EnjoyTech

I am a greentech enthusiast and I have been closely following the greentech VC investment landscape. The VCs like Kleiner Perkins who have had a large greentech portfolio including companies such as Bloom Energy are scaling down on greentech investment . Their current investment is not likely to get any returns close to what a VC would expect. The fundamental challenge with such greentech (excluding software) investment is that they are open ended capital-intensive; you just don't know home much time it would take to build the technology/product, how much it would cost, and how much you would be able to sell it for. The market fluctuations make things even worse. This is not only true in the case of start-ups but also true for the large companies; Applied Materials' grand plan to revolutionize thin-film solar business ended up in a bust .   There's a different way to approach this monumental challenge. Just look at how open source has evolved. It started out as non-commerc...

I spent a few days in Bangalore this month. This place amazes me every single time I visit it. Many people ask me whether I think Bangalore has potential to be the next Silicon Valley. I believe, it's a wrong question. There's some seriously awesome talent in India, especially in Bangalore. Don't copy the Silicon Valley. There are so many intangibles that Bangalore won't get it right. And there's no need to copy. Create a new Silicon Valley that is the best of both worlds. If you want some good reading on what makes silicon valley the Silicon Valley, read the essay " How to be Silicon Valley " by Paul Graham. Bangalore does have some of these elements - diversity, clusters, a large number of expats etc. It's quickly becoming a true cosmopolitan city in India. You don't need to know the local language (Kannada) to live there. It does have a few good colleges such as IIM and IISC, but no IIT. The real  estate boom in Bangalore is a clear indicator of...

Being at Under The Radar (UTR), watching disruptive companies present and network with entrepreneurs, thought leaders, and venture capitalists is an annual tradition that I don't miss. I have blogged about disruptive start-ups that I saw in the previous years. The biggest exit out of UTR, that I have witnessed so far, is Salesforce.com's $212 million acquisition of Heroku . This post is about one of the disruptive start-ups that I saw at UTR this year - NimbusDB . I met with Barry Morris, the CEO and Founder of NimbusDB at a reception the night before. I had long conversation with him around the issues with legacy databases, NoSQL, and of course NimbusDB. I must say that, after long time, I have seen a company applying all the right design principles to solve a chronic problem - how can you make SQL databases scale so that they don't suck. One of the main issues with the legacy relational databases is that they were never designed to scale out to begin with. A range of No...

I have been living in the Silicon Valley for a while, and sure enough I haven't forgotten the dot com days. A few days back, on my way to the San Francisco airport, I saw a billboard by aol advertising that they are cool (again!). I also observed that parking lots alongside 101 weren't that empty. I told myself "man! this does feel like 1999". The smart people - entrepreneurs, VCs, and analysts - that I talk to, tell me that we're in a bubble. They call it Bubble 2.0. Perhaps, they're right. The company valuations are through the roof. Facebook is valued around $75 billion and Color , on the launch day, had $40 million in the bank. The angel, super angel, and incubator investment deal flow is bringing all the talent to the Valley and all these young smart entrepreneurs are working on some of the coolest things that I have ever seen. But, there's a talent side that I am worried about. What this influx of easy venture capital has ensued is companies waging t...

I met James Lindenbaum, a founder of Heroku, in early 2009, at the Under The Radar conference in Mountain View. We had a long conversation on cloud as a great platform for Ruby, why Ruby on Rails is a better framework than PHP, and viability of PaaS as a business model. He also explained to me why he chose to work on Heroku at Y Combinator. I was sold on their future, on that day, and kept in touch with them since then. The last week, Salesforce.com acquired Heroku for $212 million . That's one successful exit, which is good news in many different dimensions. PaaS is a viable business model PaaS is not easy. It takes time, laser sharp focus, and hard work to build something that the developers would use and pay for. A few companies have tried and many have failed. But, it is refreshing to see the platform and the ecosystem that Heroku has built since its inception. Heroku did not raise a lot of money, kept the cost low, and attracted customers early on. I was told (by Byron, I thi...

In my previous post “ While Entrepreneurs Scale On The Cloud The Angels Get Supersized ” I wrote about how cloud computing is disrupting the VC industry. Continuing on the thread of entrepreneurship I am seeing more and more entrepreneurs building applications who do not belong to any formal organization, start-up or otherwise. The definition of what used to be a start-up itself is changing, primarily because of two reasons - simple and easily accessible PaaS tools to design, run, and maintain applications on the cloud and access to a market place to sell the applications. We have been witnessing this trend for the mobile applications for a while - Android as well as iPhone and now iPad. I see the same pattern for the cloud-based applications. I have seen many useful, productive, and successful applications that are designed by individual developers with no affiliation to any organization. Google has done a great job in designing the tools for the developers to build applications that ...

Cloud computing is disrupting the venture capital industry in a big way. One of the obvious changes we all have observed is the reduced up-front capital expenditure to start a new venture. Things that used to require an array of expensive servers and an army of people to maintain them have essentially been replaced by a bunch of EC2 instances and a few smart developers. The tools and the technology stack for today’s applications are designed for cheaper and faster experimentation allowing the entrepreneurs to follow the lean methodology and pivot as fast as they can. I agree that some investors underestimate the people cost and overestimate the capabilities of the cloud but regardless this has caused a major shift in how the companies are funded. The rise of an emergent category of super angel is all about leveraging the cloud computing. Fred Wilson closed a $30 million fund and Aydin Senkut closed a $40 million fund. These funds will invest into dozens of companies that can be boo...

It was great to be back at Under The Radar this year. I wrote about disruptive cloud computing start-ups that I saw at Under The Radar last year. Since then the cloud computing has gained significant momentum. This was evident from talking to the entrepreneurs who pitched their start-ups this year. At the conference there was no discussion on what is cloud computing and why anyone should use it. It was all about how and not why. We have crossed the chasm. The companies who presented want to solve the “cloud scale” problems as it relates to database, infrastructure, development, management etc. This year, I have decided to break down my impressions into more than one post. NoSQL has seen staggering innovation in the last year. Here are the two companies in the NoSQL category that I liked at Under The Radar: Northscale was in stealth mode for a while and officially launched four weeks back. Their product is essentially a commercial version of memcached that sits in front of an RDBMS ...

It was a routine trip back home from work one of these days. As soon as I boarded the bus the driver asked me: "So, what do you think about Google's announcement regarding China? Will Yahoo follow the suit?". The same bus driver had asked me about my views on NexusOne on the day it was announced. He even has a strong point of view on net neutrality. The other day the librarian showed me a Firefox plug-in that hides your identity from Google. Everyday it's a constant reminder of the demographics that we live in the Silicon Valley. It's an innovation dagger. One edge keeps people to stay on top of cutting edge technology and the other keeps them away from the vast majority of the users that don't live in the valley. I cannot overemphasize the importance of being surrounded by the smartest of the smart people in the valley. However for entrepreneurs it is equally important to stay grounded in the reality. As cool as iPod was and iPhone is and iPad/iSlate will be ...

The second most populous country with the fourth largest spending power, India, saw a surprising 7.9% YOY GDP growth well above the expectations of 6.3%. The Indian stock market recovered much quicker since the US financial meltdown. In fact one of my friends who oversees sales of a European earthmoving equipments company in India complained that the European manufacturers have not increased their production to meet the increased demand in India due to the faster economic recovery, especially in the infrastructure sector. When I switch on a news channel in India I hear all about incentivizing manufacturing companies to increase indigenous production that will fuel the growth of the industrial sector. I also see commercials ranging from baked potato chips to a service to transfer money using virtual currency on a mobile phone targeted to the fast growing middleclass. The marketers have no problem understanding the rich and the middle-class of India and designing the products for them. ...

GigaOM has a post " How Start-ups can win big with VCs " that muddies their point of view of having a clear value proposition with not doing something because no one may want this or someone else has already done it. I added the following comments to that post: I agree with the viewpoint about honing the pitch. However I have a different take on some of the start-ups. It’s one thing not to know what the value proposition is but it is other thing to believe in a BHAG . Many start-ups had huge success when people initially thought that they could live without that. Twitter is one of those examples. Also, there is nothing wrong in duplicating what someone else is doing. Presence of similar companies signal that there is a market. It is now up to the new entrant to beat the competition by solving the problem well. When Google announced Gmail it was one of the last (as of now) web-based email that was introduced. Google would not have released Gmail or even the sear...

The large scale software companies often deal with the tension between incremental and revolutionary innovation. They know that if they only keep listening to their customers' requests the very same customers will put them out of the business. Clayton Christensen has captured this phenomenon in The Innovator's Dilemma . Over a period of time these companies have managed to execute the incremental innovation really well to deliver the same software release after release and occasionally introduce new products. However most of these companies struggle to incubate revolutionary innovation inside the company since it is fundamentally a different beast. The executives are often torn between funding the revolutionary initiatives to ride the next big wave and funding the incremental innovation that the current customers and the market expects. It is absolutely imperative for the executive management to differentiate between these two equally important but very different types of inno...