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This is the 2nd in a series of what I believe are the four basic components needed to turn a start-up into a successful long-term company.

The second ‘P’ is passion. When hiring people you want individuals that share the same level of enthusiasm and excitement as everyone else on the existing team. Passion goes beyond liking a particular product or industry. Just because you like Ferrari’s does not mean you would make a great car mechanic or car salesperson. However, if you eat, sleep and breath cars and in particular Ferrari’s then you might make a great addition to the Ferrari organization. You have to be consumed by that product or industry and want to read everything about it and learn as much as you can.

I started my career as a technical person building large scale wide area networks and spent countless hours optimizing routers to get TCP/IP packets from destination A to destination B. Did I have a passion for it, probably not. Since the 7th grade, I have been consumed by financial markets. Most of my classmates thought I was going to be a stockbroker because I was reading the Wall Street Journal back then. I love technology but financial markets are my true passion for reasons even I don’t fully understand.

When you are passionate about something you just naturally tend to be more knowledgeable about that topic area because it interests you. And when you are more knowledgeable it adds so much more to the team. The drive and passion does not have to be in the main area of the company. If you are a technology startup and your CFO is in love with Excel and gets excited by P&L statements, then lucky for you.

An example of someone with a lot of passion is Gary Vaynerchuk. Gary has a passion for wine and it shows – he runs a retail wine shop in New Jersey but has became an internet sensation with his Wine Library TV podcast. When you watch one of his podcasts you can feel the excitement and passion he has for wine industry and he can talk about vineyards like its second nature. Gary has turned a field that was typically dominated by older middle aged men and “crushed it” as he would say. With passion comes knowledge and it shows, Gary is someone you would trust blindly because he eats, sleeps, breaths and drinks the wine industry.

Startups have enough drama on their own in the early days and you want the core team to stay and build up the company. Early on, having team members come and go can throw off the overall rhythm of a startup. By finding passionate people they hopefully will stick around even if things look grim because they are enthusiastic and excited about the product or industry they are in.

But finding passionate candidates is not straight forward. Luckily in this age of social networks, you can keep tabs on someones blog or twitter stream to get a better understanding of what interests them. More often than not, you have to interact with them on an ongoing basis to build a mental social graph of what truly gets them enthusiastic, excited and passionate.

The above article was syndicated on VCCircle.com and GQindia.com.

Over the next two months, I’m going to discuss what I believe are the four basic components needed to turn a startup into a successful long term company. They are – people, passion, perseverance and profitability. I will highlight each of these four components in separate posts in the coming months.

It may sound cliche but the most important component is having great people. It took me many years to figure this out, but people truly are the cornerstone of any company. You might have a great idea but without the right people the idea might never reach its full potential. Not only do you require smart people, but people who share the long term vision of the startup. With the early employees you want to build the right culture which is needed to attract top talent as the company grows. For many years Google was the place to be in Silicon Valley if you were a coding genius, the culture was built by early employees who were from a computer science background and insisted on the corporate motto “don’t be evil.” Nowadays, all the top computer science talent wants to work at Facebook partly because of the stock options they would receive but also because the other top people they would be working with. Top talent likes to work with top talent.

In addition to having smart people who know the market you also want people that can challenge business decisions in a constructive manner. Initially, you will spend a large part of your time with the core team building out the business and having people who are easy to get along with in a work and personal environment is highly recommended. Startup’s are inherently stressful and the last thing you need is to surround yourself with negative people. People who are always negative can be very destructive and should be removed immediately, no need for additional drama from within the company.

An excellent example of two companies that have gone in opposite directions even though they are in the same space – Google and Yahoo. As stated before, Google has a history of treating it’s employees like kings such as providing free gourmet cooked meals, haircuts and so much more. They even provide their engineering staff with something called 20%, where a programmer can work on anything that interests them. Google’s real asset is their search algorithm but without the right people to tune it and tweak it might have ended up like so many other internet search giants. At the other end of the spectrum is Yahoo – in the early 90′s it was the Silicon Valley startup to work for, but over the years many top ranking employees left. This led to a vicious cycle where other people left and then they couldn’t attract new talent that was sorely needed in such a competitive industry.

One of the most difficult tasks for any company is hiring people. That difficulty is even more amplified at a startup, as many people don’t want to take the risk of joining an unknown entity. And, if you are lucky enough to experience hyper-growth then you have all sorts of people applying and the hiring standards usually get relaxed in order to fill a job role. By maintaining a strict adherence to hiring great people can only benefit the company in the long run.

The above article was syndicated on VCCircle.com and GQindia.com.

That feeling you get when you come back from vacation is reality smacking you in the face. There are two parts to it, the first part is you are no longer on vacation experiencing new things and new places. The second part is more sinister, it’s when you start plugging back into the grid – email, RSS, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, voicemail, to-do’s, etc…

Some people just declare email bankruptcy once they come back from vacation and figure if something was that important the person will email again. There are many startups and even Google is trying to prioritize your email for you and present what is believes are the most important emails to respond to. Luckily, I’ve been able to tame email using a ton of filters so I don’t have to go down the path of declaring email bankruptcy.

However, what smacks me in the face when I get back from vacation is my RSS feeds. RSS feeds allow you to track the content of various websites into a single location so you don’t have to visit 10-15 websites on a daily basis. I use Google Reader to aggregate the information that easily tops over 400 new pieces of content on a daily basis. If I take a 3-4 day vacation my RSS feeds would easily top 1600 articles, there is no way I’m going to scan 1600 titles in Google Reader…hence RSS bankruptcy.

When I got back from my most recent vacation I decided I needed to really tame my RSS feeds. For me, I like reading articles but I’ve come to realize many of the articles that I read are just worthless and a waste of time. I believe I read these type of articles for two reasons: it diverts me from work that I should be doing and second I gain knowledge about a particular subject. The problem is if you waste 15 minutes reading garbage you won’t get time to read another article that might actually be useful. Coincidentally, my friend Sahil sent me a link saying that “keeping up with RSS is poisonous.” I would completely agree with the article.

So what did I do? I nuked about 75% of the RSS feeds I had and started following those particular websites on Twitter. Secondly, I started following several new people that seem to send out useful articles via Twitter. The idea is I might miss a particular tweet from
Engadget when it first comes out, but if the article is really useful it will get re-tweeted many times and then I can read it. You kinda have to have faith in the people you follow and truly believe in the wisdom of crowds. Twitter has now become my curated personal news aggregator.

So what were the big news stories when I was on vacation for 3 weeks? Two seem to stick out 1. Google buying Motorola Mobility and 2. The VC funding misadventures of Rand Fishkin at SEOmoz. The second story was heavily re-tweeted and even Sahil sent me a link to the story. Using my old method I would have seen story #1 pop-up in my RSS feed but story #2 would have been buried…and story #2 is actually a GREAT read if you are looking for VC funding.

I’m sure while on vacation, I missed out on thousands of stories. Let me guess there were several Top 10 articles on how to grow traffic, effectively use Facebook for your company, maximize your Google ad spend, etc…all noise to be honest. It’s the fear of missing out that drives people to track everything and read everything. The article I’m really looking for is how to score a 2012 Lamborghini Aventador since it has a 3 year waiting list.

Lexus LFA dashboard

During the late 90′s all the rage on the internet was with portals. The concept was simple, you select the type of information you wanted  - news sources you like, stock quotes for your holdings or local weather information. Then the portal would magically aggregate all the information in a single location.

If portal 1.0 was about external information (news, weather, etc..) then portal 2.0 is about your information. Portal 2.0 or what I’m calling The Personal Dashboard is the next step, where you can quickly glance at various parts of your life in a single location. Parts of your life would include friends (Facebook), work colleagues (LinkedIn), personal finance (Mint.com), health, cars, fashion, etc…

Social Dashboard
Since many websites are opening up their data stream via an easy to use API (application programming interface) the ability to create a centralized dashboard is not that far fetched. For the social piece of your dashboard you would have a mix of Facebook, LinkedIn and/or Twitter in your social news feed similar to how the individual streams look now, but it would be an aggregated summary. For the full blown feed you would have to go to the respective sites to get your daily dose of empty calories better known as social networking.

Personal Finance Dashboard
Yes, Mint.com does a lot of the financial data aggregation but two things: first it’s on their site, I want to see that data stream appear on my dashboard. More importantly I would like to weave Mint.com with all my other financial data streams. Suppose I have Google Wallet, I would want that to appear as well.  For me personal finance is broken down into 2 categories: short term (expense tracking) and long term (portfolio management). Since all my financial feeds are in one location, I would want to get real advice and/or offers based on how I spend on my short term or daily expenses.  If I constantly spend on cafe lattes at The Coffee Bean (which I do everyday in Nariman Point), it would be nice if they kick out an offer for 50% off on a new product they are introducing. Or if I suddenly stop visiting for 2 weeks, they kick out an offer for 20% off on my next visit. This would be completely automated without having to signup for some dumb-ass daily deal site (Hi Groupon!).

On the portfolio management side, it would only present offers in two cases: the product saves me money or makes me money. If there is a better performing CD/FD it would alert me to it. If I can save on brokerage, then it would notify me…but only if I really trade a lot and it would specifically show me a cost comparison based on my accounts details. Consumers would love this, but of course established companies would hate this level of transparency. However, there are new players such as BankSimple.com who might be able to make a difference.

Health Dashboard
Personally, the area of health is what got me started to think about the Personal Dashboard concept. There is a growing trend around the idea of the quantified self –  capturing details such as heart rate, blood pressure and many more data points to learn about your health in real time.  Gary Wolf gave a TED talk about the topic. When you talk about big markets, the health care industry is one of the biggest at 16% of the US GDP and a large chunk going to hospital care. There has to be a better way for people to track their own health and make adjustments in real-time to improve their health. There are several devices available today that offer a glimpse into the future.

Fitbit is the size of a money clip and tracks physical activities, calories burned, steps taken, distance traveled and sleep patterns. At a $100 a pop, this should be mandatory for anyone with a BMI over 30. Another gadget is Basis which is like the Fitbit but also tracks your heart rate. Of course, Apple is also planning to gate crash this party with their products based recent patent filings.

Gadgets are one piece, the other is data aggregation and several companies such as Microsoft HealthVault and RunKeeper have started to support the above gadgets on their platform. Once again these are islands of data and should be part of an overall personal dashboard. These services should interact with each other and kick out real-time advice based on my physical condition or let me know if my sleep cycle for the one week period is normal for my age group, etc… Or I should be able to export my data to a PDF to show my doctor that I have indeed been sleeping 7 hours a day and working out every other day. By tracking certain metrics it lends itself for people to correct their behavior if they are serious about it.

Summary
I’ve touched on 3 areas but there can be many more depending on the lifestyle of the individual. Such as a car dashboard that tracks the vitals of the cars you own – mileage, fuel tank, tire pressure, etc…then it could send a reminder for when the next servicing is due. (Yes the irony, a dashboard of a dashboard!)

The Personal Dashboard might seem like an idealistic view of how our lives should be simplified, but I firmly believe it’s where things are moving to. Currently, all this data is housed in disconnected data stacks but eventually there will be a meta aggregator of all these bits of data we are creating on a minute by minute basis.

The above article was syndicated on VCCircle.com.

When I first heard about Aadhaar I figured it was just another Government of India project that would go nowhere. (For a quick refresher on Aadhaar I put together a quick 10 slide summary.) As the program is starting to gain traction, many people are starting to challenge the claims and veracity of the projects purpose.

One of them is Sucheta Dalal, who is a highly acclaimed journalist who broke the story on India’s largest insider trading scandal in 1992 involving Harshad Mehta (he was the first person in India to buy a Lexus LS400). I’ve actually had a chance to meet Sucheta and she is a straight shooter. I’ve commented in the past that I feel Aadhaar will help to ease corruption. On Twitter, Sucheta had a more direct question for me:

@mrjain  please enlighten me how a number allotted to you will curb corruption? I am all ears

One of the misconceptions about Aadhaar is that it will solve every problem that affects India, it won’t. The other misconception is that it will be 100% fool proof and rock solid from day one, it won’t.  Aadhaar is a technology startup that happens to be ventured backed by the Government of India. As with any startup or government program there will be teething and integration issues that will have to be dealt with in real-time.

My answer to Sucheta’s tweet is “yes, but probably not for Sucheta and me.” It would benefit people that suffer from the “poverty tax”, which is a large percentage of the Indian population. If you receive a pension, you might have to pay a “fee” to the clerk to speed up the transaction. Same issue with food, subsided kerosene, government jobs, etc…if you want something you have to pay a fee.  That fee hurts more if you earn less and hence it’s called the poverty tax or you can call it what it really is…corruption. With an Aadhaar number the government would directly deposit the money into your bank account. No middle man to slow down the transaction or take money from you to speed up the process of getting YOUR money.

Fear, uncertainty and doubt are the 3 things that critics raise when talking about Aadhaar. Fear of what the Indian government will do with the data. Uncertainty about how much money is being spent on the project. And lastly, doubt of whether the program can achieve anything impactful.

The other complaint I’ve heard from several people is they feel it’s just a large technology project to benefit system integrators like Infosys, Wipro and TCS. In particular, a friend of mine questioned why Aadhaar was so keen on using iris and fingerprint scanners to authenticate people. Was it because that would force new hardware sales for iris and fingerprint scanner vendors. Why not use voice verification via cell phones that are so readily available? Granted, there might be issues with voice pattern recognition but why not open it up to a college competition for the top technology schools (read IIT’s) to try and solve the problem.

Personally, I think that’s where the Aadhaar team has done a rather poor job of openly communicating and should really improve in that department. I still firmly believe Aadhaar is a step in the right direction and will eventually benefit a large percentage of the Indian population.