This article was published in July 2015 issue of SiliconIndia.

Date:   Thursday, July 02, 2015

Have you ever reflected on the euphoric feeling you experienced when you got your first customer assuming you have been in that situation? There's nothing quite like that feeling of euphoria in making your first sale and getting your first customer. You realize suddenly that finally you've built something that has the potential to grow your business and finally realize your dream. Now the big question is how you land your first early adopter customer. Early adopters are a special breed of customers and they mean everything to a business. These customers don\'t need testimonials to make a purchase. Quite often, they are proactively looking for new technology or products to improve their business. They understand that mistakes will happen. They are willing to work with you and your team. They really want you to succeed, are patient and are willing to pay for your product or service. For this article, Avinash Harsh, Founder and CEO of Halosys, a leading early stage Enterprise Mobility Company based in Silicon Valley, provided his insights and experiences in getting the first customer based on my discussion with him recently. Halosys provides an Enterprise MobileFirst API platform, known as Mobile Backend-as-a-Service (mBaaS) for Enterprise companies to build, secure, manage & deploy Mobile Apps connecting to internal business systems.Prior to founding Halosys, Avinash worked with Cisco and was the initial member of a team that launched the first SaaS initiative at Cisco focused on small and medium businesses. Under Avinash's leadership, Halosys has acquired marquee customers and has built a complete ecosystem around the product. Along with his Enterprise strategy Run-books and Rulebooks for deploying Mobile Apps and devices, he has also been a speaker at mobility events like CTIA. Here are four key take away (4KTA) points that can be of immense value to you in trying to get your first customer.

1. Lighthouse Customer

Finding an early adopter customer, that is willing to try your product while being aware of the fact that your product is still evolving, is a critical element in building a great product that actually will be used by the industry.The Lighthouse customers are not only critical to the success of the product, but also for boosting team\'s confidence. It's almost like seeing your own baby slowly standing and walking giving rise to the greatest joy any parent experiences at that moment. It's extremely important, however, that the product team does not deviate too far from the product road-map. The risks of becoming a one off product customized for the lighthouse customer vs. the wider adopt-ability of your product by the industry have to be finely balanced.During early days of Halosys Enterprise Mobility platform, the engineering team took up an initiative to help launch Mobile Apps connecting to SAP at a leading Semiconductor company. The challenges faced for meeting the unique security needs, connectivity to on-premise business systems and applying department specific policies to Mobile Apps were highlighted. This ultimately became the genesis of rethinking security completely in a unique way and eventually, Halosys developing a fool proof security technology for Enterprise Mobile Apps. Team felt elated with a huge sense of achievement when there was a rapid uptick in adoption of mobile apps by the customer\'s employees and managers.

2. Show & Tell

Whether your customers are IT folks or a Line of Business within an enterprise; whether your solution is related to security, Infrastructure, platform or an App, in the world of Enterprise Mobility, 'Show & Tell' philosophy works the best. Enterprises today are inundated with vendors providing competing solutions. It's difficult to comprehend the value unless it is presented in the right way. It's worth spending time early on to create a visual showcase of what the final outcome of your product for the customer would be and how they will use it. Halosys, created a few pre-built, customizable Mobile Apps that showed the customer's data flowing on day one of piloting the platform.Seeing fully functional Apps, connecting to their own business systems and authenticating against their own security mechanisms provided a competitive edge by 'Show & Tell' power of the platform. This helped in customer really opening up and talking about their unique needs and pain points.

3. Real Customer

If you are selling to an IT organization, the right person for a start-up is the one who talks and thinks like a Product Manager and not like a traditional IT Executive.The right person possesses passion for new initiatives, treats business stakeholders as paid commercial customers and is hungry for being recognized as a thought leader. We were fortunate to meet IT teams that were thinking proactively and behaving like nimble Product teams. Their outlook was not to 'Keep the lights ON' but to take the system to the next level by providing tools and apps to improve the processes for their own customers, Sales & marketing teams and provide just-in-time data to the executives.One of Halosys' initial customers - a large Data Center provider, had already trained their IT team at all levels of leadership with the mindset of a product delivery team.This enabled Halosys and the customer\'s IT team to easily launch many innovative and award winning Mobile Solutions that are now well adopted by their customers and employees.

4. Leveraging Eco-System Partners Early-on

You must find one key partner that is in adjacent space with a complementary offering to your product. It\'s important to choose a company with a wider foothold in the Enterprise. In whatever way you can, try to earn the bragging rights by integrating and being able to connect or support their software.While the initial objective is to showcase the synergy, it eventually can be leveraged to have them become your advocates and channel partner. For Halosys's mBaaS (Mobile Backend-as-a-Service)solution, the complementary solutions were provided by MDM (Mobile Device Management) and MAM (Mobile App Management) companies. Halosys initially partnered with Citrix MAM and now have partnered and integrated with a number of leading industry providers of MDM and MAM solutions.

In summary, the four key take away points for entrepreneurs in getting your first customer are to focus in on a lighthouse customer, show & tell your advantages, understanding who the real customer is within an enterprise and leveraging eco-system partners early-on.


The author is Co-Founder of AURISS TECHNOLOGIES INC. and a serial entrepreneur based in Silicon Valley, California. Learn more at www.4KTA.com and follow Naveen on twitter @Naveen_4KTA.

This article was published in May 2015 issue of SiliconIndia.

Date:   Friday , May 01, 2015

Understanding and identifying a great opportunity represents one of the core elements for any entrepreneur whether it\'s starting your company with a new product idea and growing it in an existing market or into a new category. For instance, Apple\'s transformation into the most valuable company in the planet now with smartphone market and Google\'s entry into the same market with Android are amazing examples for an existing organization. The article here is focused in on startup ideas, however but similar concepts can apply if you are leading new product category launch in a larger organization.Before you begin implementing new products, you must perform market research. Based on this research, identify the problems and how you can solve them. Following this model, you may find opportunities to significantly get into high growth market. Here are four key take away (4KTA) points that center on the concept of opportunity identification that you can follow as an entrepreneur.

1. Opportunity Identification If you were to imagine and ask what the biggest pain point that a customer may be trying to solve can in itself be a powerful way to enable innovation and identify opportunity for your product. It forces you to go beyond industry reports that analysts correlate with purchase and usage to nail down on frustrations and desires that motivate a product purchase and its use.The specific problems a customer may be facing and how they assess solutions is very circumstance contingent and the context underlying it. By asking a customer about what problems they have faced in past will get you something more closer to reality than asking what to do in the future as you are going to get guesses that are less than accurate. As you delve deeper into it, you find that there are so many opportunities in enterprise space that you can come across due to different pain points that exist in various industries. The question is how to zero in on the one that not only customers are willing to pay for but is also a high priority among the top initiatives. For instance, you may have heard that we love your idea or product and it solves one of our pain points but this is not a high priority item at this time. So how do you focus in on the one that is going to be in their top priority list in next one to three years? For instance, on speaking to the Founder and CEO, Abnesh Raina of Plumslice Labs - a start up with innovative product cloud platform for retailers and ecommerce, his experience on challenges that he noticed,based on being CIO at retail and other multi-billion dollar companies, was that there was an inherent need to bring retail product management processes available to match with the current global ecommerce systems. There were no solutions that could address those specific needs in the market. Many of the large retailers were still relying on home grown systems and spreadsheets and emails to manage product workflows and data. And several of them were still implementing basic systems around ERP, ecommerce and supply chain before they waited to solve this acute problem. For an opportunity in enterprise space, you need strong domain expertise in that particular vertical and individuals who have experienced that particular problem as they can appreciate it much better. There are many subtle nuances related to that particular vertical.

2. Validation The second step in your process is to have good enough validation for the opportunity identified. Granted that there is no absolute validation in early stages of product or concept development around the opportunity, talking to a number of prospective customers can help bring clarity to your thought process about this opportunity. For instance, before developing PlumSlice product suite, Abnesh and the team despite having extensive experience in managing IT divisions for large retailers, a clear and sound grasp of their problems and pain points, still decided to get plenty of outside validation. Team conducted multiple focus groups with many prospective customers to validate and ensure that the problem was across multiple companies and industries of similar nature. If there is a problem in enterprise space, assume that there are some other competitors who are also trying to solve similar problem. The question then arises what is the innovation in terms of cost, benefit and any other value additions that you will deliver to the customers in a uniquely differentiated way. This way your customers feel compelled to go along with your solutions than your competitors. Make sure to present the problem clearly and get strong validation upfront. Ask them for honest critique and find any possible holes in it. Get an answer if they\'d be willing to pay for it and how much.

3. Embrace Complexity and Flexibility Most of the enterprise problems are complex in nature. The same problem across multiple companies may need a slightly different solution approach. You need to have the right team to understand the domain and complexity. You need to develop solutions that are configurable enough to accommodate the subtle differences. While some processes can be standardized, there will be several that will be unique that need to be incorporated in solution offerings. Extensive research is an essential step in learning about all nuances pertinent to that enterprise. Always remember what Albert Einstein said, \"If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?\"

4. Great Expectations Managing your expectation and customer\'s expectation is another key element. Expect that the initial customer sign up and implementation process may take longer than expected due to conflicting priorities that impact your customer\'s bandwidth to implement your solution.Be aware that things can change anytime due to external factors beyond your control.In the past, the typical implementations could take six months to two years. Nowadays, Software as a Service (SaaS)offerings like PlumSlice and others take from few days to few weeks only and hence, even more compelling reason for customers to adopt these cloud-based product offerings to remove their pain points as rapidly as possible.

In summary, the four key take away points for entrepreneurs to pursue a great product opportunity are focusing clearly on opportunity identification, validation, embracing complexity and being flexible and managing your and customer\'s expectations.

The author is Co-Founder of AURISS TECHNOLOGIES INC. and a serial entrepreneur based in Silicon Valley, California. Learn more at www.4KTA.comand follow Naveen on twitter @Naveen_4KTA

This article was published in April 2015 issue of SiliconIndia.


Date:   Wednesday, April 01, 2015 

Many of us touch great product experiences every day. Apple is first and foremost the king of hardware design and have made product design a must with the phenomenal success of their products. As you think of designing product for your startup, you must understand that it\'s much more than a beautiful user interface. It\'s a state of mind. It\'s your approach to a problem. It\'s how you\'re going to stay ahead of your competitors. Typically the key elements of a beautiful product design include innovative, useful, aesthetics, unobtrusive, long lasting and thorough yet simple. This article brings invaluable insights from one of the obsessive product expert Rajatish \"Raj\" Mukherjee, currently SVP of Product at GoDaddy. Raj is responsible for GoDaddy\'s efforts to help small businesses be successful online. He leads a team that focuses on providing the easiest way possible to start their online presence, from mobile all the way to seamlessly enabling small businesses to market and transact, from anywhere and at any time. Prior to joining GoDaddy, Raj worked at Google as a Product Manager leading a team for Google Apps for SMBs. Raj was also a Sr. Product Manager for the Online Services division at Microsoft working on product and business strategy for Office 365.Based on my recent discussions with him, here are four key take away (4KTA) points that center on the concept around creating a wow product. 

1. Exceptional Landing Page Design

When you think of the key elements of a Software Product delivered for consumption to the customers as Software as a Service (SaaS), the concept of packaging is entirely different than what you normally expect if you were to buy hardware product. For hardware products, the box that carries the product drives the end user experience. The wow user experience, however, in a software product is felt and perceived differently. It needs to begin as soon as somebody gets to visualize elements of your product. The first place where people visualize that is at the landing page of the software. Now as the user lands on that page, you must have an eye-catching \"Call to Action\" (CTA) functionality for the user to act upon. Next it needs to have a clear value proposition. The user must feel and experience that he is walking away with some value. The users nowadays expect a fully enriching experience. For example, if you land on Groupon\'s landing page, it immediately uses the data it has on you to know where you are from and will show deals from that area. Through using data, design and basic smarts, you can build an effective landing page without that, your product will not be \"opened\". 

2. Great On-boarding Flow

There are a variety of onboard flows depending upon the kind of software you are delivering to the customer. The first and most important thing is a simple and intuitive sign up process. The process needs to be incredibly simple. It should ask for only required information and automatically use all the data you have on the customer without having them to re-enter it. The next important element is having a guided tour of the product or having a tour video to educate the customer. Now remember that no matter what your on boarding experience is, assume many users won\'t go through the user documents or related tools to learn about the product functionality completely. This means that the product needs to be amazingly intuitive and contextual enough that users can figure out 80% of its functionalities and use it effectively just by playing with it. This is like a "payoff quotient" in the on boarding experience. For every task, you must save at least 10X that in some form in the product experience. Most SaaS products do not keep this simple \"payoff quotient\" in mind. 

3. Product That Leads to Habitual Usage

How do you get customer to get hooked to your product and bring the customer back and for what? For instance, if you have an email application, they are going to use it regardless. Now what if you have built an expense reporting application, how do you get people to understand the activities they need to perform? The expense reporting application is not really fun that users gravitate toward it. Take for example. At the end of the month, the application notifies the user that it\'s been thirty days. It\'s time for him to fill an expense report. And it automatically adds the right transactions from the credit card that user has used. The idea is that the application does not make the user do drudgery work but rather enables user\'s life extremely easy and simple. For example, when you swipe your credit card, it automatically remembers your email and sends the receipt. These seemingly simple things create moments of delight for the user and help build a connection between the user and the product and convert him into a habitual user. You may want to read \"Hooked\" to understand design principles that could be applicable to your product as well.

4. It Should Just Work

Once the product is launched for public consumption, it should just work. Asusers begin to use it, if at any time for any reason whatsoever, it suddenly stops working or the performance begins to degrade due to poor internet connection, the first thing users do is to blame the product. If you ask your engineering team about it, they will report back that server is up and network is functioning properly. As a customer centric product manager, you need to ask, \"What is the user\'s experience with the product regardless of whether server is up or infrastructure is running smoothly or not?\" How do you react when something goes wrong with the product? How do you continue to build trust with the user? How do you keep the trust by failing gracefully? A graceful failure implies you inform the customer and advise accordingly. For instance, Skype informs you when your internet connection is bad and asks you to switch off the video so you can have a delightful experience. This is failing gracefully. 

The author is Co-Founder of AURISS TECHNOLOGIES INC. and a serial entrepreneur based in Silicon Valley, California. Learn more at www.4KTA.comand follow Naveen on twitter @Naveen_4KTA

Date:   Wednesday , March 04, 2015 

This month's article brings you lessons from Rajeev Madhavan, an extraordinary entrepreneur, prolific angel investor and co-founder of several companies. Rajeev is a serial entrepreneur, having founded and co-founded three successful startups. The most recent, Magma Design Automation became the 4th largest Electronic Design Automation Company in the world under his leadership. Rajeev served as Magma\'s Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the Board of Directors since he co-founded the company in 1997, and also served as president until 2001. Magma was listed on NASDAQ stock exchange in 2001 and was ranked as the 2nd fastest growing Technology Company in 2005 by Forbes. Magma was acquired in February 2012 by Synopsys, Inc. Prior to founding Magma, he co-founded and served as President and CEO of Ambit Design Systems, Inc. Ambit\'s market leadership led to a successful acquisition by Cadence in 1998. Rajeev also co-founded and served as Director of Engineering of LogicVision, Inc. that went public and was eventually acquired by Mentor Graphics. He was also incidental in the creation of Zerosoft acquired by Synopsys and AutoESL acquired by Xilinx. Recipient of Red Herring, Top Innovator 2002, and Lifetime achievement award at NITK, India and various other awards, Rajeev is an active angel investor in a number of startups. Based on my recent discussions with him, here are four key take away (4KTA) points that center on the concept of focus from product validation, culture, getting sales and setting clear goals. 

1. Product Definition

Lots of entrepreneurs don\'t do a good job of validating the initial idea with customers. In 90percent of the cases, the best value add that your product can bring to customers was not the real value. What you discover by this process of validation is something new or other key pain points that need immediate solution by the customer. Secondly, categorizing those features into a minor subset of maximum value functionality is important. This is the stage when you are talking to customers for 10 minutes and letting them talk for 40 minutes to soak in all the information from them. It\'s only as you become clear about their pain points and solution around it, you talk for 35 minutes. Let them give comments and feedback. And you don\'t get thrown out. For instance, in one of the companies as founding investor and Chairman, we had unique machine learning algorithm technology. While speaking to some of senior management of an ecommerce company recently sold to Oracle during our validation process, it made us realize that the product can be targeted to ecommerce. Despite the fact that our team had zero experience in ecommerce, we visited 20-30 customers to understand their problems and learn what could be automated in analytics and machine learning. Today the product is used by leading brands with over twenty five companies providing them 15-40percent increase in revenue.

2. Building a Corporate Culture and Right Team

The key point to keep in mind is openness. Don\'t expect everything to be secret. Your team is 90percent of your asset. Surround yourself with people smarter than yourself. Have a stringent hiring process to ensure they fit into your company culture. Team must possess the sense of ownership. Have technical checks during interview process. Having one can bad employee is like having two good employees as that person can be more detrimental to shared goals of the company. In Magma Design, the company went through litigation where opposite party was using litigation as a weapon. While there were issues associated with IP, most of it was frivolous things related to products with no merit. At the same time, the other party was trying to hire away key employees. We had a reward program in which key people were rewarded extremely well. As a result, the company did not lose any of our key employees and delivered on number of new products during this period. The rewards program, openness of culture coupled with value system and team communication helped us to achieve that.

3. Sales, Sales and Sales

Essentially in early stages of startup if entrepreneurs are not good at sales, then you must hire right talent, consultants and investors. How you learn to sell in the early stages helps you create a scalable and repeatable template for future sales and growth. It\'s not really important to have significant revenue from first few sales but having the right equation to be able to repeat it is more useful. Be honest with the customers as initial product neither may have all testing, quality assurance done on it and nor complete functionality built in it. Getting the customer\'s buy in to a tiered deployment is a key.

4. Goals

Make sure to run your company across the board with goals for Research & Development team, goals for sales, goals for administration and ensure that key owners are held responsible. Now remember that people can only be held responsible only if you delegate them to create their own goals and help them become successful. Weed poor performers out while rewarding high performers. Realize who your key employees are and lead them to take the company to next stage. For instance, in of the companies, I've been involved as an investor, management team had a goal for product release without having lined up a customer and understanding what customer actually needs. These types of goals are meaningless. Having a customer lined up to test the product is a key goal. Getting your first purchase order from your customer that you have lined up is a must.



The author is Co-Founder of AURISS TECHNOLOGIES INC. and a serial entrepreneur based in Silicon Valley, California. Learn more at www.4KTA.com and follow Naveen on twitter @Naveen_4KTA. 

This article was published in February 2015 issue of SiliconIndia.

Date:   Thursday , February 12, 2015 

Silicon Valley is an amazing place to be in as you can find yourself interacting with many smart people from almost any part of the world. Still today, it continues to make an enormous impact in the society and our day to day lives in an amazing way with new technologies and innovations. There is no single day when one or two articles appear highlighting the accomplishments of enterprising and risk-taking entrepreneurs. 

The support system within the realm of an innovative ecosystem that exists here between angel investors, venture capital, risk-taking entrepreneurs, legal and advisory firms and determined and passionate entrepreneurs embarking on solving the next big problem is absolutely fascinating. This month\'s article brings to you a generous angel investor, advisor and highly successful executive who has helped many of these young entrepreneurs from his advice, connections to the global companies and global markets such as Japan. Tsuyoshi Taira, Founder and CEO of Tazan International, a Venture Capital and Management Consultancy Firm, has been involved as founding investor and director with a number of Silicon Valley startup companies including Silicon Storage Technology (SST), Pico Power Technology Inc. (acquired by Cirrus Logic), Junglee Corporation (acquired by Amazon.com), Armedia (acquired by Broadcom), Apptivity (acquired by Progress Software) and many others. Previously, he was Chairman of Sanyo Semiconductor and he also worked at Fairchild Semiconductor. He has published a number of books including "Audio Amplifier", "Transistor physics And application" as a Co-author and most recently a book on entrepreneurship, "My fellow engineer, let's challenge" from Nikkei BP. Based on my recent discussions with him, here are four key take away (4KTA) points that center on the concept around helping others while going through your entrepreneurial journey.


Helping Others - The most fulfilling and motivating aspect is deriving the enjoyment by helping young entrepreneurs to achieve great things from a mere concept and idea. Despite many successes and many failures, one key ingredient that I find in successful entrepreneurs is their sheer focus on helping and benefiting others including employees, customers and partners. Kazuo Inamori, Founder and Chairman of Kyocera Corporation, is an outstanding example of this. In 1959 he founded Kyocera to focus on ceramic materials that became largest supplier to semiconductor industry. His basic philosophy was focused around employee success. He ensured that as company grows, employees are happier and are able to make a decent living. Make others happy, fulfilled and appreciated. This has been the core foundation of his philosophy. These core principles, when applied by any entrepreneur, can harness and channel the vast pool of creative energy from their team members into successful products thereby creating a well-run and efficient organization. When Inamori came to Silicon Valley during its early days, he noticed that telecom cost was much cheaper here compared to Japan. He felt that there had to be a cheaper way for Japanese people to make calls to their friends and family. To realize that vision, in 1984, he founded KDDI Corporation, now Japan\'s second-largest telecommunication services provider. Due to his well-respected success, most recently, Japanese government asked him to help restructure Japan Airlines when it entered bankruptcy protection. His Buddhist belief and Confucius philosophy is a part of his life and for whatever he does, he first asks himself, \"Does it benefit others, not for me? And I will not do it just for my fame\". This mantra continues to guide his success. 


Mindset - An entrepreneur must cultivate certain mindset such as anticipating failures, being inherently curious, being able to delegate and following instincts to grow, understand and lead their business. Entrepreneurs with this mindset are the ones who eventually succeed. In addition, they must be passionate and enthusiastic for contributing towards the society and industry to make people\'s lives better. For instance, when the founder of Pico Power came to me for investment and advice, he was amazingly enthusiastic and passionate about helping the PC industry by improving the issues of heat and power that Intel 486 chips were having at that time. With no further questions, I asked Sanyo Semiconductor to make an investment of $1.5 million dollars, which was unheard of in those days for a Japanese company to invest in a startup idea. The company went on to become successful with its products and was acquired by Cirrus Logic. 


Teamwork - Teamwork and collaboration are terms often thrown casually into the optimistic mantras for small startups. This is another key ingredient that co-founders must have. When Junglee founders met me, they were still graduate students at Stanford. Their contagious enthusiasm, intense passion and determination to solve the search problem in an efficient way were obvious. Combined with the fun attitude towards each other and determination to contribute to industry inspired me and my friends to provide them with seed money despite us having zero software background. The team went on to create successful product and services. The company was eventually acquired by Amazon for over $187 million dollars. Teamwork was definitely the key to their success. 


Persistence - The quality that allows someone to continue doing something even though it is perceived to be difficult by other people is another significant trait for an entrepreneur to achieve the ultimate success. For instance, Sazo Idemitsu, Founder of Idemitsu Kosan Ltd., Oil Company possessed such a trait. In his early days, he could not get money until one angel investor believed in him. However, he ran out of cash quite fast and was ready to give up. When he told his investor about the cash situation, this angel investor sold another house and gave him the money to keep him going with his plan and asked him to persist. Mr. Idemitsu asked his Angel investor, "If I lose again, what are you going to do?" The investor replied,"If that happens, then we both will become beggar together." This is the essence of a true angel investor. Finally, with a lot of hard work and a socially responsible philosophy towards his employees with no layoffs ever, Idemistu made the company successful. His mantra was to always help his employees and take care of them. 

In summary, the four essential key take away points for entrepreneurs are helping others, having a mindset to contribute to society and industry, teamwork and persistence to achieve the final success.


The author is Co-Founder of AURISS TECHNOLOGIES INC. and a serial entrepreneur based in Silicon Valley, California. Learn more at www.4KTA.com and follow Naveen on twitter @Naveen_4KTA. 

This article was published in Januray 2015 issue of SiliconIndia.


Date:   Thursday, Januray 1, 2015 

Happy New Year to you all! May this bring a monster success in whatever you endeavor to accomplish this year!!!!

This month's article brings you lessons from Keerti Melkote, a highly successful entrepreneur, prolific angel investor and advisors to multiple startups that are applying technology to transform many diverse industries including wireless, security, datacenter, social networking, healthcare, sports and construction. 

Keerti is the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Aruba Networks. He started Aruba Networks in 2002 with a vision to enable mobility for enterprises of all sizes. This started with the creation of Aruba\'s secure mobility platform for deploying enterprise-scale wireless LANs. He led Aruba through its IPO offering in 2007 and continues to guide Aruba\'s strategic direction as it grows and expands into the leading provider of enterprise mobility solutions. Prior to founding Aruba, he held leadership roles in product management, technology marketing and engineering at Cisco, Intel and leading networking startups such as Shasta Networks. He has been granted multiple patents for innovations in the field of networking and communications and was honored by Purdue University as an Outstanding Electrical and Computer Engineer in 2009. Based on my recent discussions with him, here are four key take away (4KTA) points that center on the concept of starting your company with a monster market opportunity as one of key criteria.


Attack Monster Markets - A very important lesson an entrepreneur must focus in on is to identify monster markets. As an entrepreneur when you put everything in line from family, time, money and other resources to turn your dreams into a reality, it better have a huge market potential. A monster market is defined as the one that has the potential to grow into billion dollars or more of untapped opportunity. Personally, three large market opportunities that I\'ve been involved with over time have included Ethernet switching for plugging the world into internet, plugging the world to the broadband through Shasta Networks and finally unplugging the world into internet by providing wireless access to the internet with current company Aruba Networks. In each case, the individual markets were billion dollars or more. It did not start out that way, however. When you are developing products and services for monster markets, you have room for error in case markets did not materialize in the way you envisioned it. Once you have identified the market, the next significant question is how you go about validating it. At Aruba, the validation happened the day Intel decided to make wireless chip part of the motherboard, now known as Centrino program. Another one was a well published hack that happened at TJ Max validating that our choice of security as a key differentiating factor was right on.


Sustainable Differentiation - If the opportunity is huge, then you should expect to have a lot of competition from startups to incumbent vendors in that industry. A key differentiation in the form of technological innovation or disruption of current business models or a combination of both is a must. For instance, at Aruba Networks, we created a new way to build enterprise wireless LAN using centralized controllers and also, bet on security as the core technological innovation as a differentiator. Similarly, our focus on business model disruption was another differentiator aimed towards existing vendors who were selling wired LAN switches for internet access. Though it took longer for adoption, finally we prevailed. Today everybody talks about wireless workplace. 


Team - It\'s very important to hire best of the best during early days because fundamentally that\'s what will differentiate over time. Technology and markets will evolve and change over time. However, if you have smart people around you, they can adapt faster and find solutions as you run into unforeseen challenges. We started Aruba when economy was not doing well. It helped us in recruiting lots of really good people who joined us. There is usually a temptation to hire only experienced people. In hindsight, I\'d recommend hiring lots of smart fresh graduates and create a good mix of talent among the team. Never be afraid to let go of the people immediately if they are not a fit for any of the reasons. For instance, it took us couple of tries before we settled on the right VP of Engineering in our early days. 


Culture - The most enduring thing an entrepreneur can do is to build a culture around the Customer Focus in every aspect. It\'s not the technology or the products. It\'s what team does to meet the needs of the customer. You must put teamwork, collaboration and customers on top. At Aruba, we have a saying, \'Customer First; Customer Last.\' Lots of entrepreneurs get seduced by next generation technologies and forget what customers want. For example, when we have a tough problem, we always start with the customer first. You can find lots of smart people but one other important element is chemistry among the team members. It may become less important as the company matures and grows into a bigger scale. Another example is of 'No Jerks Allowed' philosophy that we implemented at Aruba. What it means is that you allow constructive confrontation and the differences of opinions to be acceptable. These must not become personal. You must lead by setting an example by following elements of your culture so team can observe that you are walking your talk. 


In summary, the four key take away points for entrepreneurs are identifying and attacking monster markets, creating a sustainable differentiation, building an A+ team and creating a culture focused around the Customer First mantra.


The author is Co-Founder of AURISS TECHNOLOGIES INC. and a serial entrepreneur based in Silicon Valley, California. Learn more at www.4KTA.com and follow Naveen on twitter @Naveen_4KTA. 

This article was published in November 2014 issue of SiliconIndia.



Date:   Thursday, November 1, 2014 

Timing your startup journey and defining your market segment is one of the key drivers for a company's success. This article focuses in on lessons learnt by Ajay Mishra, a serial entrepreneur. Ajay is certainly adept in identifying emerging high growth market opportunities to time the launches of his startups. Ajay has been immensely successful with both of his startups and continues to work as the Chief Customer Officer within his current company, MobileIron. Ajay works with customers to understand what is being done well, what might be improved upon, and how to expand products and services to better serve customers\'s needs. Earlier Ajay co-founded enterprise wireless pioneer, Airespace, now part of Cisco. He defined the initial product requirements for the company\'s products, working hand-in-hand with 20 teaching customers. Ajay started his career as an engineer at Motorola and was part of the team that designed the world\'s first commercial GSM handset in 1990. Here are four key take away (4KTA) that Ajay shared in my recent discussions with him.

Market

Before you start your company, one key step is to determine if there is a market. A well-known fact is that a lot of hype builds up around perceived new market trends that deflate almost instantly. Boatloads of startups get funded like wild cats and dogs as Ajay calls it. Now how do you go about validating the market? Is the timing for this opportunity now or still a few years out? If you start too early, you may end up spending all your investor\'s money before the market even develops. You maybe forced to shut down your company as investors could run out of patience. Understanding how to manage market timing for your product becomes essential. The next step is convincing customers outside the Silicon Valley bubble to appreciate the value and benefit of your technology for their enterprise. If you can convince a customer in Texas, Florida or Germany, then perhaps you are onto something. You want to solve a problem that has customers from every direction coming to buy your solution in boatloads. For instance, at the time of Airespace, laptops were shipping from Taiwan and China in boatloads in 2003 and entering enterprises from every direction. It broke the legacy structured wiring concept in the enterprise. Companies began deploying laptops causing a major shift in user behavior as everyone started getting instant access to the enterprise network. Wireless had broken the wall and as a result, both security management and business processes had to adapt. During MobileIron in 2007, smartphones were expected to become the computers of the future, entering enterprises in large scale. Suddenly, enterprises had to secure and deliver business applications and contents on these devices for first time without hijacking the end user experience. User experience now mattered even more as consumers brought in their personal devices into the enterprise environment. This time again, smartphones were entering enterprises from every direction. Building a technology to satisfy the user experience is more challenging because you have to consider a diverse set of end-users. Think about this whole process as a journey. Understanding the concept of the Mobile journey was important to visualize how customers would then use these new devices over time. Think similarly while building your company to support future customer needs.


Teaching Customers

Second, every entrepreneur needs customers who will provide him or her with some deep insight into the problems the customers face and solutions they need. These teaching customers are willing to continuously give feedback to help you design and improve your product. It\'s important to note that these teaching customers may not actually be the first paying customers. They are happy to assess your product and provide advice on how to improve it. They may not become your first buyers. In Airespace, the first set of teaching customers included a public university, a hospital, a chemical company, and an aerospace company. None of these customers were from Silicon Valley. 


Founders

Third, if you are not willing to quit your day job, you\'re not ready to be an entrepreneur. Quitting your day job implies that you really believe in your idea. If you don\'t believe in it yourself, you won\'t be able to convince someone to quit their job.This sacrifice is necessary to be a true founder and entrepreneur. Convincing one\'s family is also an important part of the entrepreneurial process. You have to share with your spouse and kids why you believe so passionately in your idea and why you plan to leave your job to do a startup. The next step for founders is to understand how to best grow the team. Always look for a co-founder that complements your strengths and has the same passion. Define the job requirements before starting the search for a co-founder. The co-founder relationship is basically like a marriage. Just like in dating, the two parties have to create trust by building a culture of transparency that extends to the larger team. And to build that great team, founders need to continuously sell the company idea and value proposition to new employees.


Measurement Metrics

Finally, the one metric that you may want to use as an entrepreneur and founder is shareholder value. Shareholder value answers the performance of the company. If the shareholder value is going up, the company is executing well. The shareholder value is dependent on the balance of three key ingredients, market, customers, and team. These three ingredients have to be in sync to build strong shareholder value. Hiring A+players and building your team around them is what will end up driving your company to its success. An amazing team gets you capital for your company as well as your customers. Finally, founders are like heart and soul of the company, they need to work harder than others to build the company and tirelessly exhibit the passion and commitment needed to build an A+ team and successful company.



The author is Co-Founder of AURISS TECHNOLOGIES INC., a serial entrepreneur and Board Member, Chair - Programs, The Indus Entrepreneur (TiE) organization, based in Silicon Valley, California. Learn more at www.4KTA.com and follow Naveen on twitter @Naveen_4KTA

This article was published in October 2014 issue of SiliconIndia.

Date:   Sunday , October 05, 2014 


One key element often overlooked by an entrepreneur is being prepared to deal with the roller coaster ride of their entrepreneurial journey. While working on your startup, every day is filled with uncertainty and unknown factors. Life is quite lonely as a founder. You have no idea what may occur every day. In order to cope with that, you need to find a way to manage these uncertainties and emotions by developing robust mental strength. By having strong mental strength, you can manage and regulate emotions, manage your thoughts and induce positive energy inside you to get to the next step in your journey. This will empower you with the courage and determination to achieve the kind of success that you envision for yourself. It is more than just using your will power. It requires a set of steps and tools combined with hard work and commitment to establish healthy and new habits. While you are pondering over it, here are four key take away (4KTA) points based upon my own experiences around it. 

1. Core Plan - As they say, when you begin with a strong desire, you are already half way towards achieving your success. Understanding fully how to develop your mental strength is a key to your success. To start with, first develop your core plan. For example, in order to manage my roller coaster journey, it was vital for me to build my mental strength. I figured out steps consisting of a set of tools that would work for me, a plan to use those tools and a monitoring process to track how these were enhancing my mental strength and their impact. The tools consisted of exercises comprising physical and mental, healthy food and nutritional choices. Similarly identify tools that may be applicable to you and will deliver the results you want. Implement your plan into practice. As you consistently follow through per your schedule, these may become part of your life long habits. Due to the result of my applying a number of these tools since early 2000, I have found that my awareness on what works continues to grow more and more. As these tools holistically enhance all areas of my life, more and more I look for ways to keep improvising and improving on them. 

2. Exercise - This component of developing your mental strength consists of three areas based on what has worked for me. You may want to figure out in your own ways what may work for you. This comprises physical exercise, mental exercise and mental nourishment consisting of ongoing learning. During my second startup days, I could begin to see effects of not paying attention to living a healthy life style. Consequently, I had to develop a plan quickly before it got out of control. The plan consisted of acquiring knowledge on healthy living and creating an exercise routine. The physical exercise plan was around cardio, strength training and stretching exercises. For mental exercises, I decided to delve into learning more about meditation and breathing exercises such as Pranayama, Kriya etc. I attended Art of Living and ten day Silent Vipassana Meditation courses. As time progressed, it began to show results in relieving the stress, inducing calmness and filling more and more positive energy inside me. Now make sure that you are committed to your execution plan. Ultimately if you do not execute on your plan, you will get nowhere. You can find tons of books from experts in pertinent areas to acquire knowledge and learn extensively from the best practices. For instance, I decided to go to gym almost every day and have been able to maintain that schedule quite regularly since early 2000. For mental enrichment activities, I combined my love of reading books and articles that are not only stimulating but also energizing at the same time. Music is another source for inducing positive energy. We often tend to worry about things completely beyond our control. Ruminating about these things drain your mental energy. Focus on what you can control. A multi-prong approach like this will keep you focused in on building your mental strength.

3. Food & Nutrition - This is another critical component of your plan. There are many books and articles available from experts and trainers that you can find freely on internet or for some payment. The only point I would like to emphasize is to figure out what could work for you and then religiously stick to your plan. Find information from your doctor, your health trainer or books and articles. As there is a lot of awareness around healthy eating now, you can readily find information from many sources.

4.Monitoring - Instilling new habits require constant monitoring. Create a monitoring plan to keep track of your exercises as outlined above with clear goals that you can work towards. Take time to celebrate as you meet your milestones. Keep track of parameters such as how many times, how many miles and how much time every week that you spend on physical exercises. Similarly, keep track of time spent and weekly frequency on mental exercises and food intake to observe your progress. For example, my plan was created around long hiking and trail running at least 10-12 times a year, weights for 3-4 times, cardio for 5-6 times, meditation 3-4 times per week and healthy eating. Keep a goal for reading certain number of books every month. Keep it exciting and adventurous. Use mobile apps to track your activities. All these will help you build strong inner strength and become acutely aware of your emotions. So you can manage and respond in best possible way. It\'s vital that you take time regularly to reflect upon your progress and find ways to keep improving on it. Always remember that developing mental strength is an ongoing process. Finally, it is about accepting your feelings without being controlled by them. 

In summary, the four key take away points for developing your mental strength to cope with ups and downs of entrepreneurial journey are having a core plan, exercise plan, developing healthy food and nutrition habits, and finally, monitoring all your activities around your plan to keep track of your progress and improving upon it.



The author is Co-Founder of AURISS TECHNOLOGIES INC., a serial entrepreneur and Board Member, Chair - Programs, The Indus Entrepreneur (TiE) organization, based in Silicon Valley, California. Learn more at www.4KTA.com and follow Naveen on twitter @Naveen_4KTA

This article was published in  September 2014 issue of SiliconIndia.

Date:   Thursday , September 18, 2014 

While I have been pondering over the concept of randomness and it's applicability to my own entrepreneurial journey, more often than not, I find myself reflecting and coming to conclusion that perhaps, many events were just an act of randomness that kept happening. When you see successful people with extra-ordinary degrees of success, it is easy to attribute their success to a master grand plan. If you talk to them, most of them may say that it was pure luck, whether it may mean perfect timing or some chance occurrence. What more often occurs is that you stumble upon the person or idea that leads to the opportunity without any specific intentions. The key ingredient, then, could be is to raise your likelihood by opening yourself to new opportunities that may randomly show up at your door. The way to make it happen is by becoming alert, opening yourself to noticing new events and even participating in networking events you would not otherwise do. By doing things you normally do not even think of doing could have you stumble upon something valuable by following your instincts. This may lead you to the possibility that seemingly such random ideas, things, even people and places may converge to create new opportunities for you. As you become more and more aware, more and more of these opportunities potentially show up and more easily and intuitively you tend to recognize them. While you begin to think about this concept around randomness and applying it to your entrepreneurial journey, here are four key take away (4KTA) points based upon my experiences around it. 

1. Meaning or Noise 

If you notice closely on what happens on a daily basis in your startup is nothing but a series of random events. The question is if the randomness that you observe, could it be a meaningful signal or just a noise? On a small time horizon, you may not notice significant variation. You may think it is a signal whereas it could be sheer noise. As we become so wrapped up in our startups, it affects our emotional well-being taking us through daily highs and lows. It is utterly important to be in tune with what\'s happening in your startup so you can detect if it is just a signal or noise. Nassim Nicholas Taleb talks in his book, Fooled by Randomness, \"The wise man listens to meaning; the fool only gets the noise.\" Every startup deals with a massive amount of uncertainty and randomness every day. There\'s a lot of noise to wade through, and not much signal. Even getting your first customer today probably does not mean much for your long-term prospects as it could be a purely random coincidence. This may not be indicative of exact product-market fit or the size of the opportunity that you may have in front of you. How do you create meaning out of it like that \"Aha\" Moment? These Aha! Moments can possibly be created by taking a break from your complete focus on one thing. Become aware of your environment around by seeing it closely and connect with the possibilities around it. When we focus on one thing only, we tend to discard everything around it. Take time to explore and use insights gained from other fields, environments, subjects, cultures and places. Become ferociously curious so you pay attention to your intuition more and more allowing serendipity to happen. Reject the most obvious path so you can seek random and unpredictable choices.

2. Risk vs. Rewards

Unless you develop a mindset of exploring and taking calculated risks, you may not discover what you may be missing or more precisely what you may not be learning. On the other hand, if you open yourself to seeing around, you could stumble upon something that leads to a huge opportunity turning into a huge reward. One way to do this is to think of all kinds of risks that are acceptable to you that others tend to avoid. Remember the Nike ad, \"Just do it\". Here is an excellent and inspiring quote from Michael Bloomberg to remember, \"Being an entrepreneur is not really about starting a business. It\'s a way of looking at the world: seeing opportunity where others see obstacles, taking risks when others take refuge.\" 

3. External Factors

There would be times when some external factors unexpectedly may show up beyond that can allow for events and actions to change, build and propagate in myriad ways. Any unexpected surprises in your way that pop up can be an opportunity to move your strategy in a direction more fruitful than you had ever imagined. Perhaps, you even had no idea about it. It is important for you to begin to notice the momentum and intensity of certain forces and the factors occurring around your startup or your product and services. Find a way to leverage it and enhance on them if they are working in your favor. 

4. Experiment

An effective approach is to experiment right away, discard it if it fails and continue to refine it rather than spending several hours in conference room meetings with theoretical and intellectual brainstorming sessions or intellectual highs as I call it. By this approach of continuous experimentation, you can keep discarding the approaches not working and continue to experiment until you find the one that works. Having the humility to accept that approach is not working and willingness to rapidly iterate and change course is more fruitful than a long drawn decision making process. It is important to get everyone\'s opinions about what should be tried and tested. However, you need to make up your mind quickly and test the idea. This eventually would lead to one of those random breakthroughs. Consider the example of the Wright brothers who did not just wake up one day and built a flying plane. They tested and tested dozens of wing designs and different types of engine. I am sure it was a grueling multi-year process of incremental refinements that lead to a flying plane.

In summary, the four key take away points for using the randomness to create success for your startup are to understand whether it is meaningful or just a noise signal, what are risks vs. rewards, paying attention to external factors and finally, continuous experimentation of your approaches. 

The author is Co-Founder of AURISS TECHNOLOGIES INC., a serial entrepreneur and Board Member, Chair - Programs, The Indus Entrepreneur (TiE) organization, based in Silicon Valley, CA. Learn more at www.4KTA.com and follow Naveen on twitter @Naveen_4KTA