Sramana Mitra informed me by via email that she is doing a series called Investment Thesis, with interviews of various VCs and what they are looking to invest in. She says - I will do what I can to profile venture firms that are focused particularly on seed / early-stage deals, as I find it disturbing how the VCs are continually moving away from seed deals, leaving a chasm which will create a big problem in the upcoming years.

She has profiled 3 VCs so far:

Sumir Chadha from Sequoia Capital, who is actively investing in seed and early stage ventures in India

Sumir: I have spent the past decade between Sequoia Capital india and Goldman Sachs investing in early to mid-stage Indian companies spanning a number of industries including consumer internet, wireless, outsourced services and software. Prior to that, I was at Mckinsey working on internet and technology strategies. I have an MBA and was a Computer Science major at Princeton. More…

George Zachary from Charles River Ventures, who is focused 50/50 on seed and Series A investments

George: I’ve been involved in technology - either operationally or as a venture capitalist for over 20 years. I am one of the few venture capitalists that has played both in consumer entertainment from leading the Nintendo64 development business to being on the board of a movie production company to being a co-founder and co-investor in a consumer web service, Shutterfly. More…

Alex Osadzinski from Trinity Ventures, who is primarily focused on investing in the first or second institutional round. They also look at a few seed deals, where the team and/or the space is well-known to them

Alex: My background is mostly on the operational and entrepreneurial side. I spent 22 years in operational roles, at 6 startups, one behemoth, and one turnaround. My roles were always a combination of VP Engineering, VP Marketing and VP Sales, or CEO/President. Of the startups, two were sold, three went public with multi-billion dollar outcomes, and one is a gently smoking crater. I’ve been at Trinity for just over five years, working across all of our practices, but with a personal focus on software and digital media. More…

Sramana - it might be better to tag it with a unique keyword that will return only the posts on the Investment Thesis. This way, people can bookmark just one link which returns all the relevant posts rather than individual links.

There are times when I write a few posts that I think deserves a lot more eye-balls than what my blog attracts. Of course, there are other times when a few other posts get a lot more views than they deserve too.

So when Heath Row from Fast Company contacted me to find if I will be willing to contribute in the Fast Company blogjam, I was more than eager. I had decided on a few posts that I will be writing but I never got to do that because of the last minute decision on me also going for the campus placements. I will have to postpone writing the same articles for some more time.

But I did contribute 2 posts in the blogjam2006 category, even though they were not the ones I had originally planned:

1. The Fear of Getting Acquired!

   We focused a lot on the fact that innovation in the world of Web 2.0 and web-applications is particularly happening in the nooks and corners and the big companies are playing catch-up by mostly acquiring the same startups. What startled me was the fact that amongst the people who had the startup bent of mind and wanted to join startups had a fear - fear of the company getting acquired! The fact that everybody makes tons of money whenever such thing happened didn’t seem to satisfy them - they were more concerned on what happens to the same innovation that was happening when the company was small.

   Read more …

2. How Good Is the Idea of Bootstrapping a Business?

   Last week, I was having a telephonic conversation with somebody from one of India’s most popular business magazine. The talk was about startups in general and drifted to lack of seed capital for India based startups. One question he asked me was “Would you have taken investment if it was easily available?”

   I said “No” - “I think it’s best to bootstrap a business and not go for seed funding if it can be avoided”. Of course, there are businesses which cannot be bootstrapped at all but it should be avoided as much as possible.

   Read more …

A little off-topic but just wanted to promote another blog that I have started at http://opera.latestinindia.com to talk about fiction, personal stuff, creative writing, and generally anything weird that I come across - and which is not very suitable for this blog. I intend to write stuff that relates to my life (other than business and technology), may contain work of my imagination and many a times will be a mix of the two.

To set the mood and get some initial content on the blog, I will be copying the posts from the first ever blog I created - at Sulekha (beware, some really cheesy posts are there). The last post I wrote on Sulekha was when I was still working in the US and none of the posts had nothing to do with business or technology. So, if you intend to read up about just technology / business, please don’t bother to go to the other one.

As I re-read my posts that I made on Fiction and Truth, I can safely say that my thought-process and maturity level has changed a lot in the past 2 years when I returned back to India. For good or bad - I am going to make a commitment to update the other blog reasonably frequently, even though my first priority will always be LatestInIndia.com.

:-)

If you believe that Robert Scoble is the most powerful geek blogger in the world, you will agree that having a popular blog will increase your ‘market value’ in a recruiter’s eyes beyond one’s imagination and will get you almost any job that you want. Not only Scoble, a lot of people / companies including Tekriti have immensely benefitted because of the blogs that they maintain.

But is there a flip side to it? I contributed my thoughts to a Financial Express article by Banasree Purkayastha which talks about the fairness of judging a prospective employee based on his / her blog or another online journal.

I think the article covers the subject very articulately. When I am hiring somebody, particularly a senior team-member, I do a quick google search on the person or read up few of his / her blog-posts (if there exists one) to know the mental make up of the person. I can live with a few incapabilities or technological short-comings in a person but the attitude is something which cannot be compromised. For one potentially brilliant guy who doesn’t have the right attitude, I will not let the company culture be affected. And the blog lets me get that information quite easily / accurately.

As I said in the article - the fact that a employer can find out about a prospective employee through his / her blog works well for both the parties. The advantages for an employer are pretty obvious. For an employee, it’s even better as they are likely to perform best in a place where they are hired after knowing that his / her mindset and of others in that company are aligned.

From the article:

More and more recruiters and employers are checking out the online profiles of potential candidates in a bid to filter out the ‘not-so-fitting’ employee. According to a recent survey by ExecuNet, an executive job search and recruiting network in the US, 35% of executive recruiters said they dropped a job candidate because of information uncovered online. That is up from 26% just one year ago. Another 77% of respondents said they use search engines to learn more about prospective employees. And the trend is making inroads in India too.

“I think blogs/online journals give a very good idea of a person. Blogosphere is built on the assumption that people, in general, are genuine and they write things that they really feel about, and the assumption is very valid. A blog tells us a lot many things about a person, like his mental setup, if he likes to work in a team or works better as an individual, etc. At times, it also gives information on anything fake the person might have written on the resume,” says Kumar.

Read the complete post here. I wrote a similar post at GoingOn and Syven made a good comment, which is copied below:

The recruitment industry isn’t today exactly the epitomy of perfection, but times change mindsets and what looks like an act of negligence today could transform ito wise cultural language tommorrow. It is true that the future is always looking backwards and I don’t want to paint bloggers as martyrs, but when a massive shift in public opinion occurs, recruiters will begin to hire those who show their hearts, rather than hide behind their glossy personal brand. Remember it was only 50 years ago a negro guy in America wasn’t allowed to use the same toilet as his white counterpart. Mindsets like that changes with experiences and time, don’t they?

Update: Chetan has a nice post on his views on the subject, which is opposite to mine. Though I don’t agree exactly (as noted in the comments on this post), he has some good points.

This is an old news now where people have been speculating about the reason for a lot of different blogs to be blocked in India.

Indiatimes has an article with the reason for the blogs being blocked: Terror heat hits netizens, select blogs blocked.

From the article:

MUMBAI/DELHI: The central government, reeling under fierce criticism of its response to the Mumbai blasts, has struck a blow at the online community by issuing orders to block blogs across the country.

Experts believe that the government’s sudden move is aimed at thwarting the use of blogs (online journals) and websites by terrorists and their supporters. Blogspot, a Google-owned site, is among those blocked by this government measure.

And, they say, we have a freedom of speech! Another reason for not using a hosted blog - thank god that I have my own domain name.

Something interesting, and unfortunate, that happened during Gnomedex 06 was the debate between Dave Winer and Blake Ross. It happened so that Blake was leading a discussion and talking about spreading software through grassroot means. By virtue of his association with Firefox, he mentioned how Firefox gained popularity and then showed a video - that was essentially mocking Internet Explorer.

At this - Dave stood up and said “I don’t care about what you think about Microsoft or IE - I would rather have you talk about future plans for Firefox and what are you doing for the users”. Blake mentioned that “this talk is not about Firefox”. Fair enough but seconds later, the discussion totally went into another direction with Blake mentioning that “You had written something against me at your blog sometime back and….” - and that was it.

I personally think that Blake should have stopped saying that the discussion was not about Firefox but the fact that he chose to use this forum to answer Dave was uncalled for. I don’t understand why even a small criticism or questioning of any Open Source Software is taken so seriously. Just because you are passionate for it and doing it for the love of it and benefitting a lot of others (and might not be making as much money (if any) as Microsoft or any other vendor with a proprietory product) - doesn’t mean that everybody else will be equally passionate and forgiving about that.

Software engineers build products and users use it not because they like the software vendor but because the product is more usable. Firefox is a great product and scores over IE6 - but I don’t see why will people not migrate over to IE again if IE7 indeed lives up to its promise (and Firefox doesn’t give enough reasons for people to stay with it). I, as a user, can empathize and appreciate with people creating open source software but that doesn’t mean that I will use it (or any other proprietory software, for that matter).

Read Blake’s post and Dave’s post on the same.

Tags: Gnomedex Gnomedex 6.0 Dave Winer Blake Ross

This is a live post of my impressions about Gnomedex 6.0 - straight from the Bell Harbor Conference Center.

I reached a bit late - mainly because I had to park the car a bit away from the venue.

1st session: Chris Pirillo - Opening remarks
I heard Chris the 2nd time - first one being at BloggerCon. Love the energy of this guy - good choice of the host. But the wi-fi is damn slow.

2nd session: Michael Arrington
It’s amazing to see a site being so popular in just a span of over 1 years - TechCrunch has become a must-read for anybody doing anything in the Web 2.0 space. Questions were raised on the business model of the various Web 2.0 companies - which was expected. Michael seems to think that there will be many micro-businesses coming up because of this space but there aren’t many that will become medium sized to big.

Damn! The wi-fi is so slow that I can hardly edit my posts. So - I will just go slow on live blogging unless I find something extremely interesting. Meanwhile - Senator John Edwards is on stage taking questions. There are a lot of people blogging live here.

Tags: Gnomedex Gnomedex 6.0

I am at Marc’s open house today where the celebrations are on for PeopleAggregator going live.

This is our 3rd big public release - after Ourmedia and GoingOn - and it gives me a lot of satisfaction to see the products being used by the actual users.

The next big stop is Gnomedex at Seattle and I fly for that tomorrow noon. Gnomedex will be the first paid conference I will be going to on this trip - so I am definitely more eager.

Anyways, I am a little tired as I write this post because of continuous late nights (and early mornings) but it was good to meet various people at Open house. Phil and Kyoko, Paolo, Richard McManus - they are all still here and everybody seems to be typing something on the laptop - so I don’t feel too bad that way

Finally - landed in the Bay Area, California on Tuesday afternoon local time and catching up with emails, friends and other stuff. Everytime I come to US and drive on the roads here, I feel that traffic is the number 1 difference between the two countries: India and United States.

Anyways - I got to meet a couple of more people today before meeting Marc Canter in the evening and then heading out for BloggerCon tomorrow and day-after. I see that the the list of attendees is pretty interesting for the conference - looking forward to that!

Just now - I upgraded by blogging software to Wordpress 2.0.2 - it looks that the upgrade was more or less successful but it’s not showing the number of comments per post (it’s showing 0 in each case on the homepage) but you can click on the comments link to see the actual comments. So, it looks that the comments are present - it’s just that the count of comments is not coming.

Oh well, I am too sleepy right now - will fix that tomorrow!

Update: Looks like there was a bug in the Wordpress Upgrade script. They introduced 2 extra columns in the database tables (posts and categories) which is responsible for storing the total count of the comments and posts-per-category. The upgrade script didn’t do the auto-calculation (so it was showing 0 comments on every old post and not showing all categories in the left sidebar) and I had to write a small script to populate the 2 counts in the database. The good news is that it is all fixed and I also activated another theme, thanks to Jeu where I first noticed this theme.