Chennai Startup - Great Minds Dicuss Ideas

Just Dial

chennaistartup — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 11:26:32 +0000

HAILING from a non-business family, VSS Mani is a born entrepreneur. He undertook his first business venture when he was in his tweens. “I had organised a paid video show of Bruce Lee’s ‘Fist of Fury’ for family and friends,” fondly recollects Mani, Founder & Managing Director of India’s biggest search engine, JustDial. The likes of JRD Tata, Dhirubhai Ambani and Verghese Kurien have inspired him to his grand vision to touch the lives of millions of people with an enterprise. And thus was born JustDial

When asked what made him choose this field, he replies, “While working for a yellow pages company in 1989, in a casual discussion with a customer, I conceived this idea of a 24×7 telephonic product and service search engine.” The first version of this concept saw an early demise as it was way ahead of its times. But he was determined to restart the service and transform it into a successful enterprise. In 1996 he launched the current version of JustDial, subsequently adding other avatars–web, WAP and print, which achieved huge success.

Mr Mani tried different ideas (including the concept of a wedding planner) to survive and save money so that he could start JustDial. Started with some borrowed furniture and rented PCs in a small (10×30 feet) hired garage, today JustDial has over 86,000 customers across the nation and employs over 3500 people with offices in major cities across India. In a very short time, justdial.com has become probably the most frequented local search website in the country. Recalling the 20 years of his journey, Mr Mani says, “So far it has been wonderful; I loved every bit of challenge the market threw from time to time. This exciting journey had no dearth of tests and trials, problems and solutions.” Moreover, he enjoyed proving all the naysayers wrong, those who kept discarding all his efforts by branding them trash.

“We believe in a philosophy of small and continuous improvement on a daily basis; so it is difficult to pinpoint the milestones of this journey. Every day, every decision we took and every effort we put in were milestones,” he asserts. However, if he has to identify a few, he considers the trust and faith shown by international investors in JustDial, the wide acceptance of its pan-India service on the single national number ‘69999999’ and the phenomenal success of Justdial.com as the highlights of his journey.

It wasn’t a cakewalk. He encountered challenges at every step. But he had evolved a game plan to overcome these challenges, which proved successful. “The major issues were raising capital and convincing the advertisers about the feasibility of our idea. We surmounted them through intelligent pricing strategies and innovative ideas,” he affirms. Mr Mani’s success mantra is conviction and passion. “Of course, a good measure of common sense and simple thinking also helps,” he adds.

His ambition is to take the company to new heights in the next five years. Leaving a global footprint, and becoming a world leader in local search services, is his ultimate aim.

As a concluding note, his advice to entrepreneurs is, “First ask yourself why you want to become an entrepreneur? If you have the fire in your belly, and a bright new idea, please go ahead, or else revisit your decision. Being an entrepreneur is all about belief, passion, perseverance and hard work. There is no substitute to passionate desire, will-power and sustained hard work.”

Don Norman

chennaistartup — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 11:35:09 +0000

Products do not stand in isolation. They exist in the real, complex world, with unforgiving people, continual interruptions, and an unforgiving environment. How to cope? Think systems. Don’t be too logical. Realize that everything is both a service and a product. Understand that the total experience is more important than functions, the memory of the experiences is more important than the reality, and emotions are more important than logic. It’s all about experience.

Don Norman is the author or co-author of fourteen books, with translations into sixteen languages, including: The Design of Everyday Things, Things That Make Us Smart, and The Invisible Computer: Why good products can fail, the PC is so complex, and information appliances are the answer. Business Week has called this “the bible of the ‘post PC’ thinking.” His latest book, Emotional

Design: Why we love (or hate) everyday things, is available in 9 languages. This book marks the transition from usability to aesthetics, but with the emphasis on a well-rounded, cohesive product that looks good, works well, and gives pride to the owner.

Norman is cofounder of the Nielsen Norman Group, an executive consulting firm that helps companies produce human-centered products and services, Professor at Northwestern University, Prof. Emeritus of the University of California, San Diego, and co-director of Northwestern’s Segal Design Institute; founded by Crate & Barrel creators Gordon and Carole Segal. He has been Vice President of Apple Computer and an executive at Hewlett Packard. He was President of the Learning Systems division of UNext, an early, online education company.

Happy For No reason!

chennaistartup — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 09:37:39 +0000

When Buddha professed, “Life is suffering”, he was likely referring not to a gloomy picture of our lives of sadness and suffering but to the constant inner struggle we have with our thoughts and emotions. Thoughts are ceaselessly traveling to the past or to the future – what I did well, what could have been better for me, what I would love to happen and so on. These thoughts are not an occasional occurrence but are a human preoccupation. A human mind typically has over fifty thousand thoughts in a day – and, all these thoughts are accompanied by corresponding emotions. Thoughts of things going are accompanied by feelings of satisfaction and happiness; thoughts of things potentially going wrong lead to emotions of fear and anxiety. As a result, our moods and state of happiness is always at the mercy of our thoughts and emotions. Is there an alternate to this existence? Can one have greater equanimity, irrespective of the direction of thoughts? Can these thoughts be minimized?

As we attempt to answer these questions, we need to first recognize what causes these thoughts in the first place. It’s our ego. It’s the notions of ‘I’, ‘me’, and ‘mine’ that we grow up with, which develop a deep sense of independent personality and separateness of our identity. We then begin working towards our own survival and growth and can end up leading an entire life focused on pursuit of personal pleasures. This sense of duality (I am different from others) is the genesis of our thoughts. As long as we see ourselves disjointed from the whole, we will continue to feel incomplete and have thoughts driven by our craving for more (money, success, knowledge, happiness etc.) or fear of losing something that we already possess (money, power, reputation, happiness…).

While there are numerous methods out there to deal with this unending train of thoughts, one powerful approach is related to connecting with ‘awareness’ or ‘consciousness’. Awareness is not the mind, or our thoughts; it’s the consciousness which allows us to observe our mind, thoughts, and emotions. If we close our eyes and just focus on the thoughts that arise in our mind, it’s the awareness which allows us to notice these thought patterns and we can notice the observer as distinct from the thinker. We can then train to recognize that this awareness is like a mirror – it only reflects what the mind is going through, without any projections of its own. The mirror has no worries, fears, anger or cravings – its pure awareness, pure consciousness. All the thoughts and accompanying emotions arise in the mind, even though we experience them only through this awareness. As we begin to connect with this inner awareness, we start to realize that this awareness is who we really are. In our normal life, we are so busy with external stimulus that we lose connection with our true inner selves. We can simultaneously learn to comprehend that this awareness is omnipresent, and governs everything; all of us are made of it and that we are all connected and part of the same whole – the awareness continuum. Just observing ourselves, without paying attention to our circumstances or potential outcomes, can be a great way towards liberating ourselves of many of our inner struggles.

Being such a witness makes us realize we have no independent identity, which in turn reduces our ego and our overarching sense of separateness and duality. Instead, it initiates us into greater equanimity – that can assist us in reducing our continuous thoughts of craving and clinging, and of judging everything as good or bad. Cultivating equanimity can help us better normalize what the Buddhist teachings identify as the eight variations of our tendency to continually hope and fear – pleasure and pain, praise and blame, gain and loss, fame and disgrace. Practicing mindfulness (by staying connected with our awareness) and an attitude of equanimity can open us up to all types of experiences (pleasant or otherwise) with equal acceptance. In fact, if handled well, suffering can then become another opportunity for further learning and personal growth. Suffering can teach us greater compassion by helping us better appreciate the difficulty of others in similar situation.

Of course, one can argue against all these ideas with a “so what, who cares?” attitude. It is so possible to continue living without bothering to analyze these aspects in our daily existence. There’s also the question around, when and where do I begin, if at all? I reckon there are various perspectives to that. I believe we are all at different stages in the circle of life (not ahead of or behind any other) and spirituality works for those who need it at their stage for personal growth. Further, it makes eminent sense to start from wherever we are – we can never be too early for it or too late; our own time is the right one for us. Having said that, once we do become conscious of these aspects, it can be hard to ignore them any further. As Socrates said, “A life not examined is not worth living.” Socrates, who lived at a time not very different from Buddha’s, believed that each person is born with full knowledge of the ultimate truth and we need only be spurned to conscious reflection to become aware of it. Socrates went a step further, to also differentiate between this quest and other self-help processes. Like the contemporary self-improvement trend, there were the Sophists in ancient Greek, who Socrates felt were more driven by imparting worldly knowledge that could be used to further one’s own interests and not really interested in searching for the truth. Like many other philosophers and sages, he believed searching for the truth to be the deepest purpose of human life.

As Patanjali, the great Indian sage, said, “The Self is pure, free from decay and death, free from hunger and thirst and free from sorrow. This is the Spirit in man. The only thing this Spirit desires is truth. This is the Spirit that we seek and know: we must each find our own Self. When we have found our Self and gotten to know about it, we have reached the ultimate, and there is nothing more to desire.” In that context, any baby steps we can patiently take towards learning mindfulness, connecting with awareness, gaining equanimity, or striving towards the journey of truth, can greatly help us experience inner joy and peace. With that, more of our actions also tend to arise from pure motivation rather than from desires of gain and loss. We then also no longer need a reason to be happy!

(http://personalalchemyblog.blogspot.com/)

RECESSION – Reinventing Ourselves in Times of Trouble

chennaistartup — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 06:43:59 +0000

By Rajiv Vij – Life and Executive Coach

In the background of how the current economic and financial crisis is impacting individual lives and families, a leading Indian newspaper had recently asked me to write a short piece on some thoughts around reinventing ourselves in such challenging situations. The same is reproduced below.

Every time we are faced with a real personal crisis — loss of job, onset of a terminal illness, divorce or financial crisis — some of the questions that cross our mind are: Why did this happen to me? Will it ever get better? How will this impact my social position? It is only natural to start feeling down and feel anxious about the future. However, people who have weathered such storms, and whom I have had the opportunity to meet during my corporate career and my life coaching practice, usually say that the crisis was the best thing that happened to them. It made them to get off their treadmill of maddening activity and do some real soul searching towards creating a better and happier future.

Drawing from those experiences, it may be useful to look at ways of dealing with such crises in multiple dimensions.

First, it is critical to maintain a healthy sense of optimism about the future — not because we want to psyche ourselves into positive thinking but because things do get better from points of high pessimism. Surveys of people faced with a personal crisis demonstrate that the same people generally feel much better about themselves and life in general just a year after the initial event. It is equally important to have a strong sense of self-belief — the belief that not only will things get better, but that I will also have a meaningful role to play in it. As Graham Bell said, “When one door closes another door opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the ones which open for us.”

If the crisis involves some form of financial impact, it may be useful to also reflect on our needs and wants. In today’s consumerist society, we constantly want more — a bigger house, a flashier car, a new cellphone. Very often, unfulfilled wants may be the biggest source of disappointment and stress in our lives, and this is accentuated during adverse times. It may be pertinent to ask ourselves whether we need all these gadgets. In most cases, our needs are usually much simpler than our unending wants.

Further, crisis tests the strength of character. What differentiates the outstanding from the ordinary is not how well they do in good times, but how resilient they are through a crisis. As Albert Einstein said, “Most people say that it is the intellect which makes a great scientist. They are wrong: it is character.” Committing to living with core personal values in all aspects of our life builds character, which provides us with the inner strength to keep forging ahead, and the courage to see our failures as mere stepping stones in the quest for larger goals.

As they say, the Chinese characters for crisis mean both danger and opportunity. Indeed, a crisis may be an opportunity for unparalleled personal growth. We can easily spend a disproportionate amount of time ruminating over our losses or being anxious about the future. The question is when things do get better, will we be well prepared to take advantage of the new opportunities? Adversity offers the luxury of time to learn and hone new skills — enroll in hobbies or educational courses we always wanted to pursue but never had the time for, perhaps reflect on our true passions and give them shape — this may mean anything from starting a new business or community initiative to discovering latent writing skills.

Finally, such times also provide us with a unique opportunity to reflect on what’s most important to us—who am I and what is the purpose of my life? Am I pursuing a job, a career or my true calling? Do I want that investment banker job because of its lucrative prospects or because I find true purpose in that work? Engaging in our calling can inspire us to operate at a much higher level and away from the delimiting struggle around external success and recognition. As Patanjali, the great Indian sage, said, “When you are inspired by some great purpose, some extraordinary project, all of your thoughts break their bonds. Your mind transcends limitations, your consciousness expands in every direction, and you find yourself in a new, great and wonderful world. Dormant forces, faculties and talents become alive, and you discover yourself to be a greater person by far than you ever dreamed yourself to be.”

TiE – Success Stories

chennaistartup — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 11:31:05 +0000

RedBus – Riding RedBus with a Mouse Click (Bangalore, India)

SafeMed – Lifesaving Answers in Seconds (San Diego, USA)

Chitika – Connecting Brands, Bloggers & Buyers (Boston, USA)

Kaboodle – In The Cutting Edge (Silicon Valley, USA)

Cucumba – Resurgence of Stressed Out Souls (London, UK)

Full Story @ TiE Global

India’s first-of-its-kind online bus travel portal was extensively supported by TiE Bangalore. This led to the birth of a new industry with redBus enabling passengers to select seats from digital layout and choose from multiple travel operators to pay online using secure payment gateway. This eager start-up company is pioneering a revolution on the roads at the click of a mouse involving search technologies and an entrepreneurial drive that helps offline deliveries.

You can book bus tickets online or over mobile phone and even get home delivery. Booking is possible at over 30,000 plus outlets with over 250 bus travel operators covering over 3600 routes across India and this is growing! Return reservation and cancellation online are also part of the facility offered in 6 languages.

During Diwali 2006 – the festival of lights, when all flat mates went home, Phanindra Sama of Texas Instruments desperately tried to find a bus that would take him to Hyderabad with no success. This was a major driving factor for Phanindra to launch the portal redBus.in along with his BITS-Pilani friends Sudhakar Paspunuri at IBM and Charan Padmaraju in Honeywell. Over weekends, they began building a software to help people find buses suiting them. At that point, they did not think of quitting jobs and it was simply a weekend project. The gamble worked as this site received over 100,000 hits and booked at least 500 tickets daily, encouraging bus providers to register with it.

Full Story @ TiE Global

SafeMed, a San Diego based healthcare technology company has a bold vision of what the future of healthcare will look like. It’s a future where patients collaborate with their doctors to improve their own health. It’s a future where doctors go beyond simple information gathering on websites or databases to access insightful, patient-specific answers in seconds. And it’s a future that some TiE members are helping SafeMed to forge.

Full Story @ TiE Global

In 2003, Alden DoRosario, Chitika’s co-founder and CTO along with Venkat Kolluri, CEO, noticed that advertisers were not yet paying attention to the opportunities in the “long tail web” comprising small to medium sized sites. Whereas, web logs (now known as blogs) were clearly being viewed as valuable unbiased information sources by online consumers. It was pretty much expected that advertisers will soon start re-directing their marketing budgets to focus more on web logs. However, at that point, there were no affordable solutions or services available in the market that small to medium sites could use to initiate advertising or e-commerce services on their sites. This prompted both DoRosario and Kolluri to recognize that small to medium websites will soon turn out to be the most lucrative arenas for online advertising.

Full Story @ TiE Global

It all started when Manish Chandra and his wife Asha were remodeling their home in 2004. “The whole process of internet shopping and collaborating between us and the decorator was really painful. We forgot which store we liked and it was hard to discover new products on the web.” To make their lives easier as well as the lives of millions of others, Manish started Kaboodle, a social shopping community.

Stella, Vivienne and the Cucumba team are on a mission to transform a nation of stressed-out, overworked souls into pampered and polished people. The aim is to transform the industry through an innovative concept where the client simply buys treatments according to the time they need or their budget.

Cucumba started trading in September 2005. A lack of capital and low initial take- up of services meant near bankruptcy and closure in March 2006. Vivienne attended a TiE event in autumn 2006 and met charter member Stuart Nicol, who has become her mentor and advisor.

CEO & EGO

chennaistartup — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 08:31:44 +0000

Excerpts from Accidental CEO – David Novak

Is ego every CEO’s biggest enemy?
Ego leads to arrogance and arrogance leads to blindness. So you have to create an environment where people keep your ego under check. I believe that you don’t look up or down when you deal with people. Just look straight at them.

Wisdom from Warren Buffet
The things that Warren said have definitely left a big impact and will have an even greater impact as we go forward. He said—‘Put your ego in your business performance, not your stock price’.

And he said, ‘Make sure you constantly do what’s right over the long term’ and ‘If you do the right thing, you’ll ultimately get rewarded in the marketplace’.

When I met him for the first time, I did not have much experience of dealing with Wall Street. So I asked him for advice on that. He said— ‘Tell people that you’re in a very competitive industry’. Be very honest about that fact. Tell them that you’re not going to be right everyday, but you’re going to be more right than wrong because your business is solid and you’re ultimately going to end up on a winning place.’

He said that in a retail business, you’ve got to be right every single day. There’s a day-to-day intensity associated with retail. He said to ‘just tell people the good, the bad and the ugly’, so we’re totally transparent with our investors. We tell them what’s working and what’s not. That was very, very helpful.

Click here for the article @ Economic Times

Chennai Events

chennaistartup — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 20:57:48 +0000

“Tiding over Difficult Times by Gopinath Ganapathy” 25th Nov 08 @ 6.30 pm The Residency Towers, T.Nagar organized by Chennai TiE.

Registration contact – sharon.henry (at)

Gopinath Ganapathy is Founder, President & CEO of Essentia,

Founder of Enlite Networks serving as it’s President and CEO from inception in 1999 until it’s acquisition by CollabNet in 2003.

Ph.D. from University of Texas at Austin with numerous patents and publications.

Chennai Open Coffee Club – 7 Dec 08, 3 pm

http://chennaiopencoffee.ning.com/

Past

Fail Camp - 16 Nov 08, 9 – 5 pm.

http://barcamp.org/failcamp

TiE Chennai – All about Successful Exits - 19 Nov 08

@ Rain Tree by Jeyan Raman Kutty.

www.chennai.tie.org, sharon.henry (at) chennai.tie.org

http://chennaitiechennaifund.ning.com/events/event/show?id=2506335:Event:17

Bad Economy and Startups / Entrepreneurship

chennaistartup — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 19:47:50 +0000

Excerpts from Paul Graham

Paul Graham

If we’ve learned one thing from funding so many startups, it’s that they succeed or fail based on the qualities of the founders.

Which means that what matters is who you are, not when you do it.If you’re the right sort of person, you’ll win even in a bad economy. And if you’re not, a good economy won’t save you.

Fortunately the way to make a startup recession-proof is to do exactly what you should do anyway: run it as cheaply as possible.

So maybe a recession is a good time to start a startup. It’s hard to say whether advantages like lack of competition outweigh disadvantages like reluctant investors. But it doesn’t matter much either way.

It’s the people that matter. And for a given set of people working on a given technology, the time to act is always now.

Visit for full article - www.paulgraham.com

Praveen Travels – Rs.50,000 to Rs.120 Crores

chennaistartup — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 09:45:28 +0000

Praveen Travels

Read this amazing growth. Parveen Travels, which opened shop with just over Rs 50,000 in the bank in 1980, did business worth Rs 120 crore last year.

As a 14-year-old, Afzal enjoyed going on rides in his father’s lorry. Often on these trips, the boy would dream of owning a fleet of cars and buses. Afzal’s father, Allah Baksh, ran a taxi service out of a small office in Purasawalkam, with a few cabs and lorries to transport cargo.

Afzal graduated with a bachelor’s degree in zoology and joined the family business.

“I was not keen on expanding the lorry business. I felt passionate about the transport industry and wanted to do something innovative,” he reminisces.

In 1981, the company purchased its first bus. “We were not keen on seeking financial help as we knew the bankers would not support us. So, we explored options that were within our limits, based on how much we earned in a given year,” recalls Afzal. To purchase new vehicles, the company put in half the amount and got loans for the remaining.

Later on introduced night service or point-to-point operations.

A Logistics division was added in the late 80s. Cargo was initially transported on the roof of the vehicles and later in cargo trucks, when the company bagged sufficient number of orders.

Parveen today owns and operates 1,000 vehicles, of which 750 are buses

The company also prides itself on its “accidentfree transportation” and swift replacements if a vehicle breaks down. “If the bus is within city limits, we replace it with one of our own vehicles within 30 minutes. All the buses are fitted with GPRSbased vehicle tracking devices.

They introduced online ticketing four years ago, allowing passengers to print their own tickets.

Despite its success, the family is wary of investors. “Many investors had approached us. But once an outsider comes, they will have their own ideas about running the business. We may not be able to take decisions on our own,” he says.

The company employs 2,000 people, 37 branches. As part of its employee welfare activities, Parveen Travels runs an institute for its drivers in Madhavaram where they are trained in driving skills, fitness, yoga, and undergo regular eyetests. Every year, the top three performers among the children of company drivers are provided financial support.

Saravana Bhavan “Annachi” Rajagopal – Cleaner boy to owner of most successful chain of restaurant

chennaistartup — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 13:04:05 +0000

Rajagopal started his career as a cleaner in a hotel… Today Saravana Bhavan has 25 outlets in India and 22 outlets in 7 countries.

First he started a provisional store in K K Nagar in Chennai.

The sales representatives who came to their shop, one day said casually , “Sir, dispose of us quickly. This is lunch time. There is no hotel in this area” triggered his thinking.

He was running the store successfully, but fell into debts after he purchased and built a 2 storied building.

A person was running Kamatchi Bhavan in his building unsuccessfully and looking for buyers.

While eating the Prasadam (food offered to Lord), returning from Thiruthani an idea was born to takeover the Kamatchi Bhavan and discussed the same with his friend Ganapathi. Rajagopal is believer of horoscope and there are some indications he will prosper in hotel business.

Then he sold the building to Rathna Nadar with agreement that he can still run the store in the same building by paying rent. He bought Kamatchi Bhavan and made some changes.

He named the hotel “Saravana Bhavan” since the idea came while eating the Prasadam (Saravana is another name of lord Muruga).

The first hotel was opened on December 14, 1981 by Rathana Nadar. Because of no experience in running a hotel he and his partner Ganapathi worked very hard from 6.00 am to 11.00 pm. His wife Valli also helped him.

Rajagopal desired to run a hotel which would earn a name for excellent food.

He used quality grocery and oil and incurred a loss as predicted by others.

He set apart Rs.50,000/- to compensate the loss. He incurred a loss of Rs.10,000/- every month.

From 6th month the sales increased. For the first anniversary he supplied 23 items for just Rs.5 and there was too much of crowd and police has to control the crowd.

Then it is all history now….

In his own word “This success was not success easilty achieved. The success was due to the hard work put in by me and my partner Ganapathi. I should refer to my devotion to God also in the same breath. It is no exaggeration to say that I achieved this success only because of of Lord Murugan’s grace”.

His autobiography “I set my heart on Victory” is available in Saravana Bhavan book stalls.