A must watch for all the entrepreneurs out there.

• Don’t hold grudges. Life’s too short for that nonsense.
• Keep learning. Every single day of your life. Your time on earth is limited. It’s up to you how much knowledge you can assimilate.
• Live in the moment. While you should absolutely save and invest for the future, try to enjoy your today also.
• Try to beat everyone’s expectations. Be it for your wife, your boss, your parents or even for some random person who needs help.
• Spend wisely. Money is hard to earn.
• Be conscious of your actions. Don’t do things mechanically.
• Don’t lose focus on the big picture.
• Be kind. Be compassionate. Be helpful.
• Stay humble. When it doubt, click here to understand where you stand in the grand scheme of things.

Have a happy and great 2011.

Three aspects to consider in a candidate when conducting an interview -

1.        Technical – Is the candidate a good fit for the position we’re hiring for?

2.        People – Is the candidate the kind of person you would like to work with?

3.        Learning – Will the candidate continue to grow along with the team/company?

Firstly, the candidate should be put to ease.

Offer a glass of water.  Break ice with the person.

The candidate has to be in a relaxed state of mind for him to be his best at the interview. Ask about previous experience to put the candidate in some familiar territory.

Don’t pressurize. Don’t harp on a question.

If the candidate doesn’t get a question instantly, try one more time then move on.  Observe and record. Don’t be hell bent on proving your own point. Listen.

Technical –

• Try to find out what are the strong areas of the candidate.
• Don’t dwell on things that the candidate either hasn’t worked upon, or doesn’t know every well. Find out a strong area and check out the depth.
• Deep knowledge in one area or aspect of technology is much better than shallow knowledge in several.
• Don’t ask API questions. APIs can be googled.
• Ask questions that require one to think – why does an API work the way it does? If you were creating this API, would you do anything different?
• To evaluate an backend engineer, here is a model question structure –

o    Two logical questions – one easy, one tough

o    One algorithm/design question – the complexity can depend on the position we’re hiring for

o    Two SQL questions – one easy, one tough

o    Two programming questions – one moderate, one tough. Don’t make it complicated. The problem statement has to be clear

o    Ask several scenario questions – How would you sort a million strings etc. The objective is to see whether the candidate can think through the complexity

• Ask whether the candidate has used good engineering processes before. Is s/he familiar with revision control systems, bug tracking, code reviews, agile development, build process, debugging etc.

People –

• Would you enjoy working with the person if we were to hire the candidate?
• Team player? Does the person involve others in design, discussion, problem solving?
• Good ethics? This is hard to judge but you’ll get a gut feel about this during the interview
• Clarity of thought and communication

Learning –

• Has the candidate learned anything new in the past 6 -12 months?
• Was it out of self-motivation or was it forced upon (like a company training)?
• Did the candidate share the learning with the other team members?
• Is the candidate curious to know the answers to the questions that you asked in the interview?
• Does the candidate pick up clues to arrive at an answer?

Do you have any more things to add? Please use the comment box.

Well, consider this scenario -

• We use Google Apps as our mailing solution.
• The mailing solution lacks some very basic features like setting up inbound filters for mailing lists.
• We have a mailing list called xxxxx@burrp.com that reaches out to every inbox company-wide. Earlier, it used to just accept mails from the same domain i.e. burrp.com. But we needed to open it up to receive mails from other domains like network18online.com and infomedia18.in.
• So we went ahead and made a simple change – “Allow anyone to send mails to xxxxx@burrp.com”. But, this set us up for massive company wide spam from the outside.
• Setting up a simple inbound domain filter should be easy, na? Except you cannot do this for mailing lists using the Google Apps mailing solution.
• So here’s the little hack that we did -
  • All xxxxx@burrp.com mails only get sent to a real mailbox -> filter@burrp.com.
  • The mailbox only  receives mails from within the same domain. So you cannot spam it from outside.
  • You can setup various filters on a real mailbox. We’ve setup a forwarding rule in the filter@burrp.com mailbox to only deliver messages coming in from the above mentioned domains. If the rule matches it gets delivered to another mailing list xxx123@burrp.com, which is now the real company wide mailing list.
  • So non matching mails are just dropped.

That’s how we did a little message routing to only accept mails coming from certain domains, even though the mailing list is open.

Hope this helps you think of other cool Gmail hacks for your enterprise needs.

Develop the 4 Qualities of an Inspirational Leader

Leaders need vision, energy, authority, and a natural strategic ability. But those things don’t necessarily help you inspire your employees to be their best and commit to you as a leader. Here are the four qualities you need to capture the hearts, minds, and spirits of your people:

1. Humanness. Nobody wants to work with a perfect leader. Build collaboration and solidarity by revealing your weaknesses.
2. Intuition. To be most effective, you need to know what’s going on without others spelling it out for you. Collect unspoken data from body language and looks given across rooms to help you intuit the underlying messages.
3. Tough empathy. Care deeply about your employees, but accept nothing less than their very best.
4. Uniqueness. Demonstrate that you are a singular leader by showing your unique qualities to those around you.

Some highlights of the conversation -

Be brave brother, don’t panic

For your mission to be successful, you must be killed

God is waiting for you in heaven

Most of the conversation that happened between the terrorist and their controllers was just matter-of-fact without any emotion or remorse for their actions. The level of co-ordination and reconnaissance is just unbelievable.

It’s a marathon, not a sprint – No one said it’s going to be easy. To begin with you need lots of  business listings. Some estimates put the number of local businesses in India in the 5-7 million range. However, in a country like India, data collection is no trivial exercise. How do you collect consistent good quality data across a bazillion cities without any central authoritative source to license or procure from? Go figure this one out. If you setup your processes and practices right, you’ll keep earning data dividends time and again.  Oh, and this keeps the barriers of entry high. A must have for any good business model.

Once you collect it, you will still need to scrub and polish it before you make it available for users to consume it. Then finally you gotta a build a business on top of it.

Building the ultimate database of local businesses – No, the database itself is not the business – the business gets built on top of it. Of course once the data is collected, you might make some money by distributing it to third-parties. However, don’t expect a windfall from this.

Services are the real revenue enablers – In continuation of the above point, building consumer and business services or offerings on top of the data are the real revenue enablers. The user gets to ride it for free – mostly. The merchants pay for the transactions, leads, clicks, impressions or presence as the case may be.

Online, what online? Still got doubts? Indiamart, Alibaba, TradeIndia run some very successful B2B marketplaces, while companies like Sulekha, Foodiebay and AskLaila run equally good local listings search services. All these companies are investing time and money in building their local databases. And who said it only has to be online? Go and ask India’s No. 1 local search engine aka JustDial. They run a very successful voice business with a topline of over Rs. 200cr and growing 50% annually. Unless you were sleeping under a rock, you should also know they’re aiming for a Rs. 700cr IPO in the next few months.

Most of the above listed companies have been around for over 10 years – which reinforces my earlier point of this being a marathon-not-a-sprint. Go ask Sequoia, Norwest, Yahoo, Matrix Ventures etc. why are they investing heavily in the Indian local search space? I think this space is about to make the big leap.

Wake up smell the coffee.

What’s the problem being solved - With the increasing number of consumers and businesses getting online and connected – many via mobile phones, there is a tremendous opportunity to service them via their medium of choice. B2B marketplaces solve the problem of connecting buyers and suppliers. Some cater to the local audience while some provide a platform for local businesses to reach out to the audience from abroad. Local listing services cater to the utilitarian need of finding businesses for specific needs. Services like burrp! add a layer of user reviews, ratings and rich meta data to help you make informed choices.

An eye for detail – Who cares how rich your business listing meta-data is? Right? Wrong. Whether you store business attributes in a database or in a flat text file, ultimately the business model should be such as to derive intelligence and money making opportunities from it. That’s what matters at the end of the day. Rich, detailed business listing information can be your service differentiators. Wouldn’t you prefer taking your girl-friend out to a candle-lit dinner restaurant?

Money makes the world go round – So where’s the money coming from? Services like JustDial, Sulekha, IndiaMart etc. charge for leads of potential customers. Generally, the price of the lead depends on the “ticket” value of the product being advertised by the business or sought after by the consumer. The Google Adsense banners etc. give inconsequential revenues – don’t even think of  building a business around it. Some players also charge money to provide online presence (read – website creation) and exposure to businesses. This entire sector is in a hyper growth stage and there is a lot of money to be made, specially since a lot of new consumers and businesses are still in the discovery stage of finding and connecting with online businesses.

I think a lot of players in this space are still in the process of discovering their business model.  A few are experimenting with group buying, a few with discount coupons. Yet some others are figuring out whether online ordering works. Even the B2B category is evolving. The space is exciting for the challenges and opportunities it offers.

Obligatory disclaimer – The opinions/facts/ideas listed above are my own and not of my employer Infomedia18 Ltd.  I co-founded burrp! in Aug 2006 with the aim of connecting users with the awesome businesses.

4 years – racing ahead

A big congratulations to all those who have contributed to the growth and success of burrp! – technologists, editors, designers, sales, users, business owners, bloggers and many many more. I am sure it’s been a great ride for everyone who dared to hitch on to the burrp! band wagon. Thanks to you, burrp! has blossomed from being just a concept to one of the best and most loved products of India.

It’s hard to imagine that we’ve been at it for 4 years now. burrp! started out with a simple philosophy – have fun and make something that people wanted to use. Several versions, iterations and features later burrp! now stands on solid pillars of a good user experience, a strong brand and lots of user love.

So, what’s next?

* Increase traffic – As you already know, the number one goal for burrp! is to increase the collective traffic on blah!, tv and local to 10 times of what it is currently today. We’re aiming for xxx million unique visitors per month by this time next year.

* Increase the distribution of burrp! content – We’ve recently put up burrp! content on UTV World movies and on the in.com homepage. Our content is unique and in great demand. We’re actively working on several more content sharing requests.

* Reaching out to a wider audience – In the next couple of months we’re coming out with burrp! local mobile apps for Blackberry, iPhone and Nokia phones. We’re also working on making our Facebook and Twitter presence stronger.

* Increase revenue – Can the burrp! products become a source of solid revenue for the company? You bet.

I think we’re standing on the cusp of breaking out. We’ve got a positive momentum going. We need to execute with a burning passion.

Let’s make it happen. We can do it.

However now it’s all over. This morning I was pleasantly surprised to receive a letter signed by Naresh Goyal himself. I think it was a very good way of handling the situation. I am reproducing the letter here verbatim -

Dear Mr. Jain,

You would have read and heard from the media the good news of our amicable agreements arrived at late last night with our Pilots.

I write to humbly apologize for the inconvenience caused over the past few days and to thank you on behalf of every single team member of our airline for your tolerance and the continuance of your valued patronage.

I am further deeply grateful for the many phone calls, emails and letters I have received from so many of you, almost all without exception, messages of solidarity, support and encouragement.

With all our domestic and international services back on schedule, our ground teams and aircrew are looking forward to serve you with their warm and friendly service that you have always enjoyed onboard Jet Airways flights in India and across the globe.

With gratitude,

Naresh Goyal
Chairman
Jet Airways (India) Ltd.

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