Anil Alur

After months of media shame, public and opposition anger, the UPA, specially our turban leader seems to be making policies in full swing.

First there is lesser known PGP, which government had launched long back, but for some reason kept this away from general public as much as possible. I have lodged lot of grievance here. Some ministries have worked on the grievance, some didn’t even after repeated reminders and some just close the grievance as solved, without actually doing anything. And then there is RTI ACT, which turned out to be pretty powerful, hence UPA started revising it, protecting the most corrupt.

In the latest turn around or (what media will start referring to as CVC scam), UPA has come up with few things to take action against corruption

• Remove the discretionary power of central ministers
• Amend article 311, which deals with removing/suspension of person under civil capacities. This will be a really change the game, if they actually do it.
• Time limits in taking actions against vigilances against government employees.
• They have also launched Project VIGEYE and Blow your whistle. It has been hours since I registered on VIGEYE and I am yet to receive my username and password.

Gave a new simple looks to my blog and personal page. Thanks to awesome theme Manifest simple and clean. Readability is just perfect.

Also made a new personal page, based on DBC theme. Thanks to @dksays for customizing the theme.

Doosro ke galtiyo se kya seekna ? Make your own mistakes ! We made them, some, we almost made them, some we realised early, some we realised late. Mistakes and learning from the mistakes have been part of our journey. It’s almost been a year and a half we have made plenty of them. I am jotting them down for my future references. All of these seems so obvious when we look back. My other team members may have few more to add.

• Never say “Hey they are big, they will never do what we do” Yes if they are big they can do anything to grow bigger.
• Don’t stock up too much. Make sure your manufacturing syncs with your marketing and sales.
• Choose the best employees that fits your bill, not the best available from the lot
• Try doing stuff yourself before you ask your employees to do it.
• Don’t try to sell super computers when all they care about is food and water.
• Early to market is a good thing. But too early to market, will make you struggle longer.
• We need a leader. Not just for the visiting cards, but for real.
• Be on time.
• When you are starting, reduce your monthly bills/monthly burnout . Being a miser helps.
• You may feel like giving up, DO NOT.
•  Stick to core values of the company and it’s founders. Don’t give them up for money or few immediate benefits. (Although we haven’t done this, we were tempted many times.)
• Don’t go by what papers or marketing brochures say, do your home work.
• Sales is the toughest and most important, everything else comes next.
• Know the legal stuff ! It’s not easy but comes in handy.

Idea of funding startups is old school. VCs and Angels fund startups for 10x returns. Everything about it is all over the internet. High risk High rewards strategy.

At Eximius 09 Prof Das NarayanDas introduced an interesting concept called search funds. It seems to be very popular in US. He was keen on bringing this concept to India. The basic principle of search funds is simple, Low risk, moderate returns (something around 5x to 6x), everybody goes home happy! This is how it works.

• A team of experts from different domains approach a funder to raise money for the search. He seemed to stress on the word “experts”, since it is supposed to be low risk. A minimum 15years of aggregated experience among the team members is essential. The initial funding is for 1 to 2 year period, during which the team looks for companies to invest in.
• The team then looks for traditional businesses, SMEs that are already in the market, making good enough profits, that are stable and stagnant. Companies which need help to grow.
• The team offers expertise in return for equities. The investor provides next round of money. The team takes over management.
• Exit option varies, buyouts, IPO or even no exit at all, just the quarterly returns to investors.

The concept seems interesting, bringing this to India is even more interesting. But getting this to work in India ? There are huge number of challenges. Most SMEs are run by families. Brothers,sons, son-in-laws and so on. None of them will want the management to be taken over by strangers. Secondly the exit will be the most difficult part. They are all emotionally attached to the companies and probably don’t want to sell it. It will be interesting to see how somebody will handle these issues in India.  But as Prof Das said, it has to start somewhere.

Who doesn’t wish to have to more and better things for the future? This is my wish list for 2009, they may look crazy, but I badly want these things to happen.

1. 2009 Elections in India makes a revolution : This is my favourite. I would love to see a revolution happening. Bringing democracy back to life. A leader and billion people making not just one difference but a lot of difference. Off course blogs are just blogs, keyboard is just a keyboard, we really need to get our hands dirty. How I wish 2009 to be the year when it is no longer OK for Mayawati to have birthday bash, no longer OK for Devegowda to own crores worth of land,Karnanidhi no longer thinks he is the GOD and APJ comes back.

2. Climate change no longer a Myth : Ah ! Many still don’t care, but hope in 2009 people finally wake up and say “OMG this is happening because of climate change. ” Are we people still not seeing that December is warm? Didn’t you hear about the Himalayas melting, Chinese desert expanding…. Forget the Financial crisis it will solve by itself within a year or two, but iceage take little longer than that !

3. Somebody really solves the energy crisis : OK lets assume we have solved the financial crisis, we have all the money, people keep buying cars, people keep building houses and industries, what next ? No energy ? I guess Indians are already seeing this problem. Rapid growth but not enough energy…. I wish there would be a revolutionary cleantech stuff that gives the world energy for free, unlimited,clean and refreshing.

4. People will see farming as a cool profession : Well I may be thinking too much on this one ! But people ! Industrial revolution is old story, food is becoming scarce. Billions of people eating everyday, the market has always been huge ! The market needs more to feed the ever hungry world. It’s already happening, the super cool IIM guys selling vegetables, farming is not very far. Think again people, our work place won’t be fabric covered cubicle, but acres of green land, amazing work tools, real pets (No more screensaver fishes or desktop flowers) and ya not to mention the great health. Well with all the financial crisis going back to farm doesn’t seem to be bad idea ! Thing again folks, which is a great idea? Selling software to bankrupt banks or selling food to the hungry billions !
5. Somebody really stops stupid scientists from doing stupid things : There are lot things happening with science that will ruin everything for human beings. Have you not seen this on Discovery Channel ? I’m not saying 2009 will be the end, but somebody has to stop stupid stuffs like genetic pollution of the food. See it’s not science fiction anymore, it’s already happening. This one from the move I Am Legend “So you have actually cured cancer….”

I was in a place called Shringeri this weekend to visit a very old friend of mine. He happens to run a small printing press in this small town which is just two streets in width. He is the local reporter, a deal-maker and person who helps people file RTI. So this person took me three NGOs in here are the true stories.

1. I travelled to another town to meet a person from a cooperative society that makes products collected from the forest, like honey,dalchini,soap nut and others. This was a very well run society, it was more like a business, totally self sustainable. The manager here was very professional.They had very clean honey processing unit. (Honey tasted great and right now I have a bottle in my room and almost finished it now ,more on this latter….). They had a transport department. They asked me to help them with a website and I’m working on it now.
   
2. After this I we went to meet a lady who runs an NGO. They train poor women for self employment and so on….. She is a very popular “Social worker” in the town. Seemed perfect, until we started talking in detail about the financials of the trust. All this woman wanted was money ! Get some grants, put them in her pocket and buy a car (She was jealous of another NGO chief who had bought a car from the grants she got from some organization in Delhi). Well so this is very common thing in Indian NGOs isn’t it? OK read my next story…..
3. In one of my previous post, I told you about the rural market survey and what exactly the people in these region need. Myself and Ashwin were still confused about how so many people would talk about selling expensive things to the rural poor and here is the secret. First promote yourself as a social entrepreneur, find some investment, get praised for doing something out of the box to help the poor. Then go to one of these regions, find a greedy NGO and some cooperative bank that provides loan at a very high interest rate (Yes poorer you are higher the interest rates). Find a family in need of money,tell them they would get a loan if they buy this product and the Greedy NGO gets some commission from the poor and the Social entrepreneur sold the product, the bank manager gets a bribe. The poor family would get the loan to buy this product and some extra money for a business. The only reason they would buy this product is because of the extra loan they get……. Phew ! I thought corporate managers were evil.

For people here these things are “fine” , because they have faced worst things in the past. Before the naxals came in, corruption was unstoppable. Naxal seem to bring a fearfactor among the corrupt , they somehow are responsible for stopping the illegal mining, they seemed to have helped the tribes understand the democracy. Now I’m confused more than ever, whom do we trust????

Starting new things with my company Enlen. One thing we figured out during our long discussions was that customers are going to be our most important assets. The market is crowded and one thing that will make us a purple cow, will be our service to customers. Luckily for us,everybody in the team accepts this. No body has a second opinion. So the next obvious thing we had in mind was, to what extent can a company accept and delvier what a customer wants?
We have heard a lot of stories, jokes about a customer care executive getting confused, trying to calm down an angry customer and then when they put down the phone the executive either laughs or curses himself for choosing that job…. Now what exactly happened here? A disappointed customer ! Really bad thing for a business isn’t it? Often I have come across big companies, who really don’t think customer is a king. Say for example Reliance Mobile. They really don’t care if they loose one customers because they are big and loosing 600Rs per month is no big deal. They don’t seem to get it, do they? Customers are humans. They have emotions, they get angry when something goes wrong. Humans don’t want to interact with robots. How often have you come across IVRs that hide the human interaction asking you keep dailing numbers, throwing you from one invisible menu to another! Ah finally you found an option to talk a human being ! You ask him in a question, he searches his script and answers you. Search a script ??? Another robot!! Yes there is some guy behind all this, implementing IVR menu, preparing scripts and ultimately saving money for the company and getting an award. Oh yes he also drives away an existing customer and few potential customers who had plans to buy his product. Yes they are not visible in the company accounts, so he is safe, he is happy, his boss is happy,everybody is happy except the customer.

Ok now coming back to our plans to serve the customers. We are sticking to Zappos model. This is our customer policy.

• No scripts, customers are humans so are we. If I don’t need a robot, my customers don’t need a robot as well.
• Give the customer what he wants and if it matters give him more than he asks for. Even if its about loosing money now, this will help us make more in the future.

After writing the blog about rural market for lights. We decided to do a market research. We choose rural regions close by to our place. It was round 1 of our market research. The villages were already electrified and were connected to grids !!! They do have regular power cuts but our research was to see how much difference would these lights to their lives. We will do a round 2 in remote villages, for now here are our findings.

• They had maximum of 8 hours power cut at irregular intervals and 2 hours in the night. Which really didn’t matter to any of the villagers. Of course it doesn’t matter much to people in Cities in India.
• They are happy without light for an hour or two, there is no way they will buy a rechargeable lamps.
• There are technical guys in these villages who can connect lead acid batteries to grid and make it work if they really need backup.
• Solar panel should be optional, a better battery management would be the best solution.
• They are aware of low cost Chinese products and thats quality for them. They don’t mind if the light is blue or white. It’s just light for them which is better than kerosene.
• They did ask for warranty !!!
• Pricing is a major factor. They will probably buy Alkaline batteries for a good lighting product rather than pay high upfront cost for rechargeable batteries.

This just few rural regions. Things vary widely. Will most our next market research data which will come remote villages with little or no access to grid.

This is my first blog in the series. This series will deal with services and products that the BOP needs. Here we go…
The most hottest product sold in the rural market are the high efficient white LED based light. Either powered from AC or a solar panel. This has given raise to few startups dedicated to provide lighting solutions to the rural market. The lights are cheap and provide a better lights compared to kerosene. There are three main players for now, all of them are venture funded.

• D.light
• Cosmoignite
• Intelizon

Dlight seems to have 3 types of products now. There is also SELCO India, which is much more amazing in it’s business model. There are few more companies that donate the lights, but thats a different story. Though the market existed in India since a long time ( even in Urban India, I remember using tubelight based emergency lamps during my exams), it is in recent times that major VCs have seen a potential market. The logic behind is simple. Most villages have either no grid power and if they have there is no sufficient power for them. They use kerosene, which gives bad light,fumes. An average person in a village would spend Rs1000 per annum of kersoene which can be replaced by these lights. There is a market for millions of such lights !!! With cheap electronics and plastic you have a very good margin.