What is a business plan? I think most people refuse to ask this question when they start building out one. It is a set of well-accepted business jargon that people continue to use and reuse. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. A business plan, in my opinion, is a document created for a certain purpose detailing the core aspects of the business addressing the basic questions of what, how, why, who, when and a few other purpose-relevant questions.

I have created a basic set of questions that the VC wants answered but does not know how to word it in a way that the entrepreneur understands it.

Each question can be answered in a single slide. So a business plan can be utmost 11 slides. Anything more than that means that either the entrepreneur does not know how to word it, or worse does not know the answer.

Here are a few basic dont’s:
1. Don’t create ppt’s of 35+ slides. And don’t send such plans (> 2MB in size) by email. If not anything it is bad email etiquette.
2. Don’t put up the market slide up first. Without the context of what you are doing, it is virtually impossible for the VC to understand what is happening in the slide. So, it’s always better if the market slide follows the value propostition slide.
3. VC’s, generally, like to see disproportionate (usually jargonised as ‘exponential’) growth. That doesn’t mean you show something that’s unrealistic – look at it from a market point of view and see if there is that kind of a space for your product/ service to actually grow. If there is then don’t worry, the VC will also figure it out. If there isn’t and you are trying to fabricate stuff, then the VC will figure out even quicker than you can complete your argument!
4. VC’s love stories. If you once went to Google or Microsoft with your revolutionary idea and they rejected it. It’s okay if it was rejected, but remember to tell them the good points that they said about your product. The VC will definitely take note.
5. Please listen. Don’t keep talking continuously. The VC, however inhumane, is still a human being. He has to go back and deal with a family. In all probability, yours is not the only business plan he is going to see in a day. So, be compassionate. The chances of reciprocation are higher.
6. If you are in advanced negotiation stages with other VCs, make it a point to reveal it during some point during the discussion. It will help save time for both of you (VC and entrepreneur). Sometimes, this might be a chance to get two investors in at the same time (co-investment).

Unable to think of anything more. As of now this is it. In case you need any more clarifications/ have any suggestions please drop in a comment here below.

Of course, Ramalinga Raju has let me down. Has let us down. But is he the lone perpetrator of this fraud of unimaginable scale? I don’t think so. There must be more people and organizations whose names will now come out in the open as investigations unfold with their results. I am just shattered at the thought of the possible names that might come under the scanner.

Imagine dragging PriceWaterhouse Coopers (PwC) to court. In India, there are atleast 100 publicly listed companies that use them as their auditor and several (possibly more than 100) other unlisted ones. I just hope they come clean through this though I have kind of assumed that they are guilty until proven otherwise. I mean you can’t be an auditor to a firm that’s been fudging numbers for seven years and yet not know what’s going on. And it was not a few bucks here and there, it was a massive Rs. 7,000 crores! I just want to study the composition of the team that was handling the Satyam account from PwC since the time they took it on. If it was the same team, then you don’t need me to tell you what was going on. If it was changing constantly, then we need to really talk to those guys who moved on to see the truth.

Then comes the board of directors. What on earth were they doing there? You had the biggest names on that board. Such a disgrace to them. I understand that they cannot get into the minute details of the financial statements, that too with Mr. Raju whose aura precedes him. I mean even if it was not for the aura, very rarely do you get into such details as you are also thinking about not irking your CEO by micro-managing or asking for too much detail or questioning his authority or any such thing. Now you add the aura of Mr. Raju and you see the position of the board. But still, I guess they have swerved away from their line of duty somewhere and they owe a moral obligation to move on from here and make way for new board members.

Come to think of it, it’s happened in the IT industry. The most watched. The most admired. Satyam had 185 of the Forbes 500 as their customers. PwC as their auditors. In hindsight, it all seems to be such a farce because the one who mattered resorted to unethical ways of managing stakeholder expectation. The good part of it is that this serves as a wake-up call to every company to get their stuff right. Also, I guess more and more companies will come clean at the earliest and revise their guidances to the market in an effort to manage stakeholder expectations better rather winding up operations or getting into such murky conditions.

Also, somewhere deep down I feel this is a representation of our Indian system. We have this fiery need to be recognized as good by the society. And this goodness is related directly to how well we manage our external image. Internally what you think or what you do be damned. But externally if you have put up your best face, then you are good. And I think this is the trap into which Mr. Raju got caught too. Just that the circle of influence of his actions was larger and it has opened our eyes to the real world.

The only thing I think I still appreciate about Mr. Raju is that he confessed to having done it all at a time when nobody actually expected it to happen. People are saying that he had no option and he was pushed into a corner and all that. Give me one instance where this has happened. He has just stood up unable to withstand his conscience and announced to the World whatever he has done. If PwC did not know, the board did not know, the finance department did not know, the shareholders did now know, the stock exchanges did not know and SEBI had no clue. Merril Lynch and Maytas were the only ones I suspect who knew. And in blowing the whistle they would have also been staring down the barrel. It was only sensible they did it this way, and even now, do we really know?

Tata releases their Rs. 1 Lakh car named ‘Nano’. ‘Nano’ means the small one in Gujarati. It looks good. 624cc engine; 20+ kmpl mileage; 20% larger than Maruti 800; own one today and pay Rs. 2200/- per month for 5 years (there must be a downpayment clause that I must have surely missed); satisfies all safety norms; obeys all emission norms (Euro IV and BS III).

Everything sounds too good to be true. And maybe that’s the reason there is so much of argument about this car increasing road congestion, pollution (apparently sheer volumes will push up overall pollution), making roads uncomfortable for pedestrians and others.

But please help me understand one thing: Why blame Tata Nano for this? What about the automobiles that have been sold till now? Are not they creating congestion? People make me sound like an idiot when I ask these questions. They go “C’mon, it’s because of the congestion that those cars have already created that we are asking ‘Nano’ not to make it worse”. This is like punishing the best because he did not enter the market earlier.

And coming to the problem on the roads and the Nano there may be an obvious link between the two, but the responsibilities for each are with different entities. The Indian Government must wake up and take measures to avoid further congestion. As citizens, I guess there is a need for mass agreement to obey traffic rules. And as far as I can see, both these things don’t seem to be happening in the near future. If I am wrongly informed, please correct me. Handcuffing corporate organizations with country’s economic problems and asking them to stop developments on innovation and cost reduction does not sound necessarily right to me.

There is a probability that Apple would have gotten away with this if they had done this in India considering the ancient laws we have protecting the consumer. But in America, I believe you have a possibility of making $1 Million if a company does such a thing as Apple has done. Check it out. A customer who had bought a 4GB iPhone for $499 has sued Apple for $1 Million.

We, in India, need a system in place to atleast to help keep the consumers aware of their rights.

I, for one, am pretty miffed with Nokia for announcing that the price of its latest phone Nokia N72 is Rs. 9399/-. I paid Rs. 9696/- for it! :( Let me look up my consumer rights booklet immediately and keep my resignation ready.

Thinking in the background: $1 million means Rs. 4 crores. 1 Mercedes Benz (Rs. 60 Lakhs), 1 flat and 1 farmhouse in Mysore (Rs. 40 Lakhs)… anyone wants a loan?! :D

My primary reason of buying this phone was that. I just needed a device to make and answer phone calls and listen to FM Radio while driving (You get to watch movies if you do this). It was the need to be connected that drew me to it. Infact my first preference was a plain vanilla 6610 – the one without the camera. But by the time I could buy it, Nokia had stopped production of that one. And by the way, I am one of those who buys only Nokia mobile phones, Sony Walkmans and Apple iPods. So 6610i it would be.

It gave me excellent company. Like all Nokia phones, I found 6610i to have a very long battery life and extremely user-friendly. One of the main reasons why I always buy Nokia phones is that it is very intuitive to use. I had a Sony Ericsson phone for a brief while in between and it was hell to go through the menu of the phone. Though I must say its display and sound quality were much better than a Nokia phone in its category, it was not the easiest to navigate through. And the number of times the phone hung, countless. So, Nokia. Period.

Today I have the same fascination for the Nokia N-Series. And I can afford the N-72 alone in that series. Everything else seems fairly out of reach. But my requirements out of a phone have not changed. I still only make and answer phone calls. Even listening to FM Radio is out. I might as well go for a 1100 (if its still in production that is), but the strange fascination for N-Series is something I am unable to get over especially since I am able to afford it. God knows what i will do with the 2 MP camera, GPRS, etc.

After UniverCell we went to another multi-brand mobile showroom. The exchange price for my 6610i went up to Rs. 1500/-. And today we went to another showroom, this guy said Rs. 1750/-. Now this huge variation has left me wondering what these guys do with the second hand phones that they buy or is it just that beauty of this phone lies in the eye of the beholder?

Role Model

I was a graduate student in Control Theory at IIT, Kanpur, in India. At breakfast on a bright Sunday morning in 1968, I had a chance encounter with a famous computer scientist on sabbatical from a well-known US university.

He was discussing exciting new developments in the field of computer science with a large group of students and how such developments would alter our future. He was articulate, passionate and quite convincing. I was hooked. I went straight from breakfast to the library, read four or five papers he had suggested, and left the library determined to study computer science.

I marvel at how one role model can alter for the better the future of a young student.

Entrepreneurship is the only way to eradicating poverty in societies:

The location: Nis, a border town between former Yugoslavia, now Serbia, and Bulgaria. I was hitchhiking from Paris back to Mysore, India, my home town.

By the time a kind driver dropped me at Nis railway station at 9 p.m. on a Saturday night, the restaurant was closed. So was the bank the next morning, and I could not eat because I had no local money. I slept on the railway platform until 8.30 pm in the night when the Sofia Express pulled in.

The only passengers in my compartment were a girl and a boy. I struck a conversation in French with the young girl. She talked about the travails of living in an iron curtain country, until we were roughly interrupted by some policemen who, I later gathered, were summoned by the young man who thought we were criticising the communist government of Bulgaria.

The girl was led away; my backpack and sleeping bag were confiscated. I was dragged along the platform into a small 8×8 foot room with a cold stone floor and a hole in one corner by way of toilet facilities. I was held in that bitterly cold room without food or water for over 72 hours.

I had lost all hope of ever seeing the outside world again, when the door opened. I was again dragged out unceremoniously, locked up in the guard’s compartment on a departing freight train and told that I would be released 20 hours later upon reaching Istanbul. The guard’s final words still ring in my ears — “You are from a friendly country called India and that is why we are letting you go!”

The journey to Istanbul was lonely, and I was starving. This long, lonely, cold journey forced me to deeply rethink my convictions about Communism. Early on a dark Thursday morning, after being hungry for 108 hours, I was purged of any last vestiges of affinity for the Left.

I concluded that entrepreneurship, resulting in large-scale job creation, was the only viable mechanism for eradicating poverty in societies.

Selling Infy:

On a chilly Saturday morning in winter 1990, five of the seven founders of Infosys met in our small office in a leafy Bangalore suburb. The decision at hand was the possible sale of Infosys for the enticing sum of $1 million. After nine years of toil in the then business-unfriendly India, we were quite happy at the prospect of seeing at least some money.

I let my younger colleagues talk about their future plans.

Finally, it was my turn.

…If they were all bent upon selling the company, I said, I would buy out all my colleagues, though I did not have a cent in my pocket.

…However, after an hour of my arguments, my colleagues changed their minds to my way of thinking. I urged them that if we wanted to create a great company, we should be optimistic and confident. They have more than lived up to their promise of that day.

Walking out on GE (not mentioned in the article, but I remember reading about it somewhere):

…a Fortune-10 corporation had sequestered all their Indian software vendors, including Infosys, in different rooms at the Taj Residency hotel in Bangalore so that the vendors could not communicate with one another.

…with revenues of only around $5 million, we were minnows compared to the customer.

…this customer contributed fully 25% of our revenues. The loss of this business would potentially devastate our recently-listed company.

…Our various arguments why a fair price — one that allowed us to invest in good people, R&D, infrastructure, technology and training — was actually in their interest failed to cut any ice with the customer.

…Through many a tough call, we had always thought about the long-term interests of Infosys. I communicated clearly to the customer team that we could not accept their terms, since it could well lead us to letting them down later. But I promised a smooth, professional transition to a vendor of customer’s choice.

A final Word:

When, one day, you have made your mark on the world, remember that, in the ultimate analysis, we are all mere temporary custodians of the wealth we generate, whether it be financial, intellectual, or emotional. The best use of all your wealth is to share it with those less fortunate.

I believe that we have all at some time eaten the fruit from trees that we did not plant. In the fullness of time, when it is our turn to give, it behooves us in turn to plant gardens that we may never eat the fruit of, which will largely benefit generations to come. I believe this is our sacred responsibility, one that I hope you will shoulder in time.

Read this.

Thought this would happen sooner than later. But didn’t expect it to happen so early.

Mysore will be another Silicon Valley of India as a number of IT firms have evinced interest in setting up shop here, Karnataka industries minister Katta Subramanya Naidu said in Mysore. 
 
Speaking to Business Standard, he said Infosys, Wipro, Tata Consultancy Services and a couple of other companies were coming to Mysore. 
 
Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro and Shapurji had sought 100 acres of land each. A few other Fortune 500 companies are also holding talks with the government for locating their projects here, the minister said. 
 
As the availability of land for new industries had become scarce, the government proposed to acquire 4,000 acres of non-agricultural land. The formalities will be completed shortly. 
 
However, care will be taken to discourage chemical and pharmaceutical industries which may damage environment. 
 
As regard the much-delayed airport, Naidu said that the High Court was yet to deliver its judgement over the disputes land. In the meantime, the Airports Authority of India had sought an additional 67 acres and acquitions process had been initiated. 
 
All these investments will give a tremendous boost to Mysore and it will grow as an IT hub, the minister said. 
 
During the last six months, Naidu said, the Karnataka government had cleared investments amounting to Rs. 90,000 crore in the state. At least 70-80 per cent of investments may come through in about two-and-a-half years. 
 
The government will give a thrust to development of tier II and tier III cities. It is releasing another Rs 100 crore, the subsidy amount due to industries.

I hope Mysore retains its identity and not become another “silicon valley”. Development should not be at the cost of the positives it has to offer today. Long live Mysore! 

Article courtesy: Business-Standard

“…According to the project plan, the Central government is supposed to foot the entire bill, which is $100 per laptop for one million pieces. The project was floated by MIT.

Complete with technical problems pointed out by IIT, Madras, pedagogical suspicions raised by NCERT and first-hand experience of a senior HRD official who found that the laptops have not even crossed the prototype stage, Banerjee had said that OLPC “may actually be detrimental to the growth of creative and analytical abilities of the child”….”

They are talking about the Nicholas Negroponte’s $100 Laptop. Probably he hasn’t done whatever is required by the Government. Otherwise, would Rs. 450 crore ever be wasted by getting into newsprint?

Another interesting part of the article is the last paragraph which says:

“…The HRD official also said that an OLPC-like project has already been started by an Indian company which has supplied 50,000 laptops to South Africa at a price of $200. “Indian companies are not lagging behind. They may need more encouragement,” he said.”

This Indian company must be either Novatium or Encore Software. Whoever it is, if the HRD official is truthful then let’s hope this is the first success for Indian Hardware Industry. Beating Negroponte’s well-publicised (probably over-hyped too!) $100 Laptop venture is not easy.