Mr. Marwari – Have you met Mr. Tata?

Posted on June 16, 2011 by Rodinhood

 

Mr. Marwari - Have you met Mr. Tata?
Mr. Marwari – Have you met Mr. Tata?

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 thoughts:

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…

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Five Marketing Blunders you must avoid!

Posted on June 14, 2011 by Rodinhood

Shop Window of a premium European Home Store - In Marketing, everything goes!

In Marketing, everything goes!

Marketing is one of most treacherous of all the business disciplines I know.

Check out 5 of the most dangerous marketing blunders businessmen and entrepreneurs make:




Blunder 1 – Believing that ‘Advertising is marketing’!

In the year 2000, I was running an ‘adver-gaming’ Company called contests2win.com and was sitting in the Nestle office in Delhi, waiting to meet the Kit Kat (wafer chocolate) marketing manager. I could see through the glass doors that he was being subjected to a rather animated presentation by a group of well-groomed and fashionably dressed team of young people.

Post the exit of the fashion brigade, Mr. Kit Kat beckoned me in and was looking very glum.

‘What bothers you?’ I asked him.

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The 3 deadly weapons (in term sheets) that Kill Entrepreneurs..

Posted on June 11, 2011 by Rodinhood

 

Things were going well for the entrepreneurs
Things were going well for the entrepreneurs

Once upon a time, in a land not so far away, two dynamic entrepreneurs – Bakra and Bakri got together and started up an amazing e-commerce business to sell sheep wool online!

Within a few months their business was rocking; orders were pouring in from all over the world, page views & comScore numbers were soaring and the servers and the site were happily crashing. This was indeed a great start up.

 

 

 

One day, on a midsummer night, they heard a knock on their cottage door, and when they opened it, a dark skinned man in a black suit, black shoes and black umbrella, with gelled black hair, holding a black satchel greeted them.

‘Hi’ he said, ‘My name is VC, and I am here to fund you’.

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Posted in Experiences, Internet, Media, Mobile and Tech, Start-Up, VC & Corporate Stuff | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 13 Comments

Yoda visits Rodinhood

Posted on June 8, 2011 by Rodinhood

Rodinhood.com was blessed by a surprise visit by none other than Master Yoda. When I walked into my Rodinhood office, I was speechless to see Yoda comfortably seated on the visitor’s sofa.

Master Yoda himself

Master Yoda himself

I was stunned and felt humbled & honored. After gathering myself,

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ALWAYS miss the Woods for the TREES..

Posted on June 1, 2011 by Rodinhood

I was admiring a Christmas tree today and was inspired to turn the old adage ‘don’t miss the woods for the trees’ on its head.

I think entrepreneurs should miss the woods for the trees.

Why?

Focus comes from being One Tree

As entrepreneurs, it’s very difficult in this hyper competitive world to get just one business right. It’s all about planting that single seedling and making the tree grow.

I always maintain that in the early days of the Internet (98-99), Web Entrepreneurs were expected to do 3 things simultaneously:

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Why don’t Companies pay their suppliers on time?

Posted on May 31, 2011 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.

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Confessions of a Digital Entrepreneur…

Posted on May 30, 2011 by rodinhood

I was born and brought up in a Marwari family where breakfast, lunch and dinner conversations (granny included) were about deals struck and money made. I guess that’s where I inherited my ‘entrepreneurial dna’.

It’s only after working in my father’s socks factory for almost 10 years and then taking the ultimate roller coaster plunge into the world of dot coms and mobile tech that I really learnt some heavy-duty entrepreneur lessons.

Post 4 companies, 7 Venture raises across my various companies and 2 successful exits (mobile2win china was acquired by the Walt Disney Co), let me share some insightful confessions with you:

Solve a BIG problem for a FEW folks or a SMALL problem for LOTS of folks – but nothing ‘in-between’.

In early 2000 in China, we cracked the elusive dual operator ‘sms connectivity’ [To explain - There were only 2 operators in China & both were govt. owned and hated each other.  At that time they would refuse to give a single COMMON sms ‘short-code’ to any private company. So, if China Mobile allotted you 7007 as your short-code, China Unicom would purposely give you 8008. Now, if you needed to communicate that short-code on say, a TV Ad (to get people to respond to you), you would have to mention 2 short-codes, who to send what to etc which was painful]. We cracked a short-code ‘8558’ that worked on both operators by presenting the potential of brand sms promotions and sms revenue to the 2 operators and they agreed! Only Nokia China had succeeded before us. So, when Disney started sniffing at China and figuring out how to buy a simple communication platform, we were the acquisition of choice. To come to the core point – we had solved a small problem but the one that applied to 400 million mobile users (the mobile population of in China)!

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