My Open Window

A Decade in the Learning Technology Industry

2010-02-03T14:00:00.001+05:30

At 36, he is a veteran in the education technology business. Vivek Agarwal started his first company egurucool in 1999, a few years after graduating from IIM Calcutta. The company attracted investments from Chris Capital, News Corp. and IFC (W) and was sold to NIIT. Vivek is now managing his second venture in this space: Liqvid.

I caught up with Vivek to discuss how the last decade in this industry has unfolded.

SS: Vivek, so tell me a bit about the business of egurucool.

VA: Sure. We were in the online test prep business. We provided courses to help students prepare for the CBSE examinations.

SS: This is very interesting. You know that there are still several players in that field. There is Career Launchers, who have an offline/online model and then there is Vriti, funded by Intel Capital, and Catura Systems, funded by DFJ India which are mainly in the online space. Then there are larger players like Edurite with its coaching centers. Tell us about some of your experiences in running this business.

VA: Obviously at the point I was running this business, the main challenge was to get users online. We tried several techniques including cold calling of schools and parents. In one particular year, we actually visited 30000 homes and demoed the content. We had great conversion ratios (post the demo) but obviously it was very expensive. Now ten years later, we have many more internet users in this country but there is still likely
to be resistance in purely online learning.

SS: And justifiably so. Learning has to be blended into a seamless online/offline format.

VA: That’s what we also figured out. It was important to use the internet to develop communities and to have assessments but we also started learning centers. I think it is important to be able to empower the instructor with the appropriate use of technology and thus improve the quality of learning.

SS: Given that there are still many folks out there trying to build a nationwide big brand in this area is there anything that you would share that you would have done differently if you had been running the business today?

VA: Actually, yes there is. We invested a lot of effort in working with teachers and developing content. If I was running the business today I would try and figure out if there was a way of making existing content available without duplicating the creation efforts.

SS: Well said. Let’s talk of Liqvid your latest venture. You actually started in the services industry by outsourcing elearning projects.

VA: Yes you are right. We worked with customers like HP, Motorola and Cisco outsourcing elearning content development. We covered the entire gamut of sales training, product training etc. We transform the technical material that clients have into learning material with the help of in-house instructional designers who work with subject matter experts from the client or with subject matter experts from outside.

SS: I used to run a company in a similar business: Aesthetic Technologies. I think that it was fun working with a team of varied talents but I think scaling up was not easy given that these projects come with fuzzy specifications.

VA: Well, you are right. The team consists of instructional designers, content writers, programmers and graphic artists. And that’s kind of fun. And over the years we have developed methodologies that help in rapid prototyping so that we can have customers engaged. Also most of our customers have elaborate content development standards.

The bigger challenge we faced was in global sales. We tried tele-calls, local hires, working with sales accelerators and so on. Our experience has not been satisfactory. I think for all start ups the key founder has to be located in the geography of the main customers.

SS: Precisely, Which is why it is so exciting that the Indian educational business is large enough for you to be based here in India and work on products for the Indian market. Tell me about English Edge.

VA: English Edge is our product to help students learn English. It arose out of our partnership with BBC. The main objective of the product is to help students learn English not by way of the traditional “grammatical approach” but in a “conversational manner.

SS: Tell me about your partnership with BBC.

VA: We started by using the BBC material (audio clips and exercises) and developed it into instructional product which comes with the instructor multimedia software, instructor manual (providing background reference), screen-wise cue cards (to help navigate the software) and a student workbook.

This is a complete product that helps instructors improve their teaching skills.

SS: But you have gone beyond this initial partnership.

VA: Yes, we have. In a couple of key ways. First of all to cater to the broad Indian market we have extended the offering into 4 levels. Our first level is really meant for people who are seeking their first exposure in English, our second level is for people who are trying to string words into sentences, our third level is for students who are trying to learn correct grammar. Level 4 (based on the original BBC product) is meant for more polished users.
We have developed the content and instructional material for all these additional levels. The other way we have tried to develop this product is to develop “domain specific learning”. In doing so, we have developed content partnerships with Outlook Money, Outlook Traveller for BFSI and Hospitality domain learning.

SS: Tell me about you go to market strategy

We believe that we can provide the best value in embedding our product in vocational learning courses (for the travel, hospitality, retail, apparel ….industries). We are trying to work with educational institutions to make English learning a part of the ongoing process at these institutions.

I want you to remember one thing. We are trying to target what we would call the SEC A in marketing terminology, we are targeting students who have completed twelve years of schooling and have learnt English as a formal subject. Even then the language skills from an employability standpoint leaves much to be desired.

SS: So Vivek, this has been a fascinating journey. Where do you go from here?

VA: Sanjoy, the potential is enormous. If you take the universe of private schools, professional and degree colleges and vocational training institutes, you probably have an universe of 9 million learners out there. We aim to reach 2-3 million learners in the next few years. If we can develop the product further to be able to incorporate learning English with the help of Indian language learning aids we can take our product to more rural settings. Finally, there is no reason to believe that we cannot take this product to countries like India and China.

SS: Surely that is an exciting goal to help India reap its demographic dividend. Thank you Vivek and all the best.

Vriti: a player in Online Exam Prep

2009-06-10T11:58:00.004+05:30

“India is a land of examinations. We have 600 of them every year”. That’s how Swapnil Shrivastav described the potential of his business, Viti. Viriti is a player in the examination preparation business in India and Mr. Shrivastav was talking to me at 9 PM over telephone. Hard work and exam preparation comes easily to Swapnil. He is an IIT alumni and so are his co-founders. This is his second venture the first being SeekNet, a company which had developed a desktop based search personalized agent.

Vriti is trying to create an online educational community: students, experts and content providers. The core of the technology is a hosted platform which provides community support and an assessment engine. Vriti’s technology is developed in-house on a J2EE platform. The statistics are impressive: at peak loads it handles 115 million users monthly and 20000 concurrent users. I asked Swapnil whether he had considered any open source LMS like Moddle and he said that existing implementations did not have a rich community integration which they desired.

The community is a key part of Vriti’s strategy. There are 1 million students who are a part of the community and about a million questions answered in the database. There are about 300 individual tutors and 300 content providers participating in the community. That is a rich source of guidance to a student entering the bewildering world of career choices. Virti’s strategy towards communities is based on segregating them into sub-sites for each exam (goiit, gocbse, pmtprep, lawcorridor, gobskool, gonift…). The Engineering and CBSE communities are the most vibrant at this point. Vriti’s revenue model depends on commissions paid by content providers (such as Brillant Tutorials, Pearson Education, Aakash Institute …) and from subscription fees paid by students. The basic community participation is free: students pay for taking assessments.

The Indian test prep market according to the CLSA report on the Indian education sector is about USD 1.7 billion. The CLSA estimate engineering, medical, civil services, business school entrance examinations and is based on an average of 4 lac students spending Rs. 25000 on exam prep every year. These are realistic estimates (CLSA accounts for the exam prep for CBSE separately). Career Launcher (investor: Gaja Capital), Catura Systems (investor: DFJ India) are the other relatively early stage companies in this area. Vriti’s Series A was funded by Intel Capital. Needless to say, there are several well established brands in the more traditional distance education and bricks and mortar modes of test prep services (Brilliant Tutorials, Rau’s Study Circle …)

There is scope to create strong businesses in this area based on a track record of consistent success and low cost of delivery leveraging Internet technologies. However, the idea behind Vriti could be potentially far bigger. To understand why, think of the category of Learning Management Systems and Performance Management Systems. Most large enterprises use some variation of these systems powered by “best of breed” vendors such as SumTotal Systems & Saba, pure SaaS players like Learn.com & SuccessFactors or ERP players like Oracle and Saba. What is the broad functionality they provide? At the highest level, they help manage the skills and competencies possessed by individuals with that required by jobs and help employees bridge the necessary gaps.

Consider the individual student at the cross roads of career choices. The solution that she is looking for is an ongoing assessment of knowledge and skills and help to prepare for career choices. It is possible to create a disruption by focusing on the technology platform that allows for the following:

A strong assessment engine that allows students to assess their learning needs and career potentials
A skills and knowledge library that helps students understand the requirements of various competitive examinations
A social networking layer to allow students seek guidance from peers and mentors
Integrations with web conferencing tools to allow for online tutoring
Integrations with content providers to provide for delivery of both off-line and on-line content

The key thing is to focus on the platform and that is why I feel that Vriti might be poking around a big thing. Think of the platform from the standpoint of both the student and the content provider. A strong assessment engine and strong assessment content would enable students to make correct choices. But you can also potentially open up the platform for content providers and experts to run their own assessments. That way they would be able to target their learning interventions to the specific student needs. They would be able to deliver the learning in current “chunks” and also leverage outside teaching help. The platform would generate value for the content provider that would be difficult to create from their own web delivery sites.

“Get to know what you are good at and work hard at it”. That is what the preacher told Rabbit “Harry” in John Updike’s Rabbit Run. If stated this way, the exam prep market is a far bigger game. And it will be fun to see companies take a crack at it.

Indian Education Market: Manipal K-12

2009-05-04T17:39:00.005+05:30

I have been interested in the Indian educational market and this is the first of a series in which I will write about companies in this space. In this post I am profiling Manipal K-12.

Manipal K-12 , a player in the Indian K-12 school market, has been promoted by Manipal group, a leader in higher education in India. and TutorVista, a global online tutoring company. TutorVista is promoted by K Ganesh, who had earlier founded, along with Meena Ganesh one of India’s early BPO companies CustomerAsset which they sold to ICICI OneSource. Meena is the CEO of Manipal K12.

TutorVista’s online tutoring focus is largely the US market. The company, which had raised VC funding from Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Silicon Valley Bank in 2006, entered the domestic Indian market by acquiring Edurite Technologies in late 2007.

Edurite Technologies (it still maintains a separate website) was set up in 2000 by Srikanth Iyer and over the years has developed an impressive library of multimedia content in the Indian K-12 segment. Srikanth is the COO of the company.

I must mention that in the late 1990s there was considerable interest in creating educational multimedia content. In 1998 I had co-founded Aesthetic Technologies with the same broad business objective. We too had developed content for the K-12 market but for schools in Singapore and Malaysia.

The strengths of the various partners brings a certain uniqueness to Manipal K-12. The flagship product targeted at schools is DigitALly™ a PowerPoint enabled multimedia tool consisting of hardware (interactive whiteboard or plasma TV) and software (the multimedia learning content developed by Edurite over the last several years). The digital solution enhances the quality of teaching and effectiveness of the teachers. Manipal K12 also targets the coaching segment of the market with Edurite Tutorials (physical centers) and TutorVista (online presence).

The key proposition is simple enough: use technology to deliver top quality standardized learning at low cost independent of the physical location of the student. It is a thought that has been at the core of technology-aided learning. There is considerable interest in this market. Educomp with its Smart class, Everonn with its ViTELs, NIIT with its Interactive Classroom and IL&FS Educational & Technology Services are direct competitors. Smart class accounted for 60% of Educomp’s Rs. 145 cr (USD 29 mil.) revenue in the quarter ended Dec 09 (source: website).

How scalable is this business? Consider the following facts.
India has about a 1 million schools out of which 75,000 are private schools. The private schools are further classified into:
• Approx. 30,000 Government aided schools with an average monthly fee of Rs. 450 (USD 9).
• Approx. 30,000 un-aided “standard” private schools with an average monthly of Rs. 750 (USD 15)
• Approx 15000 un-aided “premium” schools with monthly fee upwards of Rs, 1250 (USD 25)

At this point, the key addressable market is the 45,000 private unaided schools. According to a IDFC-SSKI report the reach of the key players is about 1000 schools each for Educomp and NIIT and 1000 schools for Everonn and IL&FS combined. That leaves a lot of room for growth.

It does, in my opinion, for the next few years. However, schools are investing in ICT infrastructure, often with the help of these same companies. In a few years time, it is possible the private unaided schools would want to be free to buy content from any publisher and not bound to multi-year contracts that are the norm today. At that point, I hope, the market would move to the public schools. It is in this market, which cannot attract decent teachers, that technology can really create a disruption. To enable this to be possible Public Private partnership paradigms will have to be established and/or companies like Manipal K-12 will have to have working relationships with educational NGOs. Most importantly, costs would have to be driven down.. At this point, Educomp charges Rs. 150 per student per month. This is 12% (or less) of the average tuition costs in a private premium school but is 33% of that in an aided private school. At current costs, these companies will find it hard to get the scale that India’s large population warrants.

Manipal K-12 will potentially be able to drive down costs given its in-house content development expertise. Its other approach is to set up its own brand of schools either directly owned or managed. The idea is to bring in good learning content, trained teachers and efficient academic management processes. The K-12 market size in India is large. CLSA estimates the total size to be USD 20 bn. (based the reasonably conservative annual fee assumptions indicated above). Can organized players emerge in this sector? Manipal K-12 does have the advantages of the brand and the technology infrastructure. Having said that, the success of a school in India is based on board-level examination success and it does take years to build reputation. Good schools in India and elsewhere are built by dedicated teachers and principals and therefore the question that I am mulling is: how can an organization like Manipal K-12 create a cadre of great teachers?

Perhaps the answer lies in the other market that Manipal K-12 is trying to target: the tutoring market. CLSA estimates that the market size to be USD 5 bn. (and this does not include specific tutoring for competitive exams and for specialized skill training). However, the market is fragmented, and likely to remain so. Tutors will come from a variety of backgrounds: young students, experienced teachers and patient mothers. However, this may provide Manipal K-12 a very wide recruiting ground for future teachers.

Success of organizations like Manipal K-12 will ultimately depend on execution. There are three key components of an execution strategy: customer (student/parent) satisfaction, entrepreneurial management of individual schools (while using standard processes and technology) and teacher talent management (motivating the ultimate knowledge worker). The business of education is that of people building people. Technology and facilities help to a point.

Solar Energy

2008-12-09T10:02:00.002+05:30

I have been reading and learning about renewable energy. This is a set of slides tht will help managers and business folks to quickly come up on speed on what is happening in solar - which is arguably one of the most active areas in the overall renewable space.

Have a look, download, reuse just email me and let me know what you feel.

http://www.slideshare.net/sanjoysanyal/introductionto-solar-presentation-812649

SaaS article in Silicon India

2008-10-14T12:01:00.002+05:30

My SaaS Blogs, posted here and also cross posted at VentureWoods has generated quite a bit of interest and I was approached by Silicon India to publish an article on new ventures in the SaaS space in India

Here it is :

http://www.siliconindia.com/magazine/articledesc.php?articleid=LDFV639135713

Learning in Innovative Organizations

2008-07-23T15:14:00.001+05:30

I have spent many years of my life in the area of Talent Management (or as it was known many years back as e-learning). The use of learning as a strategic weapon in organizations has always fascinated me. In particular, smaller innovative organizations that survive and succeed learn a lot more quickly and painlessly.

http://www.slideshare.net/sanjoysanyal/learning-in-innovative-organizations/

These slides based on a few chapters of "Making Innovation Work" by Tony Davila, Marc Epstein, Robert Shelton build a framework to understand Innovation. A key point it makes is that it links Knowledge Management (which has for many years dominated our thoughts on Learning) to the Innovation Framework. Knowledge Management is central to Incremental Innovation – operational items that organizations have to do everyday.

For radical innovation – on the other hand – learning by experimentation is key. There is really no substitute for trying and failing quickly. This reinforces the need for leaders and managers need to build an open collaborative culture to facilitate learning.

Listening to Customers is not enough. Ask the right questions to drive Innovation

2008-04-05T16:14:00.003+05:30

Companies which have dedicated customer feedback collection and analysis programs still continue to get surprised by seismic shifts in the market place. How do companies which have an established customer base and are diligently working with them fail to develop products and services only to be surprised by start-ups? Worse, why do innovative ideas within companies get killed after a round of customer research?

At one level, the answer is ready. Customers cannot give feedback on a product that does not exist. To get to understand what customers really need you need to ask the right questions. What is it that they are trying to do? What is important to them? What are the constraints that they are facing? What is it that they have and do not really need?

Have a look at these slides to put some rigour in customer research program in your Innovation process.

http://www.slideshare.net/sanjoysanyal/listening-to-customers-in-the-correct-way-to-drive-innovation/

Let me know what you think.

Open Source

2008-02-29T17:14:00.004+05:30

In my last post I had written about how innovators and entrepreneurs can work with lead customers to develop innovative products and services. Lead customers are like "early innovators" and are looking at substantial profit from using products.

Developers in open source software are more often than not lead customers. They are using these projects as inputs to their work and are actively fixing bugs and making modifications. They are adding back to the pool of common knowledge sometimes for altruistic reasons but more often than not because it makes economical sense to do so. The cost of bug fixing and maintenance is driven down by releasing code to the common pool. Companies relying on software to drive innovation should seriously learn about open source.

The other reason why open source is important because it redefines the software value proposition: the value of software lies in using it and not in owning it. This has also be the central tenet of the SaaS models which I have followed for a year.
I have read and summarized the book The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric S Raymond here:

http://www.slideshare.net/sanjoysanyal/open-source-software/

The book is an important book to read in the Open Source literature – a little too high pitched to my taste and I have tried to take the emotion out and focus on the business learning.

Entrepreneurs are busy folks

2008-02-14T16:39:00.003+05:30

I had lunch with an aspiring entrepreneur friend of mine last Thursday. He is a specialist in the consumer marketing area and has got a great idea which may click. I could see the light in his eyes and excitement in his waving hands as he explained the concept. He has a really cool idea and one that might really click. While we were walking out I asked him “what happens if you are able to raise funds right now?”. He looked at me and told me shyly “I will still carry on – I can start it anyway”. I knew that this was serious.

My friend was going to be a very busy man – starting off, getting the PowerPoints ready. And he has a job and a family like the rest of us. That’s one thing about entrepreneurs – they are really busy. So busy that they do not have time to read the great books and articles all round that is constantly adding to the body of knowledge in this field. The only way they learn is by trying it themselves – the mostly expensive method of education.

In this series of blog posts I am planning to publish summaries in the form of Slides of some of the most cutting edge management thought in our area, to help these crazy busy brave folks. This is my post with my love to this friend of mine on Valentine’s Day of course.

The first post is the slide show on User Defined Innovation. It is based on readings of Eric Von Hippel’s book “Democratizing innovation” and his video lecture in MIT’s OpenCourseWare site.

Let me know – what you feel. If there is anything that you guys want to learn and want me to work on, let me know.

Check out Slideshow at

http://www.slideshare.net/sanjoysanyal/user-defined-innovation/

Three entrepreneurs in the SaaS journey

2007-08-08T11:56:00.000+05:30

I spoke to three entrepreneurs in the SaaS space over the last one month: Sahil Parikh of DeskAway , an on-demand project management software, Sumeet Kapoor of SmilesERM, an on-demand HR applications software and Arun Dixit of Udyog Excise, a SaaS based application for helping manufacturing organizations compute excise incidence.

At the same time, I have been reading and researching the post of Mark Sherman on the investment opportunity in SaaS. I would strongly encourage SaaS entrepreneurs to download the slides posted by Mark – it would help structure your thoughts on the business opportunity. I must also add: please do read my comments and contact me offline to get my research notes, if interested.

The business models followed by the three entrepreneurs seek to exploit the “long tail” of enterprise software applications. As I have predicted in my January post, SaaS businesses are likely to succeed if they seek to exploit inadequately covered niche within the enterprise software landscape (HR, Project Management) or a niche within the business segment (financial compliance for the Indian SMB sector).

The business model that entrepreneurs should build will have to start from a definition of the opportunity they seek to exploit. I asked Arun Dixit of Udyog whether he sees substantial potential within the India SMB manufacturing sector and his answer was an unequivocal ‘yes”. His marketing and business would revolve around addressing the needs of this specific segment. However, if Sahil and Summet would like to position themselves as specific application providers then they should not constrain themselves in the Indian market.

At the same time, the important trend that I noticed from my research is the subtle shift away from the “application” to the “solution”. I would recommend that entrepreneurs study Rearden Commerce to understand this trend. It takes an application like Spend Management and spins it around to develop a solution for employees and companies to buy services. I think it is a great idea for SaaS entrepreuners to think of their businesses as solutions. For instance, can Sahil’s DeskAway be the default management solution to manage projects undertaken by temporary workers?

In order to achieve the necessary scale to even develop ambitious business plans worthy of VC attention, individual SaaS entrepreneurs will have to strike alliances. One type of alliance that entrepreneurs should seek to strike is with niche BPOs/KPOs. The HR and the Analytics areas have enough entrepreneurial mass within them to make possible a few alliances.

My message to SaaS entrepreneurs: this is a great opportunity, do not be afraid to think big!

Inspirational to Transactional or the other way round?

2007-05-29T18:49:00.000+05:30

I have always been fascinated by the number of “self improvement” magazines available in magazine stands in the US: health, beauty, home improvement, hobbies…: magazines Martha Stewart would have approved of. Meredith Corporations owns a portfolio of lifestyle magazines: largely targeted at women. Its media properties include the magazine Better Homes and Gardens alongwith its sister website http://www.bhg.com/. On its website, which was launched last month, (and I understand that all features will be up only by this year-end) consumers will have access to have to online home remodeling resources including using drag and drop design, painting, coloring and decorating tools. While trying these options themselves, consumers will be able to research associated products online. Meredith is developing a relationship with Home Depot and Lowe’s to create this catalog of products consumers can interact with. Dan Hickey, editor-in-chief of bhg.com claims he is delivering a holy grail to both consumers and manufacturers by combining editorial content with comparison shopping. Consumers will have the ability to move from the “inspirational to transactional” supported by information along the way.

I really wish Mr. Hickey the very best of luck. Nearly nine years before, in the early days of the Internet, I had co-founded an online content development company Aesthetic Technologies. One of the business ideas we interpreted vigorously was the very idea that Mr. Hickey is trying to implement. We tried to tie up with media properties sponsor content on content on specific areas (Femina for Pregnancy & Child Care, Health for Fitness, the India Today & the Media Transasia group for Travel, the then existing Spectrum group for Home Care). The inspirational editorial content will be co-developed by the participation of the traditional media house. The business model will be supported by advertisements specifically aligned with the editorial content.

I pursued this idea with single minded focus for nearly a year. I also explored the possibility of talking to publishers of technical journals on content topics such as “Fire & Safety” topics that had a more industrial or commercial audience (one of the challenges nine years back was that home PC and broadband penetration was not very strong). Our idea used to invariably meet with interest and we would have several rounds of meetings but only one occasion did we come : anywhere close to signing a deal. That was with the India Today group in the content area of Travel. But then our sponsor within the India Today group was Arun Katyar, an orginal Internet visionary. A seasoned media professional, Arun was the COO of the India Today Online venture. Today he is the CEO of SEraja, a Web 2.0 venture set up by the original Net entrepreneur: Rajesh Jain. Check it out at http://company.seraja.com/management.htm

Getting back to http://www.bhg.com/. Why is that nine years later, Mr. Hickey is still searching for the Holy Grail? It is a fairly straightforward idea end of the day. I am trying to understand what is it that has taken it so long:

1)The implementation is not as simple as it looks. Creating a database of products and services and targeting it to a content area is more difficult than it looks. Hmm …I don’t quite believe that. Do you?
2) The traditional media has been just too traditional to take advantage of these opportunities. That is more likely.
3) A decade later, online content is still in its early days of development. I was playing around with www.bhg.com and was frankly annoyed by the pop-up advertisements. Great web content requires still remains an aspiration.
I am seeking to understand this ...comment on.

Ideas are for Stealing

2007-03-22T13:12:00.000+05:30

Let me give a shout for a blog that I read regularly and contribute to: www.venturewoods.org. Alok Mittal of Canaan Investments has done a great job in bringing Indian entrepreuners together. The business ideas often have too much of a specific Indian focus: good because it shows that there is a domestic market out there but but not so good when you think that next generation Indian start ups should really have a global focus. Nonetheless, it is a great site where you can meet enterprising people with interesting ideas. That is the best part of it: Alok has actually created a community.

I have just published a high level outline of a business idea and you can click on this link to reach there.

http://www.venturewoods.org/index.php/2007/03/21/career-management/

It is a Web 2.0 + SaaS type of business model and I personally find the confluence of these two emerging arenas very interesting. Please feel free to build on it and create a business if you want to. Just do provide a lyrical credit in much the same way Ringo Starr did in the number "I get by with a little help from my friends"

Indian Images

2007-02-21T18:31:00.000+05:30

We traveled on our vacation to North India; Delhi, Agra, Fatehpur Sikri, Lucknow. The decision to take the holiday had been made several months back on a Sunday morning I had stumbled upon a “Re. 1” Air Deccan ticket while desultorily surfing online.

Low cost carriers are changing the travel market dynamics in India. The airport was crowded with first time air travelers. Was this all at the cost of the railway passenger traffic? Not really, I think. We traveled by AC First class from Delhi to Lucknow and I was quite amazed to see the compartment full up. The passengers on Air Deccan were first time air travelers: couples from small towns, old parents visiting their children. The passengers on the First AC compartment on Lucknow mail were successful businessmen, bureaucrats and families looking forward to a relaxing journey. Low cost airlines are expanding the overall travel market by making travel more affordable and convenient.

The return tickets were booked on Makemytrip.com (disclaimer: I have booked so many air tickets that I have received a year’s free Outlook Traveler subscription). I have always liked the clean interface (though Air Deccan ticketing is not integrated into the platform) and the prompt dispatch of paper tickets. This time, however, I had the unfortunate problem of trying to reschedule the dates, for which I had to make at least ten calls, each of which was greeted by a “ I shall get back to you” response. We used online portals once again to book our hotel in Agra. We decided on this part of the trip late and had no time to doi any bookings. On a cold morning, as my friend’s car sped past the wide roads of Lutyen’s Delhi, I fired my laptop using a wireless card and hit Makemytip and Travelguru.com. When a quick search yielded nothing, we called in the service center numbers from our cell phones (it was a STD call but what the heck – this was an adventure). We had just reached Faridabad by then and were sitting down to a predictable Sagar Ratna breakfast. My friend stated our requirements to the telephone service centers of both portals and we were promised a call back. Within 15 minutes, a lady from Travelguru offered us Oberois at Rs. 20,000 per night and said that that was the best they could do at such a short notice. The lady from Makemytrip took our requirements and budgets and called us back with an offer of Clarks Shiraz, assuring my skeptical friend, it is a “really good property and you are getting a deal ma’m”. Before we were at Palwal our bookings were done. She was nice enough to take our call in Agra and give us detailed driving directions.

Online travel portals can draw two lessons for building successful business models, from this experience. First, success in the online world will be dependent on building consistent customer service standards. Second, online portals will need to more successfully aggregate and discount hotel rooms and holidays.

So much for getting there. We had a great time in our holiday. We saw historical sites and we caught up with our friends. We had our fill of the range of North Indian cuisine: Punjabi Tandoori chicken in Delhi, Mughlai murg mussalam in Agra, Tunde and Galawat kababs of the famous Awadh tradition in Lucknow. We went to the dargah of Salim Chisti and to the ashrams of Mathura. We snapped pictures of the cooks in the old city of Lucknow who proudly told us that his pictures have gone all across the world. We felt sad that, in what we remembered as the serene shrine of Fatehpur Sikri, we were harassed for donations. We felt proud that the guides in Agra Fort spoke Japanese & Spanish. We shopped on the streets of Delhi and Lucknow and in the quintessential Indian shopping mall – Delhi Haat. We listened to Qaawali sung in a contemporary style by the Hussain brothers and I finished reading Paul Thoreau’s Hotel Honololu. We breakfasted in the heavenly AirForce golf course terrace overlooking the Jaipur Polo grounds and dined on Bengali cuisine at the chic Oh! Calcutta, a first generation entrepreneurial success.

All in all, we enjoyed once again the traditions of our great country: the land of colors and contrasts.

Tourism can make a big contribution in increasing the living standards of people in India , if infrastructural challenges can be met. Some of the areas to look out for are:

Consolidation of existing non 5-star hotels to a national chain that is consistent in quality and cleanliness.
Emergence of travel operators focused on domestic tourism and catering to the increasingly sophisticated middle class tastes.
Creation of infrastructural facilities like theme parks, fair grounds, stadiums, sports arenas.
Development of nation-wide food & beverages chains.
Creation of new travel options such as coast-to-coast sea cruises, river ferrying, luxury coaches.

They will not be as technologically innovative or financially scalable as online travel portals. But they will be fun to create and run.

And, I do hope that one day we have an organization like the National Trust of the UK. Seeing the condition of some of our national monuments I often despair of India’s future. Those who do not respect history are condemned to the lack of a future.

Software + Service = Service Only?

2007-01-17T04:05:00.000+05:30

The more I think of SaaS (Software as a Service) model, the more similarities I see with Web 2.0. Both target the “long tail” in their respective markets: SaaS, in the enterprise market and Web 2.0 applications like Flickr and You Tube in the consumer space. Both depend on the rapid reduction in production and distribution costs. I think of the long tail in the enterprise market in three different ways:

The SMB End
SaaS providers will target the small and medium business segment with standard business application suites and applications. Examples include Salesforce.com, RightNow and NetSuite (for CRM solutions) and Bluetie with its mail and collaborations solutions.

The Niche Application End
This comprises of applications that are not completely or adequately covered by the major software vendors. Examples include Human Capital Management (SaaS providers: Workstream, Authoria, Employease and Taleo), Supply Chain Management (Kinaxis), Expense and Payables management (Concur Technologies, Expensewatch.com, Razorsight), Product Life Cycle Management (Agile Software offers a subscription option), Analytics (Nsite acquired by Business Objects) and Postage solutions (Stamps.com) These companies typically target companies of all sizes.

The Niche Business End
This comprises of specialized applications targeted at focused business segments. Examples include sales and information tracking applications for chip manufacturers (Platte River Systems), preconstruction management services for the construction industry (iSqFt). These companies typically provide additional value to their customers other than software leveraging the business community effects of players all using the same system.

These are my 2007 predictions in this space:

Prediction 1
There will be considerable venture capital activity in the last two categories as innovative entrepreneurs exploit gaps in the enterprise software market space even as the SaaS pioneers like SalesForce.com establish their leadership in the first category.
Prediction 2
ISVs will be work extra hard to get their SaaS strategies in place. This will be a non-trivial task as it would require re-architecting their product to move to a multi tenancy environment and juggling internal sales, implementation and invoicing processes. Existing ISVs which will succeed in a SaaS strategy will, in all likelihood, do so via acquisition of pure play SaaS vendors or by way of developing a completely separate business focus.

The stake in the game for ISVs will be high. My analysis indicates that the market already places a premium on providers who have SaaS offerings in place. Pure play SaaS vendors like SalesForce.com and Right Now have a price-revenue ratio of 10 & 5 respectively compared to a ratio of 2.5 of more traditional ISVs in the SCM, HCM, Analytics, ERP, PLM spaces. The ratio of 2.5 excludes the large enterprise players SAP and Oracle who boast of ratios of 22 and 6 respectively. My prediction for 2007 is that:

Prediction 3
The market will disproportionately reward companies with SaaS offerings.

The third interesting trend in the SaaS model is the convergence between SaaS and BPO. ADP’s acquisition of Employease and the strategic tie-up between TCS and Salesforce.com is indicative of that trend. My prediction is that:

Prediction 4: 2007 and beyond
As the SaaS market matures, SaaS players will tie-up with traditional outsourcing companies to provide end-to-end managed services to their customers and SaaS investors will strive to exit by way of sale to the IBMs and Wipros of the world.

Hunting for Deals

2006-11-28T18:23:00.000+05:30

What would be the market entry strategy of a VC entering India?

With the plethora of VC funds coming into India one question that I have been mulling over is what would be the market penetration strategy? Obvious answers would include business plan competitions, entrepreneurship seminars and entrepreneur camps.

Another potential idea is corporate-venture capital partnerships.

Indian companies are cash rich. An analysis carried out by ET of balance sheets of over 1,000 companies for ‘04-05, shows that at least 100 companies have over Rs 1,000 crore each lying ‘idle’, pending utilization. Newspaper headlines scream of foreign acquisitions. In the the first 10 months of 2006, Indian companies cut more than $10 billion worth of cross-border deals, up from about $1 billion in all of 2000.

Will some of this money go in funding new ventures? There are two broad models of corporate venturing. The first model is that of Cisco, GE and Intel where the corporate runs a venture capital fund on its own. The second model is that of Nortel. From 1998 to 2001, Nortel invested in approximately 100 external start-ups through it's partner venture capital firms, acquiring usually from 5 to 20% of each venture. Nortel maintains close ties with and invests through 7 to 8 carefully selected VC firms, focused on the telecommunication space.

There are several advantages of this model with each entity bringing in specialized skills and focused expectations to the table. I think there are various ways this model can work in India. One obvious way is for corporates to participate with the VC in deal screening in areas of their interest and providing operating expertise during venture development. The trick about this is that often corporate executives do not have the necessary skill sets to work in an entrepreneurial environment. Another possible model is that corporates would probably set up an Innovation cell and seek out ideas within their organizations by asking the question: “what if we started new?” and “what would it need to get disruptive advantage?” This would help in idea generation and identification of possible entrepreneurs. Some of these could be incubated in-house and then spun off as new ventures with VC assistance.

If I were a VC in India, I would be seeking Indian companies promoting innovation as strongly as I would be seeking independent business people.

Mobile Mania

2006-11-17T15:14:00.000+05:30

Internet penetration in India: still not quite there. On the other hand: mobile usage very much there. That seems to be the general consensus of everybody.

Given this, I posed to myself the question: what are possible future mobile applications ? If we could answer that question, may be we will have insight into opportunities that entrepreneurs should be seeking out. Here, I try to answer this question by extrapolating trends in the Internet space into the mobile world.

Personalization
This is Amazon – personalized recommendations based on past behavior. Can we have a personalized “comedy service” – sending me jokes of my favorite genre? Personalized content for the sports lover, the stock broker and so on?

Ecommerce
Financial industry M-commerce is mainstream. As music download is kind of getting there. But it is possible to purchase a variety of goods – flowers for the sweetheart, clothes & CDs for oneself, airline tickets, real estate ….I also believe that auctions could lend themselves easily to the mobile world. Variation of ecommerce is sending money (or money equivalent such as talk time) in communities that do not have access to banking.

Promotion Campaigns
The Shoppers Stop and a hip nightspot in the city that I stay in send me SMSs on promotions and events. What I think is missing is tracking and customization to my individual tastes.

Publishing & Content
News, directories, maps, sports scores and movie reviews are interesting mobile applications with or without GPRS. But there are others. When I heard that the Japanese manga is going mobile, the possibility of Amar Chitra Katha on my i-mate, quickly crossed my mind.

Social Networking
This is interesting. Think of easy ways to build buddy groups and share news and views. Think of rating jokes, content and sharing this within the group. Think of passing recommendations on purchases. Think of organizing events as in Upcoming.org. And of course dating.

Games
Not snakes and ladder as you have today. Real games. Battleships. Bridge. Chess, if you are not too busy blogging.

I think interesting new ventures would be coming up in developing technology platforms for some of these applications. The other area that is interesting is technologies that would allow companies to seamlessly repurpose advertising content for mobile media and to track effectiveness at a user level.

I am researching companies that are developing these technologies and plan to profile them in a future post. If there is any company that you find interesting, send me a mail or add a comment.

Healthy and Wealthy

2006-11-07T19:07:00.000+05:30

Early every morning I drive down to the health club run by a close friend of mine: Azharuddin (not connected to the ex-Indian captain who incidentally also runs a health club in Hyderabad). Azhar loves his gym – he is in the business of transforming people.

Building a business whose objective is to make people happy has always fascinated me. Consider this:

The VLCC group was started in 1989 by Vandana Luthra and is today a Rs. 1.40 Billion company.

Both the large US health club chains: 24- Hour Fitness & Bally Fitness was started in 1983 as single club locations. Both are currently at over USD 1 billion in revenues. 24-Hour Fitness is still managed by its founder Mark S. Mastrov.

Sid and Jenny Craig founded Jenny Craig Inc., in Australia and over 20 years built out a multi-national business with 655 Centers operating in six countries.

In India, the business of health, fitness & sports has been centered around sponsorship and telecast of cricket. The following strands of business models seem to be now emerging:

Sports Events such as the Hyderabad Run, The marathons in Pune, Delhi and Mumbai.

Sports Tourism – tours for sports lovers.

Health clubs – Talwalkars is the only genuine chain that we have in India at this point.

Recreational Clubs (golf, tennis, dining facilities) funded by membership fees.

Entrepreneurs in India are experimenting along all or some of the above approaches. For example, Saumil Majmudar has founded Sportz Village focusing on the relatively wide portfolio of business lines: sports facilities, sports events, sports tours and sponsorship. Urban Yoga, a brand of the Indus-League Clothing Ltd. (ICICI Ventures and Draper International had originally funded this company which has now been sold to Pantaloon) is setting up Yoga Studios as part of the brand extension of their clothing line.

Is there possibility of building up a local Indian brand in this category to exit out as part of a global M&A deal? – that is a question that arises given the changing lifestyles of the middle class in this emerging companies.

While you ponder that question here are details of some Private Equity deals:

European deals

LA Fitness (owned by MidOcean Partners) and and Total Fitness (owned by Legal and General Ventures) acquired Esporta from Duke Street Capital. Esporta operates more than 50 clubs in UK at a total deal size of approx. £640m in 2006.

Legal and General Ventures acquired Total Fitness which operates 21 clubs in North West England at an undisclosed sum in 2004.

Boundary acquired The Club Company Limited which operates 11 country clubs and golf facilities in England at a sum of £96m in 2006.

Burgolf Investments BV acquired BlueGreen from Duke Street Capital. BlueGreen is a golf club and hotel company in France at a Undisclosed in 2004.

US deals

Forstmann Little acquired 24 Hour Fitness at an undisclosed sum in 2005.

KSL Capital Partners acquired ClubCorp Inc. which operates 170 golf courses and clubs at a sum of USD 1.8 billion in 2006.

Angelo Gordon acquired Crunch Fitness a Health club operator at a sum of USD 45 million (includes clubs acquired from other chains too) in 2006.

A missing category in the Consumer Internet space?

2006-10-27T17:38:00.000+05:30

I was reading Mark Sherman’s blog which has a very useful listing of US consumer Internet companies in the various categories. He has also started plotting the Indian consumer Internet companies against each category. Anurag Gupta’s latest blog also provides a more comprehensive listing of Indian companies in the various categories of the consumer Internet space. You can go to both from the Links section of this page.

What was stark to me was the lack of “Learning” as a category in the 2.0 reincarnation of the Web. So much for the “killer app” of five years back. However, I strongly believe that interesting business opportunities will emerge in this category. Consider this: if Web 2.0 is really all about collaboration, how do we really learn? By doing and collaborating. A lot of Internet businesses in learning have focused on content delivery and tracking. But if you look at the way we learn: we pick up information from courses just in time and then we ask around and collaborate with others on real projects, learning most often on the fly.

There are early signs of ventures emerging in this space. Dimdim is building a free web meeting application based on open source. Agreed, their target is not the consumer internet space and nor does the application supports learning requirements, completely. But consider an idea where this could lead to: a free Internet service that allows users to log in and work on projects together. It should have features that allow users to share and edit documents and code (standard content management software features) with a few web-conferencing tools thrown in (share & store presentations, questions and answers …). Finally, the key feature: for each participant to request for and rate the skills of others and the ability to search for people based on skill sets.

Can this be monetized? I think it can. Companies and universities can run specific targeted campaigns for recruiting is one obvious way I can think of.

The recent Economist survey on Talent laid emphasis on career management and continuous learning in an era of global shortage of skilled workforce. Given this, it is hard to believe that Learning has disappeared for ever from the list of interesting Internet opportunities.

A Tale of Two Indias

2006-10-25T15:52:00.000+05:30

I went to Shirdi for this Diwali-Eid holidays. I flew down from Hyderabad to Pune, and from there my friend and me drove down the State Highway to Shirdi via Ahmednagar. I had gone down this route twelve years back. In these last twelve years, parts of the State Highway has been converted to a spanky 4 lane highway – a toll road – while the rest of the highway remains pothole laden. The scenery on the road was as beautiful as you would expect: the rains have been excellent this year and the fields are green and yellow with sugarcane and mustard crops.

I have always fascinated by the faith that brings people together to the Sai Baba of Shridi. There were Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs, in the multitudes that thronged his Samadhi on this long weekend. To me this was Indian secularism at its vibrant best: a strongly emerging middle class praying for a future. What has changed in Shirdi is that there is now a large temple complex: complete with gardens, waiting halls, wonderfully designed silver layed sanctum. The town remains the same: crowded streets and haphazard buildings.

On the way back, we took a different route: the Pune-Nashik National Highway. In much better condition than the State Highway, it was double lane all throughout except for the last stretch near Pune. Predictably the last 4 lane portion of the highway is a toll road too. Altogether the toll costs were nearly 10% of the costs of fuel on the whole journey: too high a cost levied on account of years of neglect. On this route, the scenery was beautiful in a completely different way: the land is largely barren and the landscape is miles of grassy grazing lands dotted by the occasional tree and centuries-old igneous rock-faces.

We had taken this alternate route to stop at the Indage winery. The Nashik area has at least two major wineries: Sula Wines and Indage. Sula is run by Rajeev Sawant, a first generation entrepreneur who used to work in Oracle, California before he came back to India about 5 years back. The Indage is run by the Goa-based Chowgule group. Nashik is always known for its grape cultivation but it really took Rajeev Sawant to convert this advantage to a lifestyle business. In his early days, I had once emailed to Rajeev Sawant and he had promptly mailed me back. That is one sign of an entrepreneur who is likely to succeed: quick response to email. We did a wine tasting session at Café Indage. It helped me that the guy at the bar was from Bengal too. I am not a connoisseur but I do think that the Merlot and the Chenin Blanc were as good as I have tasted anywhere else in the world.

When I had planned the trip, I had imagined it would be the contrast of the traditional India at Shirdi and the modern India at the winery. Now that I have done the trip, the enduring image in my mind is that both institutions – the religious trust and the wine industry - have surged forward with the tide of their respective markets. And they are struggling to emerge out of a poor social and physical infrastructure. That is really the story of the two Indias.

Incidentally, the benefits of infrastructural investments, is evident in the story of my friend, Pankaj, with whom I made this trip. His company Scope T&M, India’s leading producer of test and measurement equipment for the power industry, is experiencing significant growth over the last few years in tandem with the investments in the sector. Scope is among the select few manufacturers of similar equipment across the world and has by far the lowest cost. They are now planning to introduce a electric powered wheelchair, their first consumer product. As I listen to him I think” “Is there still a story for Indian manufacturing?”. Perhaps the answer lies in a niche and specialized market with strong configuration and design components.

But then the heady concoction of all successful early stage ventures is a specialized skill, a gap in the market place and dollops of faith. It is the last where Shirdi comes in.