The Indian Startup Scene

Yahoo shut down its development offices in India recently. I think most large software development companies with most of their teams in the US will eventually come to the same conclusion and do the same thing. My guess is that the only ones that will remain are the ones that make their teams there strictly independent and focused on problems facing the Indian market.

Unfortunately, that is not how those offices typically operate - they usually end up doing small projects that people in the main offices in the US think are safe to be handled overseas. It is not like they think the folks in India are less capable or dedicated - it just makes more logical sense to have everyone working on important projects to all be in the same timezone, located more or less close by geographically and able to communicate well with each other. Since that is not easy to do between the US and India, even if a project of importance happens to have arisen at the Bangalore office, it eventually gets moved to the US because it is too important to be done by a team that no one has much contact with.

Also, folks sitting in the US do not have as much perspective on the Indian market (or any other market for that matter) so they tend to miss opportunities that people there would normally see.  Typically I have not seen these offices solving too many problems for the developing world. Historically, I think the number of new solutions that came out for the Indian market from these large companies has been low, especially from an engineering viewpoint. All the new ideas such seem to have come from small startups and not from the smaller offices of the established companies. Even when the established companies do come out with solutions for the local market, it seems like the initiatives originated from Indian employees in the US, not in India.

So from the perspective of the large companies, it makes sense to close down operations in India - if they are unable to innovate for the local market, and it is known that communication can be a problem, why keep these offices running? I know some folks do it because it is cheaper there - but that gap is quickly reducing..people's starting salaries have nearly doubled in the last 5-6 years. It is already nearly half of what folks make in the US, so it seems like in the next 10 years or so the gap in salaries will be mostly gone. So it wont make much financial sense to keep engineers there either.

So is this a bad thing? Are we moving in a direction where unemployment for engineers will once again become a problem? I dont think so - I think India will have its own strong startups coming out soon. There are already quite a few that seem to be doing well, and it will get better over time. The startup scene there is heating up, and college grads there are increasingly opting to work at one of those rather than join a conventional large company with a big name. Eventually we will have our own big names, perhaps ones that will compete or surpass the likes of Google and Facebook. China is already moving in that direction and I believe India will soon catch up. In fact I think most countries with strong engineering education will develop its own version of a Silicon Valley with startups churning out innovative solutions for their people.

I am curious how the next 5-10 years will play out in India, startup-scene-wise.

Dealing with Complexity

Have you paused for a moment to marvel at some of the things we have been doing lately?

Self driving cars.
Drones that deliver packages.
Contact lenses that can measure eye pressure.
Gadgets that take pictures when you just think about taking pictures (yep, that exists).

Only fifteen years ago, I would not have thought this kind of stuff would come about while I was still alive. While I see the upside of all this - in fact I make a living out of the upside, I also see some downsides. This post is mostly about the downsides. It does not mean I am anti-technology. I am very much pro-progress, and I definitely think we are better off today than we were just 60 years ago. I also think that is true on most fronts - we have better medical care, better technology and definitely a better political climate. But I have my times of doubt, and this one such moment.

The first problem I see with such complex systems is the need for specialized knowledge before one can contribute anything. The more sophisticated the stuff you make, longer someone has to spend trying to learn all the basics before they can add on top of it. And once they get all that training, they are not going to easily adapt into another job, because they will need a bunch of retraining. Not many companies are willing to hire just "smart" people and pay they until they get up to speed. Most are looking for specific skills that they can start applying on day one on their new jobs. Instead of valuing experience, most places will hire people who have been "ready-made" for the specific roles they have. Once that ready-made position is no longer relevant, heaven help them if they need a new job.

The second problem is avoiding absurdities in the system. When building something complex, it is always difficult to make sure that all the parts make sense together. In the medical system here, it has come to a point where if you dont have medical insurance, you cannot see a doctor. And the number of times you are allowed to see a doctor for any reason whatsoever is also dictated by medical insurance. Take one of my experiences for example: I had a skin problem, which was on my face and my back. I wanted to see a doctor, and called a skin specialist to fix an appointment. They told me that the doctor could only look at one part of my body during one appointment (apparently the insurance restricts the doctor from looking beyond one specific problem). So I asked for 2 consecutive appointments so I could show my face and my back and avoid another trip to the same doctor on another day. Again, insurance prohibited the same doctor from seeing the same patient in two appointments on the same day. The only thing I could do was take appointments on two different days. What kind of nonsense is that?

The third problem is conveying this knowledge to common people. Take the financial system. I dont think anyone understands the entire system, fully, including the people who designed it. And because people like you and me dont understand it, you are supposed to get yourself a "broker" or a "financial planner" who will understand these things for you and make your life smooth. I recently attended a panel discussion organized by financial planners. Their biggest advice was to get yourself a financial planner and invest as much as you can in your 401k. When asked what a financial planner did, they said it is a "halo person" who talks to your accountant, lawyer, broker, doctor, nanny, knows your family and relatives and decides what the right financial decisions are for you. Apparently they control the actions of all these people on your lives so that financially, it all makes sense. What they dont mention is that they charge thousands of dollars in fees, just like all these other people in your life that they are supposed to "work" with, such as lawyers, accountants and so forth. A lot of people came out of that panel discussion feeling like they had a "lot to catch up on and do". I came out deeply concerned that (a) our system was so complicated that something so simple as "inheritance" required working with a financial planner, a lawyer and an accountant. Its something everyone has to do, so why dont we make it as simple as possible? Why make the system such that there is one loop hole that you can go through to make sure your money goes to your children without paying too much in taxes, but for that you need to do this complicated trust fund thing? Why not just offer everyone the same thing instead of limiting these options to those people who are educated enough to navigate the laws and have money to pay lawyers who know how to deal with it?

Of course, financial planners did not mention the fine print that they charge thousands of dollars for their services. I wonder if them and the IRS setup this system so that the IRS can take a cut out of all the money from people who dont know the system, and the financial planners can take the money out of all the people who learn a few things about the system..

When I was at IITM, there was a T shirt that was made by the students of the CS department that read "Complexities Simplified for Everyone". The complexity they had in mind when they made the Tshirt must have been the algorithmic kind... but that phrase indicates what we need on almost all fronts on which we have made progress. I wish all the new grads coming out of college in the coming years will figure out a way to simplify the various systems around us so as to make it more understandable to the common man instead of introducing more complexity when they join the workforce.

The Rise and Fall of Large Corporations

I was reading an article about Sony's struggles to keep themselves profitable today. It is a company whose products I have used a lot while growing up - there was this implicit assumption that if it was from this company, it would meet a certain quality standard. Today though, the inevitable has already happened. They have been disrupted, and they are feeling the pain.

Microsoft is another example of a company that is becoming more and more irrelevant. These days when I see someone take out a laptop that runs Windows, I think they must be either dated or works in consulting and is just doing powerpoint slides everyday ;). Perhaps I feel this way because I worked for MS a while ago. Perhaps I am wrong about what I think about Microsoft. Perhaps everyone will start thinking Windows is cool and start using it again. Perhaps Satya Nadella can save that company. But my guess would be that it will not happen. They have been disrupted so many times over - they missed internet, they missed mobile, and most recently they missed social. And with each new wave that came along, they tried coming up with similar products to try to beat the disrupting company out of their own space. I wonder why they dont know any better. Its not like the individuals there dont know that this is not going to work - at least at a grassroots level they all know. When they decided to work on a product to compete with iPhone sometime in mid 2008 to hit the market 2 years from then, there were people who worked there who asked why they were doing it - Apple was going to come up with something better by 2010, why were they making something that would have features that were competitive with the iPhone released in 2007? There was no answer coming forth. They did it because thats what "management" decided the strategy was. I guess the management thought that Apple was like Netscape. Clearly, that proved wrong.

Corporations are so much like people.

The birth of a company is a lot of hard work and pain. Its infancy is a lot of learning and work. Then it goes through a phase of maturing and figuring out what its place in the world must be. Then it tries to make a decent living out of its chosen path. After a while, a newcomer eats its lunch and it is left struggling to figure out how to compete. Some manage to reinvent themselves. Most retire. In the end though, all of them die. And these are just the successful ones. There are many others who die along the way. Some die in their infancy, never having managed to take off. Some get killed. Some commit suicide. Banks seem to have a strong preference for suicide. And goverments seem to like covering it up and making it look like it was accidental poisoning.

Whats interesting to note though, is that the life cycle has been shrinking into a smaller and smaller time scale lately. In the 1950s, the average age of a company that was in the S&P 500 was around 75. These days it is more like 10.

Apparently corporations mature a lot faster these days. Just like cattle and livestock. And people.

To fuel this type of insane growth, people are perhaps working harder than ever before - with the introduction of laptops, our work now stretches into our homes, making it harder for us to detach from work at will. And since more and more people are willing to put in this type of work, everyone feels pressurized to do the same thing.

So here we are - a set of people running faster than ever before to make more wealth than ever before to spend on more stuff than ever before, dying faster than ever before with more diseases than ever before.

Sometimes I wonder what the point of it all is. The Amish lifestyle makes so much sense sometimes.

And yet I know I will not let go of my job or my chosen life no matter what conclusions I come to logically. I know in my head that it is all in vain, yet I do exactly what everyone else does. Perhaps it is peer pressure. When I was in school I used to do things to make sure I wasnt going to buckle in to peer pressure. Apparently it wasnt enough - I am still swayed be everyone else's measure of success. I still care about what impressions people have about me. One day hopefully, I will be able to rid myself of that and take a more zen like approach to work and life. And some other day, hopefully, everyone else will feel the same way and do what they love.

The New Royalty

Recently, I read about the 65th Birthday party of Prince Charles that was funded by a "philanthropist" Indian origin couple based in London. The party had apparently cost 500k pounds, and I couldnt help but wonder why any self respecting individual who wanted to known as "philanthropist" would spend money pampering the royalty of a country whose colonization and plundering has resulted in the sorry state of affairs that many countries face today. People from this country amassed great wealth either as loot, pretty much the same way pirates do their job. If it wasnt straight forward theft, they did it by enslaving the natives of the country they were colonizing. I wonder how they can look at their history and not feel shame. Do they teach their children what really happened or do they teach them about "conquests" that brought in great wealth?

It is not just England that has this type of history though - if one looks around the Americas, one can see that Portugal and Spain did the same thing. The Spanish were in fact worse - they usually exterminated the natives if they could not be converted into slaves, and then shipped Africans across the sea and used them to work the land. Why was there nothing similar to the Nuremberg trials for colonialists? How did their conscience permit them to act in such inhuman ways? Why was it not considered genocide? And what on earth was the church doing meanwhile? What was their role in all of this?

But that was not what I started out saying.. So why would this Indian "philanthropist" want to host this birthday party?After amassing more wealth than they know what to do with, I guess they hear a little voice in their heads that tell them that the only thing they lack is "titles". If one wants to buy titles, one must know someone who can sell them, right?

Enormous wealth makes all kinds of things possible - one gets powerful, knows all the right people, can fund political organizations - which means one can have a hand in almost all decision making processes, can fund election campaigns, fund universities - which means one's children will most likely receive the best education, and finally, one can also control the media.

And that is how the New Royalty emerges.
Like Reliance Royalty.
Or Kingfisher Royalty.
Or Mittal Royalty.

Think I exaggerate? One of Mittal's palaces was built with marble from the same quarry that was used for the Taj Mahal. This residence is jokingly referred to as "Taj Mittal". His daughter's wedding was the second most expensive wedding in recorded history, second only to Prince Charles and Diana, and followed by Prince William and Kate Middleton who got the third place. Doesnt that sound like royalty?

So what has really changed over the last 100 years?
It depends on your perspective.

From the average Joe's perspective, nothing really has changed. He is born, he lives an ordinary life, reads about the New Royalty's excesses and has dreams that will never come true.

From the perspective of an entrepreneur though, everything has changed. If one is born with enough ability, ambition, a willingness to work hard, and got a few lucky breaks in life, one could join the ranks of the New Royalty almost overnight. Trust me, this was not something that could be done in the old world. In the old world, one really had to be born into wealth. So in that sense, the world is now a lot more democratic. Any one of us can be Royalty tomorrow. In fact, no one knows who the next member of Royalty will be. What we have really done is taken away the ability to be wealthy from a few who were born privileged and made it possible for anyone to be wealthy. It will still be a few, but it could be anyone.

Since "wealth" is a relative term and being wealthy would no longer mean anything if everyone had it, I suppose this is exactly how we want our world to be.

Perfection

After working on a fairly complicated problem for the past few weeks, I was reflecting on the process of writing software one day. It occurred to me that a good piece of software is not just working code - it is code that the writer spent a fair amount of time perfecting until there are no rough edges anywhere. It is what you get when you have nothing more that can be removed (I didnt come up with that, search online to see who did). Not one line more, nor one line less would do exactly the same thing. (Thats another reference. Checkout Byron)

And suddenly, I was enlightened. It isnt just software where this is true. It is true of everything I could think of so far - cooking, movie making, art, music, structural engineering... pretty much everything.

So.. my learning, which is the point of this entry is: Perfection is a prerequisite for greatness.

Goodbye, Reader.

The announcement about Reader's shutdown came as a shock to me. Even though I work for the company that produced and hosted it all these years. There were enough people shocked by the decision who voiced their opinions loudly to no avail, so I did not waste my energy doing that. Instead I decided to enjoy the time remaining, in what way I could.

And now my dear friend has passed on, to Software Heaven.. I miss you, Google Reader. From June 30 onwards, I watched Facebook streams carefully to see who else seemed to miss you. Apparently not many of my friends. None wrote a word about you. Perhaps we made the right decision after all. Perhaps there werent that many that were using you. Which obviously, in our world, means demise. But if it makes you feel better, I have tried Feedly, and it is not very good. Maybe that will make you smile from Software Heaven?

But your death got me thinking.
About Software life, death and afterlife. It is just like Human life, death and afterlife.

Maybe when I reach my human afterlife (and I am in no hurry to, but when I do), I will get to read with you again?

Deals

Last week, everywhere you looked, that was all you could see - "deals". 50% off this, 75% off that, buy one and get one free, all kinds of stuff to mislead the consumer. It was so tempting to get 50% off stuff, especially when everyone tells you that this is the time of the year to be shopping, the time of the year when the best deals are available. So I went out shopping too, thinking the deals would only be available on that day.

I found yesterday that Macys, the store that advertises and makes use of Black Friday to the maximum has another sale this weekend - with the same 50% off of course. So what were they advertising about last week? What made last week the best week to shop?

In fact, come to think of it, although Macys has good stuff, the pricing is very misleading. There is no "real" price on any item - its basically an auction model, where the goods come in before the beginning of each season (sales for the next season begins way before the season itself, off) at heavy prices. The people who are particular about wearing in season and the latest fashion trends and colors buy those at exorbitant prices. After a while, the same items get marked down, and they have a sale, perhaps putting a discount of 40%. If you are unlucky, you could be paying as much as 40% more for the same item if you went shopping just one day before the sale day. And what happens when the items dont go on sale even after 40% discount? Well, they get marked down lower still. Finally it hits clearance, and they usually cost between 5-10$ at that point. Of course, one has to realize that the ones that end up in clearance are the sizes that no one can wear, the patterns that no one liked, or the cuts that did not suit most people. So the trick to shopping well is to go after it is marked down, but before people have finished buying up all the good pieces. And that is why sales are so popular here.. 

Except... what does it mean when there is a sale every 10 days or so? Are they reducing the price of items every 10 days? Isnt that an indication that their items are way overpriced to begin with? And if the store is not going bust after all these sales, surely they are conning us into paying more than we ought to?

A programming class that I took at Columbia had this interesting problem we had to solve : We had to write code that could play scrabble - we all started out with an initial (random) set of letters. In each round, a new letter would come up for bidding, and all the teams could bid on this new letter to try and get the letter (and win the game by making a 7 letter word). So at each point, when a letter came up for bid, we had to decide what that letter was worth to us and bid accordingly. Through trial and error, we learnt that the only way to get what was valuable through an auction was to put in a bid that reflected the true value of the letter for us depending on the state of our game.

Of course, estimating true value was a difficult problem. We knew intuitively what letters were more valuable or less valuable. But putting a number on it was not easy. We explored all kinds of things to arrive at true value. We never reached the right equations, and our player did not win, ultimately. But it was a valuable lesson, because I am applying it while shopping at Macys now :) .. I look at each piece and decide whether the cost reflects its true value to me. If it does, I buy, and if it doesnt, I dump it. It has proved to be a valuable aid in helping avoid regrets.

Funny how programming lessons can come handy while shopping.