think-smarter.com Blog

Proto: “Demo Conference” for India

The Demo Conference (http://www.demo.com) is a great place to launch a product in the US. Vijay Anand and others have launched Proto (http://www.proto.in) with a similar concept for India. This is a fanastic thing for the Indian startup eco-system.

The first conference is to be held Jan 20-21, 2007.

Add comment December 9th, 2006

Seth Godin’s talk at Google

This is fantastic video for enterpreneurs:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6909078385965257294

he has also written some interesting books:

http://www.sethgodin.com/sg/bio.html

Add comment December 5th, 2006

Stanford to Cornell to Bangalore

I arrived in the US as a graduate student in the Computer Science department at Stanford in 1993. And as part of being a PhD student, had to do my share of being a teaching assistant. Everyone at Stanford at that time was talking about companies … I would rarely find people talking about their grades. Actually I just assumed that this was normal in the US.

The contrast became very dramatic when a few years later I ended up in Cornell and there was no talk about companies … but everyone talked about grades. Actually most of the undergrad population had friends who were in MIT and their constant effort was to show that they are better than their MIT friends ….

Since then several years have passed by and I had a similar experience in Bangalore. I was sitting in Bangalore club with some of my mentor-partner friends and listens to enterprenuers pitching their ideas. And the contrast was striking … in the valley most peoples ideas start with the PC, Storage…, now the web … in Bangalore most ideas start with phone, phone and phone. When people want to do a company, they think phone. The eco-system is “early-adopter” mentality, Bharti, Reliance and others are open to launching 3rd party applications on a revenue sharing basis.

Again the contrast was sharp and stark.

Add comment December 5th, 2006

How to start a company with a blank presentation?

We (the think-smarter crew) are going to introduce you to a novel technique called the “blank presentation method” which will enable you to identify 70% of what should be built with 10 blank sheets of paper. No kidding. The following parable brings out the basics of how this gets done.

A story is told of a tourist in Paris in a bar one night. He got talking to a young Parisian and they hit it off. As it got late, the tourist said “I must go now”. The Parisian replied, “Let me walk you home”. “You don’t even know where I’m staying”, said the tourist. “You don’t need to tell me, I’ll take you there”, said the Parisian. Intrigued, the tourist accepted the offer. The Parisian took the tourist’s elbow and led him out of the bar. He then proceeded to walk the tourist home by exactly the same route that the tourist had walked home the previous two nights. The bemused tourist asked. “How did you know where to lead me? Have you been following me?” “I didn’t lead you” replied the Parisian. “You led me”.

How did the Parisian take the tourist home? What he did was actually quite simple. After exiting the bar, he applied slight pressure on the tourist’s arm as if to turn left. The tourist’s home was to the right, however. The tourist reflexively reacted to the pressure negatively by pulling his arm slightly away, and the Parisian was able to correct his course and turn right instead. Similarly, at each intersection, he guessed which way to go, and was able to correct his course based on the tourist’s reaction to the pressure he applied on his elbow.

Thus, through a simple process of hypothesizing where to go, validating the hypothesis, and correcting his course, the Parisian was seemingly able to lead the tourist home.

Lead, listen, learn, iterate.

Add comment December 3rd, 2006

Open Letter to John Boudreau @ San Jose Mercury News

From: Rosen Sharma
Sent: Sunday, December 03, 2006 9:04 PM
To: ‘jboudreau@mercurynews.com’
Subject: RE: India VC 2.0

John,

Read your article about India VC. I want to thank you for increasing the awareness of what is happening in India. Please don’t take the following as a criticism, but more as an informed opinion.

Everyone who goes to Bangalore for the first time does the same thing: they go an meet the Silicon Valley bank officials, meet Sridhar Mitta (with TIE) and a couple of VCs. While for the first time visitor this gives them some perspective but it is a one-sided point of view.

I think almost all US-connected firms with India funds are completely screwed up. Their structure is determined by the needs of the partners in the fund rather than the reality of the environment

Most funds in the US are built on 2% management fee and a 20% carry on the profits. So if a fund is $100M the management fee will be 2M and the carry is on the profits earned. (NEA is one exception to this – it is cost based – which allows them to raise very large funds.) On an average a US general partner in a fund makes $400K-$1M in salary per year. Thus a $100M fund can have 3-4 partners and the rest for expenses. Most US funds for India have the same or similar economics.

…
So we have funds which have USD 100M-150M under management. Such a fund can support 3 GPs. A fund is typically invested over 4 years in the US (there are several around which have a 3 yr investment cycle). If we assume the same for India, this means that 25M a year is being invested. You would invest 5M/company that’s 5 companies a year among 3 GPs which is reasonable. But consider that you can invest 2M/company, that’s 12 companies a year … that’s a bit much.

Now let me ask the key question: what is invested in each company is determined by what the company needs or what the VC needs to invest to make their model work? Why are the US-connected Indian VC’s more keen in investing in companies which can gobble up 5-10M? Why are they investing in real-estate and hotel companies? Most companies in India need an initial investment of less than 1M.

This is one of the problems: the US-India funds are based on the needs of the individuals and the funds rather than the needs of the companies.

There are several other problems with the models which exist today. Most companies over their life time in the US end up using $25M+ of cash, and companies in the India are not going to be very different. The eco-system in India today can’t fund individual companies to that extent (round C, D, E). You have people like Warburg who will do later rounds, but they only do certain kinds of deals. So if I do round A and B in India there is no bridge to US for getting the later rounds done. Infact it is going to be a struggle. In addition, most of the people who would be GP in an India fund, would not be on equal footing with GP’s in the US (not from a compensation perspective), but from a relationship, clout perspective. So if you are a GP in India and your company needs more money, can you swing the partnership into funding a tough situation: unlikely.

My opinion is that it is not the entrepreneurs in India which need to be frugal, it is the VCs. They need to have an economic models which meet reality of the market, and a cost basis which makes it possible. We have a long way to go.

Rosen Sharma
–
President & CEO
Solidcore Systems
www.solidcore.com

Add comment December 3rd, 2006

In search of a change management system (Part IV): The Application View contd…

I was talking to a guru in the change management space and sharing with him all these companies that came up in the search and asked for his opinion on this concept of the application view and he had a really great insight …

Software which starts with the applications, like Asset Management (for example, Mercury Asset Management…) and Relicore (Symantec), Collation (IBM), nLayers (EMC), Cendura (CA), Appilog (Mercury) all have one common characteristic … the need a white list.

Niether this guy nor I have used all these software, but a cursory look at their description seems correct … they all need a pre-configured list of things which they should track. If you think from an application point of view this makes a lot of sense … once you know it is Hyperion, you can enumarate all the files and configuration settings for example with Hyperion and track changes to that.

This clearly has several advantages and dis-advantages. First advantage, since most of the above software (except Relicore/Symantec) scan the system, this reduces the time and resources required for the scan. It also presents change data in an applicaiton context which is more useful for the end-user. The

The dis-advantages are same like with other white-list approaches, they need to be constantly updated, also may not be available for older/newer versions of the software. What do you do for custom software … user has to input all this stuff etc.

Add comment November 28th, 2006

ITIL Acquisitions

HP, Mercury (now HP), BMC, CA, EMC, IBM, have been on an acquisition binge over the past few years to put together thier porfolio for ITIL/ITSM. Here are some of the recent acquisitions … are there others that you think are also related to ITIL?

Add comment November 17th, 2006

Cal versus USC

Yesterday I heard Cal coach Jeff Tedford on the radio talking about preparation for this week’s big game. Tedford said he would not prepare any differently this week than any other week in the season because 1-if he knew a better way to prepare he would use it every week and 2-if he changed something and something unplanned happenned in the game he would not know if the new practice plan was the cause or whether it was something else. It struck me that what Tedford was saying is that controlling and managing change is a key part of his plan-thus the tie back to key ITIL principles.
Go Bears!

Add comment November 15th, 2006

From Help Desk to Service Desk

There are so many help desk tools out there, most of which now call themselves service desk — that I find it very confusing to understand all the nuances. I found this forrester report really useful (and it is avaliable for free, from the altiris web site).
It compares Altiris, Axios Systems, BMC Remedy, BMC Magic, CA, Front Range Heat, HP Peregrine, HP Openview Service Desk, Numara, Touchpaper and Unipress.

Here is an excerpt from the begining which I thought was simple and insightful …
“The organization formerly known as the help desk is growing up. Under the moniker of “service desk,” it is expanding its footprint and adding such functions as problem, change, and configuration management to its previous incident-focused role. The classic help desk was somewhat limited
in its scope and parochial in its focus: Users would call with a problem, and technicians would endeavor to fix it as quickly as possible. Help desk software would track incidents and open tickets as responsibility passed from one person to another. Once solved, reports would point out potential hot spots for further study and possible proactive action. Only rarely would the help desk have incidents opened directly from systems management utilities or be tied into any formal change management process.

As processes and procedures for ensuring the continuing health of the IT infrastructure developed, more complex workflows and organizational handoffs were required. Enterprise-class tools to support this service management followed. Common structures and practices added a framework for further refinements. Today, there is widespread acceptance among larger and more complex organizations of a structure following the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) model for service management, and tool vendors have followed with products that assist in ITIL implementations.

Smaller organizations and those not ready to make wholesale change to structures and processes nevertheless want tools that are robust, simple to install and configure, and easy for technicians to use. For these organizations, incident and problem resolution remains a key focus, often with an additional emphasis on desktop life-cycle management, with (but not at the expense of) workflow, tracking, and reporting tools.“

Add comment November 15th, 2006

Opsware: water water everywhere, not a drop to drink…

I was with the VP of Operations of a Global Fortune 500 company which had just deployed Opsware on thousands of end-points. Opsware is a provisioning system which can be used to push patches, updates etc. Like most other provisioning systems, such as BladeLogic, Radia (HP), it also keeps track of “known” good state and reports when deviations happen from it.

The company liked opsware as a deployment engine. It had simplified thier life considerably. But it had complicated thier life considerably when it came to reconciling change with the change tickets.

The VP mentioned that there was no easy way to integrate the two systems. Also the volume of change which was bieng reported by Opsware was so large that it made their earlier procedures which were manual just infeasible.
Opsware had taken them almost a year to rollout and they wanted to quick fix to this problem. Has anyone else seen this problem? Have any suggested solutions?

Add comment November 15th, 2006