Fun at Startups

The Startups are good place to meet creative set of people. The option of joining/running a Startup is by choice and not as a substitute of regular job. People do spend countless hours to make every system/project/product a huge success. So, it becomes imperative to create a fun-filled environment which gives a lot of comfort to each employee. People should feel very lively environment within Startups.


Here are some pointers which can make your Startup a fun-filled place:

1. Nominate somebody as CFO ( Don't Confuse..it's Chief Fun Officer). There are few folks who have lot of energy and good sense of humor. They are good at driving discussions and make people feel happy. Try to get these people engaged in more discussions where set-up is quite informal. Let all your employees laugh at small things too. Be it movies, sports, politics, love, news or anything. Don't make informal discussions look very formal. As a Startup founder engage with your employees as much as you can and make them feel at home.

2. Encourage tea/snacks break where people can walk for 15-20 minutes and then come back to work. Let them chat on various issues and refresh their minds. They can talk about boss, work, news , girls/boys and many other things. This would help them to refresh their mind. Just keep in mind the point that " Sitting at desk won't result in productive work". Employee should feel encouraged to work. So Startup owners should make small steps to make environment fun-filled.

3. Try and encourage people to get involved in showing their extra-curricular skills. Make a point to have such events every 6 month. During this time people work together and feel charged to look at professional & personal fronts together. This helps in developing skills for better time-management too. Also you get to know people with varied skills ( music, singing, dancing etc.). Startup owners should also take part actively in some of these events to encourage others to come forward and participate.

4. Startups should organize some outstation trips. These trips helps people to understand their colleagues in better way. These trips should be fun-filled and release all work pressure and people should look forward for such outings and come back with fresh energy.

Startups doesn't boast big offices, big numbers, and big things....They pride key people; their biggest asset. So, make them happy and let them enjoy the workplace.

Interview : CATINDIAONLINE Co-Founder

Recently I chatted with Manish Singh, co-founder of Catindiaonline. He is from IITK (2004 Batch) and started his venture along with Kumar Gaurav,Mayank Goel and Santosh Kumar building CAT testing platform with Analytics engine and patent pending Recommendation engine.Some of the CAT 100 percentile scorers helped them in building this platform.Its a free portal for CAT aspirant www.catindiaonline.com .

The site offers online mock CAT tests + Previous CAT papers + Topic wise Test. This site is very different and has many more features than what one may think of. Its test framework is quite cool and analysis part is something that I bet that you can't find anywhere else. Its best part is in-depth analysis that gives gory details of one's performance - topic wise, difficulty wise, time requirements wise, comparative analysis of performance etc… The analysis will precisely point you out the issues with your preparation.In the end, You will find something called recommendations which will recommend CAT aspirant how he/she should have taken the test to maximize his/her score

1. When did you start and from where?

We have a team of 5 individuals based out in Bangalore, who are totally committed to the project. Two of them are working full time for the portal, whereas rest 3 of us are currently volunteering for it. Going forward at least one more of us is planning to work for www.catindiaonline.com full time. Apart from this, a number of other people have volunteered and made great contributions to the analysis and recommendation framework.

2. A bit more about your background and experience.

The core group of consists of IIT & IIM graduates and students. The two dedicated members of the team as well as three Bangalore based volunteers are all graduates of IIT Kanpur, batch of 2004. Among other volunteers we have 3 graduates from IIMs (A & B). One of these got 100 percentile in CAT 2006. These days a lot of other people have shown interest in working with us. We will keep you updated as and when our team expands.

3. What you want to achieve out of this venture?

We have a two fold aim behind CATIndiaOnline. On one hand, we aim to address some of the problems that CAT aspirants, particularly, working professionals, face today in preparing for CAT. Some of these problems include the following:

• Lack of time to take center based tests: Our tests can be taken from anywhere, anytime
• Inflexibility of paper based tests to adapt to personal preparatory needs: Our tests are customizable by topics/sub-topics, difficulty levels etc.
• Lack of proper analysis and feedback on performance: Topic-wise, difficulty-wise, time-management wise performance analysis and feedback is given by us instantaneously.

On the other hand, when CAT goes online, all mom & pop coaching institutes will require to administer computer based tests. It will be challenge for them to develop the required infrastructure. Students of all these coaching classes will need an alternative and we will help them with our free online test solution.

4. How are you going to take this further and compete with biggies like CL, TIME etc.

At this point of time, we are focusing on an aggressive marketing and branding campaign. A number of country's biggest CAT/MBA forums/portals have shown interest in having tie ups with us. This will give us direct access to a large number of CAT aspirants. Therefore, we are strongly considering these tie-ups. As and when we formally tie up with them, we will let you know about it.

Building second Layer within Startups

A lot of startups do have good founding team which is capable of building the initial product/service. These people are able to do initial groundwork to bring startup to decent level. But all organizations want to grow with time and founders want to realize their dreams in big-way. So, from here originates the need of second set of key people who can drive organization to new heights. These people are typically either have less exposure than founders or want to gain experience before venturing to start at their own. Typically these people bring experience and freshness and can be very helpful to scale-up operations. Founders should understand the relevance of 2nd layer and act in following manner:

1. Delegating Work : Founders should start delegating work-areas in which they are either not good or they don't have bandwidth to carry it effectively. The 2nd layer of people should be given good amount of flexibility and responsibility with defined objective measures. These people should not ask founders for each small issues. By doing so, founders can focus their energies on core functional areas and other strategic issues.

2. Treating them as partners : Founders should not 2nd layer as employees only, since they can be very critical in scaling-up the business. They should be seen as business partners with reasonable equity participation as per time of entry and level. Even in terms of respect and place within organization they should be treated well.

3. Transparency : Founders should be transparent with 2nd layer, since these people are smart enough to gauge internal happenings. There is no point being secretive with these folks. Anyways, you want to groom them as future managers, hence let them understand good and bad things about the organization. If you have a genuine point and it is conveyed properly, then these guys would understand it in no time. Let them get complete view, rather than pointers.

4. Risk & Rewards : Tell them about risks of negative scenarios, while share rewards when they perform well. Think the way you would treat yourself in positive & negative scenarios. The 2nd layer will stick for longer time, once they start feeling sense of attachment and start sharing company's vision.

Once you are able to build a solid 2nd layer, there is no reason why you can't scale-up.

Start-up Tips : Are you a startup employable?

Startups in India are fast picking up and a lot of people are getting into entrepreneurship. These startups need good talent pool with slightly different genes than usual guys/gals preferring big companies. I am giving a check-list to find-out whether you are Startup employable or not:

1. You prefer doing things by yourself than relying on others.
2. Your mind is full of new ideas and you experiment few of them too. You believe in ideas & execution.
3. You are not very particular about your office timings ( I mean you can stay late or come early)
4. You want to become Head-Engineering, VP- Sales, VP - HR pretty fast and that's why want to put extra efforts to learn multiple things within short span of time.
5. You enjoy working in a team and want to learn from others. You want to learn from people outside your company too.
6. You are not very particular about your office, seating space or even space outside. You are much concerned about your work and passion.
7. You don't want to earn fast money. You believe in wealth creation.
8. You don't want to own house, car, and other luxury items very fast.
9. Apart from cash component you realize the power of stocks
10. You enjoy the whole process rather than the input and output.
11. You want to experiment new things and not fearful of making mistakes.
12. You don't blame others for your bad moves. You come forward to accept mistakes and take corrective action.
13. You grow faster and become mature faster than your counterparts at big companies.
14. You respect others and believe in open communication. You don't want to spend time gossiping about people. You like talking about work.
15. You are passionate about your work and discuss your work with your parents or friends.
16. You like attending events which enrich your capabilities.
17. You enjoy sharing your tiffin/lunch with your colleagues.
18. You enjoy Office Maggi at 9.00 PM in the night. Sometimes even you prefer sleeping at office rather than going back to home.
19. You don't mind your salary being credited to your account on 10th day of the month rather than 01st.
20. You don't have too many girl-friends.

Score Inferences

20 : Complete Startup Individual
15-19 : Good Startup Person
10-14 : Formative Startup Person
Below 10 : Startups are cool. I would prefer reading about them.

You can drop me a mail with your score at contact@venturevilla.info for specific discussions.

Startup Tactics : Realizing the power of social networking

A lot of startups put all their energies in developing their products/services. They don't realize the power of social networks which can do wonders for them. Spending good amount of time to make world-class offering is a good move, but you can't do it at the cost of losing the opportunity of being networked. Being active in various forums help you to connect to multiple people with different skill-set and opinions. Ideally one founder of startups should be very active in all networking events. There are some inherent benefits of being part of such events/forums. I am listing here some key benefits :

1. You Learn : The startup founders should be keen to learn new things on daily basis. A lot of people start their venture pretty early and hence don't know a lot of business and/ or engineering aspects. Generally talking to people at good forums helps you to learn from their experiences at no cost. A lot of them are candid enough to share their real experiences giving enough food for thought. One should always try to get engaged with people of diverse skill-set i.e. suppose you are heading sales but start talking to a senior HR person, then ideally you should learn best HR practices, employee motivation, knowledge management etc. The knowledge gained from these forums should be shared among core group members. The whole idea of such events is sharing for growth of the eco-system. Even though a lot of people/companies come for some objectives but still provide good ground for learning new things.

2. You Grow : Being part of such events help you to grow your personal network. Even though internet is fast growing and people are using internet as a medium to grow social and professional network, but still the warmth and relevance of face-to-face meetings is phenomenal. Even a small gesture like bringing a glass of water or offering dinner plate to other participant helps a lot. A lot of places do have informal set-up and starting a conversation is very easy. Don't try to be pushy and aggressive and try to engage in a healthy discussion. If there is a group talking on some topic of your interest, feel free to join and throw your ideas and/or listen to others. The whole process helps you to grow your personal network and spread a word about your company. After developing some rapport and few meetings may come-up for help in some form or the other. You should also be genuinely ready to help others in best possible manner. A lot of times, only the knowledge transfer is more than enough.

3. You Spread : Apart from knowledge sharing and learning, these events bring good amount of people looking for good opportunities/companies. These events provide enough opportunity to spread word about your company and requirements. There may be some technical requirements or sales requirements or funding requirements which can be propagated . Spreading the word helps you to reach out relevant people at almost no cost. A lot of people are updated about your growth, vision and passion. Be passionate and truthful to others. This would help you to get good guidance, right people and visibility. A lot of times such meetings also result in revenue generation, but while attending such event don't keep that objective on the fore-front. It takes time to develop some and generate business.

4. You Brand : Such forums provide enough opportunities to carry out small-scale branding exercise. Try to get involved as a speaker, volunteer, blogger etc. If you get an opportunity to speak, then try to pass-on your company's message without being invasive. Don't make 50 slides about your company, but pass-on the vision and summary about your work. Interested people would try to touch-base after your talk and/or during networking sessions. Even during normal conversations, try to put across your visions in best possible manner. Be active and show high level of energy and enthusiasm. A lot of people would try to relate your startup with your personality. So, being a brand-ambassador spread-out the right message to attract potential customers, partners, investors, employees, vendors etc.

In order to make your venture successful, you need to attend such events. After all success is not so easy; you need to work really hard.

Startup Myths Shattered - Eye-Opener for Budding Entrepreneurs

Before starting any venture we keep on rethinking the risks of a new business. Our mind is full of many doubts & uncertainties.Most of us believe that starting a business is risky, costly, and only for extraordinary individuals. No, says University of Central Florida management professor Bruce Barringer, who discusses his new book. Hear him in conversation with Business Week.

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