• Since the tweet went out  yesterday, we got a few calls from Airtel. They are looking into the issue. They promised a resolution in 24 hours. Wednesday 23/Nov 1:38pm.
• Thanks to the guys at MyAkosha who have been helping to atleast get the Collection agency calls to stop. A call an hour was driving me mad.
• Have sent an email to TRAI to the Director of Broadband Services, explaining the issue. Wednesday 24/Nov 2:24pm
• Nitin of Corp Comm calls and says its unfortunate that he has to say the “stereotypical answer” – That I will have to pay and the bill is valid. Reason: the plan was a 50GB plan and everything beyond that was billed, and its not an unlimited plan. I quite remember that thats not what the technician who came over to switch the plans said. They also cant prove that there has been heavy usage. Nov 23 3:00pm
• No updates at all on 24th November.
• Had a brief chat in a Radio Programme on Chennai Live in the Breakfast Show about this issue. Got a call from Someone in Airtel Chennai wanting to do a Sit down. Have suggested if they could solve this problem rather than getting into negotiation mode. Time is a bit of a constrain. She thanked for the time and hung up. Still waiting for a resolution. November 25th
• Still remains unresolved. I get a few calls from Collection agencies, I iterate the whole story, and never hear from them again. Feb 1, 2012

Hi. My Name is Vijay Anand and I run a small business which is a few months old. It essentially means everything is tied to budgets and we cannot afford to make lavish expenses. The rule is simple, if we go on that path, we won’t live to tell the tale about it.

When we setup the space, our first logical choice was  Airtel to power our broadband. Why? This is a company that we have been proud of. Ive been with IIT Madras for the past six years and when we talk to people about how amazingly well we do in terms of the telecom infrastructure, and how we can deliver world class infrastructure at prices people cannot imagine, the first brand to quote has been Airtel.  So Airtel it was. I am not going to say we had issues with the installation, all went fine. It took a bit of time, but it was up.

By default we were set on a 256kbps Plan, but upgraded it to the Airtel 8mbps, 50Gb plan. It would set us back by about 3K each month, 2999Rs Plus taxes and we were fine with it. I asked the technician, what would happen once we cross the 50GB. His answer was that it would drop to a 256kbps “fair-use” pipe, and there were no additional charges involved. All was good and I was so far, happy.

The first month goes off and I get an SMS towards the end of the month saying that the unbilled amount is somewhere around Rs.60,000. My heart almost stops for a second. No sooner I get a call  from a representative who says that my credit limit has been breached and we need to make payment immediately. I ask him what is my other option. He says we can wait for the bill to be generated. I am not sure why we are even having this conversation if the bill hasnt been generated so I take the option. Lo and behold, the billing cycle date arrives, and I get an SMS saying the total is some Rs. 3000 Rs. Apparently they have been monitoring and billing me on a per KB metric and then once the plan got slapped on it, it went back to the Plan.

This Shock and relief went on for Three months. We got the service in May, and June and July went on the same way but somehow mysteriously they would all align to the 3K that i had signed up for.Bills were settled. I realized that they had a rather weird way of going about this. When I spoke to customer care, their suggestion was to ask the credit limit team to increase my limit so that I wouldn’t get those calls. I wasn’t even sure why I was “owing” 60K when my plan clearly wasn’t supposed to go beyond 3K. I let that pass.

Why do I have to worry about how Airtel goes about dealing with Billing? Unfortunately I should have. (Someone else has a blog post on it here)

August arrives, and I get the same SMS. By this time I am thinking that I should ignore it. The credit limit team hasnt called me yet, which I thought was a surprise. But then the bill arrives, for 35K. I am shocked out of my life, but say to myself that the team forgot to slap the plan on this time and hence the issue. Even in the previous bills, I would get an attachment of “per KB usage” and billed to some atrocious amount and then reduced to 3K. I call customer care and let them know the issue. I am told that they upgraded a billing software and its causing havoc everywhere, but it will get fixed. I’ve never had an issue with Airtel never fixing their issues once brought to their notice, so I consider it as work done and carry on with my business (literally)

I get a bill the next month – I am wondering by now how they never bothered to try to get me to pay the amount. I remember a few calls coming in from collection agencies but I told them that there is a billing dispute and they hung up and never bothered to call back. So August passes by and September comes in. My billing cycle is on the 16th of every month. I get a bill saying 35K Outstanding, and another 30K something on top of it. That brings it to the awesome total of some 65K due. I call the customer care again and leave a ticket. (Ticket ID 4757836). After wading through the maze that the airtel customer care is, he laughs about the issue says its definitely an error and tells me it will get fixed by Oct 4th. Again I believe them.

I get a bill on the 18th of October stating that I have 67K + 38,599 pending to a sum total of 1,05,938 Rs. Just stop here for a second and think about how off we are. For a Plan that is priced at 3K, totalling to a business expense of 10K, we were being billed 10 times more.

Airtel Bill

And thats when I realized that the Nightmare had begun.

The interesting thing is that nothing has changed from our end. We are a business, so there is no massive downloads going on here, even though promptly airtel sends the Speed on Demand note a few days into our every DNS resolution. I’ll get to that in a minute. But you might be curious how life was before August right? Here’s a snapshot.

So that was our “Regular” signed up bill amount and payments made. What we couldnt explain was where it was before and what it jumped to, for no apparent reason. The biggest download that I know of that happened here was the OSX Lion Update and the iOS 5.0 update. I am sure there were a few other downloads, people download ISOs of various work environments as they setup AWS instances, but nothing that can substantiate us EVER crossing 50GB. Period.

The Big Analysis:

1. Technician during first call says there was a mistake because of the billing software upgrade. Did something happen there?

2. In one of the later calls, one of the technicians mentioned that they “accidentally” switched plans and that was the mistake.

3. I still am not sure how they could accidentally switch us from, to what. After the 50GB was over (lets just assume that Airtel DOES calculate it right, because I am hearing from several people that it starts showing that they have used up bandwidth way before the time and even in cases where people were not at home), it drops us into a 256kbps connection. Why would they charge us atrocious rates for that?

4. You will notice from the snapshot of bill below (this was one of the lowest) that there is a significant download beyond the 50GB. Is the claim that this was done on a 256kbps? Really?

For those of you who are interested in seeing the bill in its entirely. Here’s a link:

Note: You will realize that there are multiple instances of “sessions” there and it all adds up to a lot of hours in a day – sometimes way more than 24 hours? Assuming that they are timestamps, it still doesnt add up to the fact that on a 256kbps connection, past the 50GB (I am still assuming that it somehow magically happened) you can download so much in that timespan.

One or many of these things happened here:

1. Airtel seriously screwed up their billing system

2. They have no clue how to monitor usage. There are countless folks who are testifying to that affect.

3. They accidentally switched plans and put me from a capped plan to a per usage plan. But somehow we still got the “You have finished your quota, click on Speed on Demand” page, and had internet crawling at 256kbps

4. They sold the receivable to a collection agency who is calling, and despite technicians calling and agreeing that there has been an issue, not able to do anything.

5. Corp Comm (thats what they claim, though Mahesh Murthy says they are Customer Care) team claims that they close tickets even before they are resolved, right after they make the call. I’ve had more than a dozen calls with these people and with the struggle that it takes to get through customer care. Everytime its a matter of repeating the story over and over again.

6. There is no one there with logic in the team. I keep getting their answer that they are investigating. How does a 3K “fixed price plan” by any measure cross more than that amount. Whats there to investigate? No idea.

7. I really wish they could have told me whatever they are saying about fixed plans etc, in the first bill when I raised an issue. Customer Care blatantly told me its a billing issue and it will be resolved and three months went by, while they billed away atrociously. Why couldnt they tell me that this was a plan issue and i need to upgrade to a better plan then itself? And why did the guy who come to meet me and explain the plan, say with so much confidence – despite repeated asking – that it was an unlimited plan?

It takes sweat and blood to build a business in India. One request is that Airtel not add to that burden. It would greatly help.

There is a trend going on on twitter under the hashtag #airtel. Do join in if you’d like to understand more about this.

The audience of 200 odd individuals, with aspirations and dreams bigger than the world could possibly contain, fell silent for a minute hoping for me to say that I was just joking. I wasn’t though. Let me explain:

My Good mentor had two things to say: One was the question that he haunted me with for almost a year. “Success in one in a million”, he would say. The question to follow was as to whether I would still want to be an entrepreneur. One could possibly win the lottery with such oddds, he would add.

In today’s world with such feel good movies and books on entrepreneurship, such questions sound at best, outdated, doesn’t it? He even managed to go find some out-of-print books, stating tales of entrepreneurs – extremely well skilled and the best of intentions, who still ended up broke[1]. That, was a wake up call. (For those interested, pick up a copy of Nevil Shute’s Slide Rule) [2]

The equally weighted statement that followed, and was often repeated was this: “There is only one rule with startups”, he would say; “Birds fly, Fishes Swim and startups die.” While I gasped for breathe hearing those words, he would utter the words that were wisdom crystalized: “It takes a miracle to build a startup, and to make it succeed”

“Its nothing short of a Miracle”

Think about it: A startup is everything against nature and the oddds. You are a team of two, if blessed one or two more – with nothing more than a brilliant idea (which, incidentally is not worth much). You have every possible resource under constraint and you have to take on the world. Miracle, might be too gracious of a word.

I believe the world has rather glorified the nature of an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs are who they are, and even after knowing the stark and bleak reality before them still dare go out to change the world, because thats the only way they know how to live. To want to become an entrepreneur, is madness. If at some point in your life you realize that you are not an entrepreneur, my advice is that you look up to the stars, thank God for it, and go off to live your life. Entrepreneurship is not a lifestyle, its the way that you are wired, and the only way you know how to live. Jerome S. Engel of the Haas School of Business, at Berkeley put it as, “Entrepreneurship is the pursuit of opportunity beyond the resources you currently control”. I think he was being really nice and diplomatic there. There is lot of luck, hard work, timing and hustling involved – even beyond which at times, things fail. Honestly, they most probably will.

“Genius and Madness: Whats the difference?”

I’ve often come across amazing entrepreneurs, who at first sight, were mistaken for those with a loose screw in their head. Genius resembles insanity; and its extremely hard to differentiate the two at times. The saying goes that “Everyone is a crank till the idea succeeds” – It couldn’t be said better. I strongly believe that entrepreneurs and Artists are very much alike in their thought processes – both have the innate ability to create something out of nothing. What is stuck in their head most times is a reality that is only relevant and known to them and no one else quite gets it, till it can be seen functional in the realm of reality. I am surprised when Entrepreneurs are shocked that investors are not investing in “Ideas” – these supposed madness which only exists in their head. Seriously? You are?

If that is the truth, why do people willingly choose to become an entrepreneur? I doubt, this is something that can be taught. It can be imitated to some degree, but when push comes to shove, reality would reveal itself.

“Know your core”

Time and time again, I also see entrepreneurs get priorities all wrong: Everyone is waiting on that big idea. The entrepreneur, the substance he or she is made up of is what is the core of it all. What follows closely second is the insight into how things work. The product or idea is the secondary derivative of the first two. Get that right. Invest all the time and energy that you possibly can to strengthen that core.

“Stand where you are, Spin and create a vortex”

Entrepreneurs never crib as to where they are. Whether they live in New York, Silicon Valley, London, Estonia, Bangalore, Tokyo or in Shimla, real entrepreneurs find a way to make their mark. I’d even dare say that they are the only ones who are capable of making that mark. They carry that insight that no one else does, to make it work. The insight is what accelerates that product-market fit that everyone keeps talking about these days. Insight drives adoption, and forms the basis for your marketing strategies. Everything you can possibly think about in terms of execution and a clean cut one at that, is built on the insight of an industry and the problem. What do you know that no one else knows about? That’s where it all begins.

If you look at any successful entrepreneur, its rarely that they had the world handed to them in a platter. No matter where they were, if what one is working on is indeed novel, and is really looking to disrupt the way as we know it, it will demand that the whole world change itself – just a little bit – sit up and take notice. There is never going to be an “ecosystem” that is waiting for you to show up and do your magic. Real entrepreneurs,.. eh entrepreneurs, are capable of creating vortexes where they stand. They are the Archimedes of the present generation who, with a lever and a place to stand can move the world. Even when it looks like they are standing in the middle of a barren dessert, they can spin so fast, that they can attract like-minded people around them, challenge the norm, polarize people and make the world take notice. While they are at it, they’ll even manage to sell it to them.

“A skill mastered never goes to waste”

Most of these fabulous folks are also skilled. I’d never in my right mind bet on someone who is not an expert at atleast one thing. Great Entrepreneurs almost always have more than one skillset. They can code, they can design, they can sell, negotiate, speak, write, hustle – and its in various combinations of what’s known and unknown.

Step back for a minute here and think about it: To create something – not transform as what Newton talked about, but to create – from scratch, is almost an act of God. To bring into life something that never existed before; That doesn’t happen so easily. In the Indian mythology, all Gods have multiple hands, and it is supposed to signify the multiple facets of their personality, and character. There might be something of ancient wisdom in that to draw upon, and to learn that to create something, you almost can never have enough skills. If you are one of those kinds that flaunt that you can’t crunch numbers even if your life depended on it, you will very soon realize that entrepreneurship will hand you that opportunity. Be prepared.

“Bury what is dead and is past its time”.

A dead child in your hand is still going to start rotting away and stink. If its dead, the only question to ask is to find a way to bury it, and move on.

“Do we practice Shiva enough?”

A colleague once asked me that question. What caught me puzzled at first, led me to an ephiphany soon enough. Indian mythology states that there is the God of creation and the God of destruction (and there are plenty of Gods for just about everything under the sun – perhaps signifying everything has its place). Nothing ever gets created out of thin air, but in most cases is a better version of what existed before. If that is the case, without destroying something, what can you really create? In a recent TED talk,Economist Tim Harford talks about how we need to abandon our God complex and realize that the most elegant of our solutions arrive by trial and error. A wise man once said “if we are scared to experiment, then we must also admit that we aren’t open to innovating”. Its a rather abused word, and i’d avoid it if I can, but the statement couldn’t be more right. If you are running a startup and its been years and there is no light at the end of that tunnel, perhaps its time to admit that something is wrong and the Universe (or logically, the Market) is trying to say something. Learn something out of it by having a moment of introspection and rise up from those ashes. I am at times amazed as to how many different variations of that simple truth is expounded to us through all the various traditions – that death is the foundation of life, as long as it through its life had contributed for something better. In other words, Iterate, evolve and accelerate that cycle. If you do it right, and if you are a fast learner, it will look like what you unveil, came out of nowhere – and almost out of nothing.

“Evolve Holistically. Monster or Perfection”

While you are at all this, ensure that you evolve holistically. a well rounded entrepreneur has several things going on for them, and has to evolve in several fronts: The product, The business model, the team / company and in you as a person. Invest and focus in all of them – don’t start looking like that guy from Night Shyamalan’s movie “Lady in the Water”, evolving just one bit of your body and ignoring the rest.

“Everything in its time”

Take your company through the stages that it demands. You are not rambo, so don’t attempt to go in guns blazing. Anyone who looks at your business and day one and can’t see scale should be hit in the head with a paper, and greeted with a “DUH”. Models as I mentioned earlier, evolve over time, and startups have phases that they go through. Cross the stage of assumptions, to the stage of strengthening your value proposition, to the stage of modeling scale and then you’d face the challenges of ensuring that you can manage profitability and margins as you grow and then comes the function of non-linear scale. Each of this is a challenge at different timelines of an enterprise. To want to have answers for all of this on day -1, or expecting to, is just ridiculous. Sooner or later you will manipulate the excel sheet trying to do that – and since it can’t fight back with you on reality, you’ll dupe yourself into a vicious reality. Its even worse when you get funded on the basis of that. Don’t.

“You sure You Know the Product?”

“Remember at all times” said my mentor, “That the entrepreneur is the final product. Everything that you do, the skills that you possess, the skills that you groom, the products that you envision, the enterprises that you create, the networks you build, all are adding up to one final product – You.”

When put that way, you’ll realize that backing an entrepreneur who doesn’t have the necessary skills is like equipping a tool which doesn’t have the features to get the job done. Never shy away from learning a skill. It is the quirks and skills (at times not at all related to the task at hand) that fuel out-of-the world ideas. Ahti Heinla the founding architect of Skype, mentioned in a conversation that the reason why the quality of sound was a crucial element for the team, was because he was an audiophile. How do you ever factor that into a requirement document? Never. As an entrepreneur, it helps to fuel your eccentricities and nitpickings.

Before I forget, Yep I know that I started off with a controversial statement that most entrepreneurs are fake. I’d still stand by it. I believe most are misguided. There are raging discussions that I have come to witness where there are definitions for an “accidental” entrepreneur drafted, and businessmen and traders wanting to be part of the entrepreneurial club. Back off for a second and ask yourself one question: Have you ever created something out of nothing? Think long and hard. If you are honest with yourself, most of us will realize that that’s a question to answer over a life time, definitely not even over the experience of building one or two companies (Its Sheer luck, if you can). Someday when our time is near, and we reflect on that question, we just might be able to say yes – we took something that was just a radical idea stuck in our head, created an invisible vortex, and created something that didn’t exist before and when it came to life, it changed the world as we knew it. That’s the sign of a true entrepreneur. If you know anyone like that, I’d love to say hello.

- Vijay Anand

[1] Gutenberg, the man credited for changing the way we as a civilization share information, and inventor of the printing press, was quite an astounding failure as an entrepreneur and died broke.

[2] http://www.amazon.com/Slide-Rule-Nevil-Shute/dp/1842322915

Reposted from the Author’s Blog

1. Numbers have a tendency to Skew / Average reality.

Talk to two people who have very very different needs, and you do your usual analysis and do the average. Build a product and you will realize that neither of them want it now. It solves neither one’s problem in the right / perfect manner.

2. Without Context, Information is dangerous.

Our mind in a lot of ways loves to work backwards. We come up with a theory and then try to justify it with some statement made somewhere, and Google is the perfect friend to help make that case for you. You can most probably find a supporting statement for any positional stand on the web – if luck has it, even by some guy who lived in the 14th century.

3. Data can often can go both ways – sometimes meaning multiple things.

Let me quote an example. As part of my usual routine you login into facebook and you see a note by a good friend which says “ Live-In relationships decrease in economic prosperity and vice versa. The % of live in’s have jumped since 2008 with the economic slump.”

My mind jumps to the following conclusions, and rather quickly because the said friend is reputable and hence I dont even ask for the source of this data. Secondly, if you didnt hear about this similar context / conversation before, one would believe this to be true. Here how interpretation works:

Scenario 1: I believe that love is a concept of the stupor and people are always rational and moving towards financial efficiency, in which case, the above said statement strenghthens my case.

Scenario 2: If you talk to any matrimonial site owner, they’ll tell you that during times of economic slumps, people actually get more active on a site. More weddings happen, and ten months later, more babies are born. – Could it be that we are all getting more and more career driven (Gen Y tendency) and ignoring relationships, and a “economic slump” actually gives us the time and reality check to focus on relationships, build, and maybe live-ins and weddings are the much due response thats delayed and finally happening?

Truth is, we’d never know. And you also realize that this conclusion, as persuasive as it is, is also an “average” – a summary. There WILL be people who are doing it for love, people doing it for economical reasons, the darn luck ones doing it for both, and all sorts of variations in between.

Market analysis, isn’t as easy as it sounds does it. We need to acknowledge that there are strands of target groups, and if you are really targeting a specific population, dig deeper till you get the finest amount of detail, to understand motives, context and possible economic behavior. If you do, you might find some rather – unshocking, and predictable results, when you do do your pilot run, and most of all your depiction of ideal customer will actually be succinct with clarity.

Here’s some information that might be helpful. Not all Shares are created Equal. Yep, thats a fact.

Most of you might be aware that there are two distinct classes of equity – the Common Stock and then there is the preferred Stock – which is what the investors usually go for – which means that in the case of a liquidity, the Investors get to take their money out (with some agreed multiple) before anyone else – including the founder get to touch the money. This is more or less common knowledge.

What is less known is that you can infact create multiple classes of shares within the company. There is this other kind of stock commonly referred to as Class B shares (at times also used to refer to Preferential Stock if they have higher voting rights) – in which case you can significantly drop the rights and priviledges that one can have in the company – such as board rights, or the right to interfere in management. Why is this important?

Imagine a situation where you are building a company and you have plenty of friends and family around you who are willing to give you money. One of the first things you do not want to do is give them equity shares (or Common Stock) – which basically gives them direct rights into the company and gives them a say in the management and board of the company. Apart from reasons that it might become a nightmare to manage their interests, its also important cause if everyone of your friends is sitting on the board – so to speak – and carries one vote each, no investor in their right mind is going to come onboard that company and represent himself in a board that closely resembles a circus than anything else.

So the option in such scenarios would be to create a different class of shares, with the least amount of managerial rights and priviledges and allocate as much of that as possible. You will also note that in such a scenario even if the founder holds 10,000 shares (for example) and the collective Class B share holding is more than thrice that, and even if one single holding is more than the holding of the founder, it still doesnt affect the control that the Founder has to run the company. So that’s quite helpful to preserve some sanity.

As in all things you also want to be fair to those who invest into your company. Class B shares usually have what is called Redemption periods – a set time period as to when the shareholders will make an exit, and also there is a pre-defined rate at which they will exit. In some cases the Class B share holders are also given dividends – at times accrued and given at the time of exit – a percentage from the profit margin (a rough number is usually less than 10%).

Overall, Its an interesting way to structure a company – when you are raising money from friends and family, there is a lot of uncertainty as to whether its charity, and when they would get their money back – these terms would define that in black and white and quite nicely. It becomes the collateral for the loan – in a shade of equity, without complicating it too much. Also you avoid the situation where one of them might come back and ask for the money back before its time – like they’d do with a fixed deposit. Such little things can create a lot of problems with the operations of the company and you would want to avoid that.

I would strongly recommend that you spend time on this before you leap off to setup a company. Assuming that the Venture Capital Industry is not yet ready, and less than 1% of the populace will actually get institutional funding, it helps to know alternatives and plan accordingly.

Note: For the Curious, as per the Corporate Act of India, You can have upto 50 investors/shareholders in a company.

There is common perception that startups are entities who are low on resources, are always constrained by talent and time, and have none of the perks that bigger companies enjoy. That statement couldn’t be more wrong. Startups are infact by definition, entities that are extremely good at what they do, can deliver the next generation of quality and experience at half the cost. If your startup doesnt live up to that promise, its a sure sign that something is seriously wrong.

Lets think about the Logic of this whole matter for a minute. There are bigger companies with loads of cash and resources, and the network to go after the same market that you are aiming for. The only standing chance that a startup has is if you are amazingly good at what you do.

Thats exactly where Malcolm’s theory comes in. Every business has certain crucial aspects. If its a technology company, you are going to need someone who has great R&D background, one who has solid understanding of business and the markets and someone who can manage finances and play complementary roles. You Have to be the absolute best in what you are. When starting up, its worth asking yourself that question, as the destiny of the company you start very much depends on it. If you dont have a skill, its time to sharpen it. 10,000 hours to go!

But we are not nearly where we’d like to be.

Lets also have a bit of background here. We must humbly acknowledge that certain things existed even before we all arrived at the scene. There is nothing new under the sun says Solomon who was apparently one of the wisest man to roam the earth and he possibly could have been true. A report by the committee on National Enterprises clocks the number of Small and Medium enterprises in India at 32 Million. Yep, you read that right, its 32 million! 40% of the gross manufacturing GDP is a contribution of this sector of the industry. One of every ten Indian is employed by an SME. If you thought startups became fashionable in the past three years, we would be very misguided. That said, there is a sudden trend and confidence emerging that India too can build world-class companies. That sentiment is a recent one.

Though it was the camp at Proto.in, that initiated some of the key initiatives to drive this change, its no doubt that today there are several entities – all very key elements who have started to play a role in shaping this landscape. The purpose of this series is hopefully to point out some of the obvious things that we are going to have to work towards – so that we dont contend ourselves thinking that we’ve arrived.

I’ve thought about it, mulled it, discussed, debated and fought over it, but simplistically it comes down to this. Startups need two very crucial elements that we need to build in order to nurture them.

a) Media Focus
b) Capital

I’d also add a third component of Mentorship/Networks, but I am going to presume for a second that that onus can be laid upon the entrepreneur as there are several means and ways to compensate for that (linkedin, included) for now.

Media Focus:
Let me be very very honest here. There are several attempts by everyone involved in this space trying to get some coverage in the media, but there is a serious issue with the focus here. ET’s Ideas competition included, the focus somehow seems very much on the initiative than on the entrepreneurs. This goes for the Proto.in camp as well – while sometimes its nice to rest on our laurels, we have to constantly remind ourselves that we are just a mere platform and our success is when the companies we help succeed. We have got to do better in this. I know we can.

There are shows on television which as of now seem to be doing a better job at this than what most of the “showcase” events have managed to do, and its quite sad that thats the level of comparison we are at. Rest assured that there are also going to be equally enough efforts from the media to want to sensationalize it, and even make an emotional outcry out of entrepreneurs, dreams, hopes and dreams smashed, and its sooner or later meant to happen, but one of the things seriously lacking is the media network and lack of focus for startups.

Things we ought to do in this space:

a) There is a serious need for a authoritative blog that covers startups, and the emerging verticals.

b) There is also a need for a firm to start analysing the emerging market, as the value chains shift, and to help companies position themselves based on that. Such a company could almost become “the” means to start categorizing and analysing, comparing startups systematically.

c) We need more journalists who could write about entrepreneurship and startups with a solid understanding. There are very few right now (like Snigdha Sengupta) who can do such analysis as of now.

d) Everyone has this question. Every platform, Bplan Competition, Entrepreneurship summit seems to showcase 10-15 companies. What really happens to these companies after that? Do they get funded, attract clients, sign on anyone significant, strike any key alliances? There is space for a “Startup Tracker” to be in place. This will be crucial for the Media to start reporting indepth stories, and also for raising funds in the future (More on that in the upcoming series)

e) Events such as TiECon, Proto.in, Headstart have to put their heads together and figure out how to a) Get the startups coverage on national media b) Get coverage on overseas media – For Example. When PlasticLogic launched at DEMO, The Hindu Chennai edition had a coverage of what they presented the next day. Needless to say that company received enough backorders for their product, including bagging the order from Amazon and Sony within the next three months. If these native platforms are not able to offer that level of coverage, make no mistake, DEMO/TC50 will make its way to India to deliver that value.

There are projected plans to bring the employment rate in India to below 2%. In a global economy where countries are struggling to stabilize their unemployment rates, we are actually talking about almost making it disappear. SMEs will piay a significant part in it, and since Employment is a key value proposition of any government and referring to my previous article on who really owns a company, You can rest assured that the government will get involved and play its part to help. But the initial organizing of this sector has to be driven by all those who are claiming credits already. And clearly there is lots of work to do. Its time to get to work – and not stop at empty promises.

There are two things that trouble me lately, and it connects to the subject of this post. Size.

We are in a rat race, and unfortunately so are most entrepreneurs. Working with entrepreneurs, the common chorus sung these days is to build a company, get it funded, scale, scale globally, make tons of money, go IPO or get acquired, and settle down. And this usually a 15-20 year plan (Anyone who does it in time less than that is either a genius or in sheer luck). The problem with this picture is that everyone thinks this is the de-facto route to go. But not everyone seems to be built for that.

Instead of getting into all the gory details, here’s the question: What’s really wrong about running a Sole Proprietorship firm, making perhaps about 3-5 crores in revenues, and being stable at that?

I met an audience of around 300 such entrepreneurs a month back, and the pace they live their lives by, not hazzled by competition, globalization, board pressure, missing out on family time etc seems almost non-existent – One even mentioned that its a better tax plan as well.

The reason I write this to this audience is cause, one of the biggest things that we worry about, especially with rural enterprises is scale. And at times you notice, sometimes with RTBI, and often outside that not every entrepreneur and entity is built for this. Small can be beautiful, if you know thats what your capability is, and can with content deliver on that consistently.

The second aspect of whats bothering me is something directly related to the first.

I am possibly fairly young, but even I miss the days when you call a company for customer service and you got someone that you spoke to the last time – makes for such a pleasant experience. I have an issue with my Airtel connection and I have called them 17 times so far over the past 18 months trying to get it fixed – so far no solution yet and I have given up on their system and started hoping for Number Portability to arrive.

One of the other side effects that I am lately noticing is the sheer amount of bills and receipts that I am hogging. You make a broadband payment, settle something here, there and you want to keep a copy of it all, because you really dont know when one of these companies will send you a note saying you owe them something and you have to make a case for yourself – and there is no one in the entity who can show you a friendly face.

Its almost unfortunate that with scale, customer experience has gone out of the window. Its said that when we were still bound by the day and age when we werent globally connected, most local businesses and entrepreneurs eventually “ran out” of a market to target, and their way of keeping themselves busy was to constantly improve upon what they offered to keep their customers engaged, happy, and conversing with them. Those days are really gone, arent they?

I think small is, was, and will always be beautiful. The sphere of success and what we really want – whether it be the size of the enterprise we are building, the mode of operation, or the values we want to be known for (even if its darn good customer support) are decisions we make. If anyone can make a decision agains the tide, its entrepreneurs. And with this day and age when trust is nowhere to be seen, and transaction costs inevitably will rise, small can be really beautiful – with a pleasant experience and happy customer.

Thats the nightmare of everyone in the creative class.

So the bottomline is that we have to strive to be better than the best, and in most times, we are our own enemies – as we try to overdo what we have accomplished in the past. The bigger nightmare is to build one great success followed up with a disaster and have people talking about the second one, more than the first.

With this as a background, one of the biggest dilemmas that entrepreneurs have to deal with, over and over again, is as to how to deal with people. Every one of us, if we have a tint of visionary streak in what we are trying to do, will come across a point when some of those who work alongside with us, dont see us eye-to-eye on what we are trying to accomplish. When that point in time arrives, is it going to be the people, or the cause that you are going to align yourself with? Thats the question.

I have wrecked my head over this dilemma. Most achievements are a matter of the team coming together right? In which case, shouldnt the vision be easy to compromise to accomodate those who have stood by us? Yet, it is also deceiving that if the vision can accomodate the team, then there also is scope for loads of mediocrity to creep in – and thats not one that a visionary can afford to have.

One could argue both ways on this, but I’ve come to the conclusion as such: For most of us, its not the glory in the act, nor the money, but the satisfaction of getting something done that was once deemed impossible – atleast for me it is. So the question to ask, when you are placed in the bridge of having to make a choice between taking that investment money or going bootstrap mode, or letting go of the partner or team lead, or even having to ask a close friend to step down are all a factor of what you really want to accomplish and where your passion lies. If your passion is in making a difference, then dont settle for us – whatever the cost. Because without it, and the vision that is birthed by it, we are just ghosts with no life nor grip on existence.

Whoever sold you the romanticism that being an entrepreneur meant being your own boss, was clearly lying. You really never escape the chain of command and reporting structure so easily – not in a civilized society. So Its no wonder that things don’t span out as they say. As an employee you might be accountable to your boss, but as an entrepreneur you are accountable to all of your clients, stakeholders and employees. And every one of them holds you responsible to have the answers and do your best – that’s no different from being an employee times ten. Think about it.

So here’s two things you must know. It is crucial to understand this because this sets the context to understand a whole lot of things that happen through the course of the company.

1. The day you incorporate your company, you no longer own it. You want to own something, keep it a proprietory firm or under a partnership (wouldn’t recommend it, as the stats are as high as 99% of partnerships ending in breakups). It might not be a bad idea to keep it as a family business, but there as well its joint ownership.

2. The Day you agreed on a termsheet and took money from your investors, you made up your mind that you were going to sell your company for a good price someday. Investors invest looking for returns and that returns are never going to happen without an exit; And an exit means a sale. Read that line a few times, it helps to get it into your head. You have in all means sold your company when you take investment. Period.

So the obvious question arises. Why on earth would anyone want to be an entrepreneur despite all these gory truths. Well, a couple of reasons. a) You still do have the capacity and capability to build something from scratch, scale it and make money in the process – You are still one of the major stakeholders in the firm. and b) What you want to do to create this value (be it money or impact or fame) is all left to you – atleast in the beginning.

The intent for writing this article is for one thing. I see and come across enough entrepreneurs who want to own more than 50% of the company. Thats almost the sure way to kill the company and strangle some relationships, because it shows that you haven’t gotten the first thing about a corporation right – you cant own it. And the only way to scale it is to give up control, bring in the right people, and yet have enough of a leeway to make a decent exit – note how the stake you hold is towards a better return, rather than control.

And in all this does the obvious question remain. Who does own a corporate? They say it becomes an entity of its own, can own assets, can incur liabilities, can attract investments and is a being of its own shielding its board and management from most liabilities. Who then owns it? The answer to that is probably the most shocking. The Government. The Government is what owns a corporate – actually every corporate. The rules of the land, enable and provide the space for passionate, enthusiastic and enterprising individuals to spot an opportunity, exploit it, create jobs, add value, attract investment, grow the company, expand, create a board to make their own decisions and directions for the entity, make an exit, or even take it public. But at the end of the day, when and if it does shut down and incurs a loss, the losses go away with the fading memory of the company. And thats the shield that a government provides towards the entrepreneur – probably the best of freedom for an individual to create wealth and value the fast track way.

As far as the govt is concerned, creating jobs is one of its prime mandates. And corporations are instruments towards that cause.

In the light of that, look at the bailouts. You might see a slightly different picture.