to it. The application feature addition is designed to drive users to explore additional photos that may be of interest based on the photo they’re currently viewing, thereby further personalizing the experience (and increasing page views).

Just to set the record straight, we have had this feature ( and a lot more ) at http://www.lifeblob.com for over a year now and facebook has blatantly copied it. Every time you upload a photo on lifeblob, a recommendation engine not only looks at the face tags, but also the other information associated wtih your photo to show you photos that are closely related around it.So when you upload your graduation day photos, we discover other photos of your graduation day and show it next to your photo. What facebook has done is picked up this idea and launched a simple version of it that only uses face tags. Bravo!!

To see the similarity of the features, look at the screenshots posted side by side below, the first one from lifeblob and the second one from facebook.

Believe it or not, this is Bangalore and this apartment complex has been built and maintained by Larsen and Toubro. Thanks to Abhishek, I took this shot last week when I visited my friend Xp’s home there. The light was very low so I shot this at ISO 1600 ( which is the max my Canon 1000D supports ) which is the reason for some noise in the photo.

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They have been all over TV for the last 2 months, but if you missed them for some reason, watch them here before you read on: ibibo ad #1, ibibo ad #2

Notice something strange – its an internet company, that too a social network using a mass media platform to advertise, huh. I wonder who is running their marketing, but whatever they are doing goes completely counter to the concept ( of social networking ) that they are selling.

So whats wrong here – a couple of things:

1) Mass Media = Old Media. This is the age of sending specific, targeted messages to people who are interested in listening to them, not blasting people with messages they don’t want to hear. Imagine a joint family watching a movie and one of these ads shows up in the interval – how many of them are the real target audience?

2) Mass Media is for branding. Mass Media is used by companies that want to build brands, like HUL or P & G, who want you to remember the name of their soap so that you pick it over others in the shopping mall. Using a Mass Media approach for intent driven advertising has all signs of failure.

3) Mass Media is costly. Every time your ad runs on TV, it sets you back by a few lacs at least. For a company that is offering a free service, that can be a huge setback in the balance sheet and will make it extremely hard for them to become profitable. Yes, they may get some users, but how long can they sustain by pooling in money from their other businesses.

4) To top it all, the concept of social gaming has been copied from facebook, which is not only going strong globally, but also making inroads into the Indian market. Plus, they have an extremely viral strategy going for them which means that everyone that is on ibibo is probably also on facebook. Which of them is going to stick – the answer seems obvious.

5) Finally, you need to scream when your product doesn’t speak for itself. I haven’t used ibibo games, but my guess is that they don’t have a good product out there which is why they need to burn so much money in marketing to get noticed. Good products, especially the ones that are social, spread quickly through word of mouth ( or mouse ).

What they should do? Here is my advice:

1) Come up with a unique product concept, think about something that has a local zing to it, something that facebook is not going to do. So when you copy farmville, you have direct competition from facebook, but if you choose to do something around IPL for instance, that is something that the nation is already crazy about and can ensure visibility for the product from the word go.

2) Stop burning money in Mass Media for God’s sake. That is for companies that sell soap, not for internet social networks. Instead, spend more time planning an internet strategy that would spread the word – a bit of adwords, a bit of SEO and lots of social media could be the perfect mix.

3) Most importantly, focus on building virality inside the service itself. This is an intensive process and requires depth in product management to pull off. But if you have the money, why not get some good guys who can figure it out and turn the service into one where every new user brings in 10 of his/her friends rather than wasting that money in Mass Media.

4) Specifically regarding social gaming, a neat thing to do would be to have a strategy that lets other sites embed games inside them. That opens up avenues for partnership and several distribution channels which will spread the word far and wide with very little cost.

What is your opinion about their strategy? Any solutions you would like to propose?

This week, I was invited by VC Circle to be a part of the panel discussion on “Bengaluru’s Ver 2.0 Technology Story” in the VC Circle BengaluruInvestment Forum.

The discussion was themed around how the technology story of companies in Bangalore is in a next generation transition and was ably chaired by Jessie Paul. Other eminent members in the panel were Sanjay Nayak of Tejas Networks, Sean Blagsvedt of Babajob, Manohar Atreya of o3 Capital and Sunil Maheshwari of Mango Technologies.

The discussion started with Jessie doing a recap on the formation of software services industry in India as a result of globalization and posing a few questions to the panelists.

Sanjay, who has raised 5 rounds of private financing till now added that companies in the west are more focussed on marketing and adoption of products whereas companies in India are more focussed on building great technology. He emphasized that technology does not build great companies, great marketing does. He also stressed the need of participation by the government to help take the sector to the next level and push India into the reckoning as the hub for software products.

Sean emphasized on the fact that while the services industry was timely and was responsible for creation of a lot of jobs in the market, it has not done anything for the masses. Until we setup an infrastructure where it is easier for entrepreneurs to come in and create companies out of India, we cannot move to the next level. He also stressed that the current venture funding setup seems to work in the west but may not be suitable for India where a lot of companies can benefit from a small amount of capital vs a few companies benefiting from a large amount of capital.

Sunil added that companies that do not wait for the next game changing opportunity to become obvious and drive change will be the ones that will be successful. He cited the example of iPhone which was conceptualized by Apple with zero experience in mobile device area – the product has been extensively copied by competitors but no one has been able to dislodge Apple from the slot it has occupied.

Manohar gave his perspective on the venture business where he said that venture funds are in the game to make money and hence they remain extremely choosy about their investments. He also pointed to the fact that venture industry in US started in early 70s whereas the one in India started in 90s – as a result, the industry is still in its learning phase and will take some time to mature. He advised entrepreneurs to be patient, persistent and remain passionate about the idea and be prepared to slog it out for a year and a half to receive capital for their venture.

For my part, I added that to build a successful business, you need to have a combination of Market + Idea + Capital. With the mobile phone market exploding in the past few years, this creates a lot of users and plenty of opportunity for new business to use it as a channel to enable their services. In 2000, a similar proliferation of web services led to the dot com bubble, but the market seems to have learnt from it and the investment in mobile companies, though growing at an encouraging pace is not yet showing the signs of a bubble.

The salient points from the discussion were summarized by Jessie and followed up with questions from the audience. Overall, it was great connecting with the fellow panelists and I had a good time in the panel and overall at the VC Circle conference.

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