Showing posts with label Airbnb. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Airbnb. Show all posts

Monday, September 08, 2014

Ideas, Execution And The Old Economy

English: Jack Ma speaks during The Future of t...
English: Jack Ma speaks during The Future of the Global Economy: The View from China plenary session at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting of the New Champions in Tianjin, China 28 September 2008. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
(written for Vishwa Sandesh)

The taxi cab is squarely in the old economy. So is the motel, or apartments passing for motels. But Uber and AirBnB are tech companies. They are not only tech, they are cutting edge tech, they are billion, multi-billion dollar tech companies.

Software started out as pure information processing. Then when connectivity came along, and the Internet took off, that information processing went to whole new heights. By now I feel software has clearly started eating into the big world out there. Uber should be an inspiration for people who might know their small chunk of the old economy pretty well, but who find technology intimidating.

A few developers writing code is one way to start a tech company. Sometimes you have a great idea that goes on to change the world. Sometimes your idea is not so good. Acquiring a good knowledge of an industry or a segment of the economy takes time. But time spent acquiring that knowledge might also have been time spent not learning to code. I happen to think that is a smaller problem.

The saying goes, ideas are a dime a dozen, what really matters is execution. I don’t agree with that. There are scores of old, big companies that have perfected the art of execution, but that can be considered brain dead, because they stopped innovating a long time ago, and are on their way out. Ideas matter. But once you do have an excellent idea, it is then all about execution. Unless the idea is executed, it is not a business.

Once you have an excellent idea, it is all about execution. That I buy into.

In the recent years the early stage funding market has really blossomed. You can raise more money earlier than you used to be able to. That does not always mean you can skip the friends and family round. It helps to have a basic prototype even when you want to raise money from angels. And if you are not coding yourself, chances are you are hiring coders, or a tech team, perhaps a tech consultant. That costs some money, maybe less than what it costs to launch a paan dokan in Jackson Heights, but it is still money.

Angels and venture capitalists get hit by ideas all day every day. So when you have a prototype you are ahead of perhaps 95% of the people out there. But even after that, it is hard for the investors to see what you got. One metric separates you from the herd. Do you have a product that has a rapidly growing user base? If the answer is yes, the investors don’t even have to fully comprehend what your idea is, they will fall for you.

In the first dot com boom launching a dot com meant buying servers, for one. You were going to host your website somewhere! But today even a near billion dollar company like FourSquare uses Amazon Web Services. Cloud hosting seems to work just fine. And that server space is really cheap when you just start out. For a few hundred dollars a month, you could go a long way. How about that?

You need an excellent idea. You need some seed money that you can cough up yourself, or you can raise among family and friends. It also helps to have a Cofounder. A big reason is emotion management. In the morning you can feel like a future millionaire. By evening you might feel you were better off working the day at the local McDonald’s, because you might at least have made a few bucks. And that emotional roller coaster is with successful startups. I am not talking about failures.

And you need to execute. You need to move. Risk taking has to be impulsive for you. Too much caution can cause analysis paralysis where you absolutely refuge to move. Tech entrepreneurship is not for everybody. But it is for more people than have given it a shot. I think there is a lot of room for people with in-depth knowledge of segments of the old economy. Start innovating. Jack Ma, who is the new Jack Welch, is not a coder. You don’t have to be.

You have to become obsessed with your idea. The Pinterest founder wrote personal, handwritten letters to his first 5,000 users. He was just so grateful they were even using his product. You need that kind of obsession. When you have only 100 users, you shower on them the attention that you might later have to spread to a million users. That kind of obsession.

New York City is number two after San Francisco by now when it comes to tech startups. You are not in the wrong city to be launching a tech startup. You can if you want to, but no, you don’t have to move to California to launch a tech startup. Drop your buckets, you are off the mouth of the Amazon, came the morse code reply from the ship that was asked for drinking water.

Thursday, August 28, 2014

One Eye On Nepal



A tech startup launched partly or fully by Nepalis that might manage to raise 100K or 200K from among Nepalis in the first round, also called seed round, or friends and family round, if it does good work positions itself to raise north of a million dollars in its second round from professional investors. But it would be hard, probably impossible, to raise a million dollars from among Nepalis.

There is a flip side to that coin. Say that tech startup does well and ends up with a valuation in the 100 million dollar range in five years. Interested Nepalis either invested in the first round or did not invest at all. Because round two onwards you have to be a licensed investor to invest. You can’t come into rounds two, three or four.

Granted a tech startup is high risk behavior. Bottom line, it could fail. You could lose your money as an investor. But I can’t think of a better vehicle than a tech startup to start tapping into the robust capital markets in this city, the finance capital of the world. And unless you are a successful entrepreneur, you have no moral standing to make any meaningful contribution to economic growth in Nepal. Lecturing goes only so far, you have to be in a position to make meaningful investments. In this era of globalization and the Internet one can hope to make major contributions to Nepal’s economic growth, even if it might be 10,000 miles away.

Let’s say you invest 5K in a tech startup that goes on from a million dollar valuation in round 1 to a 100 million dollar valuation in about five years. Your 5K just grew to half a million dollars. It can be argued that is retirement money. A 500,000 dollar trust fund could generate 50K every year forever. It could be set up that way. As in, your half million stays intact. And you are netting 50K a year forever. 50K a year is not fancy, but it can be if you were to choose to spend all your money in a country like Nepal.

By that token a 10K investment would bring you a million dollars in that startup. A 20K investment would bring you two million dollars. A two million dollar trust fund would bring you 200K every year. That is rich!

What if you invested 5K each into 10 startups and only one of them hit it big? Your 50K still became half a million.

By one count there are 30 millionaire Nepalis in Russia. Shesh Ghale is in Australia. No matter which way you look, Nepalis in America look to be in a bad shape. America should have minted more Nepali millionaires than any place else. But that has not happened because not enough Nepalis in this country have gone into entrepreneurship. I happen to think that is a shame.

In Russia you could have bought factories for cheap when the Soviet Union collapsed. In Australia I guess real estate and education were key. But in the American economy high tech is the way to go. Old economy companies make money but not wild money. The beauty of software is it allows you to cash on your old economy expertise. I believe many software companies like Uber and AirBnB are yet to be born, companies that will target major inefficiencies in the old economy at large scales. Both are multi-billion dollar companies.

Clean energy is another way to get on the cutting edge. Finally Nepal might start making some big moves in a few years. I think there is room to build multinational corporations that do business globally, but also are deeply engaged in Nepal’s hydro sector.

The other day I was at a rooftop party in Manhattan and I came across this guy who had a biotech background who was doing Big Data for some big bank. He was not cashing in on his biotech background, not yet. But just like there are intersections between software and biotech, there necessarily are intersections between clean energy and software.

Risk taking is the top quality entrepreneurs share. Risk taking is more important than smarts, more important than a great work ethic. Sometimes you simply have to jump in and let the chips fall where they may. No risk, no gain.

But to the ablest of entrepreneurs, it probably does not feel like risk taking. To those watching, it might look like risk taking. But the best of entrepreneurs move with the assurance of a sleep walker. Just like I think of New York City as not part of America, but a whole different country altogether, I think entrepreneurs are a whole different species.