Mayank Sharma

Why Meditation?

Is meditation only for elderly folks? Is it only for religiously or spiritually inclined folks? Is it so esoteric that you and I cannot do it?

Very simply put, Meditation is an exercise that you undertake to keep your mind fit and relaxed. The way you go to Gym or that early morning walk to keep your body healthy. Mediation keeps your Mind healthy.

Mind is a very complex entity. If your body gets physically strained, you know you need to take rest and you promptly do. Your mind on the other hand is getting strained every single waking moment and yet it neither gets any rest nor the exercise to keep it healthy. You disagree? Ok what are you thinking about right now? about a minute ago? an hour ago? Try to observe the thought that you are having right now and see how quickly it leads to another and yet another one ad infinitum until someone calls your name. Your mind processes thousands of thoughts every single day. And that strains your mind. 

Meditation helps you get rid of those continuous thoughts that you are processing to a point where not a single thought runs through your mind. That is an ultimate state of relaxation your mind can experience. You are aware of your surrounding and can react to an external stimulus if you chose to, but your mind is completely free from any thoughts. It is blissful.

For a healthy life, Keep your body healthy and give equal importance to your mind as well. That is Art of Living. 
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ONZE in Times of India

Onze

Helping you find your way through sms - Onze featured in today's Times of India.

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Pepperfry Fiasco

Earlier this year a brand new ecommerce store made splashing headlines fresh with a big funding and claiming unimaginable signups. Soon people started dishing out this venture with it's unscalable tactic of acquiring customers. This business was pepperfry. Last week after getting spammed every week with crazy discounts I decided to test how much water it could hold.

I had a fresh newsletter from Pepperfry offering me a Rs. 501/- Discount on anything purchased above Rs. 1000/-. Fare enough if you are willing to pass on some hard earned (or rather a wind fall) money of yours my way, you cannot blame me for taking the bait. So promptly I order a 1200/- Jewelry for my wife and mentioned the coupon code at the time of checkout. So finally a 2000/- something stuff with 50% discount and a Rs. 500/- coupon costed me approx Rs. 600/-. 5 Days to deliver is what the checkout page said.

Yes Flipkart has spolied me with a 24 hour delivery but what the hell, I was getting a Rs. 2000/- stuff for Rs. 600/-. The least I could do was wait. Right? So I waited. 5 days over and not news. 7 days over and now I am feeling a little jittery. Was there something in fine print which I missed which would allow them to have my hard earned money the easy way rather than the other way around?

I fire-up couple of emails, and login couple of support request on their website. 10 days later I see my money credited back to my account (thank god), My order status on the order page shows "Canceled", and all my support tickets closed with no explanation.

Now my question to Pepperfry. Seriously guys what the hell are you upto? Are you just trying to acquire more signups by promising ridiculous coupons and then not delivering stuff? Do you expect any repeat purchase to happen on your site with this kind of behavior? Aren't you setting a wrong precedent and reducing the trust that people are starting to build up about buying stuff online?

Anyone else had a similar experience with Pepperfry? 
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Lets talk about Inhibition

When you were in school, you knew each and every person in your class. Did some teacher take the initiative of introducing you all? When you were in your college or university, How many of your batchmates did you actually know? And then you joined a job and knew how many people? 

Today when you are working how many friends do you think you have? Not the facebook one. They won't turn up when you die. Go back to your college time and try remembering how many friends did you have then? And now go back to your school. How many friends did you have?

As you grew older your number of friends started reducing. Why? You got busier? A lot of responsibility started coming your way? You became too important?

Back in the days of school there was no inhibition. You could walk up to any person and start a conversation. You did not need someone to introduce you to some other person. As we grew older we started becoming more and more conscious about ourselves and what others would think about us. 

There is a universal connection between each and every living human being. I don't know what that connection is, but the energy flows from one person to the other through this connection. Lesser the number of friends you have, lesser is the energy you will get from this common pool. This energy is directly proportionate to your happiness. The only way out of this vicious cycle is to get rid of your inhibition. It's not because you are too busy that you are not able to have more friends today. You have a lot more inhibition.

Without Inhibition, in your childhood you could go to anyone and talk. You can talk your heart out to someone without thinking what they will think about you. That helped you get better at what you wanted to get better at. There was no negative feeling about anyone. And there was no such thing called Stress. Whereas today we resist talking to anyone about your problems. Or about the problem you are having with them. End result, you keep all those negative thoughts within yourself and succumb to it. This then gives rise to the Stress that you may be encountering.
 
Facebook and other Social Communities let's you keep the inhibition and yet claim that you have more friends. Reality is far from that. So quit being social on Facebook and start becoming social offline. Reclaim your child hood innocence and get rid of your inhibitions. Not just with respect to making friends and talking to them, but in general. Whenever you feel there is inhibition stopping your from doing certain thing. GET RID OF IT.

That is, if you want happiness.

Thought Credits : Sri Vinod MenonJi from DSN course at Art of Living Ashram.
    
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Strong vs Weak Person

Are you a strong person or a weak person? Strength as in mental strength. A person with strong mental strength is bound to do things which may qualify as success, happiness and contentment.

You are driving on a highway and you see two sign boards. One says This way the other says That way. Which one do you choose? This way. Why? because it is easier. because it is convenient. because I feel like taking it. That way  by the way is opposite of what I said about This way.

You set an Alarm for 5 AM. Alarm rings, you wake up. You feel like sleeping for 5 more minutes. What do you do? Chose the This way and sleep for 5 minutes (maybe more). You have a meeting at 5PM and at 4:55 PM India is playing the last over of the match and you don't want to miss it. What do you do? Chose the This way.

You are presented with choices every single day, multiple times a day. Every time you chose This way over That way you get into the habit of choosing This way. This habit is what makes you a weak person. 

That way on the other hand is the path of commitment, discipline and responsibility. Indeed it is hard to take That way. But the habit of choosing That way every time you are presented with the choices is what makes you a strong person.

Do you have problems with commitment? Do you want to be a strong person and don't know where to start? It's very simple. Start choosing That way whenever you are presented with choices, and the habit of choosing That way over This way will eventually make you a strong person.

By the way, only strong person can be entrepreneurs :-)

Credits: Above thoughts are from my new found Guru Vinod Menon Ji. He teaches a course called Divya Samaj Nirman at Art of Living.
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Art of happiness

3 years ago I started on a journey with no idea as to where it would take me. For a long time I have been working with startup and big companies and so had an idea of what not to do. But what would my startup would be like, who will I be working with, I had no idea. There was this tiny fear of failure, rejection losing my 'domain expertise'. But with a little confidence (or a lot of over-confidence) and a big support from my loving wife, I tool the plunge.

So how do I evaluate my last three years? I created smstweet, did zebu, tried couple of ideas with paying customers on mcoupons, mloyalty. Tried running revu and now growing onze. Have I been a failure with my earlier attempts? No doubt if I had raised couple of million dollars for my startups or have been in the 'lime light' of this startup ecosystem, there would be 10 guys who would have written my obituary.

But the fact is that I am alive, had the most fun filled 3 years of my life and had an awesome time watching my 2 kids grow. No million dollar exits, no job creation for 100's of people, no dent in startup space and made a big hole in my savings. So is this a success or failure?

Happiness is a very personal thing. You decide for yourself what it means for you. If it means not being part of the 'last man standing game' or selling out to the 'market leader' or the so called assets sale (life mojo, lifeblob). It's your startup and you decide how to run/exit it. Startup is something you do it for yourself and your own happiness. Do not succumb to peer pressure of being called a failure or being written of by startup evangelists. 

Indian startup Eco system is growing by leaps and bounds. People are willing to experiment, vc ecosystem is growing, people have more disposable income and are finally starting to buy stuff online. Least we need here are a bunch of cassandras writing obituary of people, company and the Eco system in general.

And frankly last 2cents for people starting up. Don't read too much blogs or subscribe to startup gurus on twitter and elsewhere. That is a huge distraction. Just take the plunge and things will only shape up for the best for you.

And last 2 cents to 'self proclaimed vanguard of startup ecosystem'. Do something instead of just writing obituaries.

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Startup landscape in local space

Local_business_listing_perspec

A couple of days ago a friend showed me pluggdin forums. He suggested I start a discussion and being in the Local space for so long, decided to explore the Hyper-Local space. I started the discussion, but then got too busy to come back to it. Yesterday came back to it and was quite surprised to see the number of discussions. Now Local and Hyper-Local are two different terms and I don't claim to know the difference between them, But I felt it was a good opportunity to see what is happening in the Local space. Rest of the discussion is copied verbatim from there. 


Local Shopping : Yes this is one big opportunity, and after failing (in one sense) with Local listing, people are looking at this niche as well (nudge nudge zopnow). But I am not really convinced about the size of this market to warrant a startup. A number of them (fabmall now IndiaPlaza) tried earlier and failed quite miserably (in all senses). But yes if Flipkart can know IndiaPlaza off, I am open to surprises. But personally will not bet my money (Do I have any?)

Local Info : As CitizenMatters has shown there is definitely a demand for this. Maybe niche. May not be online (as the target audience is not online). Some are approaching it from a philanthropic front (CitizenMatters), some are actually treating this as a niche but don't have a big budget (CityPlus of Dainik Jagaran) and some obviously are trying to solve it from technology perspective. There needs to be some alignment with the above three seemingly orthogonal viewpoints to converge and make a larger impact. I have closely monitored CityPlus execution and knowing that they are maybe breaking even, I am quite bullish on this aspect. Self generated Content (citizenmatters), with a razor sharp offline circulation(cityplus) and using technology to reduce all other costs will make you win this game.

Local Listing : Clearly tonnes of companies have embarked on this train hoping to replicate JustDial's success and not one has succeeded. To borrow Ashish's words here, it's not the technology that you need here. A lot of people have dissected this space, so I will just ignore and move on.

Local Directions : We at ONZE provide directions on SMS. When people hear about it first they brush it off saying who needs them? Google is there for online. Does it work? Not really. What about offline? SMS is too cumbersome. The fact is that we have an awesome location aware local search and directions service on SMS. But even today the requests for directions surpasses local search on our platform. Believe me, this is one big space. We have just scratched the surface and are quite excited as we are digging deeper.

Local Advertisement : A TV commercial in one barometer to measure your arrival as a brand/product/service. Only the rich can afford it and masses can only see them. But what if a Local business wants to advertise on TV, and that too only for his city? Big opportunity right? Look what Amagi is doing.

Local Ad platform : Millions of apps being made today but there are just handful of them (like angry birds) who are making money. Next are the mobile ad platform like inmobi who would be making the next big buck just by sitting between the advertisers and publishers. Taking a cue from Amagi, I personally feel that the moment these Ad platforms (or maybe a new one) focuses exclusively on providing the ability to the advertisers to advertise hyper-locally (show only to jayanagar folks), it will provide a huge benefit to the advertisers. Not only the conversion will be higher, both the advertisers and consumers will be happy.

So do watch out this space. That's it and let me know your views.

Image credit [http://www.smartfindslocallisting.com/articles/local_business_listings_are_not_about_getting_listed.php]
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Startup's out of Impulsesoft and SiRF

Reading about the Burrp mafia by my friend Avlesh took me back to the time when I started my own startup journey. One of the awesome thing that a startup does to (most) of us is that it implants the seed (keeda) of entrepreneurship in you. Be it a large company like Google, Yahoo or even Infosys, or small companies like Burrp. They give birth to even more startups.

Implulsesoft did not become as famous as Burrp, but it had a decent exit when SiRF acquired it. SiRF also acquired another company in Bangalore called  Truespan and within 3 years was forced to close down it's Bangalore office(That actually is a very interesting story. maybe some other time). As a result of which most of us ventured out to start stuff we had always dreamed of. Here are those crazy guys.
Impulsesoft
Amagi : Baskar, Vidhya and Kas. Original founders of Impulseoft left SiRF early on and started Amagi. An unheard of and a daring proposition of bringing local advertisements on your national cable channels. They have gone through two rounds of funding and are growing at an exponential pace.

Zebu : Inspired by Small Giants Sri (Founder and CEO of Impulsesoft) along with Raja and Bikash started Zebu. I along with Kausik joined them after SiRF closed down. We worked briefly on a nifty application we called dog-earz

Althea : I met Vinod, Sagar and Kishore in SiRF after it acquired their company TrueSpan. SiRF had planned to close down the ex-Truespan division couple of months before they closed down the whole bangalore office. These guys started Althea soon afterwards. Raised one round of investment, got Techcrunched and created quite a flutter in the valley with their cool social video browsing tool called Shufflr.

Amberroot : Sudhakar is a master of hardware board designs. Yogesh an awesome coder only next to our great Sala coder. And Karthik, well don't go on his looks or sweet talk. He could fool you by his knowledge of his products that he is not the sales guy. These guys ventured out to make solar energy efficient to generate and economical to make it mainstream.

Muddyboots : If you thought TV advertisements, Business consulting, Video browsing and discovery, Solar energy was as orthogonal people could get coming out of a single startup, wait till you hear about Roby. He abandoned more than 20 years of being in IT and setup a travel company organizing bike trips and treks in unexplored territories of Nilgiris and other places.  

ActWitty : Sudhanshu, who just calls himself a coder, worked with Amagi for some time before venturing out into ActWitty. He is building a cool product to help you connect with people with common interest in the noise that social browsing has become. 

That brings me to the end of the list, except obviously for myself :-). You may have, but I have not forgotten about myself. I started with Sri and others in Zebu. Left within 6 months to be a solo-entrepreneur. Experimented with lots of ideas (Smstweet, mCoupons, mLoyalty, Revu). Worked as a consultant for a friend. Met a bunch of people over coffee and made some quite interesting and new friends. And finally settled at ONZE (More of that later).

I am sure there are a bunch of others who left early and started on their own. And some in the valley itself coming out after SiRF's acquisition by CSR (Lytro being one of them).

After learning about Burrp, and telling my own story about Impulsesoft+SiRF, would love to know more such stories of startups being born out of startups. Do share if you come across any.
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You TRAI we Double TRAI

Necessity is mother of all innovation they say. I agree, But innovating in a highly constrained manner is what really amazes me. And so after a much delay TRAI finally got around to forcing it's draconian NCPR guidelines on us. Bulk SMS industry almost got wiped out and all the other innovative companies who were using SMS as a primary channel of communication suffered a major blow. We (ONZE) were also in some sense on the receiving end of this enforcement. We (SMS Pull based services) paid the price for the nuisance created by UCC over SMS.

Double-cross

But if the recent developments are true, Bulk SMS will be back with a bang. With the Diwali around the corner, every retailer is pushing big time to somehow get their messages delivered (unsolicited) to the consumers. And so some of the SMS Providers have come up with a way to work around NCPR guidelines. Use an international SMS Gateway. 

NCPR restrictions (or guidelines to be precise, because there is no physical restrictions) are only for Indian mobile operators. Not for the international one. Yes using an international SMS gateway will indeed be costlier, but if retailers are ready to pump in that money, sms providers will definitely oblige. And you know very well where this money will go. If the demand only from India rises so much, the price itself will no doubt come down making Bulk SMS accessible to every one.

This shoot first and ask later attitude of the government (especially with NCPR) is hurting a lot of nascent mobile VAS company. Not only does it not solve the core issue (UCC SMS) it kills a lot of good innovation.

Doesn't this remind you of a 80's Bollywood movie, the Police (TRAI) laid a trap for the smugglers(Bulk SMS), but it was not long before Police realized they have been double crossed. oops double trai'ed?

What do you think the government should do about this? And fast.
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Bubbles, startup fundings and poor Flipkart

Eer kahein chalo Flipkart ki maare, Bir kahein chalo Flipkart ki maare, Hamao kahein chalo ham'o Flipkart ki maare. 

Jokes apart. There have been a flurry of blogs predicting the bubble and how insane the whole valuation of flipkart is. Insane or not, someone with a deep pocket and insights into the company which you and me are not privy to has made the bold decision to invest in Flipkart. That is the only bottomline. The rest that you read in public blogs is mere speculations. Some even appearing to me as sour grapes.

When it comes to the general financial marketing (primary as well as secondary included), I am a big fan of Nicholas Taleb. His rule of thumb is you just cannot predict anything (event the bubble). The market is so volatile and complex that the experts themselves are taking a calculated risk. The market just won't perform according to your's or mine prediction. Who are we fooling, when randomness is already here to fool us (shuks bad PJ. sorry Nicholas).

Recent bursts in the bubble, both the dot com and the financial meltdown have provided good insight into the creation and eventual bursts of these bubbles. But on the flip side, now everyone claims that they can now predict these bubbles, and have been predicting since about a year starting with Groupon. Both inside and outside the country. What they fail to understand that the same insight that was provided by earlier meltdowns have made the investors wiser as well. And the collective wisdom of all these 'smart' folks is unlikely to create a bubble on the same lines as the last one. 

The dotcom bubble was preceded with a flurry of dotcom companies going IPO. Is this the same story today? No. We are not doing the same mistakes as last time, but yes we are making some mistakes. These mistakes may burst the bubble tomorrow, a year later or even 10 year later. NO ONE CAN PREDICT THAT.

The pattern of risk taking over multiple rounds of funding resembles an inverted bell curve to me.
Bell
At the beginning the founders taking the biggest leap of faith in starting their company following their vision and passion. They are the ones taking the biggest risks. Subsequent rounds of funding are taken at a somewhat reduced risk when a company starts to show a good growth and cash flow. Investors look at this growing company and genuinely want to help it grow further. The company then becomes a coffee table discussion amongst everyone and the founders the poster boys. Whoever invested in the company around this time possibly took the lowest risk. The company now is on a meteoric rise. Whoever invests now is taking the biggest risk on betting a sustained meteoric rise. Is it not fair then that the equity that they get for their investment is valued at an insane figure?

The bubble will burst in one year, or 10 year or 20 year later. No one knows. What we can do is, be cautious in our investment and let others manage their own investment. You don't know their risk profile and are not entitled to comment on it. Period.
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