back to the past

JAN

UA

RY 2012

The ma

ga

zine for g

ro

win

g c

om

pan

ies

A 9.9 Media Publication

The Magazine for Growing Companies

January 2012 | `150 | Volume 02 | Issue 12

Ba

ck

to th

e P

as

t

His company grew 6500 times in the first six years. can Manoj kumar Upadhyay recreate acme tele Power’s early magic? PAGE 26

Back to the Past

Make sMaRtBUsINess

ResoLUtIoNs

the WaY I WoRk aJIt aNDhaRe

WheRe Do YoU hIRe

FRoM? Page 48

sUccess aFteR the

BIG BaNGceo, coLosceUM MeDIa

Page 52

Gu

tter

Cr

edit

her

e

PhotograPh by name tk JanUary 2012 | INC. | 13

A Perfect Role Ajit Andhare found his calling in TV content. Now, he’s scripting ideasto redefine the space.

26Cover Story The Intrepid Innovator Manoj Kumar Upadhyay’s Acme Tele Power grew more than 6,500 times in its first six years. His innovative power management products for telecom did the trick.Can he repeat that business magic with solar power and other energy management solutions? by shreyasi singh

56I Wish I Knew Then...S.N. RaiS.N. Rai, co-founder, Lava International might have got into business after two decades of corporate life, but that experience is coming in handy now. as told to ira swasti

on the coverManoj Kumar Upadhyay, founder, chairman & CEO, Acme Tele Power. Photographed by Subhojit Paul in Gurgaon. Cover design by Peterson.

This ediTion of inc. magazine is published under license from mansueto Ventures LLc, new York, new York. editorial items appearing on pages 12, 13, 22, 34-42 were all originally published in the United states edition of inc. magazine and are the copyright property of mansueto Ventures, LLc, which reserves all rights. copyright © 2009 and 2010 mansueto Ventures, LLc. The following are trademarks of mansueto Ventures, LLc: inc., inc. 500.

34 Company of the Year, Inc. Meet Your New BrainEvernote’s Phil Libin has a few not-so-modest goals: to impact a billion people, to build a company that lasts 100 years, and to completely change the way we remember everything. So far, so good. by david h. freedman

CoNTeNTSJanuary 2012

52The Way I Work A bit of Red Bull, lots of coffee and tough deadlines keeps his team up all night. But Colosceum Media’s founder, Ajit Andhare, lives on a different tonic. His adrenaline rush comes from the buzz of ideas. as told to rohini banerjee

janUarY 2012 | INC. | 1

PH

OTO

GR

AP

H B

y JI

TEN

GA

Nd

HI

05 Editor’s Letter

06 Behind the ScenesFirms that got bookworms crawling to Bookaroo, a children’s literature festival

09 Launch Tech venture trends that will dominate 2012 The Ticker CEO Knowledge Forum Research corner: How disaster-ready are you? The Inc. data Bank Skimmer’s Guide to: Too Big to Know, by david Weinberger

13 Get RealBy Jason Friedyes, there are better choices than cash when it comes to showing appreciation.

14

STRATeGY45 MANAGING Be feedback-hungry. Keeping your ears trained, and your mind open can lead to great products.

47 SALeS & MARKeTINGWhat a rural holiday venture must-do to get its business itinerary buzzing with travellers. 48 hIRING Got a signboard to your office? Let it do more than give directions. Use it to shout out your vacancies.

49 CoMPANY CuLTuRe Get more women on board. Achieve better results.

50 eLevAToR PITCh MyGuestHouse helps you book affordable rooms online. Will investors check in with ̀ 5 crore?

CoNTeNTS January 2012

09

13

14 Passions Gaurav Bhagat is an ace when it comes to the sleight of hand

16 The Dressing RoomBy Krishna KumarIt doesn’t have to be lonely at the top. don’t hesitate to reach out.

18 Innovations A small firefighter that saves many lives

21 The Goods Get these mobile apps: your business will thank you Headsets for tablets E-mail promos, reimagined Tech Wise, by Soham Raninga: The gadget universe will never be the same again. Things yashish dahiya Can’t Live Without

Guidebook, No. 12How to make apt business resolutions, and stick to them. Following Page 24.

21

2 | INC. | janUarY 2012

Gu

tter

Cr

edit

her

e


MAIL

A great issueMy heartfelt compliments for a wonderful November issue and a fabulous cover story. The Sagars have been photographed so well and the article also carries mind-blowing pictures. These calm your nerves when you see them. The magic that you have created with words is awesome. — VenkAtesh GAnApAthy, General Manager, Firepro Systems, Bengaluru

A mirror to entrepreneurs Jugaad as it is called in Indian parlance defines the unstoppable entrepreneurs of India. This magazine brings that out in every aspect of an entrepreneur’s journey. Seeing their passion is really amazing. I also enjoy the Behind the Scenes section where you showcase companies that service the-atres, bars or other public places. As an investment banker, it reminds me of the importance of observation—interesting companies are all around us.

priyesh karia, on e-mail

Addictive reading I take this opportunity to congratulate you on creating a hardcore dynamite of a maga-zine on entrepreneurship. I just read your last eight issues at one go.

mukul gupta, General Manager, Patrika Group

Good goingWanted to congratulate you for the editorial quality of Inc. India. It’s my favourite.

kuldip nar, Managing Director, Aidmatrix Foundation

A big fan I am a big fan of Inc. India. Columns like “I Wish I Knew Then” and “How I Did It” are such a joy to read. In a country that feeds on Bollywood and cricket, entrepreneurs are my heroes. And your magazine brings them closer to me.

harshvardhan bhatkuly, on e-mail from Goa

To submit a letter, or alert us to an error, write to us at [email protected] Letters may be edited for space and style. Submission constitutes permission to use.

MANAGING DIRECTOR: Dr Pramath raj SinhaPRINTER & PublIshER: anuraDha DaS mathur

EditorialMANAGING EDITOR: ShreyaSi SinghAssIsTANT fEATuREs EDITOR: rohini banerjee fEATuRE wRITER: ira SwaSti

Copy dEskMANAGING EDITOR: Sangita thakur Varma

dEsignsR CREATIvE DIRECTOR: jayan k narayananART DIRECTOR: anil VkAssOCIATE ART DIRECTOR: PC anooPvIsuAlIsERs: PraSanth tr, anil t & Shokeen SaifisR DEsIGNERs: SriSti maurya, nV baiju & ChanDer Dange DEsIGNERs: SuneeSh k, Shigil n, Charu DwiVeDiraj Verma, PrinCe antony, binu mP & PeterSon ChIEf PhOTOGRAPhER: Subhojit PaulPhOTOGRAPhER: jiten ganDhi

Community tEamPRODuCT MANAGER: maheSh raViAssIsTANT PRODuCT MANAGER: rajat guPta AssOCIATE: DeePika Sharma

salEs & markEtingsENIOR vICE PREsIDENT:kriShna kumar (+91 98102 06034)busINEss DEvElOPMENT MANAGER: arjun Sawhney (+91 95822 20507)AssIsTANT REGIONAl MANAGER (sOuTh & wEsT)rajeSh kanDari (+91 98111 40424)

produCtion & logistiCssR GENERAl MANAGER (OPERATIONs)ShiVShankar m hiremathMANAGER OPERATIONs: rakeSh uPaDhyay AssT. MANAGER - lOGIsTICs: Vijay menon ExECuTIvE lOGIsTICs: nileSh ShiraVaDekarPRODuCTION ExECuTIvE: VilaS mhatre

logistiCsmP Singh, mohD. anSari

oFFiCE addrEssnine Dot nine meDiaworx PVt ltDa-262, DefenCe Colony, new Delhi–110 024

for any querieS, PleaSe ContaCt uS at [email protected]

PubliSheD, PrinteD anD owneD bynine Dot nine meDiaworx PriVate limiteD.PubliSheD anD PrinteD on their behalf by anuraDha DaS mathur. PubliSheD at a-262, DefenCe Colony, new Delhi–110 024PrinteD at tara art PrinterS PVt ltD.a-46-47, SeCtor-5, noiDa (u.P.) 201301EDITOR: anuraDha DaS mathur

4 | InC. | JANUARY 2012

But Isaacson’s breezy style and the sheer force of Steve Jobs’ fasci-nating life makes it read like a potboiler. Like good books tend to do, it also throws up parallels. Certainly in my world, inhabited as it is by entrepreneurs, references to Steve Jobs come in thick and fast anyway.

Not surprisingly, Manoj Kumar Upadhyay, the founder and CEO of Acme Tele Power, an energy management company, and this month’s cover story, is also deeply inspired by Jobs. Does he look up to the legendary Apple boss to make sense of his own business trajectory? In 2003, Upadhyay came from almost nowhere to introduce an industry-transforming power manage-ment system for telecom tower sites. He was 33. It was an

explosive start. Within six years, Upadhyay’s Acme was roughly a `2,000-crore company—helping cli-ents like Bharti Airtel reduce their diesel bills. The ramp up mirrored the frenzy that defined telecom in the mid 2000s.

But Acme’s journey, much like Apple’s, wasn’t going to be without twists and turns. Telecom’s hunger for expansion slowed. And over the past four years, a restless Upadhyay has been trying to come up with

another radical innovation. Relentlessly curious since childhood, he’s dabbled with a wastewater treatment plant and cold chain technology, none of which have proved to be the “next big thing”. Upadhyay is now 41. Does he worry about being an early peaker? Or does he take solace from the fact that even men like Jobs came up with

products that didn’t go anywhere, only to revolutionise multiple industries later? Find out on Page 26.

Interestingly, this issue seems to be about turning points. Our parent magazine, Inc., has named Evernote as its Com-pany of the Year. Evernote has a cult following in places like Silicon Valley and Tokyo. Phil Libin, the company’s founder, wants a billion people to use its products. Yet, in late 2008, the company was in danger of going under, till a random e-mail from a Swedish entrepreneur turned things around. You don’t want to miss the story on Page 34. It’s a great way to begin your new year.

Over a long weekend last month, I devoured Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs. At 630 pages, it’s a hefty tome.

How Things Change

Shreyasi [email protected]

Things i LearnT in This issue

Keep at it. If you try 20 things, one of them will work. Point taken, Mr Upadhyay

Put more thought into your new year resolutions. Break them up into achievable, monthly goals, rather than setting wishful targets

ediTor’S leTTer

janUary 2012 | iNC. | 5

6 | INC. | JANUARY 2012

Organisation and promotionsRoping in more than 50 authors, poets, storytellers and illustrators for three days is no mean feat. But, Teamwork Productions, an entertainment firm started by Sanjoy Roy, ensured that kids and the likes of Tapas Guha, Jerry Pinto and Devdutt Pattanaik, talked a lot at Bookaroo. Founded in 1989, Teamwork provides documentary filmmaking and event management services. Their 25-member team has undertaken several projects in India and abroad: the Hay Festival, Kerala, the Jaipur Literature festival, Jaipur, and the Perth International Arts Festival, Australia, are some of their most popular fests.

BEHIND THE SCENES Companies at the Heart of Everyday Life

BooksMoby Dick mingled with Harry Potter while Charles Dickens shared space with Roald Dahl. At Bookaroo, most of the paperbacks and hardbacks were provided by Delhi-based store Eureka!. Started in 2003 by media professionals-cum-bibliophiles Swati Roy and M. Venkatesh, Eureka! provides an impressive collection of books from every genre—biographies, science fiction, poetry and fairy tales—for children. It lets people order from their online portal or visit their “shop around the corner” in Alaknanda, Delhi.

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY TEAMWORK PRODUCTIONS REPORTED BY IRA SWASTI

PostersDon’t tell your kids to read more books, let Bageera do the dirty work instead! To get children into story telling sessions, literary quizzes and scriptwriting workshops, Picture Street, a Delhi-based design studio, designed animal-based posters for the festival. Picture Street usually handles print and exhibition work for its parent company—Frame Animation. Started in 2005, by Neeraj and Pallavi Sahai, the studio has worked for the National School of Drama, United Nations Development Programme and the Salaam Balak Trust among others. It has a core strength of five permanent workers and hires more during projects.

26:11:2011, 2:30PMBookaroo, Children’s Literature Festival, Delhi

launch News, Ideas & Trends in Brief

JANUARY 2012 | Inc. | 9

What’s the future like? Tech venture trends to watch out for in 2012

continued on the next page

2011 was a significant year for the technology venture ecosystem in India. There have been islands of exuberance—e-commerce for instance, accompanied by the continuing search by technology VC investors for a dis-ruptive Indian clean-tech company. Products and services delivered on-the-cloud have def-initely arrived, as have mobile applications as an integral go-to-market for both young companies and global giants. Tablets and smartphones have breached the sub $100 price point, cementing their future as devices of choice for customers in both developed and emerging markets. As of September 2011, there were 112 million claimed internet users in India, with close to 80 per cent of them being “active”. (Source: Report on Internet in India (I-Cube) 2011 by IAMAI).

As technology venture investors strive to see the future and invest in it, the land-

scape is bound to get more interesting. Here are some top trends one can expect to unfold in the coming year.

1.Existing e-commerce megastores will move towards becoming “differentiated horizontals” Indian e-commerce took off by ventures looking to create market leadership in select consumer segments. For instance, while Flipkart focused on becoming the largest online retailer of books, Myntra dif-ferentiated itself by targeting customised apparel. These segments—books, apparel, accessories, shoes all have multi-billion dollar domestic market sizes, and the first wave of institutional investors in these companies took a bet on creating category leaders. The past year has been a watershed in Indian e-commerce with these early cat-

egory leaders raising multiple rounds of funding, aggressively acquiring customers through television advertising, and gradu-ally turning into online megastores with multiple categories.

Right now, there is immense clutter in the online megastore category itself. As these e-retailers grapple for consumer mind-share, they are expected to shift towards becoming “differentiated horizontals”. Pricing, cata-logue range and advertising is no longer enough to create a winner. Each of these e-commerce companies will innovate to cre-ate differentiation. These could include fash-ion e-commerce ventures providing online design studios and value-added fashion tips and content to customers, book e-retailers creating social networking applications to connect enthusiasts, online travel companies providing highly customised holiday plan-ning services and focusing on micro-niches such as wildlife and adventure sports. These innovations will target creating consumer stickiness and providing the proverbial ‘cus-tomer delight’. The strategy of creating cate-gory leaders will still exist but it will move on to the next layer of purchases like jewellery, home décor and grocery.

2. Rise of Indian Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) as a viable customer base for technology venturesThe Indian SME space has for long been the pot of gold in the distance—a space with immense potential but which few have been able to crack. The advent of cloud computing or software-as-a-service model has changed that. Cloud-based delivery of products and services allow pay-as-you-go pricing, eliminates need for upfront capex and allows vendors to do without face-to-face sales. These aspects are essential for cracking the potential cus-tomer base of more than 3 million Indian SMEs that are now moving from basic adoption of IT to advanced ERP and soft-ware platforms deployment. Exits of ven-ture-backed Indian cloud companies in 2011 have further strengthened investor confidence in the space.

illUstRAtioN bY PRiNce ANtoNY

launch

Bollywood and business, your lethal combo for 2012...actress Karisma Kapoor has invested an undisclosed amount in Babyoye.com, an e-commerce store for baby

and mother care, becoming its largest individual shareholder…More investments continue with Matrix Partners (India) acquiring an undisclosed stake for `22 crore in Waterlife India, a Hyderabad-based water purification firm...Then, private equity firm Jacob Ballas Capital is expected to put in $150 million in India in 2012…Not just investments, it rained awards at the end of 2011. Naveen Tewari, founder of InMobi, won the Young Achiever of the Year Award at the World Brand Congress 2011 for his firm’s role in mobile marketing and ads…The spree

continued with Chetan Maini, co-founder of Reva

Electric Car Company, the first to make battery-charged automobiles in India, won The Economist’s Innovation Award 2011 in the energy and

environment category. Healthcare pioneer

and founder of Narayana Hrudayalaya, Dr Devi Shetty, also won the same award in the business process category. —Inc. India

Going forward, SMEs will increasingly become key cus-tomers for Indian technology ventures, utilising cloud-based business models. According to Springboard Research, Indian SaaS market is expected to reach about $352 million in 2012, with enterprise cloud spending expected to grow at 60 per cent.

3. Education and vocational train-ing to move out of classrooms and onto technology platformsThe skill-set shortage and lack of infrastructure in Indian education space is already well-talked about. As per a NASSCOM-McKinsey report, only about 25 per cent of technical graduates and 10-15 per cent of generalist graduates are fit for employment in the offshore IT and BPO industries. The situation is ironical, with millions compet-ing for a few thousand seats in the prestigious IITs while tens of thousands of engineering seats in Tamil Nadu lie vacant. The situa-tion can only be addressed by pri-vate sector intervention, and we already see examples of technol-ogy start-ups doing that.

Young ventures are utilising tablets and online platforms to provide access to the best material for engineering and medical test preparation to students in Tier-II and III towns. A few have devel-oped hands-on science kits and interactive simulations to make science and math education in schools more intuitive. Others are developing content to supplement college education by training fresh graduates in real-world technical and soft skills. The coming year will see several of these ventures raise fresh capital and scale up.

4. Business model innovations to take precedence in renewable energy applications

“What’s the Future Like?” continued...

The technology-end of most renewable energy segments have become largely commoditised. Solar PV modules are available at all-time low prices due to oversup-ply in global markets, and biomass gasifiers can be bought off the shelf. Greenfield innovation at the laboratory level is mainly restricted to developed economies, with their mature R&D infrastructure. Instead, Indian technology start-ups are taking the lead in develop-ing business model innovations that help create commercial and economic use cases for Indian enterprises and consumers.

Innovative system integration ventures are developing custom-ised off-grid solar solutions to replace diesel gensets in manufac-turing industries. Others are developing pay-as-you-go busi-ness models for residential solar applications, using indigenously developed sensor and metering technologies. A new generation of Indian technology ventures is also working on BOOT (Build-Own-Operate-Transfer) based smart grid applications for energy man-agement, remote asset monitoring and control. Soon, these business model innovations will take pre-cedence over pure technology innovations in the Indian renew-able energy space.

The above trends point towards exciting times ahead for the Indian technology venture ecosystem. It could well be the much needed kicker for the overall Indian econ-omy in times of global economic uncertainty. —Soumitra Sharma. (Sharma is part of the Investments Team at IDG Ventures India, a $150 million venture capital fund focused on technology and technology-enabled businesses. The views expressed are strictly personal.)

The Ticker

kapoor

launch

investment money

shetty

10 | Inc. | JANUARY 2012

pH

oTo

gR

Ap

H B

Y S.

RA

dH

Ak

RIS

HN

A

JANUARY 2012 | Inc. | 11

according to a recent study by Regus, a flexible workplace solutions provider, nearly half of all Indian businesses don’t have a disaster recovery plan in place for their IT infrastructure. Worse, six in 10 companies don’t have an alternate workplace for business continuity when a disaster strikes. Conducted in the aftermath of global events such as the tsunami in Japan, major floods in Australia and Hurricane Irene in the US, this study, conducted across 12,000 senior business people across multiple organisations in 85 countries, aims to draw attention to disaster management plans for businesses. Yet, the study found that close to 43.5 per cent of Indian companies believe the cost of disaster recovery prohibits their planning, and is the primary reason why undertaking disaster recovery plans did not seem viable. Which is why, a significant 63.5 per cent of enterprises in India said they were ready to buy a workplace disaster recovery facility if the option is priced affordably. Smaller organisations are credited for being more agile and adaptive. But size does indicate preparedness in this case, at least. This survey found that as companies become larger, they are more likely to have a solution in place both for their IT infrastructure and for their staff. Understandably, the sector most likely to have an IT disaster recovery plan in place is the financial services sector.

RESEARCH CoRNER

are you prepared for disasters?

a Great Platform Multi-city events take us beyond the big cities

Bank, said events like these demonstrated the bank’s commitment to nurturing and under-standing SME clients. “We want to be partners in their growth,” Deshwal asserted. Still, sev-eral entrepreneurs including Anupama Arya, who co-founded Mobera Systems, and is an angel investor as well, said banks and other funding agencies had yet to come of age in India. Devi Prasad Khandelia, President, Industrial Association of Chandigarh, agreed.

Expectedly, there were many conversations in all the cities about global economic condi-tions, and how they would impact business in India. While there were worries about slowing reforms at the central government level in India, many people said Indian entreprenuers have it in them to withstand trouble. Little wonder then that the leadership and motiva-tion sessions, conducted by OD Alternatives, an executive coaching and team building con-sultancy, were a big hit. Indian entrepreneurs are keen to sharpen all the weapons in their arsenal to forge ahead. —Inc. India

Over the last two months, together with ICICI Bank, Inc. India has organised a series of CEO Knowledge Forums across towns like Chandigarh, Raipur and Aurangabad. Conceived as platforms for founders of small and mid-sized enterprises, the events brought together entrepreneurs for free-wheeling discussions on issues that confront them most—leadership, access to finance and marketing.

This series got off to a great start with the Chandigarh event. K.B.S. Sidhu, principal secretary, government of Punjab, and the keynote speaker for the evening, said India’s mid-sized enterprises were going to lead economic growth. “They must be encour-aged, and banks and funding agencies should respond to their needs to further their progress,” Sidhu said. At a panel dis-cussion afterwards, lively discussions fol-lowed about whether the ecosystem had really changed for entrepreneurs. Vijay Desh-wal, zonal head, commercial banking, ICICI

lots of great conversations More than 150 founders of mid-size entrepreneurs came together to discuss leadership and business strategy in Raipur, Aurangabad and Chandigarh.

launch

12 | Inc. | JANUARY 2012

IPOs

211 The number of companies that, as of october, had filed for an initial public offering but had not yet gone public, the most in more than a decade

launch

The book: Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren’t the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room, by david Weinberger; Basic Books.

The big idea: knowledge—pre-viously a finite body of expert opinion and accepted fact—is now, thanks to the internet, unbounded, protean, and impossible to master. decision makers must get comfortable managing an abundance of information and reconciling diverse perspectives.

The backstory: Weinberger, a senior researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard, has been a prescient cartographer of the new digital world since co-authoring the seminal Cluetrain Manifesto in 1999.

all of us are smarter than any of us: As more brains contribute to the creation of knowledge online, Weinberger observes, more brains are required to wrest value from it. Conse-quently, leaders will start to rely on networks to make decisions. For instance, Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, devolves most decision-making to the Wikipedia community.

If you read nothing else: Chap-ter Two includes a fascinating history of facts as they evolved from scarce, isolated founda-tions of knowledge to abundant nodes on a network open to interpretation and dispute.

Food for thought: As individual expertise is devalued, how will that affect consulting firms and other businesses that tout unparalleled mastery of a subject? —Leigh Buchanan

a skimmer’s

guide to the latest business

books

inc. data bank crunching the numbers

hOlIday ShOPPInG

How consumers plan to spend this holiday season, compared with last year:

portion of consumers who use coupons when holiday shopping:

33% The portion of Americans who say they have no spare cash this holiday season

EMPlOyEE SaTISFacTIOn

Share of employees who say they feel unappreciated at work:

39% (up from 32% in February)

Employees’ top choices if allowed to make a few improvements to their offices:

portion of employees who are searching for a new job:

38% (up from 36% in February)

ElIMINATE oFFICE polITICS44%

ENCoURAgE TElECoMMUTINg41%

UpgRAdE CoMpUTERS37%

IMpRovE oFFICE FURNITURE35%

pRovIdE pRIvATE WoRk AREAS34%

AlloW MoRE FlExIBlE HoURS34%

MOBIlE InTERnET

How Americans spend time online when using mobile phones

5%WIll SpENd MoRE

2011

37%

36%WIll SpENd lESS

2007

22%

—Compiled by Andrew Shafer

42%E-MAIl

3%WEATHER

10%oTHER

5%MUSIC ANd vIdEoS

19%SEARCH ENgINES ANd poRTAlS

11%SoCIAl NETWoRkS

10%NEWS, SpoRTS, ANd ENTERTAINMENT

portion of venture capital–backed companies that went public within five years of receiving funding From 1991 to 2000:

18% From 2001 to 2010:

1%

223*

299

51 55*

300

200

100

2007 2008 2009 2010 2011

*AS oF oCToBER 26, 2011

Ipo FIlINgS

Ipo FIlINg WITHdRAWAlS

The IPO Pipeline

kEl

lY k

oll

AR

NIElSEN

gloBoFoRCE WoRkFoRCE Mood TRACkER; STAplES.CoM

NIElSEN

RENAISSANCECApITAl.CoM; SCoTT SHANE, CASE WESTERN RESERvE UNIvERSITY

A Gift that Keeps GivingThis holiday season, rethink the cash bonus

It’s December, and that means it’s bonus, gift, and holiday-party time. So what’s a business owner to do?

Before answering that question, it helps to ponder another: what do you want to communicate? Every end-of-year gesture says something different. A cash bonus might say, “Job well done.” A gift: “Here’s some-thing we think you might like.” And the holiday party always seemed to say to me, “Look at all the money we are wasting that could have been bet-ter spent elsewhere.”

For most of our 11 years here at 37signals, we’ve given employees cash bonuses. And why not? Every-one likes cash. But the message that cash bonuses convey always felt a bit empty to me. What’s more, because our company has been growing con-sistently each year, those bonuses came to be expected. They didn’t feel special any more.

Last year, I decided to give a gift instead of cash. I thought about the best presents I had ever received. They were always those that I’d never buy myself and/or didn’t even know existed. Once, it was a biography of Nikola Tesla. Another year, a friend gave me tickets to the opera. Each of these gifts expanded my horizons and introduced me to something new.

When I was thinking of what to give my employees last year, I decided I wanted it to be something that few people knew even existed; something beau-tifully crafted and handmade; a one-of-a-kind and fundamentally special object. And I wanted it to be a tool.

That’s because at 37signals, we make tools. Basecamp is a tool that helps people collaborate on projects. Highrise helps users keep track of their business contacts and relationships. We make software but like to think of ourselves as craftspeople. We are every bit as obsessed with detail, beauty, utility, and integrity as a master Japanese bladesmith would be with his samurai swords.

That’s when it hit me: a sword. OK, maybe a sword wasn’t practical. But how about

the most beautiful kitchen knife in the world? I remem-bered a video I had seen earlier that year about a fellow named Bob Kramer, a knifemaker in Olympia, Wash-ington. Kramer’s knives are custom made, one knife at a time, and are absolutely gorgeous. (Check them out yourself at kramerknives.com.) I decided to ask Bob to

make each of our 20 employees an 8-inch chef ’s knife.

I believe that the quality of the prod-ucts and tools that you use every day, both professionally and personally, can have a big impact on the quality of your own work and creativity. In other words, if you want to get better, surround your-self with better.

Kramer’s knives, crafted from Damas-cus steel and a variety of hardwoods (we chose ironwood), are beyond better, which is exactly what I wanted for my employees. So I e-mailed Kramer, told him how much I admired his work, and ordered 20 knives. It took Bob a few months to fill the order, because each of our knives took three days to make, and Bob and his assistant are the only ones who make them.

But finally, right around Christmas, we delivered the knives to everyone. We also watched a video Bob had sent along in which he thanked us for the order and expressed how much he enjoyed making this particular set of knives.

Employees were thrilled, and so was I. I like to think that every time they chop an onion or mince a clove of garlic, they’ll appreciate the craft and affection that went into making the tool. And with any luck, that craft, dedication to quality, and attention to detail will seep into other areas of their lives—both in the workplace and beyond. And that’s way cooler than any holiday party I’ve ever been to.

Jason Fried is co-founder of 37signals, a Chicago-based software firm, and co-author of the book Rework.

Knives or cash—what do you think of Jason Fried’s decision? How do you plan to reward your employees this year? Let us know at www.inc.com/magazine/201112/jason-fried-holiday-gifts.html

GET REAL BY JASON FRIED

January 2012 | INC. | 13ILLuSTraTIOn by PrInce anTOny

14 | INC. | JANUARY 2012

PASSIONS Life Outside the Office

“Poker is about maths, body language

and smart bluffing. Very few games are

this realistic.”

PokerGaurav Bhagat

phOtOgraph by MANASA MAdIShetty repOrted by ROhINI BANeRjee

Losing is not always so bad. Gaurav Bhagat would agree. It was in 2009, during a work trip to China, that the founder of Consortium Gifts, a corporate gifts company, first laid eyes on a poker table. A card enthusiast, he sat down for a round. Although he was “positively thrashed”, he was immediately hooked. “It was intelligent and exciting, like business itself. You have to evaluate and strategise; read your opponent’s body language,” gushes Bhagat. Many people think of poker as gambling, like slot machines or flash. “But it’s a sport. In the next few years, it’ll be as popular as tennis or golf here.” Since 2009, Bhagat has been at it—honing his skill by “devouring” the handful of great books available, and practising his moves with his poker group. Last year, he travelled to Goa to play the India Poker Championship (IPC), and to Macau for the Asia Pacific Poker Tour. At the IPC in Goa in 2010, Bhagat was up against Indian champion Sameer Rottensay at the finals table. After fighting it out for a gruelling seven hours, a bad hand ended it for Bhagat. But his love for the game has only just begun.

Can’t wait to play here...his company keeps him firmly tied to the office. but bhagat is hoping things will change soon. “Once the business is totally set up, I won’t be needed as much. I can then play more.” here are the tournaments he wants to ace:

World Series of poker, Las Vegas; asia pacific poker tour, Macau; India poker Championship, goa

For beginners:bhagat suggests reading a book written by tom Schneider, a former CeO and now a professional poker

player. the book’s called OOPS! I Won Too Much Money: Winning Wisdom from the Boardroom to the Poker Table. Schneider draws 61 similarities between business and poker. bhagat’s a fan—probably because like Schneider he’d spotted the shared traits.

THE DRESSING ROOM BY KRISHNA KUMAR

It sure gets lonely at the topDon’t hesitate to reach out. Much like in sports, working with a coach can help your performance peak in business too.

Ancient wisdom had us believe that the higher we climb, the harder would be the fall. Down the ages, this metaphor couldn’t curtail the human spirit of reaching out for the skies and beyond. The human race has continued its upward march relentlessly with the spirit of entre-preneurship and adventure often guiding us to dizzying levels, espe-cially when this growth is looked at from down below.

No wonder, the saying now has a different twist. There’s been a modernisation of the metaphor—the higher we climb, the lonelier we get! If you are a first-time entrepreneur building a business, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Certainly, if you’re the CEO of a business, the loneliness would be an incredibly familiar feeling for you. Tell me if I’m wrong. Isn’t it a feeling that seems to overpower you, especially when the going

goals? Worse still, how can the CEO be sure that he’s read the market right? Who can he turn to for help to decide that his business goals mirror the market requirements correctly?

Mostly, the decisions taken by a company’s top man-agement relate to growing the business. At least, that should be theoretically so. But, what is the reality? In my

gets tough and the road to nowhere beckons? It’s at times like these when you desperately need a sounding board or a support mechanism that puts you back on the straight path.

The age-old maxim of “when the going gets tough, the tough get going” might sound familiar, and is a great motivational tool, but often it doesn’t offer much cheer to those in the thick of action. For example, how does a CEO figure out that decisions he or she recently made are in tune with his or her business

16 | INC. | january 2012 illustration by anil t

THE DRESSING ROOM

M. Krishna Kumar is a master trainer and professional coach specialising in transformational leadership. An internationally-certified tennis coach, he’s also the founder of Kinesis Sports, India’s first ISO 9001-2008 certified tennis training institution. You can find him at www.isecindia.in.

experience, more CEOs than not tend to micro-manage their businesses. Paradoxi-cally, the pursuit of growth ends up becom-ing the biggest obstacle to growth. How then can top-level managers ensure they do not end up missing the woods for the trees while taking decisions? As a leadership coach, it’s the biggest coaching conundrum I face. I call it the ‘growth paradox’.

Interestingly, the problem is not restricted to the world of business. I unex-pectedly discovered this one evening while talking to a lady golfer who has been profes-sionally participating on the Indian golf circuit for several years. Her regular golf coach, a good friend of mine, suggested a meeting between us to overcome a mental block that was consistently making her per-form below potential on the greens. And, the global downturn (the cause of many a good golf game going awry these days) had nothing to do with her fitness or technical expertise, I was told.

When I met the lady golfer, she began the conversation by telling me her prob-lem—her “short game” was falling apart. For those unfamiliar with the sport, this essentially means that she was losing con-fidence while preparing to putt, essentially getting the ball closer to the hole. I had worked with similar issues in the past, and was fairly certain that this one could be fixed too. But I was keen to do more. I thought she needed to simultaneously focus on the bigger goal of moving up the rankings in Asia. So, I decided to gently steer the conversation in that direction. Almost on cue, I sensed certain discomfi-ture on her part. She seemed pretty sure that she had it pat down—that fixing her short game was the panacea for all her problems. She was intent on focusing on that short-term goal. She was determined that getting that right would move her up the rankings.

Similarly, I’d worked sometime back with the CEO of a mid-sized pharmaceuti-cal company. Right off the bat, he told me he’d never faced failure in his life. I per-ceived his to be an extremely positive and optimistic frame of mind. So, I thought about starting him off on a goal-setting exercise that would help him broaden his

Coaching in the world of business is a con-cept that has been borrowed from the world of sports. Top class sportspersons routinely go back to the drawing board and discuss their career path and progress with coaches whose sole purpose is to help them achieve their high-est potential. In other words, coaches help them reach out for higher targets by jointly set-ting short-to-medium term goals for them.

Can coaches resolve the problems one faces in business too? For starters, one must keep in mind that coaches do not offer solu-tions to problems. They perform the vital role of supporting the person’s efforts to unlock the answers that lie buried within. They help the person retain focus on some broader goals, thus providing indirect sup-port towards meeting them.

More CEOs than not micro-manage their businesses. And hence, the pursuit of growth becomes the biggest obstacle to growth.

vision for the company. But that’s not why he needed me. To my surprise, he immedi-ately dismissed my suggestions for the busi-ness goals exercise and started talking about a personal goal—to lose 20 kgs of body weight. He told me he’d been obese for the past many years.

It’s not that I don’t believe maintaining decent levels of fitness and good health isn’t a laudable, worth-having objective. But I was perplexed. First, he had claimed to have never failed in life and almost immediately after, he had confessed a personal failure. It got me thinking—why was leadership for him focusing on a relatively simpler per-sonal goal? And what made him think that his business goals were much easier to achieve by comparison?

I began wondering why many hugely successful people get caught up in resolving smaller goals while the bigger picture often eludes them. What’s more, most times these people are ignorant that they’re even doing this, especially in their professional life. At the top, you often don’t have people to tell you such things.

It does not have to be lonely on the top! A supportive coach or a mentor can be really handy here. That being the case, why are senior business executives and CEOs reluctant to seek services of a coach who can help them in their journey towards achiev-ing peak performance in their business? Is it that seeking support from an external source perceived as a sign of weakness in itself, even if such help is sought behind closed doors and out of the glare of the media and peer attention?

Personally, to say that either the lady golfer or the pharmaceutical CEO benefited from my coaching is wishful thinking. But, at least, in one instance, I was able to get the person to refocus on the big picture. In the other case, I remain optimistic the change will happen sooner, rather than later.

january 2012 | INC. | 17

innovation Companies on the Cutting Edge

the firefighterEvery year more than 7,000 people die in India due to accidents caused by cylinder gas leakages. One such blast in Delhi’s Chandni Chowk in 2009 triggered three college friends-turned-entrepreneurs to develop a device that could warn of a gas leakage before it turns into a disaster. Suraksha is a mobile-sized gadget created by RoboticWares, a Bhubaneswar-based software solutions company, that sets off three alarms—a buzzer, a flashing LED light and an SMS—to inform people of a gas leak. “It can be kept anywhere in the kitchen. And it will warn you of a leakage even when you’re away,” says Gaurav Shrivastava, co-founder, RoboticWares. The buzzer remains activated till the LPG leakage comes down to safe levels. Also, five phone numbers can be registered on it for the SMS service. RoboticWares has sold around 50 units of the device, mostly to commercial hotels in Bhubaneswar. It now plans to market it as a consumer product.

affordable Safety The basic version that only sets off a buzzer is priced at ̀ 2,000. The model that also sends text messages is available for ̀ 4,500.

a Saviour in timeRecently, Suraksha helped avert a big disaster in Bhubaneshwar’s Crown Hotel. The hotel has installed four such devices. One of them detected a gas leakage on a floor that was virtually empty. The timely warning alerted the staff in time.

Specifications Power supply: 12 V DC Operating temperature: -10 degrees Celsius to 70 degrees Celsius

18 | inC. | JANUARY 2012

RoboticWaresSuraksha

PHOTOgRaPH By Subhojit paul REPORTED By ira SwaSti

“It feels great to know that through this device,

we are saving so many lives.”

—Gaurav Shrivastava, co-founder, RoboticWares

Your Business Toolbox The GoodsNow, do business on your phoneMobile apps that increase your productivity in and out of officedoing business gets easier with these smart mobile apps. No more sleepless nights over fix-ing meetings, arranging business trips or giving presentations while on the go. Check out these apps, and make your mobile a super efficient business tool. —Ira Swasti

eMeetMeTrying to fix a meeting with multiple clients and tired of the secretarial back and forth to pin down a date? This app helps you coordinate with a number of users and figure out their availability by synchronising it with your iPhone calen-dar. Select potential dates for a meeting on your mobile, choose contacts you want to invite from your address book and the app will do the rest. It sends e-mails to all invitees (who don’t need to have an iPhone or this app) asking them which dates best suit them. Their responses are sent back to you. There, your meeting just got fixed!

TripIt Planning business trips for your clients and employees can be a headache, given the endless flight, hotel and car bookings to manage. Here’s an app that allows you to organise all your trip details into one master itinerary even if arrangements are booked on different travel sites. All you have to do is forward your booking confirmations to [email protected] and personal itineraries for each travel will be created. The app automatically includes maps, directions and weather, and also gives you options to book restaurants, theatre tickets and other attractions the city offers. Travellers get a shared company calendar to view co-workers’ plans.

scan2PdFYou need to send an important business

document to your legal team and the scanner in the office isn’t working. Don’t worry. Your

phone can double up as a scanner if you have the Scan2PDF app installed. This app uses

your phone’s camera to capture the document and converts it into PDF files.

Several pages can be scanned and combined into one PDF file. What next? Mail it to the

guy or keep it as a digital backup. It works on the iOS, Windows and Android platforms.

snapdatDid you forget to bring your visiting card to an important business dinner? Fret not. You can launch, create and send one right away through your iPhone. Snapdat lets you create lively digital business cards called Snapcard, complete with a profile picture, your company logo and links to your Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter page. You can make multiple cards from 40 custom designs to send to appropriate official and personal contacts. The app syncs itself with your address book and a new contact is automatically saved when you receive a Snapcard from someone else.

MightyMeetingBe prepared for any meeting on the go with this cloud-based app. Just upload or e-mail your powerpoint presentations and they will be accessible on your mobile phone through this app. You can invite users to participate from their own phones or computers and voila! You can have a full-fledged meeting with employees or clients right there. You can also upload demo videos of your products to showcase them before potential customers.

JANUARY 2012 | INC. | 21

The Goods Products + Services

C. LoGITeCh WIreLess headseT Like the Voyager Pro, this 11-ounce headset can connect to a tablet over Bluetooth from up to 33 feet away. Songs and movies sounded crisp on the stereo headphones, and Skype calls came in loud and clear. But the person we called said our voice sounded distorted at times. The headset’s soft earphones felt comfortable, even after several hours of use. We also liked the flexible, foldout microphone boom. The headset lasts about six hours on a full charge. cost: $70

A. seNNheIser CIrCLe sC 230The Circle’s noise-cancel-ing microphone did a good job of cutting out back-ground noise during Skype calls. Our voice sounded clearer to the person on the other end than on other headsets. Music and movies sounded crisp as well, but because we were testing a half-headphone model, the audio was in mono, not stereo. (You can also buy a dual- headphone version.) The 6.4-ounce headset, which fits comfortably, connects to a tablet using a 3.5-mm cable or USB cable. cost: $104

B. PLaNTroNICs VoyaGer Pro hdSkype calls sounded loud and clear on this 0.6-ounce mono headset, which fits comfortably over one ear. That said, background noise was a problem for us, and we sounded a bit squeaky and distorted to those on the other end. Music and movies sounded average. One cool feature: The Voyager Pro, which can connect to a tablet over Bluetooth from up to 33 feet away, turns on auto-matically when you place it on your ear. The headset’s battery lasts six hours, shorter than the eight-hour battery life of many tablets. cost: $99

InBOxeS

a fresh approach to e-mail marketing Looking for ways to stand out in a sea of e-mail promotions? A web-based service called Movable Ink offers several apps that can jazz up e-mails with real-time content. On the Movable Ink site, you can create a countdown timer to encourage customers to take action during a sale. Then, simply copy and paste the provided HTML code into the body of an e-mail. You can also add live posts from your company’s Twitter feed or include a map pinpointing your business. When people open the e-mail, the map will be centered on their current location. cost: Starting at $3 per app for every 1,000 opened e-mails —Abe Brown

My company sells a content monetisation platform for online publishers. Last year, we were growing fast and hir-ing a lot of people, so my part-ner and I started looking for a streamlined way to recruit and track job applicants. That’s when we came across a web-based service called the Resumator.

now, we log on to our Resumator account to create and publish job listings on our company’s Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter accounts. (We found our financial controller on Twitter.) We also embedded a widget on our website that automatically updates our Careers page when we add positions on Resumator. We can also post listings on free job boards, including Simply Hired.

For each job, we include a unique link that brings appli-cants to the posting on our company’s branded job board on the Resumator site, where they can fill out applications and submit resumés. Then, my partner, the HR director, and I can review everything online.

We use the Resumator’s Grow plan, which costs $199 a month and gives us a branded job board, the ability to post up to 10 open positions at a time, and access to reports and analytics. It’s been a great way to organise job applications, wherever we advertise them. —As told to J.J. McCorvey

MUST-HAVeS

My favourite tool for tracking job applications alicia navarro co-founder and ceo skimlinks, san francisco

B.

A. C.

BeFore you BuyIf you’re a

frequent traveller, consider using a wired

headset because it doesn’t require

charging.

Can you hear Me Now? Testing out headsets for tablets Tablet computers can be great for making Skype calls, watching movies, and listening to music, especially during business trips. But the right headset is key. We tested these three models, which also work with most smartphones, on an iPad 2. —J.B.

2 2 | INC. | JANUARY 2012

FRO

M L

eFT:

CO

UR

TeSY

SU

BJe

CT;

CO

UR

TeSY

CO

MPA

nY

(3)

SLIDe SHOWS

Plug in and present Creating a great PowerPoint presentation is no easy feat. These new plug-ins can make the process a lot simpler. —A.B.

LIVeLooPThis plug-in lets an unlimited number of people edit a slide show in PowerPoint at the same time. After installing it, click a button to upload a presentation to your company’s server or LiveLoop’s cloud server, then invite collabora-tors. You can see which people are editing slides and chat with them. Changes appear in real time. cost: Free for three saved presentations or $9 a month for unlimited presentations

VIsuaLBeenot a natural at slide-show design? VisualBee can help. After downloading the plug-in, create a PowerPoint presenta-tion, adding text, photos, graphs, tables, and graphics. Then click the VisualBee icon in your PowerPoint ribbon to browse through a gallery of 150 templates. When you select one, VisualBee will style your slide show accordingly, placing things in the corresponding layout and adding the right colours and fonts. cost: Free for a choice of 50 templates, then starting at $9.90 a month for more design options

JANUARY 2012 | INC. | 2 3

PO

TOS

BY

PH

OTO

S.C

OM

Products + Services The Goods

Tech wise, this year is going to be disruptive, aggressive and game-changing. Let’s see product categories that are set to change forever, if the new launches this year deliver all they promise.

Wafer thin notebooks with an eight-hour battery lifeSimply called the “Air”, the Apple MacBook Air became the benchmark for thin and light notebooks in 2008. Cut to 2012. You are now spoilt for options to get almost-feather weight notebooks (under 1.5 kg) that don’t compromise on business utility, performance or battery life. No wonder there’s a lot of buzz about the new models on the horizon. For example, Intel’s Ultrabook is a super-thin laptop with gorgeous high-definition screens, solid state memory and quad-core processors along with a promise of an eight-hour battery backup. Already, Acer, Asus and Lenovo have introduced their first-generation ultrabooks. This year the action gets more exciting with as many as 50 ultrabook models ready for launch. Save up around `50,000 if you want to get your hands on one.

smart phones with more firepower than laptopsIf you have been pondering over a quad-core processor upgrade for your laptop or desktop PC, you might just have spent too much time dreaming about those four cores in your computer. The third quarter of 2012 will announce the arrival of smartphones with quad-core processors. No, these aren’t prototypes or proof-of-concept models, we are talking about a lineup of smartphones hitting retail stores —boasting of quad-core processors, almost 2 GB of RAM and more than 100 GB of memory space. Think about it—is it possible that some of us will never use a laptop ever again?

Brace yourself for the Tablet Invasion2012 is likely to be the year of the tablet. Nokia is set to launch tablets running on Microsoft Windows 8, a defining moment for both Microsoft and Nokia as they take a shot at a market which has so far been dom-inated by Apple. Google’s Android platform did allow for a flurry of Android-based tab-lets in the last quarter of 2011 but most failed to make a serious impact because of the lackluster performance of Android’s honey-comb platform. Google has announced a brand-new platform for tablets called the ICS ( Ice Cream Sandwich). With ICS, expect more than a 100 new tablet options from a price range of `3,000–40,000 to choose from in the next few months. For India, it’s a particularly special tablet year. Aakash will hit the stores. The upgraded ver-sion of the Aakash tablet, the Ubislate 7 (dubbed Aakash 2), is already taking pre-orders online with a final price tag of ̀ 3,000. No conversation on tablets can be complete without mentioning Apple. Apple addicts, rest assured. The company is likely to launch its new version this year. There’s no way the king of tablets will relinquish its reign.

3d everywhere, everytime The sheer number of 3D movie releases in the last quarter of 2011 is proof that 3D has finally arrived. Whether you like it or not, 2012 will see “3D” flashing all over the place. Smartphones, tablets, televisions, even mainstream laptops will soon offer 3D screens. Gaming and movies are expected to be the biggest drivers for this segment. 3D content creation will enter the overdrive mode, offering exclusive titles to further push buyers into adopting the technology. Personally, I prefer to watch only a select few movies in 3D—ones that really lend them-selves to a genuinely enthralling experience. But I’m keeping a close watch on 3D. Finally, “glasses-free” 3D is expected to become a reality this year.

Tech 2012.0 Belt up for one hell of a ride!

tech wise soham raninga


FOUnDeR, POLICYBAzAAR.COM

BlackBerry I need to see my

mails and messages every minute.

yashish dahiyaThe 38-year-old founder of Policybazaar.com, an online comparison service for insurance policies, says he’s always on the go. His work requires him to fly to Mumbai three times a month and it takes him more than an hour to reach office every day from Noida to Gurgaon. With such a schedule, his wheels, a black Volkswagen Vento is his best friend. Never one to waste precious time, his Apple MacBook Air and BlackBerry phone keep him in sync with office, even while he’s travelling. And to cool off the previous day’s work steam, he goes for a long run every morning at 5. “If I don’t exercise within 48 hours, I become argumentative,” he says. —Ira Swasti

A nikon DSLR camera. I’ve got my eyes set on buying one for long but never end up doing it.

Volkswagen Vento It’s my faithful companion to work every day.

Things I CannotLive Without...

...and WhatI Covet

The Goods Beyond Business

asICs running shoes I’ve been wearing this brand

for the past 15 years. I always carry a pair in my car.

apple MacBook air This handy piece of wired metal acts as my mobile office, whether I am in the air or on the road.

Remove booklet along dotted line

12

Make apt Business Resolutions

Everything you need to know to run your business in today’s economy

: : : : : : : : : : : A monthly guide to policies, procedures And prActices

There can’t be a better time than a new year to infuse a burst of energy into your business. And to put greater resolve to key initiatives and efforts you know will make your company grow faster.

So, start the new year by making a few business resolutions. They provide you an opportunity to press the restart button and get off to a fresh start (in case the last year wasn’t so good). But making ambitious yet achievable business resolutions is an art that doesn’t come easy. Many wheels motor a business which is why resolutions that focus too closely on one aspect might not make sense. Your resolutions should come together as a whole. Also, resolutions that are too daunting will not deliver results. Many a business owner has cast aside the wish-list a few weeks into January simply because the resolutions seemed too hard to get.

Remember—the best business resolutions are realistic, positive, and inspire employees to reinvent themselves as well. Fret not if you haven’t made any yet. Read on to find out more about resolutions-that-stick. —Charu Bahri

Vol. 02 No. 12 | inc. guideBook

mAke Apt business resolutions : : : : : : : : : : : : :12

Cut out pipedreams: Business resolutions can be set in a jiffy but it takes countless plans and hard work to achieve these aims. Meeting monthly sales targets, for instance, involves breaking down big numbers into more realistic weekly and daily goals. So, resolve to make minute planning a habit—this will go a long way in converting your wish list into reality.

Planning more frequently is thus an essential business resolution in itself as well as a means to achieve more. Planning is about results, a method to take stock of what’s working and where to change course to achieve or adjust goals. Short-term plans help avoid expensive mistakes and ensure a business stays on track. Meeting them also keeps up motivation levels as well as the momentum.

Institute financial controls: “Financial business resolutions focus on getting a tighter grip on cash flows and better financial planning,” says Santhosh Mogili, lead consultant, OptIT, an IT infrastructure consultancy.

A better handle on cash flows would relieve business heads from worrying about meeting expenses. For this, don’t rely completely on finance staff. Make a conscious effort to comprehend financial statements and how to use these as a guide for future action. A better under-standing of finance provides a sound base on which to draw up budgets. “Coming to your own conclusions gives you leeway to compare your analysis with the CFO’s or accountants,” adds Mogili.

Also, resolve to listen more closely to sales heads and base annual sales targets on real inputs instead of wishful assump-tions. The more realistic the targets, the higher the chances of meeting them.

Learn to innovate: Companies that do not embrace newness find it hard to achieve desired business results. Regular brain-storming sessions help throw up ideas for new offerings and innovative strategies to create more brand awareness among consumers. So, while pushing sales of bestseller products, consider tweaking your array of offerings or changing the way you work. Media agency Namaste Publications’ new year resolution is to outsource more non-core activities—such as the gathering of news and online

delivery of content—so that it can focus on business development and expanding its delivery spectrum.

Use the new year as an excuse to adopt novel productivity ideas. Amit Karia, founder and CEO of Sears Phytochem and Shinton Chemicals, plans to introduce his production team to better time management skills to increase efficiencies. “Time management skills will help reduce the cost per unit and increase profitability.”

Innovation also implies reinventing yourself by learning new skills. Make time for this—take a good look at how you spend your time with the aim of focusing only on essential matters. Delegate wherever possible.

get out MoreNetwork more: Networking provides an opportunity to learn about others’ success strategies and mistakes. A

powerful tool for business growth, it also helps acquire and brainstorm new ideas. Contacts serve as references as well as open doors to new clients and win-win partnerships. Thus, they help revitalise your business.

Follow a few do’s and don’ts to get the most out of networking. Mogili suggests, “Don’t network for immediate benefits. See it as a long-term investment. Also, don’t oversell yourself. If you promise someone the moon and fail to deliver when you are asked to keep up the

promise, you could loose that contact (and associated connections) forever. Make promises after consulting the delivery team. Lastly, accept responsibility to keep alive connections. I set aside a few hours every week to network.”

Networking is not only for business heads. Encourage the middle ranks to work on widening their circle of contacts. Explain that when the art of networking is practiced well, it can both act as a step-ping stone for their careers, and improve business prospects.

Gain visibility: “Make more money” is a popular business resolution. This hinges on higher sales from new clients as well as from the existing customer base. “Align marketing and sales goals to achieve this aim,” advises Vipin Balakrishnan, MD, Namaste Publication.

Better marketing techniques create more visibility for a business. “Carry forward effective strategies from the last year. Add innovative new methods to strengthen your efforts,” suggests Sneha Chandrashekar, CEO, Black and White Tech Writing Solutions.

Use the new year as an excuse to adopt novel productivity ideas.

look Within

inc. guideBook | Vol. 02 No. 12

Namaste Publications, for instance, plans to use media rela-tions, social media, award nomina-tions, and partnerships to become more visible next year. In particular, social media can help build a follow-ing. “You can also never communi-cate enough with prospective clients,” adds Balakrishnan.

Chase recurring business: Work on increasing recurring revenues from repeat order clients who are invaluable to long-term financial well-being. For this, Chandrashekar proposes analysing your audience to define clear strategies to draw clients back. For instance, calculations might show that offering a 10 per

cent discount and advertising on social media would increase sales by 20 per cent. Investing in strategy advertising can widen your reach and increase revenue capture.

Mogili suggests introducing met-rics to track the satisfaction levels of existing customers on an ongoing basis. Then, offer sales staff incentives based on customer feedback. Use this information to also formulate plans to eliminate existing pain points and deliver more value.

create strategies Business resolutions must be realistic and match the situation of an organi-sation in the new year. As an example, Chandrashekar points out that start-

ups aged less than two years old should resolve to work on building powerful strategies to strengthen core business and meet sales targets. According to Balakrishnan, the fifth year of a busi-ness is the right time to consolidate. So, he has identified Namaste Publica-tions’ best products to focus on, over the course of the next year, its fifth.

Business resolutions should also focus on more than just business. Karia plans to spend more time understanding his employees’ challenges. “I can’t ignore the people who help turn our aims into real-ity. If you profit more, sharing the wealth will help ensure future success.” It isn’t enough to simply list out business resolu-tions. Creating a strategy (see box) to achieve these is a crucial step.

notes:

mAke Apt business resolutions: : : : : : : : : : : : :

ResourcesPractice time management: Use www.rescuetime.com for automated time tracking and management

Get ideas: These are some actual business resolutions of business owners, http://under-30ceo.com/what-are-your-2010-business-resolutions/

Read more: Business resolu-tions for 2012, http://de.skill-sportal.co.za/.../1088780-Resolve-to-work-harder-and-smarter-in-2012

12Resolutions foR 2012I will be more considerate. I will push myself out of my comfort zone.I will proactively align business meth-ods to prevailing market conditions.I will accept responsibility for mak-ing success strategies within the business environment I operate in.I will not work overtime unless it is absolutely needed. I will be more productive when I am in office.I will be more aggressive in pursuing new client leads.

It’s easier to measure success against resolutions that quantify aims.

I will invest one per cent of my annual income in improving my skills.I will answer all client e-mails within 24 hours.I will start a business blog/social media page and post to it at least twice a week.I will attend at least one networking event every fortnight.I will make sure the business website gets updated every month.

conveRt Business Resolutions into Reality, step-By-step

Follow these steps to see your business resolutions become a reality:

Make plans: Making resolutions with no plans to backup the goals is mere wishful thinking. Resolutions must be translated into clear

actionable steps soon after you list out your aims. Since enthusiasm surrounding the new year usually fades away after the first week or two of January, harness your motivation by formulating appropriate plans during the narrow window of opportunity.

think long-term: Think of new year business resolutions as a starting point towards a healthier business. Plans must be revisited from

time to time to steer action in the right direction. Also, stay flexible. Accept that your plan and sometimes, even your goal will change when unexpected situations arise. Accept as well that achieving your goal is but an incremental success that should lead to bigger and better aims.

inc. guideBook | Vol. 02 No. 12

Gu

tter

Cr

edit

her

e


Distance is no longer a barrierNow you can look them in the eye from half way around the world

visit: www.polycom.co.in/telepresence

Telepresense

Wouldn’t your businessbenefit from more face to face

communication?

New Delhi (Head Office)4th Floor, GHCL Building, B-38, Sector-1, Noida - 201 301Tel: 91 . 120 . 309 1600 | www.polycom.co.in

Local Sales Offices: Banglore, Kolkata and Mumbai

2 6 | INC. | january 2012

By ShreyaSI SINghphotograph By SubhojIt Paul

IntrepidInnovator

the

acme tele Power’s business saga is unique. unlike most start-ups, it grew like lightning thanks to a slew of blockbuster product innovations. then it hit a wall—growth and revenues slowed dramatically. Can Manoj Kumar upadhyay put the mojo back into the company?

january 2012 | INC. | 2 7

the INtrePId INNovator


altered the operational costs for telecom companies. It helped players like Bharti airtel cut fuel bills for gensets, and contributed significantly in helping them execute their grand infrastructure expansion plans. It also ensured that upadhyay’s company, acme tele power, grew over 6,500 times in a span of six years, swelling from a ̀ 30-lakh turnover in 2003 to roughly ̀ 2,000 crore in 2009. With telecom, upadhyay defined what smart thinking and being in the right place at the right time could do for a company. today, that exponential growth is a tough legacy to live up to. the market has completely changed—there’s little, if any new demand for telecom infrastructure in India. over the last three years, upadhyay has diversified his business. he knows it’s the only way to grow even half as fast as he’s been used to. today, acme tele power is dabbling in solar energy, rural electrification and energy management to come up with radically new technology solutions. But is upadhyay anywhere close to his “next-big-thing”?

Manoj Kumar upadhyay befriended outlandish ideas as a child. When he was just seven, he tried his hand at inventing a new family of medicines—combining allopa-thy and homeopathy. “I used to wonder why we couldn’t mix the two, and make a medicine which had the benefits of both,” he recalls. So he put his ingenious ideas to test. Alas, the formulation was a disaster. But young Upadhyay had spent his month’s pocket money on it. So, to cut his losses, he tried to sell the concoction to cattle farmers in Basti, his hometown, pitching to them the benefits of “refined” human medicine. Unfortunately, the sales efforts came to a naught. Yet, the setback did nothing to dampen Updadhyay’s curiosity. At 12, he dismantled a bicycle because he believed the pull mechanism wasn’t perfect. He tried, but couldn’t reinvent a better system. Instead, he was left with a heap of parts he couldn’t put back together.

Most of his family and friends thought he was crazy, says 41-year-old Upadhyay. But they are easily forgiven now. After all, nobody could have forecast how far this precociousness would take Upadhyay. Today, as founder, chairman and MD of Acme Telepower, he has to his credit several patents in energy management and passive telecom infrastructure. In less than eight years since he founded the company, its products have been installed at more than 1,50,000 telecom sites across India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh,

Manoj Kumar upadhyay blazed on to the business scene in 2003 with a Power Interface unit (PIu). this was an innovative energy management system for cell towers that dramatically



and a clutch of African nations. Acme is also a keenly-watched solar power player in India with 30 MW either commissioned or in the works. Its green energy solutions help generate carbon emission savings of nearly 2.2 million tonnes a year.

the blockbuster Innovation In 2003, telecom in India was beginning to enter its turbo charged phase. The government was allotting what in industry parlance is called “circles”—essentially licences for particular geographic regions to telecom companies. Bharti Airtel was a key player at the time. It had huge growth plans but was beset by anxieties on how it would ramp up its net-work of cell sites. Most of the infrastructure was imported from European manufacturers. But this equipment wasn’t able to withstand Indian conditions like erratic power sup-ply and near-bipolar fluctuations. “Power generator sets in Bharti’s cell towers in Delhi were fraught with problems. When Delhi was like this, there were huge worries about what the situation would be in other places,” remembers Upadhyay, who Bharti Airtel had brought on as a consultant to figure out what to do about the problem.

Upadhyay had just sold his entire stake in his first busi-ness venture, a lightning protection systems company, to his co-founder for `20 lakh. Bharti Airtel thought his experience with lightning and power protection systems could help them. Upad-

hyay put together a project report, and they approached GE for a solution. “What they suggested was not doable, or implementable. It’s then that I started thinking—can I do this? The customer is in trouble. Can I create something that has never been made before?”

reminisces Upadhyay. It took him 17 days, 12 of

which were spent without a wink of sleep, as he tried to come up with his innovation—the Power Interface Unit, a power manage-ment system that minimised die-sel usage and maximised utilisations of mains power. Bharti lapped up the product because it upped cell tower uptime from an 80 to 90 per cent to close to 97 per cent. It also resulted in huge energy savings. “We did nearly 80 per cent of Bharti Air-tel’s total roll-out from 2003-2009,” says Upadhyay. How important a role that was is evi-

dent from Bharti Airtel’s growth trajectory in those days. “We grew from 12,000 sites in 2005 to 1,50,000 in just six years,” adds S. Asokan, executive director, supply chain, Bharti Airtel.

It took him 17 days, 12 of which were spent without a wink of sleep as he tried to come up with his innovation.

a range of Solutions (from top left) green Shelter, their pre-fabricated units for cell sites; solar thermal plant in Bikaner, rajasthan; photovoltaic solar panels at the plant in gujarat

ph

oto

Co

ur

tesy

Co

mpa

ny



2011Commissions 2.5 MW solar thermal power station in Bikaner, rajasthan. It’s the first plant of its kind in asia.

Important milestones in acme’s journey

2003acme

telepower founded

2003power Interface unit launched, which over the next six years would power nearly 80 per cent of all Bharti airtel installations

2004Launched product

called green Shelter, an energy-

saving system, which would eventually be

installed in 60,000-70,000 sites

2007Filed draft red herring prospectus

2008Ipo plans

abandoned because of

turbulent market conditions

2010 Signs module

supply agreement with First Solar

for pV solar power projects

Asokan credits Acme for quickly identifying a “sweet spot”. “They saw the opportunity and used it. Basically, they combined many power conditioning equipments available back then to create the PIU,” elaborates Asokan. “I’m very good at putting things together to create new things. It’s not about being the smartest engineer. To create, you need to know what will make a useful product,” adds Upadhyay.

The PIU, which was later patented, became a “household name”, says Upadhyay. It also brought him right to the centre of the kind of business he wanted to run—massive and scalable. “I had a huge vision. I’d left Adhunik Power Systems, my lightning company, because I knew it couldn’t scale up to `2,000 crore. That was my filter for a business-worth-doing,” Upadhyay says.

Incredibly, he actually got there. Acme started with `20 lakh as seed capital, and by 2009, it was a `2,000-company. The early suc-cesses also helped Upadhyay secure a place in history. “I’ve played a critical role in the telecom revolution,” he says with pride. “By bringing down fuel costs, we brought down operational costs. We all know the benefits of the telecom revolution in India. It feels great that we’ve played a role in this, and left a social impact by the amount of diesel we helped cut down,” says Upadhyay.

the twist Acme followed up the PIU with a range of successful products such as the Green Shelter (a pre-fabricated, integrated energy manage-ment solution which houses the electronics and energy-efficient components at telecom sites), Phase Change Material (a solution for storing thermal energy in off-peak hours that reduces fuel con-sumption by more than 6,500 litres per annum per site) and Free Cooling Units (reduces AC running hours on telecom sites). “They didn’t stop at their first product. Every year, they kept widening the gap between them and their nearest competitor,” adds Bharti Air-tel’s Asokan. Even now, roughly 70 per cent of all Bharti Airtel cell sites use one, or more of these products.

Imitation is the best form of flattery, it’s often said. Acme got heaps of compliments in the guise of the many patent wars they had to fight as other telecom vendors copied their products. Within its first five years, Acme had become a comprehensive wireless telecom energy management company. Thanks to Upadhyay’s itch to con-stantly experiment, they had also begun to dabble in alternative energy solutions like solar power. In November 2007, the company filed a red herring prospectus to go public. CRISIL gave Acme’s keenly-anticipated IPO a 5/5 rating. Acme wanted to raise `1,000 crore from the market to invest in bolstering their manufacturing and research capacity. But that wasn’t going to be. With the global economic collapse in early 2008, Upadhyay had to abandon these plans. This unplanned turn of events was symbolic of the twists the company would have to begin negotiating.

Bharti Airtel’s Asokan says Upadhyay always seemed to him to be more of a technology leader than a driven businessman. There may be a kernel of truth in that. Surely a wiser entrepreneur, especially one who is so technologically sharp, wouldn’t hoard all his eggs in one basket. In Acme’s case, this spelt double trouble. Not only did all the

2009 Makes $30-million equity investment in eSolar, to use its tech-nology to build solar power plants in India over the next 10 years


january 2012 | INC. | 31

products cater to telecom, a lion’s share of the business was conducted with one client—Bharti Airtel. Once the frenzy of cell tower construc-tion was over, Acme’s main business was in trouble.

An R&D junkie by nature, it isn’t that Upadhyay wasn’t trying to come up with industry-transforming innovations even when things were going like a song with telecom. But the wastewater treatment plant he conceptualised that could recycle a household’s waste water, and produce clean, usable water, ran into choppy cur-rents. After spending `30-40 crore on research, Acme wrapped up these plans. “To install these, every house would need two plumb-ing lines. Nobody was going to break their house to get that done,” explains Upadhyay.

Similarly, in 2007, Acme worked on a thermal cooling technol-ogy which could store and transport vegetables, ensuring they wouldn’t perish before reaching consumers. The lack of cold chain and refrigeration facility is responsible for a lot of produce going waste in India, says Upadhyay. So, they developed hawker carts that could keep the vegetables cool, and farmed a new company called Cold Chain. Although they managed to transport 210 tonnes of vegetables from many states, the company was eventu-ally closed down. “We were too ahead in technology and time with this one. Also, we couldn’t manage the daily give and take of cash. We’d have to become an operational company from a technology company to do this,” explains Upadhyay. Again, they lost nearly

a backstory: Fit for Bollywood With the benefit of hindsight, Manoj Kumar upadhyay’s life makes perfect sense. pieces of a larger puzzle were strewn across his early years—mirroring the pattern his life now follows. they also lend themselves to a dra-matic achiever story.

Son of a jute factory worker, he spent his early years in Kolkata. his family had to move to their hometown in Basti, uttar pradesh, after the CpM movement gained strength in West Bengal in the late 70s, leading to the closure of all industrial units. upadhyay stood apart from his family. as others aspired to become bankers, teachers and engineers, upadhyay remembers wanting to be a businessman ever since he was eight years old.

“nobody in my entire family was in business. I always wanted to do something different.” that contrarian streak prompted him to give up admission in an engineering college, and join a technical poly-technic in Shahajahanpur, uttar pradesh. “Somebody had told me that in a polytechnic, you actually did something with your own hands. It wasn’t about getting theoretical knowledge. I wanted to be both—a scientist and a labourer.” at this institute, upadhyay quickly acquired a gravitas beyond his position. he began taking classes to

fill in for teachers that never showed up. although he was studying electron-ics engineering, he took classes in mechanical and production engineering as well. “It was great learning. I had to do lots of research to be able to teach.” through the three years there, upadhyay pushed himself hard. For the examinations, students were asked to answer five out of the 10 questions on paper. “I used to challenge myself—could I answer all 10?” recalls upadhyay. he also led some “bizarre” research projects, none of which saw the light of day

(see box on next page). yet, the overreaching wasn’t self-destructive. upadhyay created academic history in the institute by becoming the state topper. “nobody has managed to match those marks till today,” he says. with pride.

although his big-business dreams remained constant, upadhyay took up a job in a german engineering firm after getting his polytech-nic diploma. he moved to germany and within two years, was made head of a department despite being “totally wild”, he says. “I was full of ideas. I’d keep giving feedback, asking questions, sometimes not realising I could be fired because of the suggestions I was giving.” the german firm soon moved him to India to lead the indigenisation of their machines for the market here. he recounts a fun anecdote from those days. “When I moved back to India, I told them I’ll leave the company exactly three years later to start my own company. I gave them a three-year notice period. they probably didn’t take me seriously because they were all shocked the day I left,” laughs upad-hyay. and, thus began his entrepreneurial journey. 1999, first with adhunik power Systems, and then acme tele pwower in 2003.

“I always wanted to do something different. I wanted to be both—a scientist and a labourer. ” — Manoj Kumar upadhyay



`60 crore. Upadhyay philosophises, “No success comes without paying a price, especially when you try to work on disruptive tech-nologies.” He continues, “For one thing to succeed, you have to try 20 other things. From the outside, people can only see the suc-cesses. They don’t know how many products we worked on that could never materialise. I was lucky that my first, second and third products were super successful. I had to work much harder for my fourth, and thereafter.” the FutureNot surprisingly, Upadhyay is an impatient man today, as he waits for another innovation from his stable to storm the market. S.S. Kohli, vice president of R&D at Acme uses a sports analogy to describe the performance pressure. “It’s like asking Sachin Ten-dulkar’s son to give us as many centuries,” he says jokingly.

“It isn’t that we are not growing. We’re still growing 50 per cent year on year. But nobody wants to see a dip. Fifty per cent isn’t great compared to the triple digits we were used to,” confesses Sandeep Sethi, Acme’s CEO. Today, the company has a new set of priority

efficiencies in generation, utilisation and monitoring. In their next birth, companies like Acme can cater to the very real need to manage these three fronts.” He cuts out the task for Acme, though. “What would make us happy is if they do this with speed. They have to come up with superior products quickly, and make sure they’re easily adaptable.”

Upadhyay plays a key role in the company’s new R&D initiatives. It’s part of his non-negotiable morning routine, in fact. “When I come into office, the first thing I do is spend an hour with the R&D team. That gives me the energy to work throughout the day.” He wor-ries that because he “doesn’t actu-ally work with his own hands” on the technology, things don’t get executed as well. “I need a model where the wheels run faster like they used to. Our product pipeline must be robust.”

Kohli, who heads the R&D function, deconstructs the morn-ing meetings. “We’re slowly learn-ing the culture of how he works. He fires away with a lot of ideas. We’re trying to build a culture of technol-ogy. Manoj wants to make R&D a process—how do we as a company make sure we think like that?”

upadhyay knows coming up with bril-liant solutions is a factor of constantly trying, and not succeeding. Failure isn’t a word that is part of his vocabu-lary, he asserts. over the last few decades, first as a student, and later as a professional and entrepreneur, upadhyay has always allowed his imagination to fly. “you have to keep trying. If you try 20 things, one will work.” here are some of his efforts that didn’t work out—some didn’t get out of the science lab at all, others cost him several crore rupees.

hydroplant, Shahjahanpur Polytechnic, 1991:

a bunch of us thought we could create a hydroplant that would collect the rain between the earth and the sky. the channelled water would then run the turbine. We identified the Khasi garo jayantia mountain range in Meghalaya for the project because it’s large and it gets a lot of rain. this idea travelled up the government departments. IIt roorkee and IIt Kanpur were brought in to see what they thought of this “bizarre” idea. Eventually, it was rejected because if the channel broke, all of assam and

Meghalaya would get washed out. the risk was bigger than the idea.

Foldable televisions, Shahjahanpur Polytechnic, 1991:

I always wondered if there could be a foldable television—could one fold the tV like a newspaper? this was before LCD screens became popular.

Wastewater treatment, acme telepower, 2008:

Because so many houses in India are not connected to sewage, I thought every house should have their own wastewater treatment plant. We developed through research a wash-ing machine-like contraption that could be fitted in every house. It would treat all the waste water and give back fresh water. We spent `30-40 crore on this research. But, to install this machine, every house would need two different plumbing lines which most houses didn’t have. and nobody would break their houses to rework the plumbing. So we wound the idea up although we still manufacture this for use in defence.

Failed Innovations: Great ideas, alright. But they didn’t go anywhere.

areas—coming up with innovative energy management solutions for the telecom sector, targeting Africa as a big export market for their products (compared to India’s 55 per cent, the continent has a tele density of just 33 per cent, says Sethi), and becoming a leading player in solar power, and other alternative energy areas.

Going back to the drawing board has been great, adds Sandeep Kanwar, the company’s chief operating officer. “We have matured a lot in the last four years,” he says. “We’ve been able to take stock and zero in on long-haul, sustainable opportunities. The corner-stone of this evolution has been diversification,” he adds.

Each of the opportunities they have laid out certainly has poten-tial. “We see Africa as being seven years behind India in terms of telecom maturity. In three years, we’ve grown our business there from $16 million to $80 million a year,” adds Sethi. With about 4,00,000 existing telecom sites, and energy costs amounting to 60 per cent of the operating costs of a telecom operator, Sethi adds that energy management, operations and maintenance is about a `15,000-crore market, of which they currently have less than five per cent. Bharti Airtel’s Asokan agrees that there’s definite promise. “There can be



Even as Acme tries to do all of that, you get the feeling that it’s solar power which gets Upadhyay most excited these days. In April 2011, Acme commissioned a 2.5 MW plant—which is connected to the grid—in Bikaner, Rajasthan. In Gujarat, their 15 MW plant is ready and is likely to be connected to the grid within a month. On the back of the Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission—which has mandated 20,000 MW of solar power in India by 2022, pledg-ing $19-billion government funding—the solar power sector is abuzz with new plants and activity. A host of companies have entered the fray to capitalise on the policy push by state govern-ments like Rajasthan, Gujarat and Punjab.

Still, Anindya Das, industry manager, energy & power systems practice for South Asia, Middle East and North Africa, Frost & Sullivan, believes Acme already stands out from the pack. Their Bikaner plant, which works on solar thermal power plant, is the first of its kind in Asia, and only the fourth in the world. “Con-centrated solar power (CSP) plants become viable if they’re larger than 15 MW. The technology is tough to adapt to smaller projects. Acme has been brave to do that,” says Das. Most solar projects in India work with photovoltaic (PV) modules—it’s an established technology, and therefore simpler to execute, adds Das. “Every-body is on to PV including large companies like Reliance and Tata. It’s too early to say how successful Acme will be, but with

Steve jobsI’ve always looked up to Steve

jobs as far as technology is concerned. there are many people smarter than him in

Caltech or Stanford. But they remain core engineering or numbers people, they can’t understand how technology

can be used.

upadhyay does seem incredibly self-sufficient, admitting frankly that role models change. “Sometimes, you admire people with great awe at one stage. But it might not always carry on.” But he does credit these four superstar entrepreneurs for valuable lessons he always keeps in mind—in business and life.

N. r. Narayana Murthyhe showed everybody how to make an Indian company thrive on transparency and good corporate governance practices.

dhirubhai ambani I admire the entire company’s ability to manage huge projects. now that we are working on solar, I understand the importance of that skill.

solar thermal, they’ve again shown their intention to be niche, pioneering players.”

Kanwar affirms these ambitions. “We want to be in the top three solar players wherever there’s any opportunity. We were the first movers in solar. When we started talking solar, at the end of 2008, the solar mission wasn’t formed. But solar at a MW-scale doesn’t happen overtime.” In March 2009, they signed an exclusive licens-ing agreement with eSolar, a leading US-based solar producer, to build 1,000 MW of solar thermal power plants over the next 10 years. In fact, Acme made a $30-million equity investment in eSo-lar, a rare move by an Indian player, says Frost & Sullivan’s Das. “They haven’t just become eSolar’s distributors. It’s a strategic initia-tive—to be part of the R&D itself.”

COO Kanwar, who has been with the organisation through the last four years, says smart thinking like this, shows how much dis-tance Upadhyay has covered as an entrepreneur. “When he began, this was a telecom company. The approach was one-size-fits-all even for the other business verticals that came up. Today, he looks at each business differently.”

With solar power, though, project financing and access to debt capital is likely to be a pain point. Right now, Upadhya says, Acme is largely debt free. Can the warmth of solar power help the com-pany reclaim its scorching past?

his entrepreneurial heroes

Sunil bharti Mittal

I’ve seen him work up, close and

personal. I really admire the way he built his team. he was totally hands

on, always clued in.

HowEvernote

is rejecting industry

trends, getting

customers to pay for

something that’s free,

and reinventing the way we remember

By DavID h. FreeDmaN

Illustration by PC AnooP

EvernoteCompANY of

thE YEAR

Say hello to your

New BraIN

Phil libin remembers the moment he left childhood behind. It was nearly four years ago, when the funding for his internet start-up fell through. He was 35.

ComPaNy oF the year

It had all been so much fun until then. But at 3am, out of cash and having waited in vain for a venture capitalist or angel or CEO or anyone at all to return his increasingly desperate calls, Libin knew that he would have to pull the plug on Evernote, a software application that helps people remember things. “I realised I was going to have to wake up tomorrow and lay off everyone in the company,” he says.

Exhausted and demoralised, he was reaching for the light switch when his e-mail dinged. A momentary blast of hope—but no, just a message from a fan, something he had been getting more and more of lately. This one was from some guy in Sweden, a fel-low software entrepreneur, and it was the usual “Evernote has changed my life” sort of thing. Libin almost missed the last line: “If you ever need any money let me know.”

Feeling more awake, Libin typed back: “It just so happens we could use some cash. How much did you have in mind?”

The answer came right back: “Would half a million dollars be enough?”

Today, the company is swimming in tens of millions of dollars in cash from both VCs and profits. Evernote is buying companies, tripling in size each year, and drawing 40,000 new users a day. If you live in Silicon Valley or Tokyo, where Evernote has reached cult sta-tus, none of this probably surprises you. Otherwise, you must be wondering: What the hell is Evernote?

Libin has different ways of explaining it: It’s your brain offloaded to a server. It’s Google for the web of your life. It’s a spotlight on the dark matter of your universe. It’s a tool for converting your smartphone from a time killer to a time saver.

OK, so Evernote is a little hard to explain—you have to get to know it to appre-ciate how subversively effective it is. You could say pretty much the same about Libin, as well as about the team of fellow manag-ers—many of whom have stuck together through multiple start-ups—and the com-pany they have built around memory. It’s a company whose employees romp in spacious offices ringed with conference rooms named after video games. (So much for adulthood.) Whose customers are so dedicated that many eventually choose to pay for the service, even though they can use it for free. That’s starting to change the way children learn in schools. And that which has set its sights on affecting the lives of a billion people—a goal that’s look-ing less fanciful every day.

Such lofty ambitions might have seemed absurd when Libin’s family moved to the Bronx, New York, from the Soviet Union in 1979. Libin was eight years old. Fourteen

years later, he had managed to effect a trifecta of ancestral shame when he left Boston University one course short of his bachelor’s degree, in a fit of pique over a questionable charge on a school bill. “I was the first one in my family for 200 years who had no degree, didn’t play an instrument, and wasn’t a chessmaster,” says Libin, who, whatever his limitations, has raised acerbic self-effacement to an art form.

Degree, schmegree—Libin could code. He had been a com-puter whiz at New York’s prestigious Bronx High School of Sci-ence and had been making good money at it on the side since age 16. After dropping out of college, Libin was snatched up by ATG, a company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with a corps of brilliant coders who were helping invent much of what would become standard e-commerce technology. “It was the first time I had ever felt average,” says Libin. After three years, in 1997, he left ATG along with a few of his fellow laid-back but hard-hacking pals and launched Engine 5, a company in Boston, developing e-com-merce software. “I was the least productive programmer, so I got stuck with the management job,” Libin says. Knowing nothing about raising money, the group didn’t bother and simply started programming. In 2000, it sold the company for $26 million.

The following year, Libin began pulling together the core Engine 5 team to launch another company. Joining up with MIT computer scientist Silvio Micali, Libin aimed the venture, called


CoreStreet, at producing high-tech security systems for government agencies and large financial institutions. But having cut his teeth on the Mach-speed, make-it-up-as-you-go world of the web, Libin found the byzantine, multiyear cycles of government procurement maddeningly inefficient and—even worse—boring. In 2006, he left the company, which was sold three years later for $20 million. Though the experience wasn’t an entirely satisfying one, it had convinced Libin that his team and he were the perfect solution in search of the right problem. Micali, who returned to academia after CoreStreet, thought the same. “It’s an incredibly talented group, creative and fun to work with,” he says. “And you have to love Phil. He’s not only brilliantly original in his thinking; he can find humour in anything. You laugh all the time around him.”

Libin immediately started casting about for inspira-tion for a third company. Given his experience with his first two ventures, Libin knew two things: He didn’t want to be bored, and he didn’t want to merely make money. “A billion dollars isn’t cool,” says Libin, contra-

dicting the speech Sean Parker supposedly delivered to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. “What’s cool is impacting a billion people. Whatever I ended up doing, I wanted people to get excited about it. I wanted long lines forming for it.”

An idea had been brewing for some time in the back of his mind: How do we remember something, like the name of a res-taurant? It’s largely through the associations we have with it in our heads. The trigger might be thinking about whom you were with when you heard about it, where you were, what else you were doing at the time, or a related word or image. From these bits and pieces, we can often dredge up a forgotten but important thought.

the loyal leaDer phil Libin, whose second company,

CoreStreet, made high-tech security systems for the government, decided to

ditch the slow-moving world of contracting. But he held on to his team.

they Go way BaCk

Many of Evernote’s managers workedwith Phil Libin at his previous companies, Engine 5 and CoreStreet.


Ph

oto

co

ur

tesy

su

bje

ct

ComPaNy oF the year

But not always. Our brains have limited memory capacity, which is why no matter what you do, you still forget most things you come across. And that’s a growing problem in an age in which information in all forms comes flying at us at ever-faster rates and you’re not sure which of it will prove useful. Plus, aging baby boomers are finding themselves with less and less memory to work with. “No one is happy with their meat brain,” says Libin. “It’s overloaded by the time we’re in high school. It’s as universal a problem as you can get.”

We try to compensate by storing data on our laptop computers and tablets and smartphones. But that works only if we trouble ourselves to enter the information in the right place in the right file in the right form, and even then it can be hard to track down where that crucial nugget of information is hiding. Is the name of that restaurant on my laptop or my phone? I could ask that guy from the conference who told me about it, but what did I do with his e-mail address?

Libin began to think about what a better electronic memory would be like. You could put in information in any form, be it a typed document, a handwritten note, a photo, a webpage, a spoken conversation. And you could instantly get the information into any of your devices on the fly without worrying about how to organise it. “When people want to capture a thought, they don’t want to stop what they’re doing,” he says.

More important, you would be able to find whatever it is whenever you need it, as effortlessly and intuitively as we now dig up stuff via Google. “Google is great, but it only knows about public information,” says Libin. “We needed something that could handle your information.” It would be as if Google were indexing your life on an ongoing basis and putting it all at your fingertips. What’s more, you wouldn’t need to remem-ber much about what exactly you were looking for. As with your brain, what you would need is only a vague clue, like a person, a place, a word, a time.

How great would that be for productivity? Especially if it worked well on smartphones, which more of us are pulling out more often throughout the day. As we do an increasing amount of how everNote workS

Here are some of the items Phil Libin added to his account in October. Evernote can store audio memos, webpages, e-mails, documents, and photos. Libin uses it to keep a log of meetings, company metrics, and online articles. He even takes photos of his meals when he travels, so he can remember what he ate.

weB ClIPPINGS By downloading a browser add-on, you can save webpages—like this snippet about a camera that caught Libin’s eye—with a single click. Evernote archives text and images.

SearChaBle SCrIBBleS Evernote reads and catalogues visible text in photos, including handwritten notes (provided you have decent penmanship). If you upload a photo of a white-board to Evernote, you can find the file again later by doing a search for one of the words on the board.

DIGItal BreaD CrumBS You can add labels and tags to make items easier to find in a search. Evernote automatically tracks when the note was created and where you were when you created it. You can also organise items into notebooks.

It’S everywhere Evernote has apps for pC, mac, ipad (seen here), and nearly every kind of smartphone. there’s also a Web-based application. You can even store information by forwarding e-mails to Evernote.


co

ur

tesy

eve

rn

ote

(2)

our work outside of the office, realised Libin, there was a growing opportunity to make the bits of free time away from our comput-ers count. But so far, says Libin, smartphone apps have been more time killers than productivity tools. “They’ve been great for wasting time on Facebook and Zynga when you have a couple of minutes,” he says. “I wanted to make smartphones great for getting work done in those minutes.” And, finally, Libin thought it was crucial that this memory tool be fun to use. “In the past five years, there’s been a huge emphasis in giving us great tools for entertaining diversions,” he says. “But no one has applied the same great user experience that we see on something like Facebook to productivity tools. Microsoft Office isn’t fun to use.”

Put it all together, and you would get what Libin calls “a ubiqui-tous platform for lifetime productivity.” Now all he had to do was build it and get a billion people to use it.

In 2006, libin pulled the crew together again with the intention of starting a company called Ribbon, as in, tied around your fin-ger. (As a big fan of Japan, Libin notes, it was a nice bonus for him that the name was similar to how people pronounce his name there.) But shortly after throwing himself into researching electronic memory aids, he discovered there was a tiny, two-year-old stealth start-up in Silicon Valley called Evernote. It was creating tools for extracting text from photos so that you could

take pictures of notes and make them searchable. “I had thought of that,” says Libin, “but these guys were already pretty far along with the technology.”

In fact, this Evernote team had previously developed some of the key software for Apple’s visionary but ill-fated Newton personal information manager, a sort of primitive iPad that came out in the late 1980s. It was primarily a Russian crew of talented coders, not unlike Libin’s own team, and it was led by a brilliant techie named Stepan Pachikov. Libin flew out to meet Pachikov, liked what he heard, and suggested they merge the teams rather than compete. Libin became CEO of the company, which retained the name Ever-note, while Pachikov gradually shifted his focus to other projects.

Libin and his team moved from Boston to Silicon Valley, where Libin found the culture vastly more welcoming of his off-beat, high-tech entrepreneurial style than Boston had ever been. After the teams merged, the new company was left with enough money for a year or so. That would be long enough to get a prod-uct up and running, if everyone was focused. To that end, Libin cut loose most of the projects Pachikov’s team had been working on to concentrate on the key characteristics of his revolutionary memory aid: free-form capture of any type of information, sim-ple associative retrieval, super-smartphone-friendly, fun to use.

In 2008, the company launched a “private beta” version of the soft-ware intended mostly for Silicon Valley insiders. The night before, at

loic le meurFounder of Seesmic, a San Francisco–based maker of social-media- management software

how I use it to save lunch receipts (which I share with my accountant), business cards, meeting notes, and memos I speak into my iphone

Favourite trick When I’m handed a business card, I immediately take a photo of it with my phone to put it in Evernote. then, just for fun, I hand the card back, unless it would be impolite.

how it has come in handyBoth my mobile phones are perfectly synchronised with all my latest information through Evernote. I have no paper in my life at all now.

adelle CharlesCo-founder of Tinder, a San Francisco–based company that makes online publishing tools. She also co-founded Carbon Ads, an online advertising network.

how I use it to keep track of honeymoon ideas, recipes, notes, e-mails, and shopping lists

Favourite trick I treat Evernote as my other e-mail inbox. Everything that doesn’t require an immediate response goes there, so I can follow up later and keep my inbox clean.

how it has come in handy I needed to match a paint colour in my home, so I searched Evernote and found a picture I had taken of the paint can.

Guy kawasakiAuthor and co-founder of Alltop, an online news aggregator based in Palo Alto, California

how I use it to keep track of passwords, travel itineraries, receipts, contracts, business cards, and webpage snippets for book research

Favourite trick my fujitsu ScanSnap S1500 scanner automatically sends everything straight to Evernote.

how it has come in handySeveral months ago, I flew to Los Angeles to do a com-mercial. In order to get reim-bursed, I had to provide a copy of the receipt. But I bought the ticket at the airport, and the paper receipt was long gone. thankfully, I had scanned it into Evernote.

aN aFFaIr to

rememBer

Many Evernote

users, especially

those in the tech

industry, have

become fanatics. Here are three of

them.


co

ur

tesy

su

bje

ct

(3)

3am—apparently the time at which he produces his key insights—Libin realised that the team had forgotten to put together any sort of tutorial. So Libin threw together and nar-rated a quick demo and put it on YouTube. “I’ve gotten death threats over it,” he says. “I’ve been said to have the most annoying voice ever heard anywhere in the world.” That video would eventually get more than a million hits.

Word started to get around pockets of Silicon Valley about this cool new app that helped you remember stuff. It worked more or less as Libin had envisioned. Most types of information can be added to Evernote in a few seconds, from any computer or smartphone. You

ing, and one add-on tool even allows for searching photos by colour—if all you remember about a meeting was that the other fellow was wearing an orange sweater, you will be able to dig it up. “Evernote finds the way your mind works and gives you more and more hooks into your memories,” says Andrew Sinkov, a childhood friend of Libin’s who worked at CoreStreet and now heads up Evernote’s marketing.

No wonder the Silicon Valley crowd loves it—these are people who grew up navigating constant multi-ple streams of information. “So many things are happening in life that make me end up with more data,” says early Evernote devotee Jason Freedman, who co-founded

ComPaNy oF the year

FlightCaster, a Web-based travel-information service, and recently launched an online real estate start-up, 42Floors. “Evernote is the tech-nology version of what the Container Store does for my bedroom,” he says. “It’s a simple solution that brings sanity to the situation.”

Despite the enthusiastic reception for Evernote’s beta version, which went public in mid-2008, the company’s cash was running out fast, and Libin struggled to raise more. VCs confronted him with a host of concerns. For starters, Evernote didn’t play off social networks at a time when Silicon Valley was looking for the next Facebook. Plus, Evernote eschewed the widespread wisdom that everything was moving to the cloud. It relied on native apps—software that does most of the work while running on your computer or smartphone instead of letting an internet server somewhere else handle the job. Though there’s a web version, Evernote is mostly intended to run as a native app, because it runs a lot faster that way, and Libin was con-vinced that a snappy response was critical to delivering a satisfying memory-retrieval experience.

There was one more concern, and it was a big one. Evernote was being pitched as a so-called freemium service. In other words, people could either use it for free or upgrade to a paid premium version, which is how the company would make money. So far, so good; the freemium model was seen as a smart one. The problem was that, unlike virtually all other entrepreneurs relying on that model, Libin refused to cripple the free version, removing the incentive to upgrade to the paid version. You could pay $5 a month and get additional file storage, but why would anyone do that? asked the VCs. The free ver-sion was full featured and offered generous storage.

Libin explained his theory: The more stuff you put in Evernote, the more important the service would be to you. Who would begrudge $5 a month to a company that was storing your memories and helping you retrieve them? “Your notes, your restaurants, your friends, a year of your life, then years of your life,” says Libin. “That’s worth thousands.” The danger wasn’t that people wouldn’t upgrade, he

can type in a note, handwrite a note on a touchscreen, take a photo with your phone’s camera, record an audio conversation, put in a web address, save all or part of a webpage, or forward an e-mail to Evernote. The software takes it from there, sucking the data into Evernote’s servers, which are backed up religiously, as well as storing it on your computer. The system also labels the incoming data with any information that could come in handy, including when it was added and where you were when you added it. Thanks to the soft-ware developed by Pachikov’s team, any visible text in a photo becomes searchable. “Before I go to the supermarket, I take a snap-shot of the list my wife has on the refrigerator,” says Daniel Kuper-man, CEO of Aprix Solutions, a Silicon Valley Web start-up focused on helping companies manage marketing efforts, and an early user of Evernote.

You can add titles or tags to the notes, though you don’t have to. You can also file notes—any piece of information in Evernote is a “note”—in different “notebooks,” and share these notebooks or individual notes with others. To find your note later, you need to recall only one key point about it and then search on that. Want to remember that restaurant you went to? Search on French toast, because that’s what you had there, and you took a picture of the menu. Or on Seattle, because that’s where you were. Or on Janet, because she was with you, and you took a picture of her. Or on black holes, because you remember clipping an online article about them that day, and once you know the date, you can bring up other notes from that day. “It’s the electronic version of having something at the tip of your tongue,” says Libin.

To the delight of Silicon Valleyites, the tool is a boon at meetings. You can type notes while recording audio and cap it off by taking a picture of the whiteboard. And all of it winds up in Evernote, ready for easy recall. By tying Evernote into other services, you can have even more ways of finding things: audio recordings can be tran-scribed (at extra cost) to allow searching by anything said at a meet-

50%

30%

10%

1 year 2 years 3 years

perc

enta

ge o

f mon

thly

retu

rn u

sers

Length of time after customer registration

A graph of how people use Evernote over time shows that customers who abandon the service often return.

reaSoN to SmIle


Gu

tter

Cr

edit

her

e


argued; it was that they wouldn’t try the service in the first place or wouldn’t stick with it because the free version was skimpy and failed to impress. Get them to fall in love with the service, and they would eventually pay, because they would be invested in its success. “I want to build a 100-year company, and I’m serious about that,” says Libin. “I don’t need to squeeze money out of you. I’ll have the rest of your life to take your money. It’s my long-term greedy strategy. Our slogan is, ‘We’d rather you stay than pay.’ Basi-cally, I wanted a business model that rhymed.”

The VCs were not impressed. “No one would touch us,” says Libin. In desperation, Libin turned to Europe and managed to cut a $10-million deal with an investment firm there. The deal was set to close in October 2008—smack in the middle of one of the worst crashes in the history of the stock market. The investor called the deal off the morning both parties were to sign.

Libin, unable to find another investor or even anyone who would return his call in the postcrash chaos, realised that he would have to close the company. Then the Swedish guy wrote, offering half a million dollars. Libin now had maybe six months to try to prove that his stay-versus-pay strategy could work. “That’s when everything started happening,” he says.

In mid-2009, Gary Little, a partner at Morgentha-ler Ventures and an influential figure in Silicon Valley, received an e-mail from Guido Appen-zeller, a Stanford professor who was working with the VC firm to launch his second company. “Guido said I had to check out this hot new appli-cation that was taking Stanford by storm,” recalls Little. Little checked the app out, was impressed, and invited the CEO of the company, who hap-

features; if they don’t like it enough to upgrade, they tend to abandon the service altogether or use it lightly. But Libin showed that Evernote users became more likely to upgrade over time. For those users who had been using Evernote for a year, the upgrade rate was an impressive eight per cent. If Evernote could get to a million users, explained Libin, sales would be close to $4 million a year. And, at the current growth rate, Evernote would reach 10 million users within two years.

Then Libin showed activity rates, or, roughly, how often an average user was actually using Evernote over time. For many soft-ware companies, that curve runs relentlessly downward. Most people who try an app abandon it pretty quickly or use it less frequently as time goes on. But for Evernote, the curve was a smile. There was a slight drop-off in usage after the first few months, but then it went up again—not only because active users were finding the service more and more useful, but also because customers who had stopped using the service were returning to it. People who left Evernote missed it.

Morgenthaler invested. So did Sequoia Capital, another top Sili-con Valley VC firm. So did other VCs. Altogether, Evernote has raised $95 million. “We didn’t need most of the money,” says

libin explained his theory:

The more stuff you put in

Evernote, the more important the

service would be to you. Who would begrudge $5 a month to a

company that was storing your

memories and helping you

retrieve them?

pened to be looking for funding, to come in and pitch the firm. The CEO was relaxed, amiable, and humble, and he soon had the group cracking up at his deadpan humour. The type of guy who says he chose his business plan because it rhymed. And that his international strategy was focused on Japan because he liked Japanese food.

At a following meeting, Libin stunned the group with a series of slides that Little calls “one of the best analytical dissections of a business I’ve ever seen.” Libin showed the group that the rate at which Evernote users were upgrading to the paid version within a month of signing up was half a per cent. This was not good—and not surprising, given that the free version worked fine. But then Libin showed the upgrade rates over longer periods of time. Normally, this would be an even grimmer picture, because at almost all companies with freemium models, users who upgrade tend to do so pretty quickly. They sample the hobbled free version, and if they like it, they upgrade right away to get all the

Libin. “But that’s when you can get it, so we took it.” Evernote didn’t need it because the company became profitable early in 2011, not long before hitting 10 million users and reaching annual sales of about $16 million.

Today, the company is in a large, airy, colourful, storefront-like space in Mountain View, California, whose layout has a random feel-ing to it. It’s cramped here, wide open there, toys and boxes scattered around. There are 80 employees—15 of them from Russia—and there’s a development team in Moscow and an office in Tokyo. When Libin travels, he is represented at the office by a garish wheeled robot with a video camera and laser pointer, which Libin controls from his laptop. When he is present, he looks like a coffee-shop poet trying to appear respectable as he roams around sipping from a mug appar-ently glued to his hand. The features of his face seem designed to showcase his formidable goatee.


ComPaNy oF the year

The company is passing 15 million users, with users signing up at the rate of more than a million a month. And this for a company that doesn’t have any salespeople. Evernote doesn’t do anything to encourage people to pay it, which is one of the reasons it’s so popular. “When you eliminate trying to get people to pay you, your goals change,” says Sinkov. “Our role is educational, not promotional. All we need to do is tell people what Evernote does.”

The irony and genius of that nonsales strategy, of course, are that so far, at least, it has resulted in terrific sales. The long-term conversion rate can now be tracked out to three years, and it turns out to be more than 15 per cent. Will new users keep upgrading at these rates? Kuperman, the entrepreneur and early Evernote user, thinks Evernote has adopted the right approach. “People end up feel-ing they need to pay as a thank-you for having such a great product,” he says. “And Evernote has the benefit of not having to spend much money marketing. Every time I use Evernote, someone asks me what I’m doing, and then they want to try it out. I’m doing their marketing.”

One thing Libin says he refuses to worry about is competition. And there are, in fact, vaguely competitive products and services. Most notable among them is Microsoft’s OneNote, which has some of the same features and comes with Microsoft Office. But it doesn’t provide Evernote’s effortless toss-in-any-kind-of-note-on-any-device environment and hasn’t achieved nearly the traction that Evernote has. Nevertheless, it’s inevitable that more and better competitors will emerge. When that happens, Evernote users will be able to painlessly take their memories and leave, because Libin has insisted that the information be made easy to export, so that no one feels locked in to the service. “We used to have a saying in the Soviet Union: ‘Any country that you’re free to leave, you’re free to live in,’ ” he says. “We want our users to feel free to leave.”

Instead of defending the company’s flanks, Libin is forging ahead into new markets. “There are millions in Thailand who will be getting smartphones next year,” says Dave Engberg, the CTO and another CoreStreet alumnus. Japan has already been an unmitigated triumph for the company. It now accounts for 20 per cent of Evernote’s user base, compared with 35 per cent in the US, and Japanese users are on average twice as active as are US users. “There’s an archival culture there,” says Hitoshi Hokamura, who heads the company’s Japan efforts.

Evernote is a cult in Tokyo. Bookstores have Evernote sections—there are 32 Japanese books on Evernote—and when Libin is there, he is sometimes stopped in the street by fans. NTT Docomo, the largest cell-phone service provider in Japan, provides Evernote’s premium service for free with its Android phones, a big draw. (And Docomo’s VC arm invested $2 million in Evernote.) Elsewhere in the world, the adoption of Evernote tends to parallel the growth in smartphones, which would suggest a pretty steep growth curve internationally over the next several years.

What’s more, a vast ecosystem of products and services has sprung up around Evernote. Computers, phones, tablets, printers, and scan-ners have Evernote compatibility built into them, in some cases via a physical, dedicated Evernote button. (It doesn’t hurt that many leading electronics vendors are based in Japan.) When you take your brand-new HTC tablet out of the box and turn it on, it immediately asks you to sign in to Evernote. Some 6,000 software developers have tied or are working on tying their apps and services into Evernote.

And as an unusual tribute, Boston University has taken to listing Libin as a distinguished alumnus, even though he never graduated. Libin is being a good sport

about it but with an ulterior motive. “I’d like to be the first person in history to get an honorary bachelor’s degree,” he says. It would be easier than mastering chess or the violin.

For now, libin, who is truly serious about the 100-year thing, is thinking hard about how not to end up another flavour of the month in the fast-churning world of internet apps. Part of the answer, he believes, is to expand the company beyond simply being a way to remember stuff. “We want to go from being one app to being a family of apps, all of which have something to do with memory,” he says. “Our test for whether we should build something is: will 100 million people use it right away?” This year, the company released its second product, Evernote Peek, an iPad app that turns the tablet into a flash-card system for studying. It became the most popular educational iPad app virtually overnight. (K-12 schools are already going gaga over Evernote, and many that provide laptops to students are installing Evernote—it’s never too early to start recording those memories.)

More products will be coming. The company announced in September that it’s opening a studio in Austin—the term studio is borrowed from the computer-game industry, which tends to set up fairly independent shops to develop new games. Libin says he wants to follow that model. “It will be a local team that can develop pride in what it does,” he says. Libin plans to open additional studios in Singapore and somewhere in Europe—presumably he will be trying out the food in different countries there to make his choice.

In the long term, Libin wants to figure out how to do more to help people remember, learn, understand, and communicate. Noting that images can be more evocative than text, he would like to see Evernote be able to recognise objects and faces in pho-tographs, and perhaps one day even recognise smells. “Your own brain,” says Libin, “might end up being the last place you search for information.”

David H. Freedman is a contributing editor for Inc. He wrote for the October issue about doing business in China.

evernote is a cult in tokyo.

There are 32 Japanese

books on Evernote, and when Libin is

there, he is some-times stopped in the street by fans.


advts.indd 58 3/23/2010 2:32:15 PM

Managing How a technology start-up listens, and then does. this page Hiring NetAmbit smartly uses direction

signboards as prime real estate to advertise vacancies page 48 Company Culture A recent book tells you why

hiring more women is a canny business decision page 49 Elevator Pitch Can MyGuestHouse convince inves-

tors it’s worth the ̀ 5-crore fund tariff? page 50 The Way I Work Ajit Andhare knows creativity is the core of his

business. Which is why, he’s happy to let his team members design their own workspaces. page 52

Sales & MarketingExperts on how a rural travel company can bring in more holiday seekers. page 47

strategy

In October 2009, Paras Chopra was biding time at a Noida-based technology firm—he was sure his days as an employee were limited. Barely a year out of Delhi College of Engineering, Chopra was too busy to care. His attention was on the reams of code he was writing for a product he called Wingify—one that he had devoted his after office hours and weekends to write.

Wingify was a suite which could increase website conversion rates for companies. Chopra knew that the product would power his entrepreneurial flight—a feature-rich, jazzed-up platform which could give companies a one-stop repository for split testing, behavioural targeting, web analytics and visitor segmentation tool. “My research found that online marketers had to use five to six

Managing Listen Up! A technology start-up shows how to really use feedback

ears to the Wall Paras Chopra (left) and Sparsh Gupta (right) have made

active listening a business art.


ph

oto

Co

ur

tesy

su

bje

Ct

strategy

tool kits for their website functions to drive traffic or increase conversion. Wingify could do all that. It was very comprehensive,” he says.

An avid blogger, Chopra decided to showcase Wingify on an online open forum, Hacker News, where geeks converge. The reviews caught him by surprise. Contributors found the loaded product too confusing to navigate. As one reviewer put it, “It took me 14 page views and 1,738 seconds to find a product tour on page.” Plus, the product tour was heavy on technical jargon. For a tool that aimed to simplify matters and make website analytics easy to implement, this was particularly off-putting. “I had put zero thought in usability. I’d concentrated only on coding a plethora of features,” Chopra recalls. He’d also wasted up to six months of his time. “The feedback should have been taken while making the product, not after it was complete,” he confesses.

Though it was hard to start over, Chopra couldn’t launch with a product that potential users didn’t get anyway. He decided to re-code Wingify, refining and revamping the site’s usability, design and paring down its features to create a more effective program. “I focused on what the feedback told me. I made myself a goal—to keep the user interface as simple as possible. Users shouldn’t need more than three to four clicks to get the features they want.”

Five months later, a new and improved version—Visual Website Optimiser (VWO)—was born in its beta version. Sparsh Gupta, Chopra’s senior from college, and a Masters in computer science from Oxford, became an enthusiastic and keen sounding board through the re-work journey. Gupta also saw immense potential in the product. And the college buddies decided to become business partners. They called the firm Wingify Software and it went live as a paid product from May 2010.

Since then , the Visual Website Opti-miser has seeded a business to watch out

for. In the past year-and-a-half, Chopra and Gupta have amassed more than 13,000 users, nearly 900 paying customers, and up to 800,000 site visits. Wingify considers some of the more famous tech firms glob-ally as its clients such as Microsoft, GE Money and Groupon.

And it has several successful case studies to its credit. CityCliq, a Florida-based search engine for small businesses, registered a 90 per cent rise in conversion rates after Wingify stepped in. AquaSoft, a photo presentation software, saw a 20 per cent increase in product sales after using Visual Website Optimiser’s A/B Split Tests.

Recently, Wingify was recognised as one of the top 10 product companies to watch out for, at the prestigious Nasscom Product Conclave in Bengaluru. It’s also being courted by prominent VC firms and angel investors.

Yet instead of flying high, the partners have their ears trained to the ground. They continue to leverage feedback while adding new tools or tweaking older ones. For instance, while working on their traffic seg-mentation feature recently, the eight-people Wingify team had worked out various seg-ment options. But their customers felt what they really wanted was testing “by the day”. That is, to find out how visitors to a website

respond differently to a change depending on the day of the week—do responses differ

from a Monday to a Friday, or a Tuesday to a Thursday? The idea found its way into the suite. “At the start-up level, the crowd approach has worked for us. We develop what our users want. Eventu-ally, they are the ones that are going to use it,” explains Gupta.

They typically solicit reviews on features-in-the-pipeline from 10 per cent of their customers. Wingify was recently working on a feature that informed users what they should be testing on websites to gauge its effectiveness and impact. Nearly one in three users

came back with ideas and suggestions which were later incorporated.

Of course, sifting through the often-clashing views and debating over it in a no-holds-barred environment is the key to judiciously using feedback. “People are usually resistant to change. When we redid an interface a couple of months ago, users didn’t think it was great. But we stuck to it. At times, you have to keep faith in what your gut tells you,” Chopra asserts.

But for the most part, Chopra believes the feedback has been invaluable and spot on. And he confesses he’s sort of fanatical about hoarding up on it. “If somebody signs up for a product but doesn’t use it, I will want to know why. We have created a very customer centric company—every support that we do, our customers are asked to rate it. We have personal blogspots for them and we log their every move.”

Recently, even while hiring their US sales manager—their key geography now—Chopra, the avid blogger asked his readers, several of them also entrepreneurs, their opinion on what he calls “a hiring experiment”. Judging from the Gupta-Chopra track record, they needn’t worry about the new hire. After all, when they listen carefully, things usually go well.

—Shreyasi Singh

Before and after On top, Wingify’s first product website. After feedback on forums like Hacker News, the product was tweaked into the current Visual Web Optimiser.


strategy

sales & Marketingexploring rural India Can a travel company make village holidays cool?

How does a bullock cart ride through an orchard in a remote village sound for your next holiday? If you’re tired of Goa or Manali, Travel Another India (TAI) offers several options to explore a ‘not-done’ India. Started by Gouthami in 2009, TAI organises unique rural

holidays. “Every village is perfect for tourism,” says Gouthami. Simple joys like climbing a tree, exploring the wilderness or reading a book by the local stream are great ways to escape the city. Rural communities play host for TAI’s travellers, from cooking food to becoming their tour guides. Guests are charged between `900–3,000 per head per day. So far, 200 people have travelled with TAI to the two homestays they built from the ground up in Pranpur, Madhya Pradesh, and Ladakh. It also organises trips to six other destinations like Hodka in Gujarat and Greenstay in Mysore. TAI has already amassed more than 45,000 fans on Facebook. Experts give her some ideas on how to welcome more guests. —Ira Swasti

PItCH NO. 1: go viralPeeyush Dayal, CEO, OnSumaye, a web solutions providerThey should directly target their large Facebook following. I didn’t see any promotions or travel pack-ages on their page. I would recom-mend they solicit quotes from their guests and post it on their website. They have a guest speak section but it only has a few quotes. Encourage and provide incentives for guests to post comments and pictures on Facebook. This would lead to viral marketing and friends of guests would come to know about Travel Another India.

PItCH NO. 3: Call out to urbanitesSunil Gupta, CEO, Avis India, a car rental service The idea of a rural sojourn is very powerful. It would be a good idea to contact the HR and administrative heads of large multinationals to give their employees and visitors a glimpse of rural India, albeit a sani-tised version. Companies are also looking for locations where their employees can carry out voluntary work and the areas around these sites would be great. They could also tap colleges and schools in metropolitan cities to give urban children a rural experience.

PItCH NO. 2: target backpackersAjay Chaturvedi, founder, HarVa, a rural enterprise They could target backpackers who are cash-strapped and are looking for exotic locales to get away from their daily humdrum. They can market TAI as a venture that takes you back to the roots, in nature’s lap and provides a getaway for nat-ural cures to illnesses and dis-eases, from maybe herbs found there. Also urban travellers have this misconception that food and water in villages is not healthy or safe. So it would help if they could highlight and give information on their website that eatables are safe to consume.

PItCH NO. 4: tell stories well Deepak Goel, founder, Drizzlin, a social media marketing firmAn interesting addition to the Face-book content could be a series of sto-ries about the various places covered by TAI. Most of these places have interesting history or trivia that would create a stronger connect with the chosen sites. A crowd sourced model to create “suggest a location, help us grow” kind of a program will bring a sense of belonging among guests. Also, their website has an interesting Indian feel to it that can be accentu-ated through comic books, cartoon strips and short stories.

FeedBaCk ON tHe FeedBaCkWhile our guests are willing to give us feedback, only a handful of them are willing to be quoted. Yes, we need to rework our entire position-ing on Ladakh. We are slowly reach-ing out to the overseas market. So far, backpackers have found our prices too high. We will put an FAQ prominently on the website to high-light the hygiene aspects of the stay. The school market is a different game with a different set of rules altogether. There are huge numbers involved and our guest houses are ideal for groups of upto 20 people.

How would you sell that?

Pure Bliss Can TAI convince travellers that India’s villages can offer them the trip-of-a-lifetime?


hiring Net the right employeeA wide hunt for talent

It isn’t often that one comes across a sign-board that also doubles up as an advertise-ment for jobs. That is why the bright-blue boards with a hard-to-miss “We are hiring” message placed along the Noida and Greater Noida Expressway instantly draw attention. The boards take you to the sprawling corpo-rate office of NetAmbit, a financial products distribution company, and right to the centre of their many innovative hiring techniques.

Girish Batra, the company’s founder and MD, says because they hire in large num-bers, using every possible opportunity for visibility is important to them. The message must get across to as many people as possi-ble, and thus utilising the signboards was almost natural. “This idea just came about. Somebody from my team suggested it, and it made perfect sense,” says Batra.

The need is certainly there. NetAmbit, which has been offering a bouquet of financial products to customers since 2003, currently employs more than 4,000 people to staff their 150 branches, and six call centres across India. The company uses the direct marketing model to sell products like insurance schemes,

strategy

home loans and corporate fixed deposits. Each month, 3,000 to 4,000 candidates walk into their office. Because the churn is so intense in a customer services-oriented com-pany like this, NetAmbit hires up to 700 peo-ple each month.

Amitabh Kapoor, the company’s head of human resources, says it’s tough to deter-mine the impact of the board-advertising— how many people have actually been recruited as a direct consequence of the campaign. “We don’t have a way of knowing how many candidates have applied after see-ing those particular ads. We get to know that informally later on after they join.”

This isn’t NetAmbit’s first innovative take on hiring. Because financial products was (and remains) an under-penetrated market when they started out, Batra knew he had to use a comprehensive outreach campaign—one that leveraged the internet, television, ground sales staff and call centres. The latter two necessitated the need for a vast pool of tal-ent. Beyond using job sites, newspaper classi-fieds and employee referrals, NetAmbit also roped in NGOs to help them find employees.

They partnered with NGOs such as Sar-thak and Etasha to recruit young people from the slums. Batra says doing so has had multiple benefits. First, it fulfils their phi-losophy of creating jobs for the underprivi-leged. Second, these recruits have shown to be better, more committed employees, though some of them are barely high school graduates. “It’s best to hire people who genuinely need the job. The more we go to the weaker sections, the higher is our success rate,” says Batra.

Their job advertising campaigns in smaller towns, or semi-urban areas on the fringes of metropolitan cities have been very successful. “We manage to get a lot of candidates who otherwise don’t get jobs because of their poor command on English. We don’t mind hiring people who know just Hindi or the local lan-guage in any of the states we operate in,” explains Kapoor.

This has proved to be a hiring master-stroke of sorts. Many people who joined them from these campaigns as tele-service operators (TSO) have risen through the ranks to become heads of divisions. Amit Chugh, who joined in 2007 as a TSO, con-fesses he never thought he’d stay in the company this long. Four years later, he heads an entire centre, and has no plans to go anywhere. “I’ve grown a lot as an indi-vidual here. I don’t think I would have got this opportunity anywhere else,” he says.

Another recent initiative NetAmbit has come up with, is to invite potential candidates to undergo a day-long workshop. The work-shop gives them an insight into the highs and lows of the job, thus providing them with a clear picture of what to expect. It’s worked out well. Forty per cent of those who have attended the workshops have been recruited.

Batra knows such innovations will have to be bettered, and newer ones introduced, as the company grows at a robust 80 per cent. For NetAmbit, the hunt for the right employees is far from over. —Meenakshi Kumar


strategy

Company Culture greater diversity, better results Are there enough women workers?

gender dividend Muriel de Saint Sauveur says companies with more women workers are more in sync with the market’s pulse.

as organisations go global, they need to rethink their HR policies to accommodate a diversity of talent in the workforce, says Muriel de Saint Sauveur, author of A Women’s World, A Better World? Sauveur, a former communications director at Mazars, an international audit and consultancy firm, argues companies must be more open to women to achieve better results. Inc. India’s Ira Swasti recently met her for a chat.

Q. What is the inspiration for the book? I have been with Mazars for 23 years. In my last role as the diversity director, I discovered that at our entry posi-tions, we have an equal number of men and women. But only 14 per cent women are remaining as we analysed our top level. In our office, women were leaving the organisation as they turned 30 or 35, to take care of their families. When hard-to-find talented people leave your company, after you invest your time and resources in them, you lose money. It does not make good business sense. It got me thinking. I wanted to see if this was happening elsewhere. This book has emerged from interviews with 100 women across 33 countries.

Q. you statistically prove that companies that hire as many female managers as male managers show better financial results. How?The results of the study showed that companies with at least 35 per cent of their workforce as women performed better. These companies are also more open-minded. Greater diversity leads to better strategy because men and women think differently, and you get a variety of ideas and perspectives on the table. Also, a lot of products today are bought by women, so it’s good to have more of them on board to know how women think and what they would like to buy.

Q. What are other advantages of having more women? they’re good managers but do they make great business leaders too? Women don’t work the way men do. They are more people and team-oriented which is why they are good managers. But yes, to run a busi-ness, you need to be more strategic, anticipate the future and take risks. I did find some women don’t like to take risks. But that’s a benefit too. It’s not by chance that the more ‘feminised’ companies were capable of

withstanding the 2008 financial crisis better. And as the global economy continues to move fast towards a services-based market, from a product-based one, the quality a company needs to deliver requires both emotions and brain. Women can ‘humanise’ a corporate environment quite well in that manner.

Q. What can companies do to get more women? A firm’s organisational model needs to be more in sync with humanity’s life cycle. HR policies must take into account gender differences. Flexible hours and sharing of family and household concerns will help too. Historically, men have focused on their work, creating an impenetrable barrier between

their private and work lives. That needs to change. In Germany, for instance, because of the lack of day-care options, women are discour-aged from applying to executive positions. Creating private and govern-ment-endorsed child care systems will be useful. Today, thanks to the communications revolution, office work can be taken home, thus reducing the time spent in office. The government could also provide tax incentives to companies with greater diversity. Quotas for women aren’t preferred but some companies have used them well.


5 0 | INC. | JANUARY 2012 PhotogRAPh bY sUbhoJit PAUl

Budget Boys Arora, Chawla and Chauhan

help travellers find the perfect guesthouse.


strategy

the Pitch “Not only is it difficult to find a budget hotel or guesthouse online, it’s also impossible to figure out if they are any good. MyGuestHouse offers an e-commerce platform to bridge the gap between good budget hotels and price-conscious travellers. We are the only portal focused completely on budget guesthouses and hotels—other players offer accommodation within their bouquet of services. With 10,000 rooms available on our site, users can simply click to book. Hoteliers can update their room inventory in real time and travellers can check out the services, using the room inventory management system. Because we are present in 11 cities, consumers have access to multiple services and price points. In the next couple of years, we should be in 30 cities. The current budget hotel market is pegged at $1.1 billion. Budget hotels charge approx $100 per day. We charge `1,500 from hotels for every booking they get through our website.” —As told to Inc. India

Investors Weigh In

FouNdersJitendra Arora (backround)Varun Chawla (left foreground) Prashant Chauhan (right foreground)

LoCatIoNDelhi

LauNChed2010

reveNue (2011)`5 crore

ProjeCtIoNs (2016)`500 crore

reveNue ModeL Fixed amount per booking and additional ad revenues

FuNdINg sought`5 crore

FuNds sought ForAcquire more budget hotels and invest in technology

BuILd reLatIoNshIPs building real-time look-and-book capabilities in tier-ii and tier-iii towns and providing budget accommodation is challenging. but if done right, it represents a large portion of the travel expen-diture. travel continues to be a lucrative segment for the investor community. Especially with busi-nesses transacting more and more online. the key is to create long-term relationships with hotel properties, so that Myguest-house can distribute this inven-tory both in a direct to consumer and third party channels. the firm’s flat fee per booking seems to be a little high. Also, acquiring customers online is expensive—they should use third parties. Rahul Khanna, managing director, Canaan India, New Delhi

do More grouNdWork Myguesthouse seems similar to hostelworld.com which was acquired by a private equity house for more than €200 million in 2009. hostelworld dominates the hostel booking space with over 23,000 properties in 180 coun-tries. the key to its success has been developing a proprietary booking system given away for free to hostels that powers online search and sEo or sEM prowess. Myguesthouse is taking the hos-telworld playbook and adapting it to the indian market. they will need a lot more people on the ground. they should try managing the process of signing up guest-houses quickly and bringing in appropriate traffic.FaIsal GalaRIa, angel investor, United Kingdom

BuILd trust WIth CustoMers typically, auto and rickshaw guys are the ones who guide new trav-ellers to budget hotels or guest-houses. if Myguesthouse can organise that system, it will be a great business. Marketing and distribution is a challenge though, and the company needs to build trust among customers—maybe by opening retail outlets across strategic locations such as rail-way stations and bus terminals across india’s tourist cities. they can also start their own hotel rat-ing system and crowdsource rat-ings based on customers’ feedback and reviews. the team has shown great promise, and is at the right stage to grow the business to the next level.amIt GRoveR, angel investor, Mumbai

Elevator PitchWith Myguesthouse, budget rooms are a click away. Will investors check in with ̀ 5 crore?

strategy

“

a media CEO’s life follows a markedly different routine. I realised that as soon as I started building Colosceum Media four years ago. My company is not built on capital alone. A lot of emotional and physical investment goes into this. Sports and exercise are my answers to the stress. I knew both Colosceum Media, and Mumbai, where we are based, would cost me my life, routine and physical health—and if I was not on the top of things I wouldn’t be able to make it. Interestingly, I

the way i work | ajit andhare, Colosceum Media

Ajit Andhare, founder and CEO of Colosceum Media, spent the first 12 years of his professional life deriving a new meaning from his marketing job—creativity. He admired the way ad people could come up with new ideas constantly. Although he loved his job, he always found something amiss. So he gave up his posh corporate career to plunge straight into entrepreneurship, prompted by “an insistent inner voice”. That voice has been all-important since. It helped Andhare decide on a career in television content and visualise his first programme—Wheel Shrimati—which is in its fifth successful season today. He didn't worry about being new to television. From his own experience, he knew a stress on technical skill or domain knowledge could kill a passion. It took away his love for the tabla, for sure. No wonder, Andhare stays true to his inner voice—in things big and small—as he takes the `52-crore Colosceum Media to greater creative heights.

as told to rohini banerjee | PHOTOgrAPH by JITEN gANdHI

In our job, creativity is the currency”

5 2 | inC. | JANUARY 2012

strategy

in tinsel townAjit Andhare stays away

but keeps a finger on his company's pulse.

JANUARY 2012 | inC. | 5 3

strategy

discovered a love for squash and exercise almost simultaneously, as I started building Colosceum Media.

Every morning, I’m up by 6.30am. Depending on what day of the week it is, there is either squash or a rigorous exercise session to finish. For business, Mumbai is the place to be—but it’s a tough city. You can never feel in control here. Especially, when you have to deal with its harrowing traffic every day—no wonder I feel most “out of control” when I am driving. Which is why my morning routine gives me some sense of control. It prepares me to not cow down to the challenges that the city and a typical work day throw at me. I recharge my body, mind and soul in the morning. By 8.30am, I’m done with my exercise.

Once home, I have breakfast with my family as I scan the day’s newspapers. A priority for me in the morning is to spend time with my two daughters—one of them is four, and the other is eight years old. I try to get them ready for school everyday.

However immersed I may be in the familial duties, work or thoughts of work, is never far away. Richard Bran-son once said that he sees no distinction between work and play. I too live in a similar state: work’s life for me. Colosceum Media is not my job, it’s my third baby. In fact, the company was founded around the same time my second daughter was born.

At night, even though I may switch off my BlackBerry, I never switch off from work. My BlackBerry’s on from early morning—its a good time to start conversations. When I’m commuting, I’m constantly on the phone, especially during the nearly hour-long drive from home to office. Our company is really about the business of ideas. In our job, creativity is the main currency. We need to be thinking ahead. We need to ask—what’s next for us, and therefore, for the viewers—constantly. How can we be different from the rest of our ilk? Now that we have an idea, how can we execute it successfully?

So from the moment I step into office, around 10.30am, I start talk-ing to five key cogs of Colosceum’s operations. These are my go-to guys from the creative, production and finance teams. In meetings we take stock of our live projects. Then the best part of the day—brainstorming and bouncing off new ideas. Some of us pitch in the ideas, others trash them. At the end of the day, we are our worst critics. One of the unique challenges in this job is that we need to think out-of-the-box constantly. In fact, when I quit my corporate life, it was this energy and excitement of content television that drove me towards it. I was in the marketing sector and often worked along side the advertising and creative teams. When we were brainstorming and developing marketing plans for my previous brand—Wheel—we came up with the idea of Wheel Smart

Shrimati. I sort of conceptualised the whole idea and thought of making it into a television show. When I got the chance to interact with the cre-ative and advertising team, up-close, I sort of audaciously thought, “I might actually have a creative bent of mind.”

ill today, it’s the brainstorming bit that keeps my team and me on our toes—it keeps us happy. Because of these discussions, mornings are usually an intense time in office. These aren’t your typical corporate office mornings of hushed quiet and shuffling feet. In the media world, we’re all up till quite late in the night. My creative team may well have been in a shoot or in the edit room till 2am to 3am—so it’s unfair to expect them to be up and running by nine. But when they are up and about, they are a dynamic set of people.

Most people saunter in between 10:30-11 in the morning. But only in a few min-utes, the office energy is electric and buzzing. Mornings are like the early phase of a company: energy levels are really high. Once the creativity starts, and people get into the “zone”, things start moving almost automatically.

On a lighter note, the caffeine and Red Bulls the teams guzzle down also

keep people on their toes. My high comes from the ideas and discus-sions. Those are my “tonic”. Ideas are essential for our well-being. If we are not always stoking the creative fire, we’ll be in trouble.

I have “in” and “out” days in office: client meetings and shoots are the out days. At the client meetings, pitching in new ideas and arguing the cases, teams are usually full of enthusiasm and excite-ment. But nothing beats the shoots—those are the craziest of times. We sort of travel across the globe for them—we flew to Brazil for a season of MTV Roadies. We shot Splitsvilla (again for MTV) at Dubai, and in 2012, we will be taking it to Ibiza. The first season shoot for MasterChef India happened in Jaipur. There’s no knowing where our job will take us next. I have shot in grandiose sets built in ramshackle Mumbai studios, in the palaces of Udaipur and Jai-pur, and in camps of the Border Security Force. We have shot high up north, south and in the west.

I do travel extensively for the shows, however, I try to balance the in and out days. Between my assistant and me, we have the shoot and office days planned out in detail. I usually try to concentrate on the task at hand. If I’m not in office, I try not to be anxious about what’s happening there. Unlike regular corporate offices where a lot depends on numbers being generated and analytics constantly happening, this is a different business. Unlike my corporate days, there’s a sense of freedom that being an entrepreneur offers. I don’t feel slotted to a chair or a role. Similarly, if I am not there at a shoot,

5 4 | inC. | JANUARY 2012

strategy

I don’t hyperventilate. Cameras don’t stop if I am not there. Being on spot, however, helps us understand how a show is shaping up.

When we travel, we have a tendency to do so as a pack. We’re a very close-knit team. If we’re all in office, we try to do lunch between 1-1.15pm, sit down together to talk of everything apart from shop. This is the time when we catch up with each other. I know a lot about my team’s personal lives, I talk to them about it. I work with creative people. It’s imperative that I treat them with respect, compassion and empathy. Managing people is the biggest aspect of running a busi-ness. The other things keep evolving irre-spective of close attention.

The start of a company resembles the Big Bang: it’s all heat and intensity. As you go along, you start putting systems in place to cool things down a bit. To assume the role of a strategist, as a founder, I had to delegate work. It wasn’t tough. I didn’t feel the separation pangs that a lot of people talk about. After all, my immediate team comprises the operational experts—these guys are supposed to be good at what they are doing. I always try to remember that I am the generalist among them. As their leader, my work is to designate responsibilities and deliv-erables that also link up to the overall vision of Colosceum. Let’s take a simple example: a firm’s vision is like an image in a colouring book. How you decide to colour the pages is up to each team. I think that’s why the experts find it harder to delegate work than I do. I understand that I am basically asking people to per-form a contrary role: stay away for a bit but be on the job 24/7.

However, to be fair, my role is somewhat similar: let go to stay plugged in. I intervene only when I am asked to. At the same time, I have to be at a distant yet conscious, focused and always “right there”. I try to make sure that our office is a creative den. At 38, I’m possibly the oldest person here. Our people have stamped the space with their individuality. The

“the start of a firm resembles the big bang, all heat and

intensity.”head of the fiction team has done up his workspace in a theme of his choice. The head of the non-fiction team has a completely different theme and space. Our edit rooms are called Adda and Den. The office walls are covered with animated posters and photographs—of Phantom from the Indrajaal Comics and of show posters. There’s no bigger “yahoo moment” than entering through the office doors and staring straight at a poster of a show that you’ve helped create, ideate and produce. The office is a pleasure to be in—it’s vibrant. Now that I think of it, there is a theme of black and red repeated in some sections of the

office. Only the area that we call the “idea room” is less vibrant. It’s more a sanctuary—done up in soft furnishings and bean bags. While the space that looks remotely formal or corporate-like is the conference room.

ctivities continue unabated till 8pm. Then, it’s time to wrap up for some of us. Those in charge of production and post-production often stay back well into the night. I like to wrap things up early so I can be home by 9pm to tuck in my daughters. Though, to be honest I do miss doing that if I am attending calls or get stuck in traffic.

After the babies are safely in bed, it’s tele-vision time for me and my wife. TV is like homework in this profession—there’s a lot of idiot box viewing through the day for me.

Evenings, I surf channels again to gauge the content that’s the trend. Often, I discuss themes with my wife. She’s one audience I can’t ignore even if I want to! I also read a lot of popular magazines to see what people like to know about. But, these activities are less relaxing for me than it is for others. Real relaxation is listening to Kishore Kumar and Mohammad Rafi songs—melodies from vintage Bollywood. Some-times, I also take a walk around the neighbourhood before I hit the sack. Most often my mind is screaming pack up before my body.

JANUARY 2012 | inC. | 5 5

I wIsh I knew then...

Born into a middle-class family, S. N. Rai was conditioned to lead a “financially secure” life. So he worked for over 20 years as an engineer before taking the plunge into business. In 2007, he co-founded Movico Technologies, a video content pro-vider for the web and mobile. And in 2009, he co-founded Lava International, a mobile handset provider. Within a year, Lava has acquired four per cent of India’s total mobile market and established its presence in 50,000 retail outlets pan-India.

shailendra nath Rai, co-founder, Lava International

For as long as I can remember, starting out on my own was on the top of my wish list. But financial security and stability were greatly valued in my family. It was only after working for more than two decades that I finally dared to take the plunge along with two other friends. We put together our job savings and started Movico. We didn’t know how to raise money. We were driven by pure enthusiasm. It was while working in the mobile service business in Movico, that I realised there was a big opportunity in handsets as well. My travels had shown me that areas which were mobile-enabled witnessed greater progress. Mobile phones had become tools of empowerment. I wanted to speed up the process. That’s how Lava came into being. Many of our price-competitive models like the KK-1, KKT-11 and KKT-22 targeted the rural populaces with features like a torch, a 30-day battery backup and radio.

Both Movico and Lava taught me two key lessons, albeit the hard way. We didn’t put much thought into choosing our part-ners—distributors, supply partners, CSM and retailers. Looking back, it was imma-ture and unwise not to realise the value of selecting the right partners. We often went

in with those who were most readily and easily available. Soon, we ended up having to scout for new partners. Our earlier part-ners couldn’t stay with us for the long-term. Now we make sure we don’t do business with those who don’t share our vision and values, irrespective of how big or small the company is.

When we started out, we were also very conservative, especially with Lava. Our target was to clock in around `150 crore

within a year. We achieved that target within four months! We were fools to not have studied the market properly before entering it. I’m sure we missed a lot of opportunities we could have cashed into if we were better prepared. We are way more aggressive now. We’ve made multiple investments in R&D and distribution—our aim is to take our retail pres-ence to 1.5 lakh outlets and add 700 distributors to our existing 1,000 in the next one year. Lava already has consid-erable presence in Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Nigeria. Our plan is to enter 40 more countries by 2012.

Even though the decades spent working in the telecom sector proved invaluable in

Lava’s early years, I regret having worked for so long and not getting into business earlier. When you’re an engineer, science dictates your life. But business is not just science, it’s an art. If it was all about the numbers, a genius mathematician would have become Bill Gates or Mark Zucker-berg by now. —As told to Ira Swasti

Gut feeling Shailendra Nath Rai has always followed his instincts to lead his businesses.

5 6 | InC. | jaNuaRy 2012

Gu

tter

Cr

edit

her

e


a venture of

Adventure Weekend Getaway International Travel Family

HB Holidays is a crediable expert at making customized holidays for the corporate executives & their families that is in harmony with their lifestyle.

Contact: +91-80-42745656. +91-9742260038 email: [email protected]

www.hummingbirdindia.com

you are now connected through linked-in[ [

Gu

tter

Cr

edit

her

e


back to the past

Documents

mansueto ventures llc

solar power

new york

business magic

company culture

pasthis company

media publicationthe

colosceum media page