I feel like a high flying executive right now. I’m sitting in Raleigh airport as I write this, on my way to a Chicago and then San Jose where I’ll meet VCs and tech execs in the Fulbright seminar. Plus good food for a week.

Lootmaar has been keeping me very busy, and I wanted to tell you guys what I’ve been up to. We actually have a team now. We have 1 software engineer, 1 graphic designer and 1 intern. We’ll also have a couple of interns joining us over the summer. The experience of managing people has been a little (lot) more time consuming than I expected. Being the engineer that I am, I feel I’m not doing “real-work” when I’m doing management-stuff like keeping track of payroll, making specs, and defining tasks for the team. I’ll be honest, the most fulfilling time I’ve had in the past few weeks was when I sat on the compiler and actually wrote some code.

A few days back, I was whining to Ben Rissing about how time consuming people management can be. Ben is one of those inherently organized people. As a project manager for outsourcing research, he managed a team of 18 students to produce research that was cited in Washington Post, New York Times, USA Today and The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman. Ben’s advice on people management resonated with me: You have to trust your team to do a great job. Of course he also said that that only works if your team is as obsessive about quality as you are. Aka Dream Team.

So what does my limited people management experience tell me:

Share information: When you’re a startup, good people won’t work with you for the money. Its promise and excitement which draws them. When you make progress, tell them. When you ask the impossible, tell them why.

In the past when entrepreneurs related harrowing stories of hardships before getting that first break, I used to brush it off thinking “now it can’t be THAT bad.” Well, as it turns out, it is!

Earlier this year, when I met billionaire Deshpande, one of the people in the meeting asked him, “So how did you actually get started on entrepreneurship?” I expected him to utter some half profound buzzword like “by focusing on the longtail of the tipping point.” I was kind of surprised at his actual response: By living simply. My stomach turned. Must’ve been the shiitake mushroom and grilled salmon from last night. Could also be the Riesling.

As a young professional he was frugal, saved lots of money, didn’t eat out, and had enough stashed away to keep him afloat for a year, while he worked on his idea. His advice really hit me this Thursday, when I finally realized I have to live a poor man’s life until Lootmaar takes off. Of course, right after this thought, I went to Magnolia Grill, ate a $65 dinner, had my debit card rejected twice because of insufficient balance, and came back to see that Wachovia had slapped $175 in overdraft fees for a couple of 3 dollar transactions. I couldn’t sleep that night. I really was poor.

I guess I’ll be living on mashed potatoes, and tinned tuna over the summer.

-Adnan

This is the long promised second part of my post on the OPEN Seminar at MIT.

In my first post, I told you guys that Umair Khan (Founder of Chowk.com, Clickmarks, Folio3) had some counterintuitive things to say. It was counterintuitive enough for Ken Morse to disagree with him on a few points. So what do you need to be a successful startup in the 2.0 world?

Let’s start with our assumptions.

1: The pinnacle of success is a Nasdaq IPO
2: US should be the first target market, Asia can wait
3: Keep the high-level design and architecture work in the US, offshore mindless operations

Guilty, on all three counts.

The truth is that a Nasdaq IPO is not the only exit option. There are a number of venture-public market pairs coming up like Tel Aviv-London and Bangalore-Bombay. Karachi-Dubai may also be a near-term possibility. But why even worry about going public. In the world of serial entrepreneurs with quick turn around times, getting acquired by a bigger player is the new utopia.

The tools available to an entrepreneur today lower the financial barriers to record lows. Offshore teams are sophisticated enough to design, architect and develop solutions allowing for rapid prototyping. In fact, Umair’s company, Folio3 does just that. They specialize in providing product development services to US-based startups. With operations almost entirely offshored to Pakistan, they have managed to retain a talented team that helps customers develop next generation software products for the US-market. High quality, low cost, rapid development. Welcome to the new venture world.

As Umair puts it, “The Game is Asia”. Asad Jamal, a prominent Pakistani VC knows that well. Asad is the Managing Direct of ePlanet Venture, a fund focused on global venture opportunities. He foresaw the technology trend in Asia and Central Europe and made investments in companies like Skype and Baidu (China). Ofcourse, each company has a multi-billion dollar valuation now. Do the numbers.

If you’re an entrepreneur sitting in Pakistan, scratching your head for ideas, then get a hint from Baidu or Naukri. It’s really about transplanting successful business models and executing. Baidu just did for China, what Google is doing for the world. They maintained a singular focus on the Chinese market, a finger on the pulse of the user and fought-off the largest dot-com in the world. Similarly, Naukri.com simply developed a Hotjobs.com for India. And for those who think dot-coms don’t make money, take this: Naukri posted $18m in revenue and $3m in profit in 2005. They filed for a public offering last year in India to raise another $30m.

Bottom line: If China and India are “Pre-IPO”, MENA/Pakistan are in the “bootstrap phase”

Go start a business!

-Adnan

ps. A special thanks to Mo Aidrus for sharing the presentations from the event.