And, I mark my return with a brand new photoset: The Performers!
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If you don’t like how things are, change it! You’re not a tree.
-Jim Rohn
There’ll some been bigtime changes in the engine room, and I have some news to share. Shortly.
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I’ve been working on a slide deck for a presentation that I have to make before the MBA class of a rather credible business school. I’m quite excited about this- I pitch for a living but I’ve never spoken about my startup journey before. The dean has generously given me ‘a hundred and fifty minutes’, and I’ve been told not to wing it. So, I sat down to think about the decisions that landed me here.
Turns out this is a lot harder than I thought it would be. I can’t remember any Eureka moments. I remember writing code and selling software back in high school, I ran a software consulting practice during my engineering undergrad days, and somehow I’ve always been this hallucinogenically optimistic about my destiny as an entrepreneur. I had a bunch of ideas that I wanted to pursue so I was never very interested in the college job fair. I was finding furniture for our office when Adobe was looking for talent on the campus. I could not wait to get out of college for my shot at changing the world. On my own.
The earliest I ever spoke about my wish to be at a startup was in grade 10. I remember we had gone away for leadership training course and we had to answer a formal ‘career-goals’ question, I guess that’s when I first consciously thought about it, I told this girl- very pretty and a year senior to me- that my life’s aim was to build a company that could make a reasonable dent in my universe… I don’t know if she remembers this, I hope she does. Would it make her happy that I’m even attempting to do it?
I was lucky in getting an opportunity to help start QuadLabs. Gaurav is a brilliant hard-knocks entrepreneur who had already tasted both the fruits of victory and the tribulations of failure. That makes him the perfect partner and teacher. Tempered, yet unjaded. A kindred soul, if you like. And how has it worked out?
Well, I’ve loved it thus far.The feverish adrenalin rush of conceiving and executing ideas, meeting unreal deadlines and building products that people love. Sometimes falling, then dusting-off, getting up and then getting hit on the nose again. Yes, we have had our days when noone knew where the next paycheck was coming from, and we’ve had our days where we thought we ruled the world. We’ve been shaken up and euphoric, beaten down and charged up, but we’re still at it, still fighting and still dreaming, and that’s what counts. There is no Gulfstream V. Not yet. But there might be, just around the next corner, the next deal, the next great idea. And that’s why this is all I ever want to do. And for the students hopefully hanging on my every word, or at least awake, I can only offer this. A man’s reach must always exceed his grasp. Or else what’s Heaven for?
Some dreams take longer than others to come true. But they always do, and they’re worth waiting for.
Now, if I could only remember that girl’s name…..
Here's a bunch of images from the early days...!!
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I enjoyed taking these pictures over a couple of trips to New York. Hope you’ll find them interesting-
Click here to explore the NYC photoset!
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Took these pictures at Isabelle et Vincent(Fairfield, CT), an old-school French bakery run by the brilliant chocolatier- Vincent Koenig. Like their stuff? You can order online here. Thanks to Neha and Srini for suggesting that we go there!
Click here to view the whole set!
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A dear friend told me she was sick of my ‘new-yorker length(length, not worthy!) rants’ and that she would stop reading my blog if I didn’t cheer up a bit!!
So here goes! 
Click on the kitten for a bigger version( magic...magic!!)
I think the bokeh is almost as awesome as the the kitten is cute.
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Alright, I quit! I’m giving up on the idea of a daily photoblog for now. I find myself much happier with a format where I can tell a story without worrying about timelines.
Click here to view the whole set!
To start off, here’s a bunch of images from a recent trip to San Francisco.
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As someone still grappling with ‘Binge-install Syndrome’, I find my computers loaded with tons of applications that I rarely use. Wordweb is one such application. I hadn’t noticed it around till the day I saw this-
This is definitely not a generic software licensing prompt where we always go for the least annoying option: Ignore, Later, Don’t Register or Cancel.
The Wordweb free licensing prerequisite stands out- this might well be the most ingenious bit of license copywriting that you’ll ever see. It’s interesting how an innocuous dialog box plays on the user’s principal moral obligation- honesty- to achieve a deeply commercial end.
Contrast this with conventional ’shareware’ agreements that people routinely ignore, circumvent, or under-license without feeling a little badly at the dinner table?
The key difference here is that you’re offered a choice, a measurable context in which you make your decision; you have an option to cheat and keep using the software for free, or to be honest and pay up. It gives you a benchmark to judge yourself. It isn’t ‘did you find it useful?’, it’s ‘did you lie?’, and that’s the big difference: the economic decision is preempted by a morality test.
What choice did I make? Well, I might be average at spellings, but I’m not a software thief!
For fellow entrepreneurs and folks who are curious about software pricing theory, Wordweb is a great example of the Freemium licensing model where a bunch of paying-users subsidize a service for free-riders. I’m told this company makes money which means this unique moral incentive actually works!
Chris Anderson gave a great talk at Startup School 2009 where he argued that free (for some) is indeed a viable pricing model for products and services, particularly those delivered through the internet.
At the heart of the Freemium model is the idea that you offer your base product for free and then build an incentive for users to pay for premium features. Offering a good product for free can attract a large user-base fairly quickly, and from there, it’s not hard to monetize a captive audience that already loves your product. One might imagine that Freemium works only if the material costs of the product are low( typically software, where the cost of delivering and scaling services is reducing every day)- this is incorrect. Look at how gaming consoles are priced, Microsoft and Sony barely break even on the hardware but make a killing selling game titles. Anderson cited his company’s example to make the point: Wired magazine where a small portion of premium-subscribers help the company sustain the service for a vast majority of readers who don’t go for the premium offering.
It’s important to understand why a user might pay for the service:
- Users pay to save time.
- If risk is lowered.
- If there’s a social (/status) incentive.
- Users pay if they are made to pay. (Much like the Wordweb license which compels the user to pay, or cheat!)
Clearly, one cannot offer the kitchen sink in the free variant of the service, there have to be some restrictions which are to be applied to develop an incentive for the user to upgrade or go premium.
- Feature Limited
Restrict certain features in the base version and offer them as ‘paid-for options’. - Time Limited
This is a legacy shareware software model where all the features are available for free for a certain duration, after which, the user must pay for the product. This model has a serious drawback whereby the user never really commits to the product as he knows that he might have to give up on it. Time limited licensing fails often as it has the least user engagement. - Capacity Limited
This restriction is popular with most data intensive internet services (Flickr, Picasa, Box.net?) where free users are given a certain amount of free capacity beyond which they must pay. - Seat Limited
Free for a certain number of users, beyond which you must pay. - User Class Limited
Free for students and non-profits, corporate customers must pay.
Far from a mere buzzword, Freemium(the naming credit wrests with Fred Wilson!) model is the big mover, and by far the most interesting pricing model on the internet. This presents endless possibilities for savvy companies to bundle their products in a sweetened wrapping of free, and make a lot of money in the process.
Think about job sites showing teasers to potential (non paying) recruiters and charging per lead, or offering a free posting to non members. This might nicely compliment their generic all-you-can-eat(time limited) database access. I know a lot of ways this access can be, and is, abused. How about helping a small company get started and making some money doing it? It takes away the incentive to cheat, and develops some real goodwill (/love) for your product. And that, we know, goes a long way!
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Our golf days have an inviolable pattern: I get owned on the first nine holes! Embarrassingly, I’m almost always down by a number in the high single digit territory. Then there’s breakfast, soda and the obligatory fight-back. At close, I’m generally trailing Raza by 5, and poorer by a few balls sacrificed to driver-fade, or waterlogging at the 2nd.
Yesterday was different!
Gaurav and Manav joined in for a slack round, interrupted by conversations that were not centered around the Gaussian copula function. Those two had to leave for meetings after nine, I suspect they decided they were better CEOs than golfers! Because me and Raza are not CEOs ( just brilliant golfers!!), we continued to concentrate on the task at hand.
As we walked up to the eighteenth (par 4), I was back by two. Raza went first and hit a mean driver that went 250-275 yards. A few shots later, the day ended with my pressure putt, a 13 foot downhill shot to hold par. Raza, went two over on the hole and there it was-my Tin Cup moment, we were quits for the day!
Take up golf, it can be humbling. And that, sometimes, is a good thing!
Derived wisdom: If you’re basing your flight option calls on ‘who acquiesces to carry my golf-kit, gratis?’. You’re dangerously close to losing your job.
{Clicking on the pictures magically makes them bigger!!}
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Product innovators dilemma: how do you build a 15 inch black tire that stands out?
If you worked in product engineering at Bridgestone, you would relate to the folks who work on the IE team at Microsoft. Internet browsers, like car tires, are a hard space to be in- it’s nearly impossible to build a truly differentiated product. Innovation is mostly centered around minute obscurities, or engineering hacks to play catch-up with competition.
You’d imagine this is not a market for insurgents, and then came Chrome.
A good example of Google’s re-imagination of the internet browser is my favorite new feature- bookmark-sync, now available on the dev-build channel.
Using the Google Docs service, Chrome now let’s you synchronize browser bookmarks across multiple computers (/devices). I think it’s a standout example of product improvement through a cloud based service (Software-backed-by-a-service?). Win7/Mesh is another great example. Give it a shot, I’m sure you’ll find it useful.
*Safari has had this feature for a while but you must pay a ransom for the MobileMe service. And, I don’t do Mac!
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