Whether you are building or buying, there are some guidelines to follow, says Karan KuraniIn a startup, there are always has 100 different things that need to be done at any given point of time. There are umpteen ways you can accomplish those tasks. Many of them can be solved by using tools that other companies provide. Some of them clearly require something to be custom built internally in your organisation. And then there are some, often pesky, things that are in the middle. You can solve the problem by using some third party tool/software, or you can also build a replica of that tool internally with a few tweaks here and there that would be nice to have. It’s these situations which cause a lot of sunk time in wasteful projects that could have easily been solved by just using some existing solution out there. But how do you decide when it’s good to build something in-house vs just buying your way out of the problem? I would like to walk you through two situations where the build vs buy question typically pops up. The first one is the problem of “Big data” (or even little data for that matter). The world is awash in data, but data is not the same as information. Data is just a fact, or an observation. It is information which empowers your organisation to make decisions. There are entire companies built to help you convert your data into actionable information. Whether it is to help you track your funnel for sales conversions, keep track of how many times in a user returns to use your product per day/week/month, at what points are your users getting frustrated and dropping off, and a million other things. Karan KuraniBuilding and maintaining such systems in-house is an expensive, time consuming affair. Adding to the difficulty is the fact that the people who are well versed in this field are rare, and are super hard to recruit. Therefore, there are a lot of companies out there who promise to provide you the same kind of insight into your data at a fraction of the cost and time of building in-house systems. Many of the products currently on the market are pretty good at their specific use cases. New Relic, for example, is an excellent way to monitor your infrastructure and the raw performance of your application. Google Analytics is another great free solution to measure the basic metrics of your website / mobile app. But, it’s not as well defined when it comes to business metrics - especially if you are a startup. A startup by definition is something new and its business model is undefined early in its life. This means that nobody - including the founders themselves - know what the best way to measure the business is. This means there is no one stop shop which will have all the things that your startup needs to measure its health. DoctorC’s dashboard was customisedAs an example, at my current company - DoctorC, we needed a dashboard which measured all our critical metrics for the current day at a glance. We wanted to know how well each of the city was doing and what was contributing to its progress as well as how far or close we were to our daily goal overall. It should also update in near real-time so we know what’s happening now as opposed to 60 minutes later. There is simply no solution out there which would provide such functionality out of the box or that can be modified like this without significant tech development. And since it is so critical to our business we built the dashboard from scratch. Each bar would turn green if the goal of each acquisition channel is hit. The circle for the city would also turn green once its goal passed. The bar on top would similarly green once our overall daily goal was hit. The more green we saw the better our business was doing - we can process everything in a very visual manner. It also acts as motivational tool where the entire company would try together to get as many greens as possible every day.This investment has paid off immensely. This is exactly what is right for our organization specifically, not for anyone else. It has helped us move fast in decisions since we have the right data at our fingertips. It was an explicit, conscious choice we made to strengthen our business.What we did not do - we did not build our own infrastructure monitoring tool - we use New Relic, we did not build our a/b testing/optimization tool - we use Optimizely, we did not build our own servers - we use Amazon Web Services, we did not build our web analytics software - we use Google Analytics and Heap Analytics. We use off the shelf software as long as they are saving us time and money and are very well defined in nature. Anything that is specific for our business and which we absolutely must have our way - without any compromises - is built in-house. Learning from the NYTimesThe second example of an in house tool that is core to a large business is New York Times’ internal Content Management System (CMS) called “Scoop”. It powers all their workflows for publishing articles on the web, mobile and print. Apart from that, it allows them to render images that are automatically cropped and aspect ratios adjusted so that the writers and editors don’t have to worry about managing how images are displayed. There are several other features which are very specific to NY Times such as “Story Budgeting and Planning”, a tool used to coordinate the publication of articles across multiple news desks across the world in different time zones in a painless way. It’s tightly integrated into their workflow in a way that is not found in a generic CMS. For NY Times, the entire experience of writing, copy editing, publishing and post publication editing is handled seamlessly with minimal friction with Scoop. They are currently changing “Scoop” so that they became a digital first organization. They have this flexibility because they have built Scoop from the ground up for themselves. It is beholden to no other organization than NY Times itself. The results speak for themselves, nytimes.com and its mobile site are industry leading media websites in the world that improves constantly day after day after day. Anything that you find unsatisfactory in the market and doesn’t serve your business needs is up for grabs. After that, it’s all a question of prioritizing what you want to build. Another point to note is that the “in-house tool” does not need to be fancy or use heavy technology. It can be as simple as a simple spreadsheet which is filled manually every day - we still do that for some of our internal projects. In the end, there are 2 simple things that you must ask yourself -1. Is the thing you want to do critical (and I mean really absolutely “Oh my god, my business will die without this!” critical)?2. Are there zero off the shelf tools that will allow you to do exactly that critical thing?If the answer to both is yes, you should seriously consider building it in-house, even if you just started your startup yesterday. This philosophy is, rightly so, independent of the size of the organization. Karan Kurani, is co-founder of DoctorC, a startup clustering diagnostic centres and consumers with technology
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The Scaale Group, a Venture Resource Ecosystem, is spreading its wings in India. Based in San Francisco, it works with over 150 venture capital funds to find startups that can make an impact in areas such as but not limited to education, healthcare, SaaS, big data, travel, food tech and more . Scaale’s investment club called Cross Border Angels has already invested in a Hyderabad incubated company, Jay Robotix, for an undisclosed sum. It has also invested in seven companies, across the world, with an average angel round of $200,000. The group’s founder, Kaushal Chokshi, says that India has enough ideas that could be funded and taken global. However, talking to BW|Businessworld's Vishal Krishna he feels a policy framework, for startups, is the need of the hour for India to become a powerhouse of entrepreneurship. Here are the excerpts of the interview. Where is funding headed, is there some reality today that there could be a bubble?I think the motivation comes from exits. Thousands of people get excited about it and the exit rates are so high that there are so many entrepreneurs who want to start businesses. Yes the best ideas get funded; the bubble hype is the valuation itself. It is not the quality of ideas. It is a business model that everyone is betting on and it is fine. This is how entrepreneurs are made. It is just the beginning of some good things to happen in India because of private capital. The bubble itself is a process. It is a necessity to find the best ideas. I agree there is very high valuation today but it is not a bubble that will stop investments from happening. I think any innovation around the world has gone up because of immigrants. The case in point is India. There are so many Indian companies going abroad. So, such entrepreneurs need Angels that can fund companies going global. These companies have implications to change society and we need to de-risk their presence or focus from the Indian market. There is better exposure if one goes global and the best practices can be implemented on a global scale. It makes exits all the more easier. What markets are your favourites?USA, Spain, England and India are growing in terms of entrepreneurs. Even Estonia has startups; it is tremendous. I have met several companies in the product software and hardware side there. If they can do it, why can’t India? India needs to make it easier for startups from a tax and listing perspective. One of our startups, Jay-Robotix, has gone to Singapore. They started out of Hyderabad. The city state is wise at picking companies that can keep them ahead in the future. Robotics is such a good bet. The current Indian government is very serious about entrepreneurship and wants to help such companies. Let us what comes from policy to foster growth of startups in the next four years. What do you think India should do?Tax incentives, for investors and entrepreneurs, are a must. We need to define the best practices for a nation of entrepreneurs. Today we do not have a framework and this why intellectual property goes abroad. The state governments should also look at this in their budgets very seriously. To be honest, job creation happens from startups. It is a compelling story to change society. Technology innovation today is getting people get noticed and people around 30 years of age have a career goal of changing society with their idea. Such businesses command transparency and, today, people are saying that they can go achieve things. This is a change in India. You no longer need contacts to grow; it is a culture of meritocracy. I must also add that education can aide this growth. People of all ages should be given the opportunity to learn. Age is no longer a barrier. To be honest, city states can run things much better than large nation states. How much of our entrepreneur pool is stuck in investment jargon?Yes people spoke about cloud, mobility, big data services three years ago; now they call it SMAC, which is social, mobile, analytics and cloud. These are just terms. But what is the difference between research and innovation. Research is about spending money to drive innovation. Innovation is using an idea to triple bottom lines of a business. We are looking for innovation. I do not look for Unicorns, as they call it. I want people who can change lives. We like companies with technology intervention in Health care, security and education. Technology for future cities is also very interesting. We need to look at how Singapore, Hong Kong, Estonia and Kosovo are fostering growth for entrepreneurs. With the Indian government starting a smart city called Gujarat International Financial Tec-City it is a great move to set up a financial centre for financial tech startups. We are already aligned with that program. This is the intention that we are talking about. So India has to seize this. Look at it this way, that startups are creating a cashless economy and Indian banks should embrace these companies. Today Aadhar, which has such great technology and data, has opened up its APIs to build applications. Imagine the applications that can use data to change lives. Social impact is very important for India. Will legacy companies open up to change?Take the example of ZipCar which got sold out for $450 million. This disrupted the car industry. Nobody has to own a car anymore. Most exits around the world are corporate buy outs and are all under $30 million. Legacy companies are the ones who are running accelerator programmes. Startup companies can get bought within two years. This is another area which will see major growth in the coming year.
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Microsoft Ventures, a technology startup accelerator, by software giant Microsoft, announced the launch of a new corporate engagement initiative called Innovation for Corporates (ICI). The new initiative aims to work with enterprise based startup businesses to innovate and drive growth. Innovation for Corporates offers three programs titled MAP, PIA and Hi-Po. The Market Access Program (MAP) will bring startups and enterprise businesses together to work together. The Partner in Acceleration (PIA) program allows corporates to know their resources and network to set up their own engagement with startups. The High potential (Hi-PO) program works with top startups backed by corporates to build them into stronger business respectively. Ravi Narayan, director of Microsoft Ventures in India, said "We have been working with various corporates for years to help them with their business problems with innovation from startups." He says that many enterprise businesses are looking at Microsoft for guidance. Over the last three years, Microsoft Ventures in India has built a portfolio of 74 startups through its program, with an impressive $500,000 average funding and four exits till date. Microsoft has also partnered with Reliance Industries for their accelerator program, GenNext Innovation Hub. On the partnership Vivek Rai Gupta of GenNext Venture fund says, "We have been able to mentor the startups and help them gain traction very fast." It also partnered with NASSCOM's 10,000 startups program. Tyler Bryson, general manager for marketing and operations at Microsoft India, told Businessworld that the culture of innovation at Microsoft is driving excitement and enthusiasm across the ecosystem. The new series - Think Next Talks, bringing speakers from across the industry and cultural spectrum to discuss how the innovation can improve work and life. Think Next 2015 saw over 400 CXOs from leading corporates and the conclave witnessed the top technology products in the country and the graduating Summer 2015 batch- AdPushup, Frilp, iReff, DailyRounds, Uninstall, iBot, FortunePay, Customer XPs, FlamencoTech WAGmob and Gazemetrix.
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Healthifyme raises close to $1 mn, announces its partnership with Micromax Mobile, report K Chandra Mohan and Vishal KrishnaHealthifyme, a nutrition and wearable technology company, announced an undisclosed second round of funding at a startup conference held by Microsoft Ventures on Thursday (18 June). Sources added that this second round was close to $1 million led by Bala Parthasarthy of Angel Prime and Amit Gupta of InMobi. HealthifyMe had earlier raised $250000 from angel investors. This signals the interest of investors in investing in wearable health device companies that offer services. According to IDC, a research firm, vendors will ship a total of 45.7 million wearble units in 2015, up a strong 133.4 per cent from the 19.6 million units shipped in 2014. By 2019, total shipment volumes are forecast to reach 126.1 million units, resulting in a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 45.1 per cent. Healthifyme also announced its partnership with Micromax Mobiles, one of the largest mobile device manufacturers, in the country to sell their UFit band. This device purchased by the first 1000 people will offer free nutrition services through the Healthifyme app downloaded from any app store. This move will give Healthifyme a market access of nearly 20 million smartphone customers. The company will now compete with the likes of GoQii and GetActive which offer wearble technology health services. GoQii has added over 500 nutritionists and is a leading startup in the wearble technology industry. Sources say it has invested over $5 million in the seed round itself. The next rounds of funding for both companies could be more than $50 million. Meanwhile Healthifyme plans to recruit 1,000 nutritionists, currently it employs 100, and fitness trainers in the coming days. It also plans several low cost plans to its customers and has managed to acquire 100,000 users. Thushar Vashist, CEO and Founder, Healthifyme says, "We are on a mission to HealthifyIndia. I am glad to have received support from investors who believe in our mission." He adds that with this fund raising round they are going to democratise healthy living - providing fitness and weight loss at a fraction of market value, while simultaneously providing employment to hundreds of nutritionists and trainers. HealthifyMe, built for the Indian customer, provides access to the world's first and largest food database, a sophisticated calorie counter for regional foods and a thorough exercise tracker for logging in physical activities. While GoQii tracks calorie count based on food intake and has a nutritionist assigned to each individual. HealthifyMe also works in partnership with leading giants, in healthcare, such as Apollo and Manipal, where the app has proved effective in treating and preventing clinical obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular problems and other lifestyle diseases. The only problem is that regulation does not allow these companies to share data with insurance businesses. Therefore customised insurance plans cannot be sold to individuals. Regulators also fear that the data of consumers, stored in the cloud of these service providers, could be stolen by hackers for malign intent. If regulation comes through these businesses are in for $1 billion valuation with added services. "All wearable companies have to provide services to scale up. They have to define their business models," says Sanchit Vir Gogia, CEO of Greyhound Research. Currently, the wearable and health services makes sense if hospitals and insurance companies can use this data to track and reward users. The data is a gold mine. Since the hardware is already commoditised, the companies should make good with the data to increase revenues. GoQii is focusing it's plans entirely in the USA because the propensity to using data is higher in the USA. Healthifyme wants to focus on South Asian markets where the price points are lower and is a challenging market to conquer. "Today everyone wants to have a great lifestyle with good advice; its the service that makes us unique," says Vishal Gondal of GoQii. Meanwhile GetActive is focused on the Indian market and is offering fitness tracking at an affordable price of $80. They have raised an undisclosed round from angel investors. But it offers no advice on nutrition. India has 600 million people below the age of 40 and it surely is a large market for the nascent wearable health technology industry.
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In his four years of engineering, 28-year-old Paras Chopra, founder of Wingify, launched four startups. In the long summer breaks of Delhi College of Engineering, he didn’t allow himself the luxury of “chilling out”, as it is typical for students on holiday. Instead, he would hatch a new business idea, develop it, and even launch the product.
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It wouldn’t be wrong to say that amidst all the controversies between the different ideologies of faith, it is the religion of entrepreneurship that has engulfed and unified the country. Stable, highly-paid jobs at bluechip companies no longer seem as attractive. Young people today want to step out and start up on their own. They want to create value, make an impact and solve a pain point.
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An American business group will be in India next month to meet investors keen to take up projects that come with a promise of US residence permit. The Ashcroft Sullivan Economic Development Centers (ASEDC) and The Jha Group (TJG) have formed a partnership to bring investment and economic opportunities to India under the EB-5 program. Overseen by the US Citizenship & Immigration Services (USCIS), the US Immigrant Investor Program (EB-5) provides foreign nationals the opportunity to become residents in the US for a period of two years upon making an investment of $1 million, or $500,000 in a designated Targeted Employment Area, in a new commercial enterprise. The new joint venture, known as Ashcroft Sullivan Jha, will hold its initial launch in India. It will set up offices in the country and educate investors about the opportunities available to them through the EB program. The Jha Group is headed by its founders Vibhuti Jha and Satish Jha. They lead a group of professionals with experience in banking, finance, media, international business, technology and entrepreneurship. "We are thrilled to be partnering with the Jha Group to bring economic opportunities to India. Vibhuti and Satish are leaders in their field and have deep roots in this emerging economy," Mike Sullivan, principal at Ashcroft Sullivan Economic Development Center, said in a statement. "They have been at the forefront of driving Indo-US relations since they came to the United States and will be a valuable partner to us in their home country," Sullivan added. Sullivan along with partners Joe Fitzpatrick and Brett Griffith, accompanied by the Jha founders, will be in India in late June for meetings and presentations in Delhi, Mumbai and Dubai. "Over the past decades people of Indian origin have flourished and taken pride in contributing with their technical knowledge and entrepreneurial skills in the US ecosystem and TJG is proud to partner with ASEDC to contribute in achieving the laudable objective of EB5," said TJG chairman Satish Jha. Vibhuti Jha has been an integral part of Indo-US relations since the early 90s, the group said in its statement. In his role as a senior executive with American Express Bank International, Vibhuti pioneered the development of investment/deposit programs for expatriate Indians living in the US to invest in India through the bank. Satish Jha served as an adviser to Dr Manmohan Singh at The South Commission in Geneva. As federally designated regional centers, ASEDC aims to create new jobs in the Mid Atlantic and New England regions, expanding economic productivity and help foreign entrepreneurs obtain permanent residency for themselves and their families. The ASEDC is led by the former US attorney general John Ashcroft, former head of the Department of Justice David Ayers, and former deputy director of alcohol, tobacco, and firearms Michael Sullivan. (BW Online Bureau)
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Finding start-ups that are changing the lives of people is a hard step to take. There are some that go extra mile to tell the world that there is merit in creating businesses that change lives. The Unitus Seed Fund, which is a $23 million fund, has made finding social entrepreneurs easy. However, the fund managers are humble enough to say that India can produce many more ideas that are relevant in a mobile first world to solve social problems. With more than 300 million smartphones hitting the Indian market by 2018, USF can create great businesses. Its three year track record has already set things rolling with investments in sectors like education, mobile commerce and retail. Dave Richards, the managing partner of the fund, spoke with BW | Businessworld's Vishal Krishna about their endless quest to create social impact. Q: A decade ago your equity fund took risks in microfinance and created a change in India, you showed everyone that microfinance can make money. Does the same philosophy follow this fund with the proliferation of mobile technology? A: Yes we want to set a similar trend. We want to back entrepreneurs that can change the other India, a sizeable population that is yet to experience the internet. A decade ago we saw our investee companies build technology that could capture payments on remote devices and send information back from the village to the central operations centre. Now with mobile phones, and growing network infrastructure, we can build new businesses for challenges that were never addressed better. For example, in healthcare, we have invested in a company called Welcare Health Systems. They create affordable eye screening solutions. All the data captured on diabetic retinopathy, a disease which can lead to blindness is captured real time and sent to doctors on a real time basis. The company can easily integrate a mobile solutions play. Similarly we have invested a market place for health services which can bring transparency in connecting hospitals to patients. This can have a mobile device play too. However in healthcare there are underlying challenges, in the Indian system, because of the unaccounted for cash transactions in the ecosystem. This is still difficult to break. That said there is a chance for technology to create transparency. Q: What about education and other retail services?A: Hippocampus is a company that has changed the way we look at rural education. They are a rural kindergarten learning centre. The data suggests that 60 per cent of rural children do not finish school. This company has already created more than 100 learning centres and is targeting the rural masses who can pay Rs 250 a month. Think about the solutions and technology intervention here in the long run. This company is making a serious impact and will eventually send more kids in to schools in rural areas. The fund’s interest is also to look at agriculture. Supply chain is a key part of India’s growth in the future. One of our portfolio companies makes organic agri-input. They help farmers improve the soil and make it ready for organic farming. Then we have a retail company that connects rural artisans to customers. This is a Rs 16,000 crore opportunity. We have invested in 16 companies and we have several business plans sent to us. Q: What about mobile first businesses? A: Mobile internet is a key here. A majority of India will access internet on phones and this will change the way information is consumed and services will be very important here. We have three portfolio companies that use mobile to deliver low cost services in the city. They are mGaadi, JiffStore and Blowhorn. All these companies address the local commuter to connect with his rickshaws, the second company provides a mobile solution for small stores and the last one connects businesses to move product across the city and deliver to customers. These businesses will build more services on top of the mobile. We believe this will be the fastest growing segment in the country. Q: Tell me a bit about the fund and the support you have had?A: It has been great. We have nine start-up scouts across the country and they are the ones who bring the maximum number of ideas to the table. We have several top senior fund advisors from across the world. As you know we have big names as fund investors; to name a few for the global fund are investors like the Lemelson Foundation and the Deshpande Foundation. Then we have local investors for the seed fund and they include names like Mohan Das Pai and RanjanPai among many others. Today investors across the world are looking at India because of the sheer opportunity and challenges it presents. I must tell you that, since you had asked me about skilling, it is very important to create employable people in this country. We have already invested in a company that can help people in soft skills, especially for commerce students, to be able to land a job. The fund will look at profitable businesses ideas in the rural and urban poor areas. (BW Bureau)
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India's biggest online cab-hailing service Ola has raised about $314 million in a fresh funding round from investors led by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner's DST Global, a company filing showed. Private equity investors including Accel Partners, Tiger Global and Steadview Capital also invested in ANI Technologies Pvt Ltd, the owner of Ola, in the latest funding round, the filing dated April 2 to the Registrar of Companies showed. In October, Ola had raised $210 million from Japan's SoftBank Corp, which did not participate in this round. Last month, Ola bought rival TaxiForSure for $200 million in one of India's biggest e-commerce deals as it looks to see off fast-growing United States-based rival Uber. Ola is investing in technology, better safety features as well as new offerings as it expands its network. Besides letting customers hail taxis as well autorickshaws, the cheaper three-wheeled taxis that ply on India's roads, Ola's mobile app also allows customers to order food in some localities.
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E-retailer Snapdeal.com said on Wednesday (8 April) it bought online mobile recharge firm Freecharge for an undisclosed amount in a bid to boost its reach in the fast-growing mobile transactions business. Snapdeal, backed by SoftBank Corp, competes with Flipkart and Amazon.com Inc's India unit in the country's online shopping market, which is expected to be worth $102 billion by 2020, according to Morgan Stanley. Easy availability of smartphones and cheap data plans have resulted in most of those transactions to be made via apps, where consumers use their mobile phones for everything from buying clothes to booking movie tickets. Freecharge allows users to top up amounts on their mobile phone or internet connections and get coupons as reward for using its service. Snapdeal Chief Executive Kunal Bahl said 1 million mobile transactions would take place daily once the companies are combined. About 75 percent of all Snapdeal transactions now are through mobile users, he said. Freecharge would remain an independent platform even after the deal, which is expected to close within the next 6 months, Bahl said, without specifying how much much it paid to buy the mobile recharge firm. With the acquisition, Snapdeal would become "the largest mobile commerce company in India," the company said in a statement.(Agencies)
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