Showing posts with label San Francisco. Show all posts
Showing posts with label San Francisco. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 17, 2014

The Incubator Idea

English: Logo used for Rockstar Games's Grand ...
English: Logo used for Rockstar Games's Grand Theft Auto series, appearing, with some modifications in all GTA games since Grand Theft Auto 3. Português: Logo usado para a série Grand Theft Auto da Rockstar Games, aparecendo, com algumas modificações, em todos os jogos de GTA desde Grand Theft Auto 3. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I am in touch with one individual, and two groups in the New York Nepali community right now. These are people who desire to launch tech startups, and would like help. Thakali Kitchen, Yak, Malingo all have websites built by my team. From there to helping people with their tech startups is a long way. I am glad for the ground covered.

In each case the idea is truly excellent. Between the three teams there are about eight ideas that I have come across. I have shot down one. I have called another mediocre. Some excellent ideas were simply let go. One idea was taken all the way to version 1. But the result was not that good. 300 downloads of an app is not impressive. I still think the idea is good. But for version two I have made a case for a 5% equity for my team, and a total say in the feature set of the app. I saw the mistakes that were made as they were made in version 1. But I had no control over the features. I was just to build what was asked of me. Big mistake.

50,000 is the magic number. You need 50,000 people using your app before venture capitalists will take a look at you and possibly invest money. Angel investors can come in earlier than that. But even early means a few thousand users at the least.

One guy on the second team came up with this brilliant, simple idea. But he chose not to follow through. Some other client independent of that approached my team with a very similar idea for the Kuwait market. It was a huge hit. I am talking close to half a million downloads. He quickly turned around and sold it for a million dollars. This was this past December. But we did not have equity. The failed app and the successful app both taught us to take equity when building something for a startup. And now that is a rule with my team. We take both dollars and equity. Dollars alone don’t suffice.

Excellent idea is a prerequisite. Without that you can’t move. But if that excellent idea is not only your beginning point but also your end point, you don’t have a company, you are not going to create wealth. You got to move.

Now I take a sign up payment, to be credited towards the down payment within days of talks starting. If your idea is excellent, and you intend to pursue it, your sign up payment is due. That separates the serious from those merely thinking about doing it.

The third team is five friends with an excellent idea who could raise 100K just among themselves. Version 1 work on an app tends to be in the 20K range. There are other expenses like legal, and marketing. You could not launch a Thakali Kitchen or a Yak with 100K, hardly 100 million dollar ideas, but you could launch a tech startup with 50K that, if you could turn into a hit, could end up with a market value of 100 million dollars in something like five years.

Two years back I could have helped. I have had to expand my team. A year from now, I will not be able to pick up clients like I can now. I expect to be too busy with my own startup.

You can be smart, you can be hardworking, but if you are risk averse, you are not going to be able to do a tech startup. This is not for someone looking for “guarantees.” Often times you have to move at full speed with little information. I could not convince or train someone to be a tech entrepreneur. Either someone is or is not a tech entrepreneur. I can only hope to find them.

You come up with an excellent idea, you raise round 1 money, you build version 1 of the product, you launch and do some fierce marketing to try and hit 50,000 users in the shortest possible time, along the way you raise round 2 money, something in the million dollar range, and you move towards version 2 of your product, you build your team along the way. Excellent execution is everything. A love for risks is a good thing. Be humble. Read. Learn. Take the plunge.

Or you could skip all that and simply invest 5K or 10K in my ambitious Augmented Reality Mobile Game. I think 5K invested in my startup today should be a million dollars in five years. Three of my friends came in at 5K each. I made it risk free for them.

Should the venture fail, from the day of the failure, I will have 12 months to return their 5K to them, as if it were a personal loan. Should the venture succeed, I get 5% of the growth their investment might see. So if this 5K becomes a million dollars in five years, I get 5% of that million, namely 50K, and they get the rest.

Gaming is the next big thing after movies, just like movies were the next big thing after radio entertainment. Grand Theft Auto making three billion dollars in three days after its last release proved the point beyond doubt. No movie has ever done anything like that.

We think Augmented Reality is one of the next big things in gaming itself.

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.

Sunday, July 27, 2014

Silicon

Larry Ellison on stage.
Larry Ellison on stage. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The number one destination for tech startups on the planet today is San Francisco. No, it is not Silicon Valley which continues to be home to the top tech companies in the world like Google, Apple and Facebook. Why did the center of gravity shift? Because the engineers wanted the city lifestyle. Most engineers who work for companies like Google in Silicon Valley tend to live in San Francisco.

Guess which city really has the city lifestyle? New York.

Boston used to be number two after Silicon Valley. Not any more. New York City has wrested that number two spot. Although Boston continues to be strong. Austin and Seattle are also strong spots.

But the Silicon Valley ecosystem is to be envied. One generation of successful entrepreneurs invest their money and wisdom into the next generation of entrepreneurs. That cycle goes on. You have to have several generations of successful companies to end up with the ecosystem that Silicon Valley has.

London and Berlin are also coming along. Bangalore in India has a decently rich density of developers. Chile has experimented with replicating the Silicon Valley thing. Israel has a vibrant tech ecosystem.

Geography matters less and less. India’s answer to Amazon - Flipkart - just raised a billion dollars. They are not in the Valley, or even in the US.

In New York City the primary tech action is in the Flatiron District. There is also a pocket in Dumbo. But Long Island City also has potential, I think. When Cornell establishes its tech campus on Roosevelt Island (New York City’s own “Stanford”) LIC will be a major attraction. Rent is substantially cheaper just because you crossed the river.

Culture is supreme. Silicon Valley’s strongest point might be that failure is celebrated there. Risk taking is probably the top quality in an entrepreneur. Failing is an essential part of the process. If you did not fail, that means you did not try, you did not take the plunge.

The big venture capitalists in the Valley raise their big money in New York City because this is where the pension funds and the like are.

FourSquare, one of the most celebrated tech startup stories to come out of NYC, has an office in San Francisco because they can’t afford not to hire some of the talented developers there who don’t want to live anywhere else. On the other hand, by now Google has a major presence in New York City. They just so happen to own the largest building in the city. It is because Google makes its money from ads. And guess where Madison Avenue is! But it is beyond that. Google has a major engineering presence in the city, as does Facebook, as does Twitter.

Silicon Valley is an attitude, it is a culture. It is about moonshots, as Larry Page might put it.

I routinely go to numerous tech events in the city. If someone makes the mistake of showing up in a suit, he immediately gets labeled a “suit.” I think there is something to be said of casual clothing, but you can not capture the essence of Silicon Valley in jeans or in a hoodie. Larry Ellison, probably the most colorful character to emerge in the Valley, has been wearing suits forever, that is his way of giving the finger to those who wear the casual stuff like they were uniform. You wear what you are comfortable wearing. That could be jeans and a turtleneck, the Steve Jobs way, or a suit as worn by his best friend Larry Ellison.

Software is eating the world, Marc Andreessen, the father of the Netscape browser that launched the web era, famously said in a Wall Street Journal article. There is so much still left to do that I expect the feast to go on for decades and longer. That is my way of saying one Silicon Valley is not enough, if it ever was. My answer to the famous question if Silicon Valley can be replicated is, yes it can be replicated. New York City is as good a place as any to build a tech startup.

Angel investing is a major aspect of a successful tech ecosystem. You seek some basic funding from friends and family. You need a basic prototype to be able to take a stab from the professional angel investors. And then there is crowdfunding. I see that as a majorly positive trend.

I think doing well as an entrepreneur in the New York City environment is a necessary precondition to being able to contribute to Nepal’s economic revolution. Brain drain is a pre-Internet, pre-globalization term. Today the work is so much more interlinked that you can be many places and contribute many places. There are global solutions to many local problems in Nepal.

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Nepali Diaspora: Rethink Time?


America has a special place in the world, and so it does among the Nepali diaspora. The ANA convention that takes place every July 4 weekend, this year in San Francisco, is an event thousands of Nepalis from all across North America make a point to make a pilgrimage to. It is landmark social event. Many look forward to it for good reason. I don't think I will make it, I will likely stay put in New York City, but the oncoming event has made me think again about some of the issues I have thought about before. Why should Nepalis in the diaspora get organized? To what end? How? How much progress have we made? Without expressing disrespect towards those who did the early work, how can we ask the tough questions and level the tough criticisms that will help take our diaspora organizations to new heights?

(1) Homesickness/Bonding

I think the number one reason we talk so much about Nepal in the diaspora is homesickness. It is self interest. Bonding has to happen. The identity has to be claimed and nurtured while the dollar chasing goes on.

(2) Cream Of The Crop

Even those who are not super duper educated are entrepreneurial to have left Nepal. It takes much initiative. Much is asked of those to whom much is given. The diaspora seeks to give back. I think the best giving back would be if the diaspora could invest big time in Nepal. I hope the leaders in Nepal create such an environment. I am for both the service and the profit motive.

(3) Immigrant Rights

Immigrant rights are far behind where globalization has already taken us. We try and get organized to make our modest contributions to the cause of immigrant rights.

(4) Networking

We can help each other out. We can share expertise and experiences. We can pool resources. Although it gets me that not enough of us have gone for hard core entrepreneurial pursuits. It helps our careers here in the diaspora when we network among ourselves.

These are some of the reasons why we need organizations like the ANA. But I have to be honest about something as a Madhesi. To be a Madhesi in the Nepali diaspora is like being a Madhesi in the Nepal Army, or the Nepal Police or in the state bureaucracy in Nepal. You represent a community that is anywhere between 35-45% of Nepal, but is less than 1% of the Nepalis in America. I think it is more like 0.1%. I have felt much more at home giving my time to digital activism for the Madhesi Movement back in Nepal than I have mingling with the Nepalis in America, especially when you routinely encounter the prejudice, the chauvinism, the attitudes, the whole nine yards.

Good thing in Nepal we have a constituent assembly for the first time in history, and we are working to reinvent the Nepali identity because, so far, the Nepali identity has never been inclusive of me and people like me. Maybe the new Nepali identity we will create will.

But then it is that same dissatisfaction that also helps me see the stark fact that the Pahadis on the global stage are powerless like the Madhesis on the national stage in Nepal. Maybe we can empathize with each other. Maybe we can seek and find common cause.

Democracy, Transparency, And The Nepali Diaspora
Alliance Sets The Tone For Diaspora Organizations
White Paper: A Major Diaspora Milestone
A Nepali Diaspora Milestone
Ram Sah: Concern Over State Excesses, And Diaspora Politics
Ram Sah, Ratan Jha, Lalit Jha, Pramod Kantha: Madhesi Diaspora, Pahadi Diaspora
Dalit Diaspora Calls For 20 Percent Reservation
Those In Nepal Should Take The Lead On Logistical Help From Diaspora
Diaspora Dynamics
Diaspora Logistical Help To The Movement
The Nepali Diaspora Contradiction: Would You Like Some Tea?

Some of the deficiencies of our organizations are that:
  • They seem to have no desire to go mass based. There is too much living room politics going on.
  • Too much elitism. No major membership drives. Elected officers end up from the same small group of people who all know each other. It is like a game of musical chairs.
  • Not enough transparency and democracy within the organizations.
  • Not enough use of Web 2.0.
  • Our sights are too low. There is seldom talk of immigrant rights.
  • No reach out to create a larger South Asian, Asian solidarity. Too much inward looking.
  • Not enough constructive, respectful engagement with our counterparts back home. You can't help people you look down upon.
  • The few umbrella organizations are in name only. Most organizations act autonomous. Not enough talk, not enough coordination.
  • I absolutely don't see the Beer Gorkhali thing on immigrant rights. We almost never bring that up as a topic.
I think progress on all these fronts would start with injecting democracy and transparency in the way we operate our organizations. And then we will have to lift our vision to seek equality for us in the diaspora. We will have to forge alliances. We will have to claim the Blac identity, Black Latino Asian Coalition.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]