Why (and how) should entrepreneurs attend events

I was at a startup event last year, my first as an Entrepreneur, where I learnt a tip from a fellow entrepreneur. He said, at each event he plans out what sessions to attend, prepares a small question beforehand and then enters the hall. This is what he said next, “During or after the session, I take the opportunity to ask the question, for the first 45 seconds I introduce my startup and then ask my question in the next 15 seconds. After that I’m not even bothered about the speakers response, my job’s done”. Apart from his point about not bothering about the response, I feel, every individual, entrepreneur or not, should follow what he said. The 45-15 second rule can really work out.

Since then I try to go at any startup event I can possibly attend. Next week also comes another event, a big one though. Its the Nasscom Emergeout and this time a lot of focus is on startups and/or SMEs. There are about 13 sessions and the entire agenda can be found here.

Since there are parallel sessions, the ones I am interested in are the sessions on “Big business decisions”””, a discussion on “Scaling up your product” and the one on “Effective sales strategies”. Of course, this is apart from the Keynote sessions where speakers are of the stature of KrishnaKumar Natarajan, CEO – Mindtree, Aditya Ghosh, President – Indigo Airlines, Venky Mysore, CEO – Kolkata Knight Riders and Rajan Anandan, Managing Director Google India.

You can register here. I know, its slightly expensive if you are a startup, but then there’s a deal for startups! Also, there are a few contests running on Twitter, check out the Emergeout hashtag.

Still if you feel the fee is high, here’s a small tip I got from a VC sometime back. “Don’t register for the event, just express interest. Most of these payment forms would be tracking who all fill the details but don’t pay. In most cases, event managers contact these guys and offer them a low fee entry on last days”. That’s what he told me, I don’t know how often does that happen though πŸ™‚

If you are coming, great! See you there, I would be available @AbhinavSahai

What India thinks about the Guwahati molestation episode!

That’s how Police in our country behaves…always!

No wonder what happens, its the Govt. that gets blamed, rightly so!

Something that all of us have believed in now (and its not just women)

Media can bring down governments, only if we had better journos though πŸ™

Sad state of our country!

Not sure, cynics? Or maybe they are right?

Of course, some people will always believe its those fake film stars who can solve all our problems!

The difference between the Facebook and the Twitter junta:

Yeah, someone needs to defend the media too!

Update: The verdict was delivered a few days back: Amar Jyoti Kalita, 10 others convicted; TV reporter acquitted

Delhi-NCR: The 'tharak' capital of the world

Yes, you read that headline right. I wrote Tharak!

Incident 1: [Gurgaon] Its around 3 in the afternoon, I was walking towards the metro station, barely 2 mins from my office. 2 girls were walking ahead of me. I saw a bike coming, 2 guys, no helmets and just when they crossed those girls, one of them shouted – “arre idhar aaja meri jaan!” (come to me my darling).

Incident 2: [Delhi] It was 8.30 PM. I was with a female friend of mine, waiting for an auto. I see a Maruti 800 coming our way. 2 guys seated in the front, I didn’t notice the rear seats. As soon as they crossed us, one of them, shouted “abe yahan kyu khada hai, ghar leke jaa na!” (why are you standing here, take her to your home)

My friend tells me the security guard at her apartment stands in her way everyday while getting into the building, leaves barely any space for her to get in. You obviously know what he’s trying to do. Just to remind you – he’s the SECURITY GUARD!

If you are thinking these are frivolous incidents just for a minute imagine what would these girls be going through in their daily lives? No, you can’t imagine. Nobody can, Nitin and I tried once but failed.

Dhruv Arora has started a great campaign against such people. Great campaign Dhruv but honestly, I believe that such campaigns reach only the people who are not the ones whom I mentioned above! I hope it solves some purpose.

No, I don’t know what the solution is, maybe capital punishment!

Ever since I’ve moved to NCR from Bangalore, if I’ve read/heard numerous such cases. (No, I am not even talking about the rape cases.) I suddenly feel why did I move at all? This is the NATIONAL CAPITAL REGION – within an year, I’ve found out the capital of what!

In case you’re unaware, these are the things to do in Delhi. (Keep clicking on that text)

Btw, this is what pushed me to write this post.

Why do you want to be an entrepreneur?

When I told my friend/colleague/mentor that I want to be an entrepreneur, along with a few other questions, he asked me ‘Why’ . I took some time but answered it honestly with what I was feeling. I am sure it made sense to him as he later on partnered with me to start my business.

A couple of days back I was sitting among a group of entrepreneur and we were again asked the same question. Most of us had our answers but 1 of the participant gave answers which kind of didn’t settle in my brain. She started answers with “Because I don’t want this…..”. Most of her answers had ‘this shouldn’t happen’, or ‘not because of…’

Well, in my humble opinion, becoming an entrepreneur (or doing any job in life) should not come from the “Not this, hence..”. Your reason to become an entrepreneur can’t be “Not because of…” or ‘Because I don’t want to do a job’ or ‘Because I don’t want this to happen’ etc. It should start from – why you want to do it! Find a reason to accomplish any task in life instead of making it an excuse for doing something else, the momentum won’t survive!

Agree? disagree? thoughts? Your experience?

Originally posted on DARE.

How much is enough?

Yesterday I went to the Delhi Blogathon, a bloggers meet. Apart from the other interesting stuff and people, there was this really interesting gentleman who could mimic accents of various countries. He’s even played a tiny role in the Bollywood movie Band Baaja Baraat.

Post the event, I got a chance to converse with him. When we discussed about his livelihood, he said he used to be a teacher till sometime back but then he quit in his early 40’s. He does shows at events for a living. He even makes sure returns home by 5 (mostly) and cooks dinner, as he loves to cook. He mentioned that his wife also works and normally comes back around 6. We happened to ask him whether he’s able to manage with just doing shows? Is that enough?To this he answered that they manage to sustain their lifestyle fairly comfortably. Yes, he has kids too.

He then mentioned about a friend of his.

This guy goes to work at 8 in the morning, comes back around 8-9 and then goes to play badminton. His friends wife leaves for office around 9 and comes back only around dinner time. They have dinner and then they sleep. In the midst of all this they have a 16 year old daughter……

After saying this he looked into our eyes and said:

You decide how much is enough?!?

Update: Uncle Andy pointed out some corrections in the comments about his work: i do not do shows..i do voice overs and some acting…and my wife gets home at 730/8…delhi traffic!.

Gurgaon women: don't step out after 8 but what about men – don't step out after 7

I dont know where to start from. I dont know what to complain about

  • About the local Gurgaon crowd being inexplicable stupid? Mind you, the locals, read uneducated.
  • About my physique not being great? I cannot fight these tall healthy guys!
  • About me taking that shortcut route to home, which by the way every other ‘ordinary’ person takes?
  • or About Gurgaon Police – who tell me if I got assaulted and robbed of a Rs.32,000 phone – it is my fault that i carry an expensive phone? ‘Victim Blaming’ is quite a known feature of Gurgaon Police!

Yes, today while returning from office with my friend, we got assaulted, injured and robbed of my phone and whatever money my friend had. Thanks to some gutsy behavior in the later stages, we saved our laptops, our credit cards, my watch, some more cash and most importantly – our Lives!

And all this happened when the sun had barely set – around 7-7.30 PM! I got the message, Welcome to Gurgaon. 5 men surrounded us at a somewhat lonely patch of the road we take to home everyday and within few minutes we were running to save our lives! Probably the scariest incident of my life where for 5-10 mins i actually remained NUMB

By the way, a small question for Gurgaon Police – if women should not step out after 8 PM, should men stay inside after 7 PM?

Whats new?

Incident 1:
When I was in school, once just before the summer break, my teacher asked everyone to maintain a diary during the vacations and write everyday whatever we did. When we came back from the break, this is how my diary looked.

Yes, all the pages had the same content, just a little bit of change in timings. Okay, the truth is that my day started at 10AM and ended at 10PM with the entire day spent playing and watching cartoons. But that’s not the point I want to make here.

Incident 2:
A few years later, 2nd year of my BTech. One day a senior asked me – kal ka kya karne wale ho?
I responded with a strange look, the look didn’t mean – I don’t know, it meant – How would I know?
No, he wasn’t asking to invite me to a party, he wanted to know how would I make the most of the next day. The fact is like other batchmates, I didn’t know

Now I use Ohlife daily and the reminder mail lands in the inbox with the subject line ‘How did your day go?” And mostly my response starts with ‘Okayish day….nothing major …. ‘ and the story continues. Yes, once in a while I am really excited about this Ohlife mail, like the day we launched Moneno, but that doesn’t happen too often!

What do I/you/all-of-us do on weekends? Booze, movies, sleep, cleaning? Thats it!?!

14 years have passed this way.

Today if my ma’am asked me to write that diary it would be like:

Wakes up. Walks to office. Works/tweets/facebooks simultaneously. Have meals sometimes. Walks back home. Eat. Sometime read. Sleep.

My ohlife now often has “Nothing New” written over it. Every time i write that i am reminded of Steve Jobs’s Stanford commencement speech.

“If this was the last day of your life, would you still do what you plan to do today? And when the answer is NO for too many days……”

My problem is even bigger. I dont know what i am going to do! Yes of course work, but do i know exactly what am i gonna do?

I read a few articles, have a lot of unread articles opened in various tabs, often i have 50-70 tabs opened and because of twitter, end up increasing that unread count each passing day. And then suddenly one day the browser gives up, read crashes, and i ask myself, do i really need to restore all those tabs? What if i don’t? No, i never have an answer to that question, primarily because i don’t even remember what tabs i had opened! And because of fear of losing something important that was to be read, i always end up restoring all those tabs and the same cycle repeats.

What happens next? Of course, this entire bigger cycle repeats. And then in the daily rut of things, forget about whats actually happening in life. Whats important to note here is that:

Not that i am doing bad at my work. Not that i am doing something i don’t love, I really enjoy my work. Not that i am living someone else’s life. Not that i am not making money. Not that i am away from friends. Achieving, attaining a lot of things, i still feel i am kind of lost. Something’s wrong!

How can i sense that? My creativity has taken a beating. I get irritated and angry a lot often. I feel i am not doing enough. In the longer run my productivity decreases. And apart from all that, i often end up feeling/thinking what i’ve just written!

Niswey is the name!

170 days ago since I wrote this blog post about making a career move. Not that I wasn’t working all this time, on the contrary was working so much maybe that I didn’t even have time to write the next update. Well, finally the partnership deed for my startup is signed off with Rahul Dewan and its actually his blog post earlier in the day that motivated me to write this post.

The name of the startup is ‘Niswey’, to be registered as an LLP. We really had a hard time coming with this name, partly due to our thoughts but primarily due to non availability of a .com domain name (yes, its really really tough to get a domain name of your choice these days). Before you ask me, Niswey means optimally, best in the Na’vi language, the language invented for the movie Avatar. Bizarre ? Hehe. But I am quite fancied by languages other than English or Hindi (my previous startup was named Zapylacz – meaning pollination in Polish πŸ™‚ )

About Rahul Dewan: Rahul sir, as I call him, has been a mentor and motivator to me ever since I got in touch with him 3 years ago when I joined his company Srijan as a developer. Well, even though that engagement as an employee didn’t last long, thankfully our relation did. Reminds you of some social networking platform ? Yes, LinkedInRelationships Matter ! If you’ve read my blog before, you would have noticed, I’ve mentioned about him on my People Page ever since I wrote that page.

About Niswey: Niswey’s a digital marketing startup. It deals in complete online branding and marketing strategies. Includes Web Analytics, User Behavior, Heatmaps, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing (Advertising), Social Media Marketing. The list is not exhaustive as once we get involved with a brand, we have a lot more to offer, yes talk to our clients for testimonials πŸ™‚

The website is not still up, for the time being this is where we are putting things up. Hope this venture brings in much success and more importantly ‘satisfaction’ to all those who get aligned with it ! Wish us luck.

My encounter with Narayana Murthy: Indian IT’s Face


I dont know how to describe it. In a really really rare unexpected, exciting and i don’t know what moment, i met the baap of IT industry in India.

Standing in the airport check-in queue i couldn’t actually believe that he was standing up there. Its only when another guy standing behind him, looked at me, smiled and said “believe it or not; its actually him!” Its only then i relaxed and said to myself “its ok, its not only me” as i gave that guy a smile back.

Till the time of his security check, i kept an eye of his movements. In fact i was quite flabbergasted when the security personnel asked him to open his baggage as there was something suspicious in his briefcase. Felt like telling them, dude he’s the one who has got your city on the World Map, how dare you question him!!! But then realized, after all they were doing their job.

Narayan Murthy

And then i lost his sight. As soon i was through my security check my eyes went desperate looking for him. I saw the book store and somehow got a feeling he might be there. Sneaked in and bravo! he was there! I thought not to disturb him and wait till he came out. In the meantime thousands of questions started rising in my mind as to what should i talk to him?

How does he maintain such a simple lifestyle?
Should i ask him about his down to earth nature?
Should i ask his thoughts about business ethics?
Ask him how he built this empire?


And then i realized, this is one moment, i might not meet him again in my life, lets ask a question which might help me reach a meagre 0.01% closer to his stature!

As soon as he came out from the store…my heart started beating faster! No i wasn’t nervous but it was a feeling i just can’t explain.
Gathered courage and walked upto him:

Me: Sir, sorry to disturb but can i ask you a question?
NM: Yes
Me: i am a budding entrepreneur, setting up a venture in Gurgaon, if there is 1 advice you would like to give me what would it be?
NM: You have to assure that your product/service is giving something to your customer? Are you adding value to them? Are you reducing their manufacturing costs? Are you helping them increasing their profits?

And then he sealed it with this statement of his:

“Make sure you can explain your service in 1 line, if you can’t, its not worth it”

Me: [amazed] i had thought he would say something generic or something that can be found in the books. But no, probably thats why he is The Narayan Murthy.

As i write this i am still shivering in my flight and still reliving the moment and ruining the fact that i didnt take a personalized autograph of his πŸ™

What i did after the answer?

Me: Sir, may i seek your blessings?
NM: Sure
Me: bowed down, touched his feet and waited till i felt his hand on my hand as he said:

May God be with you


Making a career move

Every time I used to read Jeremiah’s blog titled People on the move in the social business industry I used to think when would I make a move. Finally the time has come. Yes, I am making a move, not only in terms of career but also in terms of location. After an exciting and really fruitful 2.5 years at Bangalore, I am moving to Delhi.

Away from the lovely weather which can turn you on anytime of the day, will move back to the extremities of hot and cold weather ! From the IT capital to the National Capital. From a city which probably has the highest road taxes to the lowest ! From a city which releases movies in 5 different languages, most of which I don’t understand, to one which will have movies in just 2 languages, thankfully I understand both πŸ™‚ That also means I can watch 2-3 movies in theatres in my new city for the same price which I paid for a single movie in Bangalore. Loads that I can talk about the differences but let’s not make it too long.

Where am I joining ? I would be venturing out (yet again) and starting a Digital Marketing Company based out of Gurgaon. Lots of things happening around and lots in store but will have to wait for the right time before I can share everything… Stay tuned and wish me luck πŸ™‚