Monday, March 10, 2008

A key ingredient for a successful start-up...

...is its people. From my personal experience, hiring part-timers does not work for multiple reasons. It's easy to lump all the reasons under "lack commitment" but that would be an unfair generalization. Part-time employees have a commitment to their other job that cannot be discounted or shrugged off (particularly when I expect the same commitment to the position I hired them for!), a bigger juggling challenge to achieve work-life balance and often, conflicting priorities which are equally important. I believe happy people make better employees and consequently, no surprise when I found myself in full agreement with this blogger and his post. With that said, no part time employees for me at my next start-up unless faced with a dearth of options. Perhaps I should look at contracting out positions. What do my readers think? Either post a comment below, or send me personal email. I would love to hear your thoughts.

Wednesday, March 5, 2008

Once a geek, forever a geek

An ambulance siren and an innocent observation triggered my train of thought this morning about the Doppler effect. It eventually got to the point where the geek in me HAD to know the Doppler formula, and the keyboard being more convenient and handy than pen and paper, I went online to find it. Which is when I stumbled across this totally cool, awesome website.

Bernoulli's equation and the Venturi Flowmeter were the next perfectly logical stops to my mind, and to my delight, found those too! The geek in me totally revels in the content on this website, and wishes it had been there when I was swotting for yet another final exam. It would've been a great entrepreneurial idea back then.

Travel's more convenient these days, with Virgin leading the way

I came across an announcement about Virgin's new charter service on Techcrunch. I also learned this factoid:

"Twenty-five years ago, stuck in Puerto Rico after a canceled flight to the Virgin Islands, Branson found a charter plane and went around the airport with a blackboard that advertised a charter flight for $39 per person. He filled all 50 seats, and that is how he started Virgin Atlantic."

Pretty cool! Now there's a website that connects the consumer with charter flight operators, and importantly, allows leverage of this information by offering "Hot Deals". "Hot Deals" are basically flights that were chartered for one way trips and will be flying back empty to their home base, therefore any revenue generating passenger is better than none.

I was even more encouraged when I came across this operator. I would definitely consider flying from Dubai to NYC on a private charter aircraft, with all business class seats and fully flat beds, checking in 30 minutes before the flight at a private terminal with no serpentine security check lines for less than 4200 USD, round trip.

Now, I am looking for a company that will let me combine different modes of travel to optimize my travel by time or cost or convenience (child friendly would be great!). For instance, instead of flying San Francisco to London Heathrow and connecting at Heathrow to Rome like we did recently, a more sensible itinerary would've been to fly non-stop from San Francisco to London, and connect by train/chunnel to mainland Europe and onwards by Eurail to Italy. I even explored booking this itinerary but was put off by the complexity of figuring out flight/train/shuttle departures, connecting logistics across foreign geographies and the realization that I will be completely on my own trying to figure out Plan B in a foreign country with linguistic barriers, if my Plan A doesn't execute perfectly. Perhaps it's time to build another start-up....

Saturday, March 1, 2008

Made in India - Software as a product company

It came as a breath of fresh air to read about an entrepreneur who has successfully built a software product out of India for the global market, and is competing with household names elsewhere. Even more impressive were the following facts:

- This is a 100% bootstrapped effort, with no outside funding.

- Some of the "engineers" who are coding this software are high school graduates with 9 months of training. Without this job, the prognosis for the future of these individuals is not particularly encouraging. I applaud this social element which Mr. Vembu has successfully combined with the financial success of his venture.

More about Mr. Vembu and his venture can be found here.

Ms. Mitra has published an interview with him on her blog.

I first stumbled across Zoho at the Web 2.0 expo held in San Francisco from April 15 through 18th last year. It piqued my curiosity since Google had not rolled out the spreadsheet functionality completely, whereas Zoho had a spreadsheet program I could use. I played with it for a while and though I liked it, found Google more convenient since I am already a Gmail user. I returned to their website recently after reading the Forbes article and found that they have introduced a whole slew of applications since. I am sufficiently intrigued to check out "Zoho show" and will post a review soon.

The one thing that struck me as unusual is that Zoho is competing purely on price. Few companies, if any, have managed to sustain growth and profitability with pricing as their sole competitive advantage. With software in particular, once the code is written, debugged and staff salaries paid, there are no limits as to how low the price can be slashed by a competitor. Even a penny per customer is a profit in this case, unlike physical commodities where rock bottom pricing will equal lowest manufacturing cost. It remains to be seen how Zoho fares and whether the Googles of the world will bankrupt the Zohos by offering the software free, since their revenue stems from elsewhere.