I have not really followed the fintech much but understand the Telecom side of things. You seem like an expert on this space in India and hence my questions:
1. Do you think making everything Aadhar based is a good idea?
2. How much awareness is there about privacy issues related to Aadhar?
3. What risk do you see which would derail the $500B projection for Fintech in India? Also it wasn't clear if that projection was the total payment transactions or the market opportunity for players (e.g. commissions etc.).
A particular section (to which I belong) is quite afraid with the direction India is taking. Reddit /r/india has many discussions along lines that I'll summarize.
- Aadhar was forced into being without legislation or check/balances.
- The guy heading it is Nilekani, a not so ethical dude, who once ran Infy, and has quite a lot of
influence with the right people, both in the US and India.[1]
- Previous admin. was likely planning on making it mandatory "citizen id", but was
pushed back by the courts.
- Current admin. has magically turned back on their erstwhile opposition due to "a presentation"
and have finally made it mandatory, for everything from passports, SIM cards, and tax refunds.
- Aadhar has no legislative curtailment. There is nothing stopping them from forcing the
collection of my DNA, and then selling those to some insurance company in a few years.
- There is also nothing stopping the vogons in the Indian state (and the corporatocracy it serves)
from getting hold of all my data... because you know "national security". Accountability is the
last thing you'd expect of the Indian state; transparency probably being penultimate.
- This means that anyone who declines to be part of the Animal farm, can neither leave the
country nor work there. Jaitley really screwed us over. Naturally this is dressed up as a "us-
vs-them" "nationalistic" "black-money hunting" "anti-western/left" move, and this is what
comments on Indian newssites reflect. Ironic that the system will be used to clamp down even
harder on the people who belong to a English colony run by Brown sahibs, which has made it
its goal to destroy every culture, language and religion that are its heritage.
- Next stop is likely the complete destruction of cash (and thus opposition), by tying it all back to
Aadhar (which the parent is cheering for). Very very scary future.. will be moving out before the
prison cell closes shut.
[1] India's IT Industry does not serve India; now that the outsourcing play is coming to a halt, many are looking to diversify. One way out is to secure massive contracts from the state.
"This means that anyone who declines to be part of the Animal farm, can neither leave the country nor work there" --- you mean 'either leave the country or not work there?"
Excellent summary. Covers all the key points that I wanted to take away and put it so much better.
For me, the theme that runs through his work and talks is this: (Constantly ask) How to make use of computers to learn and create in ways better than we do currently?
Now yes, the above sentence seems like incremental and not so far out but lot of what he and some of the people he has worked with is trying to answer this.
And I completely agree with him that we haven't fully explored this new digital interface and in some ways have regressed.
His words are truly inspirational and at the same time it is slightly disheartening that I am not working on something great.
You have a valid point. Do you have pointers to learning Design for a programmer? I know about book 'Deisgn for hackers' and there are many resources on Photoshop/Sketch etc. but I haven't found nifty little projects like you have in programming where you design, say a toy compiler. Also Photoshop/Sketch are paid and/or platform specific. Any useful pointers would help.
What you say might be true in a lot of cases but I know of one case (Ubiquisys) where they were not hands off probably because it was too close to their core business and also because they had a similar internal product.
Now Cisco have given up on the whole small cells idea. And a lot of it is because of their botched management practices and some of it is also due to Ubiquisys' own inefficiencies.
RISC-V is a general puspose CPU architecture. Does something exist which is open like RISC-V but for DSPs? I am asking because unless we have that, no smartphone can be truly open and infact you can argue that it is what runs in baseband that needs to be open rather than on the main CPU.
Ofcourse RISC-V is an architecture so not just applicable for smartphones but the point remains. RISC-V solves half the problem but what about the other half i.e. DSPs?
>> Is there something on the horizon for graphics and GPU?
There is the MIAOW open source GPU but it is based on an AMD instruction set, so it's probably not viable for general use.
I believe in the short term the solution will be simply running LLVM-Pipe on a bunch of RISC-V cores for software rendering. The SoCs will just have frame buffer graphics. Another option is to have PCIe support (which HiFive is going to) so you could at least recompile an open source driver for a proprietary video card. I suspect that once RISC-V SoCs are running a full linux distribution with one of these inferior graphics solutions then people will jump in to make better open graphics hardware.
I have been reading Ribbonfarm for sometime now and I really like how Venkat analyses things. But to me, the problem starts after I finish reading those articles as I really don't know what to do with that knowledge.
So I have started to summarise what he says which incidentally is the exact opposite of how he likes to write i.e. write long pieces with almost every conceivable point covered.
And to me, the TLDR version of most things he says on his blog is this:
- Life is messy so don't look for smooth contours. Instead, indulge yourself into the messiness.
This is quite similar to what I felt when I (partially) read Antifragility by Taleb. I am sure there are many nuances but there was one TLDR version of that book that kept popping up in my head and it was this:
- "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger." So the best strategy is not to avoid death but to make sure you get yourself into situations where death is a real possibility.
I still haven't got my head around the 'growth' thing is how is it applicable to software/hardware startups that are NOT developing products for mass market.
For example, if someone in telecom industry creates a product that can only be sold to operators. The time it takes to convert an engagement can be upwards of 6 months. In such cases, what would be a good growth metric with which to measure your progress?
Now, we can chose not to call such companies startups but that doesn't solve the problem.
I am sure there are many knowledgeable people on this thread who can provide some insights here. Any pointers to read will also help.
What you are describing is enterprise sales. I co-founded one of those. Early traction is easy to spot:
- at first, you can barely get first meetings with any potential customers. You track how many companies even agreed to meet with you once.
- a few months in, you get your hopes up (incorrectly - usually). A few companies you met are talking about doing an evaluation of your product.
- another few months go by, just one of all your contacts moved to do an evaluation, but then they postponed their purchasing decision to the next fiscal year.
- still no revenue, but now you have a funnel: x prospects in first meeting, y prospects in second meeting, z prospects in eval, 0 prospects have bought. Keep tracking those numbers and the trend will be clear.
I've been a manager working for telco companies so I know a bit about it. Usually the backlog is a good metric but it works from when you have already sold the product.
Usually to assess what happens before the sales team is asked to assess the probability of closing the deal and discount the deal size by that probability. An increase of the scope (and of the total value) or of the probability to close the deal represents your metric.
It is not very scientific but could be made pretty accurate. E.g: you know the price of your product and how much you are willing to give a discount in order to close the deal. Also, even if negotiation, especially with big companies, could be unpredictable, it is usually done in steps and each steps closer means an higher chance of success. A possible sequence of steps is:
- RFI received.
- RFI answered.
- Q&A and first meeting
- Follows Up
- RFP received
- RFP answered
- First round of Q&A/meetings
- Short Listed
- Second round of Q&A/meetings
- Product demo
- Final negotiation (usually price and conditions)
This is the process for RFI, there's a different one (and a little bit more complex) for "cold calls" that probably is more applicable to startups. Obviously some steps are optional and the names could changes but this is how it works.
Just a final note, though. If you are a startup in B2B avoid, at the beginning at least, big corporation as client if you can. They have a huge negotiation power, they will drive down your price like crazy and being your biggest client they will use their force to ask you a lot of extra work than the one negotiated. You will end up loosing a lot of money on the deal and also you will have little ability to follows other deals. Yes, they are useful to qualify for other clients and if you lock them in they could be quite profitable, but unless you have deep pocket they will crash your company.
Thanks for the detailed answer. I suppose tracking stages of sales pipeline is a good metric as you and several others have mentioned. Much better than being completely in dark.
Also by 'backlog', I assume you meant product backlog (e.g. features remaining) or something in the sales funnel?
While tracking the sales funnel is great to use as an indicator of progress, it is not great as a decision-making heuristic internally (e.g. for product features) as pg mentions in his essay 'Startup=Growth'. I suppose product backlog is a good metric for such cases.
Tldr; use sales funnel to track business side and feature backlog internally.
Because of the faster feedback cycles, the web/mobile app world can use the same metric to track internal and external progress.
What do you mean by backlog depends a lot on what you are selling:
- If it is software, usually you sells it in stage or you have to deliver customization/integration at a later stage:
- If it is SaaS is like before but you have also the following months of license (they usually ask for a minimum guaranteed lifetime for the SaaS);
- If it is hardware for internal use usually it is installed in stage, so you could have your sales spread over few months/years.
- If it is something they resell, you will have the projection of sales.
_ If it is a service, you have the service not yet delivered as backlog.
Obviously they can cancel when they want, but it is still your backlog until you deliver it or it is cancelled.
Its very different as you mention. "Growth" in the sense that its talked about here only really applies to products with many feedback cycles where iteration is possible (not hardware). For products with longer sales cycles its generally based on more traditional sales metrics, measuring where people are in your sales funnel and conversion between sales funnel steps.
That is great to know. I had mistakenly assumed that it is one of the key requirements. I am in my late 30s and will be soon starting on my startup journey. Having worked with a big telecom vendor for a large part of my career, I sometimes make the mistake of finding reasons why I cannot start a venture. I suppose it is time for a real change. Whether I go for YC or not this year (I live in the UK and cannot leave in the near future for personal reasons), I am surely going to give this whole startup thing a good kick in the coming days!
I suspect it is also true that comments are more of a liability than an asset.
"He has no comments, he must have been busy doing something else interesting." vs "He has 500 comments, and shows he isn't interested in considering other approaches"
I created an HN account when we applied, because I had to. I lurked beforehand, but never commented. My cofounder had about 14 months on me account wise but he had been thinking about applying us to YC for that whole time. So I don't think it hurt us.
There are so many different approaches to interviewing that come in and out fashion every few years. This is only natural but the common theme in a lot of discussions on HN is how people feel these approaches were not good for their particular case.
Wouldn't it be better if flip the whole thing and ask the candidates under what situation would they feel most comfortable and then conduct the interview that way? Surely, we want to get the best out of people while making them comfortable?
Yes, even this approach is not suitable for those interviewees who don't know what is the best for them but atleast the interviewer will show they they genuinely care.
