Jawwad wrote a post berating poor fresh grads (and their parents) for joining stable companies rather than boostrapping something on their own. He writes well, has sound logic, but I love flames too much to let this pass. There are two implicit questions here:

1) Why wouldn’t a smart fresh grad bootstrap something if he has a killer idea?

2) Why would he join an MNC, when he could work with Random-Software-House (Pvt.) Ltd? Look at my post on IBA.

So here goes my attempt at starting a flame which Jawwad will hopefully add lots and lots of fuel to.

Why would a kid join Cisco or IBM, when he could join Random-Software-House (Pvt) Ltd?

Because the reward is often not proportionate with the risk. There are two types of IT companies in Pakistan: Those doing cool work, and those doing insultingly mundane offshore development. Its a crime joining the latter. If you do, then you die and go to the purgatory.

For cool companies it is a difficult call. At most of these companies the starting salary is not comparable with what you get in Banks and MNCs, and there is no real upside of stock options or an imminent billion dollar IPO. If you perform well, then 5 years down the line, the differential in percentage terms is about the same. Without getting into the real numbers, my friends in Cisco and Oracle are getting significantly more than their peers in local companies. The second difference is exposure. My friends in IBM travel abroad every other quarter. Austria, Switzerland, US and Dubai being popular destinations. The lucky ones go to Monaco, Barcelona and Cape Town. In Pakistan, they meet their customers almost exclusively at the CxO level. I don’t know of many local companies that give 22 year olds this level of exposure and executive interaction.

Financially speaking, fifteen years down the line you will probably be better off working with a good MNC. May be they will also fund your MBA, and make you travel the world, with some foreign assignments here and there for good color. You don’t have to report to whimsical seths, and have a job that is relatively secure. The risk vs. reward doesn’t add up.

Jawwad care to comment.

-Adnan

ps1. There are exceptions on both sides.

ps2. Local companies CAN hire top notch talent. Read how.

Its basically:

1) Join Unilever or Proctor & Gamble.
2) If you can’t then sulk for a month.
3) Take the next best offer.
4) Who cares about entrepreneurship and startups, when you can sell diapers and soap.

I just didn’t understand it. I challenged my friends “So you won’t join startups doing cutting edge work even if the money is good” and often heard an arrogant “NO.” But I get it now. In the Pakistani culture you are measured by the prestige of your employer. “OH, so you work for P&G!” Your friends envy you, and your parents almost get a stroke out of sheer pride. Its safe, pays well, opens up doors, brings in marriage proposals Or RFPs (Request for Proposals) as the case may be. That’s all granted, but my question is this:

Could the smartest graduates from the best b-school in the city, also be the dumbest?

-Adnan

Updated: Read here why IBA grads and indeed others may want to join MNCs in Pakistan.

When I said that they used to teach the “Old rules” in b-schools ten years back, I was wrong. Most of them still do. I’m glad Stanford doesn’t though. In fact, Tom Byers, Head of the Tech Ventures Program at Stanford, expressly said “We expect our students NOT to write detailed business plans.” Interestingly enough, when I started meeting advisers, mentors and potential investors for Lootmaar, I got exactly the same advice from Jawwad Farid. Build the business, not the plan. That’s good advice guys. Build a F****** business.

Rule 1: Get Going
You can either spend $10,000 dollars on focus groups and customer research, or you can seed your business and kick-start it. Too many of us wait forever for the right idea, and when we finally get it, we don’t execute. So the old rule is to go to VCs, raise capital, spend at least half of that in market research, and the new rule is “Ready, fire, aim.” Generate revenues, then get capital for expansion.

Rule 2: Create Value
The new rules tell us NOT to run after wealth. When I took my first class in entrepreneurship the instructor asked, “Who here wants to become a crorepati?” The entire class raised their hands, not one of them is an entrepreneur. Why? Because entrepreneurship is not about creating wealth, its about creating meaning and value. Wealth follows.

Rule 3: Build an entrepreneurial team
Brilliant entrepreneurs alone just doesn’t cut it. I mean, yeah, you need them to start the company, but what then? What about employee no. 1 and 2 and 3? Everyone in a startup has to be entrepreneurial. What “being entrepreneurial” actually means, I don’t have a precise definition, butt it does mean this: They are persistent, unrelenting, and are unfazed by limited resources.

Rule 4: Sharing the Vision
If someone from Mckinsey ever starts a company, their mission statement would be something like this:

“We exist to professionally build long-term high-impact
sources so that we may endeavor to synergistically
leverage existing effective deliverables to stay
competitive in tomorrow’s world.”

Not a good idea. What we need is a “mantra.” A message that tells the world and your employees what you’re about, And does this in less than 10 words. “Absolutely, positively the next day” FedEx. Get the idea?

Rule 5: First mover advantage is not all that
Its about the first adoption advantage. If you are short of ideas then try this: Think of a business that has limited adoption in Pakistan (Outsourced payroll, electronic banking, mobile applications). Is there something you can fix that will lead to user adoption? If yes, then get off your butt and do it. Think of me when you go public.

-Adnan

—-
This one’s for CJ Skender: F******* = Feasible

Listen to Guy Kawasaki at TiE (Google Video).

Check the Resources in the Garage Ventures website.

A few days back a friend sent me a talk by Guy Kawaski at TiE. I remember thinking, “Man, Indian entrepreneurs are so well networked. They actually have GUY KAWASAKI.” Surprise! His partner Bill Reichert was there to speak at OPEN. I love Garage Ventures, firstly because they fund early stage businesses, unlike most tight-collar VCs. Secondly, they’re cool. Bill was perhaps THE best presenter at the event, and I just loved his advice.

The theme of his presentation was “Small is Beautiful: Building a lean, scrappy, nimble company without raising piles of money.”

Conventional wisdoms says that first you come up with a disruptive technology. Btw, right before my management final this spring, I had a nightmare that a disruptive technology wasn’t a radical innovation. Jeff Glass had nothing to do with it, promise.

Anyway, back to conventional wisdom. So what you learned in B-school 10 years back, and what is still taught in most B-schools in Pakistan is that after you have this radically disruptive innovation, you write a business plan that is at least 40 pages long. Anything less, and you won’t get funded. You then prepare a stirring elevator pitch, raise a pile of money, burn through it, raise another pile, build a “world class” team, develop version 1.0, ship it, raise more money, give most of it to iBankers, and cash out.

Those were the old rules. They’re fun, but they’re so passe. For the new ones, well, wait for the next post.

-Adnan

I’m sitting in San Jose airport as I write this. I was really living it this time around. My friend, Rehan Akbar, was kind enough to let me crash at his Stanford apartment, and Hertz upgraded me to Buick Enclave 2008, which by the way, is a monster. I almost said to myself, screw the gas, screw the environment and all that green stuff, I’m going to buy this baby. And then I thought of my poor little ‘96 Saturn.

Its been a great trip. I flew in here at the advice of Umair Khan who suggested that the annual OPEN event, themed “Rational Exuberance“, would be a great place to see what Pak entrepreneurs are up to, and I wasn’t disappointed. I got introduced to some very interesting people and realized one thing: Pakistani entrepreneurs need to come out more.

I mean, I’ve written about Folio3 before, but I got to meet the CEO, Adnan Lawai, this time. They are overflowing with business and are expanding globally. They already have an office in Romania, and are planning other locations soon. Following after Techlogix and Netsol, they are setting the trend of global expansion for Pakistani tech companies. Then there are other companies like Zenprise and DiagnosisOne, which are doing cutting edge work in their niches. In the next few weeks, I’ll be speaking with some of these CEOs and will be posting their interviews here.

If you are a Pakistan entrepreneur looking to start up, there is an entire community to support you. It has founders and CEOs of publicly traded companies, senior executives in companies like Yahoo, SAP and Sun, professors in top schools like Berkley, and of course, angels and top-tier VCs. And you know what?

They want to see you succeed.

-Adnan

Gibu Thomas is an entrepreneur. Very few people would give up a guaranteed H1 visa and green card application for a startup with no money. He did. Of course, he eventually sold the company to Handspring for 16.1m, moved on to managing their strategic relationships with telcos, and then rebooted to start his next venture, Sharcast.

I met Gibu at the Fulbright conference in San Jose last month, where he participated on one of the entrepreneurship panels. Gibu started his career in India with Tata Consulting, and after a few years of working with them in India he was moved to the US as a mainframe programmer. When in the US he saw most of his peers applying to MBA programs, planning career advancement in ways that he hadn’t before considered. “Surround yourself with smart people,” advises Gibu. He worked for a few more years, and decided that to move his career forward he needed an MBA, and only one from a top tier university would do. Modestly he says, “Call it serendipity or dumb luck, I got into Stanford.”

When joining Stanford he consciously decided not to be the resident South Asian bookworm, but to meet people, learn and have fun. “Looking back,” he says, “most people who spent all their time studying wished they would’ve lived more.” Attend parties, meet people outside of your social circle and get out of that comfort zone. Too many Chinese and South Asian students make up little clique, and they shut out a world of opportunity. He actually met his co-founder at a party in Stanford, and one of the people he randomly said hi to later became his VC.

For Gibu, entrepreneurship is about affecting change. That is what led him to join Bluelark, a company that developed the first robust browser for mobile computing, and it also led him to start Sharpcast, persevere on no funding for 2 years until he struck a deal for 16.7m of venture cap. Good money. I’ll write a review on Sharpcast soon. For now let me tell you this much: it solves the pain of synchronizing documents across different computers. Imagine saving photos on your laptop, sending emails from your desktop, adding contacts on your palm, and having everything accessible everywhere using transparent synchronization. They already have the photo sychning software online that has been reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, PC Mag and NBC. Check it out, it’s cool.

-Adnan

Btw, if you have any questions for Gibu then comment away. I’ll request him to answer them.

Yes, there I said it. And yes, I’ve recently been reading a book of the same title by Mark Stevens.

Stevens is the president of MSCO, a marketing firm. In the book he makes the argument that most companies use marketing improperly and ineffectively. What more important is that he expounds on the virtues of extreme marketing, and how to leverage ROI based marketing to drive sales. The book is a quick read, and highly recommended.

Inspired by a recent article I read in which the author details his week spent using only Google’s suite of office tools, this is a short post about some online tools which can make your life easier. This is a list of online tools and applications I use regularly and highly recommend.

We’ve all been there, needing to send a file too big for email. I know engineers, architects, and designers frequently run into this problem with CAD and photoshop files. Two great solutions are at www.senduit.com (free, file expires after time you specify) and www.dropsend.com (free for up to 250mb, $99 for up to 250gb).

Contact management made easy? We’ve all had our bad days with outlook. Well, the guys over at 37signals have released Highrise. Go ahead, give it a shot, its free for up to 250 contacts. Its designed with the small business in mind, and enables multiple logins. Their other tool, Basecamp simplifies project management for small companies and work groups.

Behind a corporate firewall? Can’t access your instant messaging and chat away on your bosses time? No problem. Meebo has been solving this problem for a while now with a slick ajax interface. Its so good that on my new computer I’ve just not installed any bloated IM software (Skype, of course, being the exception).

We all need our news! RSS is pervasive and those who haven’t heard of it should definitely start using it. Google reader is a fantastic way of keeping all that news in check. Now with google gears beta, you can read your news offline!

To finish up I have to mention Pandora. A brilliant service for finding music personalized to your own tastes. They recently released a new, slicker interface too. See my previous post on acquisition theory.

If you have other tools you use, please share by commenting. Of course, your web viewing experience is best done using firefox.