Are you bribed to work or is your work a bribe?

Posted on September 9, 2010 by Rodinhood

Are you bribed to work or is your work a bribe?

For the past 12 years of being involved with Start Ups, I’ve always been quizzed about compensation questions, dilemmas, challenges and upsets that prevail in entrepreneurial set ups.  This is my attempt to put my words where my money is.

Are you Bribed to work?

Sure you are, if you in a typical ‘corporate’ Fortune 500 Job!

Characteristics:

  • It has a predictable growth curve already set for you. From executive to manager to director to president (of god knows what) over a finite set of years. I vividly remember a meeting at a Fortune 500 Corp’s office a few years ago when seven gentlemen gave their cards and all of them read ‘President’. When I looked at them quizzically, one of them sheepishly smiled and said ‘Alok, even the office boy here is a President’. So, you can be the Junior Prime Minister of a Company, but your moronic boss – ‘the’ Prime Minister will still treat you like an office boy to run the errands.
  • It has more politicians than all the members combined of every political party in India. You know what happens when so many politicians assemble together? You have to be mentally numb to survive in that set up.
  • Colossal time dedicated to planning, budgeting, forecasting and ‘strategizing’. You have to be a Monk to survive the insane meetings that are meaningless and never-ending.
  • You have to do what the system needs you to. It’s built that way. Like an axle that has to drive the wheel. You can never become the wheel and you definitely can’t chuck the job of being an axle. The driver(s) will not allow it.

To endure all this, you need a hefty bribe (pay package) to stay in the job. And that is the sweet numbing pill you swallow each month. Each year, the bribe gets sweeter as does the migraine.

Now, is your work your bribe?

This is the case in a typical start up that survives on pure innovation, energy and entrepreneurial zeal!

You enjoy:

  • A massive learning curve from day one. From tech to ops to finance, you learn it all. If you stick around long in a start up, you will be stunned at how many multi disciplinary job functions you will have mastered. I remember one particular day when I opened my contests2win.com office (in a ramshackle room near metro cinema), swept the floor, made some coffee, uploaded my content via FTP, drove to the courier to deliver some prizes and then went and met the CEO of ICICI Ventures – all in the breadth of a few hours. In contests2win.com, we hired a HR professional who enthusiastically put together the processes, etc. in order. I still remember the day when he messaged me via IM at 11 am saying ‘Alok, I don’t have any work, what do I do’? One thing led to another, he got enamored by ‘Sales’ and the next thing we knew, he was in Shanghai and Beijing, selling Mobile2win offerings to clients there!! Try explaining this ‘career plan’ to a silver fox in an MNC organization.
  • There is massive OWNERSHIP from day one. So you understand the difference between ‘following’ and ‘leading’.  You typically make decisions, not implement them! You can steer the ship towards the ocean or onto the icebergs.
  • Mentally you are trained like a ninja. Ready to take on any surprise and turn it into a victory. Fighting till the end. That training at a very formative stage is very important in long-term career success. I meet lots of ‘Corporate Suits’ who have no edge of being able to take hits and downsides.

Working up in a start up is very enriching and heady experience and some folks are happy to accept this job as ’bribe’ rather than fat cash compensation.

Also, from a financial perspective, consider this:

Description Fortune 500 Job In lacs Start Up Job
In lacs
Middle Manager Salary Year 1 15 10
Year 2 20 12
Year 3 24 15
Year 4 28 18
Year 5 32 21
Total moneys earned 119 lacs 76 lacs
Tax (1/3rd) 40 lacs 25 lacs
Net take Home 79 50 lacs
Shares in Company 0 % 2%
Exit of Company in 5 years at a minimum sale value of 10mn US$ 50 crores
Sale value of Shares 0 100 lacs
Tax (long term capital gain) 0 0
NET EARNINGS 79 lacs 150 lacs

Interestingly, even financially you could become richer working for a start up than a straitjacketed tight MNC job. Sure, one can argue that the exit may never happen or the equity grant may not be 2%, blah blue blee. Even so, the experience of 5 years in a start up will be so enriching, it will be worth the salary sacrificed and will be easily recoupable in the years going forward.

My 2 paise – Work in a start up early in your life, at least for a decade gaining first hand experience, and then start up your own venture. And sure, as sweet revenge, you can hire the suited goons from the local MNC anytime you want.

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Why don’t Companies pay their suppliers on time?

Posted on September 2, 2010 by Rodinhood

Can you postpone paying your telephone or electricity bills by a couple of months by sweet talking your Utility providers? Would you continue working for a company that paid your salaries after you had to wait outside the accountant’s office for hours? Would you ask your kids to tell their school that their fees will be paid by their parents ‘soon’ ?

If the above sound ridiculous, why is it that Companies routinely pay their suppliers late?

The basics:

Assume that you walked into a Café and ordered a Cappuccino. Once you have finished, you would either settle your bill by cash, credit or debit card. That means that the money almost immediately transfers from your account to that of the Café operator. If this café is a profitable business, at the end of the month, everyone associated with the business should be paid.  On the outside, credit should be a month long. Ok, make it two months max.

What really happens:

Payments that are made without delay are Rents, Utilities and Salaries so that the business is kept alive.

Payments that are made with some procrastination are to suppliers, packaging guys, etc. The attitude is ‘where will they go’, or if not X then Y is always available to sell to us.

Payments that need begging and groveling to be paid are to advertising and media agencies, event agencies, travel agents, etc.  The simple rule here is that even if I don’t pay these helpless folks, my business will simply go on.

Some deeper reasons for ‘late’ to ‘never coming’ payments:

The business model of the buyer is inherently broken:

Examine Companies that pay really late and you will see a business that actually is losing money. Accountants tricks (the results they declare in the newspapers) aside, there is a gap in ‘cash in’ and ‘cash out’. This is the reason why a ‘Ponzi’ scheme is used (pay Peter of yesterday from Tom’s money of today). Sahara airlines, was an epitome of this model. 20-30% of their seats were given away as gifts to Govt. Officials or friends and family that were never paid for! Beware of such Companies. Many ‘reputed’ companies execute media campaigns in the hope of selling a new product. If that offering fails (remember the launch and failure of ‘Cease Fire’- the fire extinguisher brand), there is an immediate gap in cash flow.

Don’t be happy when someone buys something from you. Be convinced that they make money from what you gave them and hence will be able to pay you eventually!

The business is cash break even but not profitable.

Simply said, the Company is not able to afford anything beyond day-to-day expenses. So, if a new office is bought and refurbished or large investments are made in say machines and equipment, then suppliers actually are punished to pay for it. From an accountant’s view, the company cannot cover its depreciation and amortization (write off) costs. Lots of the old textile firms, manufacturing businesses, etc. are in this circuit.

Inherent fraud in the business.

If you examine the case of Subhiksha, its inconceivable how hundreds of crores left the balance sheet over a few weeks. All this after  astute investors like ICICI Ventures and Azim Premji had just invested in the Company and done a deep diligence.

If the promoters are taking money off the table, the business will sputter and choke and you will be left holding cheques with invisible ink on them.

It’s a very long-term gestation play.

Some businesses like Telecom, Power, and Infrastructure are in ‘investment’ mode for years. It takes 10 years to build a dam. In that process, with no cash flow, all the payments come from Capital that is always heavily controlled. Suppliers of the Mumbai Sea Link waited for years to be paid.

It’s just an attitude!

Some Companies believe that they should pay late because suppliers are meant to be paid late. They feel ‘guilty’ if they pay vendors on time. Once I asked a CFO of a 200 crore Company how they prioritized payments – he said ‘depends on who calls us most often and which parties make people sit in our offices. Usually we wait for a legal notice to pay out large amounts’.

If you are selling something to somebody, make sure that:

Every claim of yours is documented and signed.

A reputed media Company recently did not pay one of our firms – Media2win despite us having fulfilled all our obligations. Our paper work was perfect. We filed a ‘winding up’ petition in the Mumbai High Court against them and recovered our money in less than 18 months! So, in such cases, going to court does work. It doesn’t take 20 years.

Don’t be embarrassed to badger debtors for your money! It’s not a favor they are doing you.

Believe it or not, I know folks who have hired ‘follow up’ staff, whose job is to land up in their buyers offices in the morning , sit on the sofas, keep badgering the accountant folks for money and go home at the end of the day to repeat the same process next morning. If you deal with the government, you can hire ‘brokers’ to do this for you. But in India, if you aren’t after someone to pay you, they never will!

Factor in interest and more importantly the ‘cost of mental agony’ of dealing with a company in the price you sell to them.

It is my estimate from having been working for 20 years now that suppliers to really troublesome Companies charge them almost 25% higher costs than they would charge to normal customers. In the world of business, everything is costed for. Just add the ‘pain %’  in, and you will be way more relaxed when payments get delayed since you are getting extra money for the pain!

A long-term proposition is to have a ‘payment rating’ index that ranks and rates companies on their payment ‘hygiene’ like Crisil does for Companies’ credit worthiness or Moody’s does for a country’s sovereign risk status. This will create a supplier reputation index to help vendors decide if they want to supply to a Company or not. Obviously badly ranked companies will improve on payments to move up the ranks.

Sounds gloomy? Every cloud has a silver lining. For years we did business with Nestle Delhi. I remember my office boy telling me ‘ Sir, each month I know it’s the 7th coz that’s when the Nestle Cheque arrives without fail.’

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Do you know how to say ‘Jump’?

Posted on August 26, 2010 by Rodinhood

In the early 90s, a lovely girl called Somya from a prominent business house was engaged to marry Mahesh (a scion and inheritor of one of India’s biggest business families). Theirs was to be the marriage of the decade. Somya’s father – Gulshan was the head of the family and managed the joint family business that included his brothers. One of the Gulshan’s younger brothers Sushant was not on good terms with Gulshan and was constantly litigating with him to separate the family assets and split the family fortune. Theirs was a raging bitter battle that had carried on for years.

On the wedding day of Somya and Mahesh, the baraat (a marriage ceremony in which the bridegroom goes to the wedding venue of the bride) had begun proceeding to Somya’s house. Just when Mahesh (the bridegroom) was about ten minutes away from his bride’s building, Sushant (the uncle) did something very dramatic. He climbed out of his flat window, stood on the ledge and threatened his elder brother Gulshan to agree to split the business failing which he would jump out, kill himself and derail the marriage. Something so horrendous had never happened before and would mar the reputation of Gulshan’s family forever.

Gulshan tried reasoning with Sushant and politely told him to respect the occasion and the family reputation, but Sushant would not yield.  The baraat was just two minutes away.

Gulshan then said something that I can never forget. He looked at Sushant, folded his hands and said ‘JUMP’.

Sushant was dumbstruck. He never jumped and climbed back inside. The marriage did go down as the marriage of the century.

The lesson to learn here is to have the courage to say ‘Jump’. To anything in your entrepreneurial journey that puts you in a corner.

Employees, Colleagues, Clients and Co-Partners.

All of them have individual aspirations. They partner with you since their vision and yours is the same. However, things change and that’s when you have to be unyielding in your conviction as well as in your beliefs.

In each appraisal cycle, we face challenges, when our co-workers expect larger than affordable salaries. You have to have the courage to take the risk of losing them rather than ruining your business. Most of the times when you recommend your colleagues to quit and move on, they stay back.

Clients always test the limit to which you will bend, negotiate and yield and will pretend to not be interested in your proposal. But when when you really walk away, trust me, they will come back running.

I still remember a pre-board meeting in which one of my investors asked my CEO to change the business direction fundamentally and present it to the board. He refused. The investor indicated that he would fire the CEO and that he had the support of the other investors if he didn’t do as instructed. My CEO asked him to ‘Jump’. In the board meeting the next month, we went through the usual rigors and my CEO and I were dreading the dismissal motion to come up any moment.  It never did. The investors stayed on the ledge and climbed back in.

(Names of people in the marriage example have been changed to protect privacy).

I would like to dedicate this post to my Contests2win COO Raj ‘babu’ Menon together with whom I have told lots of folks to jump.  This shorter crisper blog format is also his recommendation.

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How to avoid your Start Up from getting a Hangover!

Posted on August 22, 2010 by Rodinhood

If you are thinking of starting up or already have taken the leap, consider some tried and tested remedies that can prevent your start up from getting a nasty hangover:

H = Hanging Out With Friends

The worst hangovers happen when you hang out with close friends and folks with whom you feel uninhibited. It works well in a personal setting, but consider a different approach whilst starting up.

I come across Start Up entrepreneurs who spend too much time ‘hanging out’ internally. What I mean by internally is with peers, co-founders, friends and colleagues. Very often, this restricts important learning from folks who are in the real Industry that you want to create value in but are not spending time with.

In 1998, when I started contests2win.com, I wanted to create a new paradigm in promotions. But I had spent a decade in textiles and in a factory.  Contesting dealt with creativity and direct marketing. I hounded the two experts in India who were the best in their fields – Cyrus Oshidar (creative founder of MTV India) and R. Sridhar (head of Direct Marketing at O&M). I hung out with them and was even lucky to get them on my board as advisors. The lessons I learnt from both of them were invaluable (Cyrus is my creative founder in all 2win companies).

A venture we (media2win) recently incubated – hover.in has very interesting founders. Arun Prabhudesai is an experienced tech services expert and Bhasker Kode (Bosky) is a young engineer who is a techie (CTO) but has leanings towards marketing, branding and sales. For months Bosky would ‘theorize’ about brand gyaan in our meetings and we would yell at him saying ‘that’s not the way brands think’. Bosky is now ‘hanging out’ in brand and agency offices and I can tell how quickly he is learning what the real market is!

A  = Angel (Client)

If you get drunk with someone you know, she will surely drop you home and make sure you are safe. Similarly, whilst starting up, try and cultivate one or two major clients who can completely uplift your venture. It’s nice to say that you are working across lots of clients or customers but getting many to sign up becomes very difficult at an early stage.

Contests2win latched onto MTV in early 1999 and they made us famous as a website via massive TV promotions. Mobile2win China got Coke interested in mobile promotions via TV and that scaled us up in China. Mobile2win India bagged the Indian Idol sms business and that made us front-runners in the media short code activation business. Games2win got lucky with Viacom’s addictinggames.com and they exposed us to USA and EU audiences.

Get an angel client and get dead drunk with her.

N = Now

If you want to avoid a hangover, you know when you should have that last drink. Never say ‘after this one’.

Similarly, whilst starting up, learn to test your ideas and theorize NOW. I come across so many entrepreneurs who keep extending their launch dates in the hope of perfecting their offerings. The point they are missing is that the market and their clients will often help them decide how to perfect their product as they build it along!

In the case of Inviziads.com (a business division of Games2win), we foolishly spent months developing an ‘auto wrapper’ for the large publishers to DIY (do it yourself). Later we figured out that they never DIY’d this process and hence weren’t interested. Similarly at Hover.in, we presented a DIY option for publishers to create their own ads – however we understood that publishers neither have the time nor the resources to do these time consuming things. In both Companies, we finally listened to what the Publishers really wanted, created the appropriate solution and there was no looking back ever since!

G = Get out and don’t generalize

I have the opportunity to judge business cases for competitions and B-School events and I am appalled at the ‘generalizations’ I have seen in business plans.

Entrepreneurs wildly estimate market sizes using industry reports (made by a bunch of armchair consultants who have no clue of the external environment). Further, entrepreneurs calculate conversion rates and business revenue lines as if their business would be as simple to execute as the excel sheet that they had created.

Get out there, and measure every metric that you have modeled you business on. For example, if you think 5% of all companies will sign up after you present your holiness, try meeting 20 and check if 1 (5%) converts.

In contests2win.com I made 1000 cold telephone calls before the Annapurna Brand owner just agreed to meet me. I never knew it was going to be that tough.

O = Overdose

OD on a few drinks down and check out the amazing hangover you will enjoy. It’s difficult to restrict drinks when you are having a rocking time, but that’s the only way to survive the night and the day after.

Start Up entrepreneurs suffer from a similar ‘Overdose Syndrome’. They try their hands at many things with little time. This results in a half-baked business that serves no one.

Have the patience to look at the ONE big idea that you believe will create value for yourself and your clients and then focus on making that happen. It’s tough to stick to one offering when there are so many options, but that helps create expertise and value in one core proposition.

At mobile2win India, we were good at creating mobile advertising campaigns for brands. Later we diversified into Media activation via Indian Idol. We should have stopped there. Instead the team got into mobile gaming, telecom services, content aggregation and even website creation and solutions. It was a disaster.  The OD created a massive de focus within management and team members and potential investors no longer could understand what the Company was really trying to do well.

V = Venture Capital yourself first.

The last thing you want to do is get drunk on someone else’s money. Similarly, try and fund the business initially with your savings and current cash flows.

If this means working for a couple of years and building a capital and then starting the start-up on the side, so be it.

A company I mentored achieved this beautifully. Amongst the 5 founders who had worked for about 3 years, they pooled in start up capital and then quit their jobs very gradually (one founder every 2 months), so that they had the cash flow to scale up.

Avoid getting start up funding from friends and family. It’s what I call ‘Sticky’ capital – very difficult to return and even harder to digest. VCs too don’t like a start up with 20 chunnu munnu (mini) stake shareholders.

E = Equity distribution:

Often I come across young Start Ups comprising entrepreneurs who have studied or worked together, connected up and started up a business together. Almost logically, equity gets distributed equally amongst the founders. However, as the venture rolls and the challenges surmount, founders react differently. Some give up, others just watch from the sidelines and the truly passionate founder gives the venture her heart and soul.

The question is – should equity continue to be shared equally in such a situation?

Equity is a fruit of creating a business from an idea – not just conceptualizing it. Once equity is given out, it’s difficult to roll back. This puts the hard working ‘living on fresh air, gallons of coffee and and start-up love’ entrepreneur at a distinct loss compared to the guy who walked out and got a job with a Multi National. Sometimes this can be so demoralizing, it can derail the start up.

The solution? Get an ‘equity earn out’ model in place. So, each founder is entitled to ‘earn out’ their equity over a 36-month period and with certain signed and sealed parameters like full time working, etc. If then a founder wants out, he is entitled to the pro-rata equity earned, and the remaining shares kept available to new founders who could join. This is a common condition in Series A funding, so why not follow it while starting up? Also, appoint a good friend as arbitrator so she could easily sort out differences between partners.

R = Revenues

If you like to get drunk, then make sure you have the wallet power to support your habit.

The concept of ‘revenue later’ is DEAD. Don’t be fooled into thinking that the dot com logic of scale and market size will carry you into a funding round. Even the mightiest of start ups are tumbling since they have no foreseeable revenue.

Get into the game of Revenue generation from day zero. It doesn’t matter how much you earn, but the fact that you are able to generate revenue from your start up proves the long-term viability of the business.

So what are you waiting for? Grab that idea with a drink and an excel sheet but avoid a hangover!

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Have you been ‘wiped’ out?

Posted on August 13, 2010 by Rodinhood

Losing is winning.

In the upper Himalayas, an ancient Tibetan monastery follows a secret Zen tradition. Newly ordained monks perform their daily rituals of chanting, meditation, cooking and cleaning and in the evening paint colorful patterns on the floor (Rangoli in India) using dry powder paint. Initially they draw basic patterns and then graduate to complex designs.

In the second year of their stay, they are inducted into a very sacred ritual. The Master priest gives each monk an extremely intricate and complicated design to replicate as their Rangoli. This pattern is so complex that it takes 5 years of  part time work in the evening to complete. The monks are made to vow to keep their pattern secret and not show their work in progress to anyone. Their reward for this mammoth effort is to have their complete painting examined by the head Sensei (Priest) of the monastery.  If the divine Sensei is pleased, he can bless the monk.

After 5 long years of working on one painting, the examination day arrives and the monks tremble with trepidation as they take their master and Sensei to their room for the final review. The Sensei wears heavy robes, with the long overflowing sleeves that reach the ground.

Just as the painting is being shown, the Sensei calls out to the monk, looks him in the eye, and in one strong, swift motion, wipes clean the painting with his robe’s sleeves without even looking at it. The act is sudden, swift and brutal – executed with a benevolent smile.

It is said that the act of seeing 5 years of your hard labor being wiped out in a stroke creates a moment of ‘blankness’ in the minds of the well-trained monks, and that blankness produces nirvana (enlightenment). If not immediately ‘enlightened’, the monks begin weeping with joy at the realization that nothing lasts forever and everything must go.

Entrepreneurs I know shiver from the word ‘failure’. What they must realize is that one venture or a business is just like a Rangoli – the act of it disappearing ‘may’ create the enlightenment of success in you.

Celebrate failure!

Do you really have a problem?

In 2008, my partner Mahesh and I were convinced that players were discovering flash games on the web in a chaotic way. Consumers had to go to portals and then play the games the portals featured there. If I wanted to say play only ping-pong games, I could not discover all ping-pong games in one place. Google would give me some links, but also of the videos and images of the real ping pong game, etc.

We felt that there had to be a single destination to search and discover flash games, and if executed well, we could be the first movers in that space.

When we presented the concept of ‘gamecurry.com’ to our board, the investors were puzzled. Why were we getting into the search business? Did this make sense? Wouldn’t this distract us from our day to day business. How would we make revenue? I still remember Sumant Mandal of Clearstone Venture Partners telling me ‘Alok, the ads revenue arbitrage in just letting consumers discover content via search is dead. Why would you want to pursue this’?

Despite all these doubts, Mahesh and I went gung-ho creating gamecurry.com. We spent a good amount of time, energy and resources putting the site together and allocating armies of teams to search, index and tag global games.

The site launched in mid 2008 and we promoted the service extensively using our own network, etc.

The concept was a massive failure. Nobody seemed to return after using the site once and there was no viral traffic being built up. The worst part was that a service intended to help consumers was being spurned so badly. Much later we figured out that kids don’t search for games on search sites – they like to ‘stumble upon’ them.

We failed at this project but learnt an important lesson all entrepreneurs must imbibe – Even before you create an amazing solution, ask your consumers if they even want it? Your consumers will not use something made ‘easy’ if they never had a problem in the first place!

Why do everything the old fashioned way?

In mid 2007 I had this brainwave that if so many young people liked to play ‘dumb-charades’ (charades in the USA), why shouldn’t they play it online?  It would take away the pain of assembling people in a room and the web idea of a traditional game could infinitely expand the universe of players to millions.

I convinced the contests2win team (a company I am on the board of) to create youcharades.com. The idea was to host a set of 200+ quality ‘charades’ that consumers all over the world would log in to watch, and then predict which movie was being enacted. Players could also shoot their charades and send them in!

Contests2win hired a foreign crew of actors and models in Mumbai and shot very slick videos. They invested in a video player backend that integrated with flash technology. There was extensive work done on the site and they even created a Myspace application for the same.

On launch day, I dreamt of instant nirvana (like the monks). By mid week, there was little pick up. By the end of the month the site and the idea was in the weeds.

What I had failed to indentify was that it was not the game of dumb charades that youngsters liked so much – it was more the act of getting together with friends and family and really prancing around and making fun of each other in the process of playing out a movie title.

While youcharades.com was erased in an instant, I learnt 2 very crucial lessons:

  • People like to do certain things not for the act of that activity but for the pleasure of engaging others while doing it.
  • Everything in life cannot be ‘technologized’.

Who needs human intervention – get it automated!

Advergaming (or integrating advertising and online games) has been a business we as a group pioneered globally (circa 1998). While the concept is very interesting and rewarding, there is huge pain involved in meeting clients, getting briefs, meeting repeatedly to present work in progress, making changes to the game and convincing the client that the game is indeed ‘perfect’. It frustrates the most hardened of servicing people and creates massive friction between internal teams.

After a success lasting 10 years and 1000 advergames, I was convinced that an ‘automated’ solution was the answer. I hammered the contests2win management to create a one stop ‘do it your self’ advergaming destination called gamewok.com. The site allows potential clients to ‘order’ their advergames and toss up (like a wok) options of game type, look and feel, budget, etc,  that clients can choose and mix and match.

A year later, we still haven’t received a single order via gamewok.com. The site is a disaster. The verdict is simple – a hands on, meeting of the ‘hearts and minds’ process that results in business being won can never be automated.

Lesson – don’t try and automate what pains you. The pain is what brings the profits.

I dedicate this post to all those entrepreneurs out there who have had hits and misses. The important thing to remember is what a famous man said – ‘a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step’. Who cares if the first step begins with a sprained ankle?

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‘Entreception’ = Entrepreneurs + Inception can be the new Bible of Success!

Posted on August 5, 2010 by Rodinhood

This post is dedicated to my absolute fanaticism to the movie ‘Inception’. If you haven’t seen the movie yet, my humble suggestion would be to see it before you read further.

I was calmed and excited simultaneously when I saw Inception. Calmed by the spirituality of the movie and the way ‘transience’ of life was packaged in it. Excited because it just spelt a new rulebook for entrepreneurs.

My point of view:

It’s all about dreams.

Tell me any entrepreneur worth his sleep who hasn’t sold to himself and then to a VC a dream. With poor proof of concept, little or no market data and certainly zero revenue streams, most entrepreneurs make massive leaps of faith when it comes to creating a business. They dream of the future that lies ahead and then dive back into reality to reach there!

Dream 1:

In Shanghai around 2001, while pavement pounding for Mobile2win, I had the opportunity to meet the Wall’s (Unilever Ice Cream) marketing team. Wall’s ran a very large business in China and they were keen to use mobile contesting to ‘activate’ more sales. Since we were the first in China promoting short-code based promotions, we convinced Wall’s that we could motivate Chinese consumers to sms a code that they would find on the lid of a Walls Ice-Cream in return to win a prize. This promotion would be advertised by them on mass media and would create the first of its kind ‘digital mobile’ activation led sales promotion for Wall’s China. They loved the idea, bought the dream and we were on!

Dream 2 within Dream 1:

A few weeks later, I had the opportunity to meet Disney (China). They were keen to reach out to large consumer masses in China via the mobile platform. We already had a massive consumer activation going on with Wall’s and this could be the ideal platform for them. But the question was – why would Wall’s allow Disney to ride on its media and product activation plan? We thought hard and hit on dream 2 within dream 1.

The problem Wall’s was facing  was that while lots of folks were sending SMSes hoping to win prizes, only a handful were winning. So it was becoming a typical ‘I keep trying but never win’ disappointment. Adding more prizes was not  affordable. Even if we gave away small prizes, the cost of distribution of those prizes was uneconomical. Our Eureka  solution was to create ‘digital prizes’ –  a la mobile wall papers and screen savers of the most popular Disney characters such as Winnie the Pooh and Mickey Mouse and then send it ‘across the air’ via sms to contesting participants for every right answer!! This way almost everyone would win, lots of Chinese consumers would own a Disney character and Wall’s would be happy that its promotion got additional boost. Both Wall’s and Disney bought the plan and dream 2 within dream 1 came alive.

Dream 3 within Dream 2.

What we realized was that we had pulled off a major coup. This new concept of zero cost digital prizes was creating a new reach and activation model in the consumer goods category (add to that – in the largest consumer market in the world), and this was an opportunity that could have resulted in much more than just one time project fees for ourselves.

We built a close rapport with Disney over the months and dreamt with them on how the combination of their Media (channels) + Assets (character library) + Mobile2win’s platform would be the ultimate solution for them to engage millions of young and upwardly mobile Chinese consumers perpetually.

Walt Disney acquired Mobile2win China in 2006 in an all cash transaction and our Dream 3 was fulfilled!!

Creating layouts (biz plans) as you walk

As in the movie, most entrepreneurs have to imagine and execute a business simultaneously. Its like planning a road and paving it at the same time. There is no grand plan or blue print that can be followed by the book. It has to be imagined, and implemented at the same time. If you can’t do that, you can’t be successful entrepreneur.

In so many client pitches I remember my team and I being asked a question by a client in terms of ability to make a campaign or reach a target audience that we have never done before. Almost every time we said ‘yes’ and then on the way back to the office figure out how to do it.  Sure there were some cases of bad deals like the ‘paradox staircase’ in the movie, but those stray cases didn’t dent us from growing and creating a business!

Making sure the ‘Kick’ is in place.

One of the biggest dangers of entrepreneurship is that you fall in love with what you are doing and even when events turn ugly, you refuse to ‘wake up’.

So, make sure that before you start dreaming, the ‘kick’ to wake you up is in place.

In Mobile2win, we created lots of mobile games and were the first in India to start featuring our own games on operator decks. Then operators got greedy and competitors became insane. The game teams by then had fallen into a never-ending dream state of just making games coz they loved to, despite the fact that the ROI was negative. As an investor, I ‘kicked’ them and myself and pulled out of that business before the market destroyed us.

Watch out for your Mal – she will destroy herself and you.

Many entrepreneurs I know go into an  ‘ever dreaming’ state of almost coma-like zombie survival. They cannot come to terms that they need to move on. Their business gets stuck, the markets turn against them and the world changes permanently, but they ‘Mal’ themselves. They cannot distinguish fact from reality. They sit on the ledges and jump off windows in the hope that they will wake up. They never do.

We went all out importing a Massive Multiplayer Online game from Japan in games2win in 2007. We believed that this was our Nirvana and also brought our Japanese partner into that dream . Yet, 1.5 years later and almost 500k US$ down, we had hardly earned 50k US$ from the business. It was a disaster. Yet the Japanese Company was ‘Malled’. They believed that the market would turn around and this format of game would redeem us in the future. They saw no reason to evacuate. I had to give myself a big kick and wake up. We pulled out of the game in 2008. It was a very tough and emotional meeting in Singapore with the Japanese partner who refused to understand or believe our rational. It was exactly like the ending of the Movie in which Mal is still in the dream. Having said so, I still know 2 companies in India who have sunk over 7 million US$ collectively in this genre of gaming and believe that India will change to make their game successful.

Watch out for Mal. Either never let her become who she is and if you cannot avoid that, then know when to ignore her and stay focused.

Else your dream will become your death.

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What Entrepreneurs must learn from Fashion Models!

Posted on July 29, 2010 by Rodinhood

I have always admired fashion shows and their glamorous models. Not so much for their skinny and anorexic looks but for their amazing ability to change their clothes, make-up and persona within minutes and then walk the ramp with such élan and confidence.

What these models teach me is how to manage change without hesitation.

Some fashion tips that I have learnt!

When you finally get dressed, it’s time to undress.

In 1998, I spent 18 hard months creating a website called contests2win.com.  The idea was to aggregate and host all nationally advertised contests in one place and allow consumers to respond without the hassles of cutting newspapers and mailing competition postcards. Brands like Unilever, Channel V and Disney quickly embraced the concept and became my first clients. However, there weren’t lots of contests to keep the site really busy. One day, when I was on my regular ‘contest begging’ trips, I was stunned when the brand manager of Liril Soaps (a Unilever Company product) said, ‘Alok, don’t harass me. We make soaps here – not contests. If you like contests so much, why don’t you make them and pitch them to me, rather than the other way around’. While that attitude completely ‘disrobed’ my then existing business model, I was forced to invent the business of customized ‘advergaming’ (Advertising meets gaming) to make clients sign up. 12 years and 1000+ advergames behind, I am still smiling. If I had stuck to being a digital ‘post box’ for contests, I would have not survived beyond the first year.

Thank God someone forced me to undress.

The fashion show venue changed just as you arrived.

Post the dot com bust in 2000, everyone in India suddenly stopped believing in the Internet. It was like saying that if a plane crashes, the entire business of airlines becomes a suspect.  We were doing great business with most of the global Fortune 500 brands, but it became increasingly difficult to scale up the business. Softbank was one of our investors and was impressed by our business model. They invited us to China to start up the same business of contesting and offered to incubate us.

I still remember that January 2001 day when we packed almost half the office on a plane and sent them to a hostile land that most folks had never ventured into. It was a bizarre feeling to travel overseas to seek our fortunes just a couple of years after starting up in your own country.

But by 2003, China had become a larger business for us than India and we actually imported a mobile business from China into India.

Forcing a change  – this time a geographic one was a painful but beneficial lesson we learnt.

A cosmetic nose job is a must to walk the ramp.

Years ago, I used look at models with perfect ‘cosmetically altered’ noses and pitied them for altering their god gifted bodies just for a profession. Soon, I had to taste my own disdain. In China, our contesting business had migrated to the mobile platform and was scaling well. It caught the attention of Siemens Mobile who offered to invest in it. One of the shocking clauses in the term sheet was the condition that we alter the company name (from our famous dot com contesting legacy) into a ‘mobile’ connoting name!

It was almost like someone asking me to change my name and surname for a job. On inquiry, Siemens revealed that their investment committees were allergic to dot coms after the bust and this was just a simple ‘cosmetic’ change. We rebranded ourselves to be called Mobile2win.

The day I signed the term sheet, the perfect nosed models flashed in my mind.

Are fur coats best suited for Mumbai weather?

In 2007, I was lucky to meet Rahul Khanna of Clearstone Venture Partners. Rahul was keen to explore an offline Cyber Café Gaming business in India modeled on the success of China and Korea and I was happy to take on the challenge of creating one.

We raised 5 million US$ from Clearstone and Silicon Valley Bank and went gung ho into importing a ‘has to succeed’ business model into India. I signed up SEGA of Japan to license us their car racing game and then went aggressively into all the gaming cafes of India to host and promote the game.

In 6 months, the business failed badly. No one seemed to be interested in playing these complex games in dungeon like cyber cafes in India. On introspection, it was so clear why the games succeeded in China – with no mass entertainment options available (TV and films are state controlled) and very cold weather, Chinese teens were happy to lock themselves into gaming dens and play away for hours non stop. On the other hand, in India, with 3 bollywood movies releasing a week; 500 channels on TV and very warm and ambient weather, teens cared a damn to sit in suffocating game parlors and play online games with silly dragons and elves.

We were forced to replace our fur coat (MMOG game) with T-Shirt and Shorts (snacky flash games) and went on to become a top 20 global online games company.

But the misery of wearing a fur coat in Mumbai remained etched in my mind.

Miss beautiful, did you forget your stilettos and handbag?

Games2win became a global 20 online portal business by 2009, and my partner and I became absorbed into creating more portal centric games with an ambition to reach a top 10 rank.

While we got distracted just making single player games, young and nimble game companies like Zynga (now worth 5 BN US$$) arrived on the scene and took the humble flash game into social networks like facebook and created global phenomenas like Farmville and Mafia wars. Just by combining the dress (flash game) with sharp stilettos (social media) and handbags (virtual goods), they became the hottest models in towns!!

All of a sudden, old hags like us were playing hard to catch up.

Entrepreneurs when they watch FTV, shouldn’t dream of pretty young models as companions they wished they could date – rather they should think of them as fellow entrepreneurs who have important lessons to teach you.

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Have you partnered with thieves and robbers?

Posted on July 16, 2010 by Rodinhood

In early 2008, at games2win.com, we had created a huge hit game called ‘Bombay Taxi’. It was a really funny flash game that challenged you to park a Black and Yellow taxi in the crowded streets of Mumbai while overcoming obstacles like beggars, kite fliers, local trains and elephants. And in a typical Internet style, we began receiving massive traffic to our portal via viral traffic – especially from USA and EU since Bombay Taxi was a classic parking game blended in a new exotic theme.

Just after the huge spurt of traffic, I was shocked to notice that visitors suddenly disappeared – almost like they had fallen off a cliff. This was not typical – traffic always tapers down and then plateaus out, so I decided to investigate. When I typed ‘Bombay Taxi Online Game’ on Google, I was shocked to find that overnight almost 400 websites had stolen our game and embedded it on their portals. These thieves had sniffed out a good game and now were enjoying traffic on their own sites thanks to our hard work!

My partner Mahesh Khambadkone and I huddled in our corner office conference room and brooded. This was a disaster. Each time we would make a hit game, thieves would steal it and we would never reap the benefits of tsunami like viral traffic. Flash files could not be protected and this was a big blow to our business model since we relied on advertising on our site to make us $$$. Also DRM (digital rights management) for flash games was really not a successful technology.

This led us to apply a thought process model at 2win group that we call “mental demolition”. Essentially it converts ‘how things are’ to ‘how things can become’.

Just demolish each fact and event and build it into something that works for you.

So, we realized:

  • Why do things get stolen?
    • Because they have value… no one steals the dirt of the streets and takes it home. So one big positive was that we had created some great content that the world loved to take home.
  • The sheer number of websites that had stolen our game in 3 days overwhelmed us. This proved that there was a massive distribution opportunity for our games amongst sites we had never heard of before.
  • What was really hurting us? The fact that we were missing on the ad revenues that these stolen games were generating on the pirate site.
  • Was protection ever going to work? Everyone we knew had pirated music and videos and films from all over the Internet. Protecting IP was futile on the Internet.

In a brain wracking session, there was a flash of inspiration and a ‘Eureka’ moment: We plotted to create a technology that would allow us to place INVISIBLE ads in our games (for the pirates not to notice them) that would then travel along with the game to the pirate sites and become automatically VISIBLE when the game played there!

We actually cracked this technology (MK and I are the inventors in our patent filing), and the games2win.com business changed dramatically after that day. To give you a perspective, we now touch 15-20 million users via Inviziads each month (comScore May data – extended web). These ads are fully controlled by us and we change and sell the ads as per our control in each of the 160 countries the games have been stolen in.  Over 8900 websites have stolen our games and new websites get added each day. Games2win from zero has become a top 50 global games business (comScore online games ranking May 2010) thanks to the traffic we pull into our sites via inviziads!  Internally, we now benchmark a game’s success by how many websites have stolen it!

Look at the love triangle – Pirates love our content and steal our games. We love ads and place ‘invisible to visible’ ads in our games. Consumers love games and they play them on all kinds of websites all over the world!!

Players such as Viacom, Ubisoft and Warner Brothers now license Inviziads and you can study the business model on www.inviziads.com.

What are the lessons for entrepreneurs and start ups in this story?

  • Try and create gold from dust. If you have a problem that is destroying you, look at it using a prism that could turn it to an advantage. I always feel that if Virgin Music and EMI etc., would have bought Napster (instead of suing it and closing it down) and then converted the site into their official mp3 website, iTunes would have been a me-too and not the gorilla it is today
  • Understand and accept the eco-system. If the internet is about piracy and lifting, flow with it – don’t fight it
  • Foes can be Friends just by a flick of a switch. Think of everyone as a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hide. Make your enemies work for you

Remember that winning the nuclear war in planet start up requires not just creativity and innovation but the ability to mentally demolish and rebuild yourself from scratch.

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Mr. Marwari – Have you met Mr. Tata?

Posted on July 9, 2010 by Rodinhood

In the past 12 years of pavement pounding and boardroom hustling, I have had the honour of doing business with the biggest companies in India.  Nothing compares to the experience of dealing with Tata companies. For me personally, coming from a traditional Marwari (trader) family, this is special – it helps me juxtapose my Marwari training vs. how a corporation like Tata thinks and behaves.

Some brain waves:

My Salt tastes better than yours!

The best way to explain this is to narrate a conversation I had with Sam Balsara of Madison Media a few years back. Sam was invited by a Mega Marwari Corporation (MMC) for a chat to help create a Salt Brand. Sam was asked by the grey haired senior executive, ‘how much money would it cost to build India’s greatest salt brand?’ Sam thought for a moment and said ‘Say 20-30 crores (4-6 million US$) in media spends. Assuming your product is great, that should take you to the top’. Mr. Grey Hair heard this and almost fell off his chair… He said ‘Sam – with that money, I can build 5 more Salt factories!’. Sam pointed in the direction  across the street and said ‘Mr. Grey Hair – the folks just opposite your office created Tata Salt. Today, every salt factory in the country goes to them to supply them unbranded salt. The one solo Tata Salt brand is more valuable that 100 plain factories put together. Adding 5 more factories to your collection will not do anything for you’. Mr. Grey Hair looked perplexed.

From the first day of attending my father’s business, I was told ‘advertising is a waste of money’. It gets you mixed up with wrong people. Just invest all the moneys in factories and machines.

How short term is that! Once in a while, I look at a toothpaste tube of Colgate in my bathroom & flip the side and read ‘Made by xyz in abc fatory’. Mr. Grey Hair and his 5 factories come to mind. Just consider the economics – If he were in toothpaste supplies, he would be paid 4 months after supplying his goods to Colgate, while Colgate would have collected money from me in advance even before I opened my toothpaste box.

Its ironical that I left my father’s business to start a digital advertising business.  And I have learnt that no matter how great your service or product is, if you can’t brand it and communicate it, it will not create long term value.

What comes first – Reputation or Profits?

If you go to most family owned companies, their core focus is profitability. How much and how soon? Little time or money is spent in building a reputation. When I visit many of the big India business group offices in India, I rarely see a poster in the visitor’s area that communicates:

What are their business practices?
What do they stand for?
What are their values?
What are their views on treating their employees?

In most Tata Companies, I see that Value Statement at eye level while sitting on the sofa at the reception. It makes me feel nice.

By not aggressively creating a positive reputation, Companies stand the risk of being determined by legacy and hearsay. That’s a big risk that can cost you your business.

A few years ago, after buying a new car, the showroom lady called me up and asked me my preference of insurance companies. All the insurance offers were uniformly priced. I asked her to rattle the name of the Insurers and the minute I heard a Tata Company name, I just said ‘buy that one’. Why I made that decision, I still cannot rationally explain.

Building a reputation may be tough and non productive in the beginning, but ignoring it can have serious implications on your business.

White money is more nutritious that black.

After my first round of VC funding, I ran into my uncle at a dinner. He had read about the financing in media and cornered me. ‘So you’re rich! Why are you looking so gloomy?’ he said. ‘Huh’ I asked? ‘My Company’s the one that got funded, not me! No one got rich. The VCs got poorer and a long arduous road lies ahead of me to return the money to the VCs many times over’. He chuckled and said’ ‘What nonsense! The first rule of the funding game is to siphon out 25% of the funds and make yourself-rich. Investors can be dealt with later’. Shucks… hadn’t I heard that story before? Many of my relatives have floated public issues that were nothing short of scams and they still boast about it!

This ‘get rich, siphon out’ philosophy left so many old industrial houses bankrupt. They were never capitalized to take advantage of acquisition opportunities and punished their shareholders so harshly that they could never raise capital again. Think Mafatlal, Dalmia and many more.  Even today I meet embarrassed professional managers working in ‘family’ firms who get paid salaries in ‘half white and half black’ to avoid taxes!

It takes a Tata DNA to create a TCS, Tisco, Telco + 100 other Companies with massive cash reserves on their balance sheets. This was especially tough during the Indira Gandhi emergency tax regime when the Income Tax rate was over 90%. Almost everyone gave up and resorted to siphoning off money from the Balance Sheet, but the Tata Companies hung on.

When you build a cash war chest, and deals like Corus or Land Rover come your way, you have the ability to execute.

On a depressing note, look at the state of Hindustan Motors and Fiat India today. Even though they dominated Indian roads for decades, they are bankrupt today. Even the mighty Bajaj could not build a Nano (the natural progression after a scooter). It took the Tata group to do it. Of course, on the flip side there are the Mittals and Ruias who have built massive empires in the past 20 years.

Outsiders stay away. We are the Adam’s family.

12 years ago, I visited a large (100 crore+ topline) textile factory in Gurgaon (Delhi) and met the CEO, COO, CFO, CMO, and CTO. They all had Kumar printed as their last name! On inquiring, it turned out that the family tree right down to the grass roots was involved in running the show. In conversations, all they did was nod at each other for consensus. No one had the guts to tell Grand Dad Dinosaur that he was wrong. It seemed so stifling and stuck. When I asked the young 23-year-old MBA what his vision for the Company was, he said something that I felt was his father’s vision and definitely not his own! 12 years later, I did a recon – the Company had shrunk to 20% of its market cap.

Companies like these have no future. Their boardroom antique furniture doesn’t think laterally and has no clue of new business lines. They would get a heart attack to pay Accenture Rs 1 crore to suggest a strategy to uplift them. They don’t hire gold standard professionals because they can’t expose their business loopholes to them.

Think of it – most of the old family run companies I know still make steel, cement, ingots, rods and all kinds of cloth, while the Tatas play in Software, Telecom and other value added businesses.

Like the Tata retirement policy, all the granddads need to be sent home and professional CEOs hired across the board to run the Company. Else, most family concerns will cease to exist.

Sometimes an Opera Singer can make the best CEO.

If you go for a live music concert or a dance performance at the NCPA (National Center of Performing Arts) in Mumbai or listen to an Opera at the Jamshed Bhabha auditorium next door, you will marvel at the massive contribution the Tatas have made to the Art scene in India.

Given this background, if I were an Austrian CEO who can run a steel plant as efficiently as I can play the Oboe, I will be far more motivated to join the Tatas as the CEO of TISCO rather than become the CEO of some Industrial House in India whose CEO cannot understand if the Oboe is a wind instrument or a Shoe.

Life and business is being cultivated way beyond the dusty corridors of factories and sheds. I wish that all wannabe entrepreneurs and inheritors of family businesses understand this early on!

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Do you know ‘Board’ Room Dancing?

Posted on June 30, 2010 by Rodinhood

So, you can burn the dance floor, but can you tango in the Corporate Board room?

I have had the pleasure of attending many board meetings and am happy to share some experiences and tips in the lessons on how to dance in the Board Room:

Always Maintain Direct Eye Contact

One of the biggest learning is to maintain direct eye contact with your fellow board members – at all times. The eyes speak a thousand sentences. In VC funded companies, you can quickly understand what your investors like to hear and what they don’t find palatable – just by looking into their eyes.

An interesting strategy I follow is to place my co-founders at direct eye contact with the VCs so that all partners get a vibe of who is reacting to whom and how in the meeting.

See my Eye Contact Flow below.

Keep your eyes Open!

Keep your eyes Open!

( The entrepreneurs are your co-founders and the VCs are your investors)

Your CFO is the best observer. Since she will be doing the least talking, she will be ideal to gauge body language of the other attendees.

One of the most interesting lessons that I learnt in this strategy was thanks to Sandeep Singhal (now of Nexus Venture Partners India). A few years ago, the Mobile2win CEO of India – GK was making a passionate pitch to Sonali De Rycker (now with Accel Venture Partners) for a series B investment. Sandeep and I were present as board members (we had nothing to do with the day to day management of mobile2win). GK was very lucid and charged in his pitch, and I thought that it went well. The next day, Sandeep called me and told me, ‘Alok – Sonali has passed on the investment’. She said, ‘every time GK completed a sentence, he looked at Alok as if to check if he was on track. It showed that Alok, the founder is actually the CEO and not GK. I cannot invest in a company whose CEO is not in real command’.

Look into the eyes of your partners at all times.

Figure out who likes to Dance with whom

I have always noticed that sides between external board members get created instantly when the board meeting starts. It’s almost like dancing partners getting magnetically aligned when the music starts.

Typically, if the meeting is going to point towards an objection or disagreement, you will notice one Board Member (VC) make a strong comment and the other VCs (who are in agreement with that thought) quickly follow suit.

As an entrepreneur, it’s great to get feedback. Pay attention to the groups on your board that think in the same manner. It later helps figuring in out what the motivations of those objections could be and if there is an external influence that is channelizing the discussion, etc.

In my humble experience, VCs typically have a chat on the board-meeting outcome before they enter the room and hence the moves they make inside the room are choreographed.

Pay attention to song requests!

OK – so you are the DJ, but you have to listen to the requests of the floor. One of the biggest failings I see in fellow entrepreneurs and myself is the inability to LISTEN to investors and interpret the point they are making. Sometimes, we (entrepreneurs) get so swept by the passion and emotion of the business that we blank out to anything that doesn’t sound like the tune we like.

A couple of years ago, after raising our series A from Clearstone Venture Partners for games2win, Sumant Mandal (from the Santa Monica office) and Rahul Khanna (from Mumbai) were present for our first board meeting. At that time, we had just started rolling out our larger MMOG game formats. I remember pitching ‘concurrent’ users to the board and Sumant kept asking me the relevance of that metric to the business we were trying to build. Mentally I kept saying ‘Sumant – that’s what the world measures MMOG performance with’. Almost 2 years later, I realized how meaningless that metric was for a market like India in which concurrency was hardly available. I should have just listened to Sumant carefully rather than spend my time measuring something that was redundant!

Control the Dance Floor

Typically, discussions tend to flow into several directions and it’s common to see the meeting spill over beyond the time slot planned. Your investors may not wait forever. This harms the entrepreneur team who was supposed to expose all the items of the agenda across investors.

It’s a good practice to run a quick run of the PPT (at least I do) and then rewind to slides that either you want to focus on or any of your other external board members may want to discuss further. This allows the not so involved board members to at least get a bird’s eye view of what’s happening in the company and not be an ignoramus when they speak about your Company to the outside world.

Get your dance troupe in

Once every alternate board meeting, I usually invite the core team members to come inside the board room and present their slides (integrated into the master presentation) to the board members.

This expands the perspective of how the Company is being managed and is also very encouraging to the team to actually come up and present to a full-blown board, comprising of powerful VCs and other members of your board.

If there is a scuffle, play bouncer!

Rarely but not never, a nice brawl will break out in the boardroom. (This is an excerpt from my recent blog Toughest decision on my life ‘….Just a month earlier I had come back from Shanghai and attended the most bizarre board meeting ever in my memory. The meeting started at 9 am and by 9:30 am, there was war in the boardroom. 2 Germans (Helmut Struss and Oliver Kolbe from Siemens), 1 Indian (Gopala Krishnan (GK) – the CEO) and 2 Chinese (Peter Hua and an Observer from Softbank) were all screaming at each other simultaneously in German, Chinese and in Hindi (me telling GK to control himself). The issue was typical start-up stuff – scaling up, finances, hiring, firing, etc, etc, and while I let them go at each other (Softbank shouted at GK for pointing fingers at them– a very ‘disrespectful’ act in China)’

In such events, you MUST take control. Disagreements are a good sign – and usually result in a positive outcome. But you must control it before the argument becomes PERSONAL and then turns into a vindictive styled riot.

Everyone in that room is there to create value and hence need to be listened to. In my case above, Siemens and Softbank actually rescued the company from destruction in China!

Ask to teach the steps you don’t know!

Finally, you may be Mr. Know All, but there are lots of moves that are still unknown to you. In my board meetings, what I really appreciate about Rahul & Sumant of Clearstone is their insistence to ask me how they can help my business scale further. Be it introductions, best practice guidelines and definitely recommendations to other VCs – there are always things you want. Be bold enough to stand on that floor and ask the DJ to teach you a move or two!

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