Emergic: Rajesh Jain’s Blog

From a Tech Talk series written four years ago:

Today’s world looks very different from the vantage point of where I reside here in Mumbai, India. It is a world full of infinite opportunities as companies seek to leapfrog the legacy of decades of slow development. It is a world with youthful energy and money being unleashed as one navigates the new malls and restaurants coming up all over. It is a world where mobile phones connect people who never used a landline before—and perhaps will never use a desktop computer, opting for more advanced NetPCs and wireless devices of all manner.

It is also a world where the services juggernaut in urban India is complemented by the largely agricultural rural economy, where hundreds of millions still live in poverty. It’s a world where the old still exists and, at times, even dominates the new. The contrasts may be stark, but there is one thing that is ubiquitous in my homeland: Optimism! For the first time in living memory, there is a belief that tomorrow will be better than today. That perception alone can make all the difference. I see not just the Old India of yesterday, but the New India of tomorrow. It is an India that will be built in a world of extreme competition, and extreme opportunities—powered by transformations and disruptions.

This week’s links:

• The Scary New Rich: From Newsweek. “The global middle class is more unstable and less liberal than we thought.”
• Building a Better Teacher: from The New York Times Sunday Magazine. “When Doug Lemov conducted his own search for those magical ingredients, he noticed something about most successful teachers that he hadn’t expected to find: what looked like natural-born genius was often deliberate technique in disguise.”
• Role of Data in the Mobile Future: by Tomi Ahonen. “Like Alan Moore says, this is why mobile phone user data is the ’new black gold of the 21st century‘.”
• Top 50 VC-backed Companies: from Wall Street Journal.
• Reflections on India: by Sean Paul Kelley. Brutally frank. “I’ll start with what I think are India’s four major problems–the four most preventing India from becoming a developing nation.”

Continuing with my list of favourite websites:

Blog.800ceoread.com

I visit this at once a week. It gives very good suggestions on business books. Its reviews expose you to new ideas in the business. The sheer diversity of thought that is out there makes it a fascinating read.

Deeshaa.org (On India’s Development)

This is my colleague Atanu Dey’s blog. He is an economist and blogs on issues dealing with India’s development. He writes on what we have done wrong on the policy front, and what are the challenges that India faces on its path to development. He updates it frequently, and I check it about once a day.

NayaNaya.mobi

This is a made-for-mobile public aggregator of breaking news on many topics (created by my company). I check this on my phone the first thing in the morning. The India-centric headlines aggregated from multiple sources in different topics (national news, business, tech, cricket) provide a very good overview of all the ‘new-new’ happenings.

One of the publications recently asked me for my five favourite websites. This is what I wrote and sent them.

My favourite sites represent my interests: technology, business and politics, books, India’s development, and India news.

Techmeme.com

This is an aggregator of the best of all the latest news, blogs and the buzz in the tech world. On a single page, I can see all that’s happening in the world of technology. I check a couple times daily. I wish something like this were available for Indian tech!

The Wall Street Journal and New York Times

I go to these sites for the global news coverage, technology reports and their op-eds. WSJ offers good tech insights, and also has very good centre-right leaning op-eds. They now also have an India start page. On the NYT site, I go on to the Books section, the Op-eds (somewhat centre-left views) and of course, the technology page. Much of my viewing of both these sites happens on the mobile.

Continued tomorrow.

I was thinking about this the other day, as I was chatting to a friend about my experiences as an entrepreneur and investing in early-stage companies.

I mentioned to him that one of the reasons companies fail (and I have also gone through my share of failures) is that we do not reset starting assumptions against the market realities. Let me explain.

We start off with some ideas, and assumptions about the market. Once we take the product out into the market, we get feedback - about customers’ expectations and market size. It is at that time that we need to think about some course alteration - in case there is a mismatch. Many times, we don’t do that - working under the principle that our efforts will accelerate the market’s response towards our product. That rarely happens. What follows is disappointment.

It is never easy changing one’s assumptions quickly, especially when one has been thinking about them for a long time. But they should be exactly that - just starting assumptions.

Over the recent Holi holidays, as I sat thinking about life past, present and future, I realized that I could take life in five-year chunks and think of a dominant theme for each of these chunks. So, here goes:

• 1984-1989: Education (IIT-Bombay and Columbia)
• 1990-1994: Work and Error (NYNEX, and failed efforts at doing a startup)
• 1995-1999: IndiaWorld (India’s first Internet portals, sold to Sify in Nov 1999)
• 2000-2004: Experiments (tried a number of digital ideas; none of them worked)
• 2005-2009: NetCore’s Growth (put the company on a growth path)

What will the next five years bring? Two things that I would like to do are: ensure NetCore can grow to a dominant consumer mobile data company, and help bring about a change in India’s political and policy climate.

I was part of a small team from Friends of BJP that was invited to attend the BJP National Council meet in Indore in mid-Feb. It was quite a gathering - over 5,000 people brought together from all over the country.

Among the announcements made was that of the revival of Friends of BJP.

Here is what Nitin Gadkari said in his Presidential Address: “We are also planning to revive Friends of BJP, an associate organisation of the non-member Well Wishers of the party. All patriotic citizens, especially all young professionals who look forward to BJP as an instrument of making India a resurgent republic are welcome to join this forum.”

We will be back with more details soon. My hope is that we can help bring about a change in India’s political and policy climate in the coming years.

From a 2-part series I wrote a year ago with Atanu Dey (Part 1 and Part 2):

India’s economic growth and development poses challenges that are clear but fortunately are solvable. The hard part is not in the figuring out the solutions but in the implementation, and more specifically in the prioritizing and sequencing of the implementation. The elements that require immediate and sustained effort relate to “infrastructural elements” which are few in number but form the absolutely necessary foundation upon which any functioning economy is based. These elements are interrelated in complex ways and if present simultaneously, they enable that emergent multi-dimensional phenomenon we call development. The elements are: Education, Energy, Urbanisation and Transportation.

This week’s links:

• 5 Innovative Online Business Models: Woot,Groupon, Hotwire, Blippy, Dubli.
• Platform Shifts: by Don Dodge, on why leaders fail to make the shift.
• Fragmentation in Mobiles: by Rich Wong. “The smartest entrepreneurs will not wait for these fragmentation issues to be solved but are figuring out now how to pick a use case, a core platform, and geography to bound their problem and get going.”
• The New Rules of War: from Foreign Policy. “Every day, the U.S. military spends $1.75 billion, much of it on big ships, big guns, and big battalions that are not only not needed to win the wars of the present, but are sure to be the wrong approach to waging the wars of the future.”
• The Future of Money: from Wired. “It’s Flexible, Frictionless and (Almost) Free.”

• Xaverian: I used to love writing for the school magazine. In the early years, I would excitedly open the latest issue to see if my article was published. In later years, I solved that problem by becoming one of the Editors!

• LBW on Thursdays: We were one of these rare schools that had Thursday as the holiday (rather than Saturday). I remember joining Leaders for a Better World (LBW) in school, as an alternative to Scouts. We would meet on Thursdays in School.  The event I used to look forward to was the Camp.

A recent memory is of taking Abhishek to school. One of the teachers retired a few months ago, and a few of us got together in her honour in the School Hall. I took Abhishek to school and showed him around. There’s a memory that will stay on with me for long: Father and son, separated by 37 years, standing together in front of some of the nature exhibits, outside the Staff Room.