Back to Basics - Entrepreneurship

From my final article in this first phase of the Start-up Logic entrepreneurship series in the Hindu BusinessLine

Much like riding a bicycle or swimming, with entrepreneurship too, no amount of study or theory can take the place of plunging right in. Yes, some scraped knees, water swallowed and spat out and wounded egos are likely to result, but nothing helps you learn like real-world experience.

Over the past several months, I have tried to walk through a typical, if there is any such thing, life cycle of an entrepreneur. From when the thought to start something first lodges itself in your mind through all the way to exiting your business, the entrepreneurial journey is a roller-coaster ride on steroids. As happened with me, and every parent prior to me, you are clueless when people tell you, “Your life will change once you have children.” They could just as well be talking about being an entrepreneur. All the reading, talking and thinking does not prepare you for it — it’s messy, sleep-depriving, unpredictable and will make you want to cry! Yet, it is is exhilarating, scary and fun all at the same time.

Read the rest here.

Exiting your business

From my twelfth article in the Start-up Logic entrepreneurship series in the Hindu BusinessLine

Whenever I read of a pre-nuptial agreement, I react viscerally. Not that I am particularly romantic, nevertheless there is a sense of foreboding. Putting in place an agreement should the relationship fall apart, even before the marriage, seems unsettling to say the least. In the Indian context, where marriages are still largely arranged and families actively contribute to heal rifts (and in some instances serve as the source), there is no major downside to a pre-nuptial la ck of preparation. However, in the case of entrepreneurial businesses, even those that plan well before starting up, often give little thought to how it might end.

Read the rest here.

Top 5 Online tools - Life on the cloud!

Last month, I wrote of my Top 5 utilities that I can't live with. Guess the computer gods were watching and about five days ago my laptop gave up its ghost (of course tossing it on my bed and watching it slip down to the floor may have had something to do with it!). The loss was all the more untimely, as the first half of an overdue article was on the HDD! Frantic calls for sysadmin help, safe mode log on as admin and scraping the ascii text on to Zoho writer resulted in my getting the article out an hour after my Friday 6PM deadline! You can read it ("Selling Every Moment") at Hindu Business Line here .

The good news is that even a couple of weeks before this tragic moment, I had made a beginning to go completely on-line, as in render my laptop a mere client and operate solely on the net -- yep, store my data on the net and use apps on the net. So here's my report from life on the cloud!

GMail & Google Apps pretty much the bulk of my time is spent with GMail and more frequently with Google Apps, as we try to get our new business (still in stealth) on-line. When I first began using GMail (from being a Yahoo! mail user and Eudora client) it seemed outright strange not being able to do folders. My current use pattern leads me to pray each day that Google actually means its "Do no evil" pledge. Pretty much sticking to mail and chat in Google Apps and only kicking tires with their Docs and Sites utilities.

Skype - and now with video. Skype is the only utility that gives gmail a run for the first place in my working life. Between chats, international calls, peer2peer file transfers and now video chat it gets a great deal of use. For several years we ran most of our internal business on AIM and Skype has pretty much replaced this for both intracompany as well as across company (and country boundaries). Now with utilities with the ability to record (not a feature I have used yet) it promises only to get more important.

Zoho (http://www.zoho.com/) pretty much replaces the MS Office suite and my experience is that ZohoWriter particularly kicks butt. Am using Zoho Project and as a power user of Microsoft Excel I am amazed at Zoho Sheet (though miss the work offline feature). Not having used Office Office, I found both Zoho and Google presentation tools not as productive as good old PowerPoint on the local HDD. Got my neighbor using Zoho CRM (free for up to 3 users). Personally found the CRM feature, even for a motivated user like me, a bit heavy! Likely switch to

BaseCamp - was using this as my primary project management, planning, newsgroup tool for the last six months with other conspirators as we prepare for our next startup. Simplicity thy name is BaseCamp! I must admit though I have, since writing this first, switched to Zoho projects, as I needed to be able to track a whole slew of tasks, milestones that are overwhelming BaseCamp's simple(r) lists.

Blogger, Twitter and WordPress
For a while there, I had to physically abandon my computer, so that I could get over my growing addiction with trolling blogs. Now even without a self-help group, am doing better though Blogger probably gets more use than it should; planning to move this and other blogs over to wordpress eventually and so spending time there in installation and learning about it. Twitter, though my own contributions are bite sized, a fair amount of time is spent reading/tracking others posts & leads. The jury is still out on it utility beyond serendipity.

GMail Drive - in addition to using of course Google mail and their news alerts, I just learnt how to use GMail as a virtual Hard Disk Drive on which I can store my files. Of course this requires installing a Win Shell extension. But 2GB of storage on a virtual drive is not bad! There is a Firefox plug-in gSpace that does the same thing as well. As many of you pointed out this is not a lot of space - but I got my mom (yep, mom) to use it, so simplicity trumps all else (again!). In my case I also have a 500Gb Seagate drive on my desk, so I don't pretend 2Gb is all I'll ever need. But its pretty good to start with.

I realized that there are a whole lot more tools I use including RememberTheMilk and LibraryThing, but the first three above hog 80% of my time and effort. If like me you are poor at backing up, it might not be a bad idea to check these out.

Selling every moment - sales in an entrepreneurial firm

From my eleventh article in the Start-up Logic entrepreneurship series in the Hindu BusinessLine

No one looks forward to a visit to the dentist, especially if it is a root canal that’s in the offing. Yet, most people would choose a root canal over haggling with a car dealer. The words ‘used-car salesman’ have come to epitomise our loathing for the selling profession. The sweet-sounding young thing who keeps calling offering me credit cards and personal loans, is most reluctant to answer when I ask her if it is a sales call. So it would appear even s alespersons are at times ambivalent about their jobs.

Read the rest here.

Life - two weeks offline! Aoi Maturi to Zen gardens

From January 2008, several months before I got off the job treadmill, I had gotten a serious case of blog addiction and was going to sleep later each night as I found yet another post to read before signing of. Previously I suspect only the New York Times op-ed pages held that sort of neck craning, fatal car crash fascination. And learning how to use Google reader and doing "research" for my next startup were only excuses I suspect to feed my growing blog addiction. There is something mid-afternoon "Ricki Lake-ish" my-sister-stole-my-boyfriend quality about a lot of the soul baring blogs out there, and I don't refer to just personal or mommy blogs but even a wide swath of tech and political blogs. While I have been able to turn the telly off, I have had less success with blogs for reasons I am not too sure of. I have probably avoided going there anyways!

Now the good news is that I went off the air, not just in my own writing but also in browsing, lurking, reading or other forms of being online. It helped that I left town with family and that connectivity was intermittent (which I thought would be poor, was not - and yes, I did take my laptop with me). But just doing real world things such as visiting temples, attending festivals, such as the Aoi Maturi and sitting in Zen gardens pondering the imponderables and lots of walking (to/from temples, hole-in-the-wall vegetarian joints and 7/11 stores) and keeping two nearly teen kids engaged kept me unbelievably busy. It also provided some much needed distance and withdrawal from the whole blogosphere which seemed to be sucking my hours and what few grey cells remain. If in early May you'd have told me that I'd be off line for two weeks, I'd have though that serious withdrawal symptoms would incapacitate me - am happy to report that I couldn't have been wronger. And here I am back adding already to the navel gazing personal post category!

For those of you not wanting to travel to the Orient (or other real world places) here's one of the most succinct articles on avoiding blog addiction!

Five utilities that I can't live without

When I read Marshall Kirkpatrick's post Five Tools Everyone Working Online Should Have (IMHO) this morning on ReadWriteWeb, it triggered the thought about the five tools (ok call 'em utilities) that I can't do without, especially when off line. This is somewhat ironical as I have over the last thirty days tried to move my entire electronic content on-line - basically trying to use my (now borrowed) laptop as a thin client. But that's for another day, another post.

Yesterday my wife finally got her Dell Inspiron 1525 (in a truly inspiring blue) that your's truly volunteered to set up and I realized that even without thought I loaded the following utilities first, so that her (and therefore my) off line experience stayed blissful (ok, maybe that's stretching it). So without much ado, here are the five utilities without which I cannot get through my offline work day:

WordWeb its hard to say which was the chicken and which was the egg. That fact that I had WordWeb made me the local authority (not just to my two kids, but to colleagues) on words from the (not always) Queen's language or that I positioned myself as the LA and found I could not maintain it without the help of WordWeb. Nevertheless, this tiny little program is an incredible dictionary and thesaurus, when offline and even better when you are off line. Get it today!

Gadwin ScreenPrint - for whatever reason I seem to need screenshots at the most inopportune moments and that too without the cursor, or with it and a delay built-in, or I need only portion of the screen/dialog box, want to save it file, clipboard or printer - you get the picture. Gadwin ScreenPrint is that it-slices-dices-makes-breakfast screen printing tool that doesn't need even a high school diploma to operate.

Google Desktop is likely the second most used combo on my keyboard. This is one of those tools that make me wonder how we ever made do without it. Sure I hear muttering out there about how someone's system got crawling after they installed GoogleDesktop but having installed this on five computers at last count, including my parents, I know that I'd install this in a moment's notice again in my next computer as well. Never had much use for the sidebar but primarily use the quick search. I have probably improved my file naming protocols but am likely overly dependent on this utility to find that document I created last year on Why mushrooms don't get their due credit or the scanned copy of my father-in-law's passport.

Picassa - I'd have thought I'd have picked IrfanView as the utility of choice - but it turns out that I don't do a whole lot of image gimmickry besides, storing, sorting and acting as the family image repository manager. And truth is we presently have far too much vested in Picassa, with location tagging as well as comments. Also I love the time based viewing of (searched) images so for instance, I can view a slide show of all pictures of my daughter Roz taken in Singapore in chronological order (don't even ask why!)

iTunes - I am just spoilt. Despite its reluctance to easily convert my wife's 300+ cassettes into digital music, iTunes is the music player of choice in our household and so it's got to be there. This is particularly weird since none of the three (I can't even find that original Shuffle) iPods we have in our house are actually used. But I never said this made sense.

Special mention (the only not-for-free app in my top list)

David RM's Journal - journaling and practically most of my writing is done in this. You gotta experience it. Comes with an addictive free to use for forty five days trial period.

Even putting this list down helped me gain some insight on how I work - do most of my work with words (hence The Journal, WordWeb, Google Desktop), use pictures reasonably (Gadwin Screenshot, Picassa and IrfanView) and actually listen to music (even though moving all our content on to the 500Gb HDD remains a dream) from the computer (iTunes).

What gems do you have to work off line?

Marketing your entrepreneurial business for success

From my tenth article in the Start-up Logic entrepreneurship series in the Hindu BusinessLine

Most people seem to have a reasonable idea of what engineering (design and build stuff), finance (manage the money) or sales (make money by selling stuff) do in a business. Marketing is another story altogether, being confused with sales in the best case or perceived as a money-sucking black hole in the worst. It is likely the most misunderstood part of doing business.

Read the rest here.