Author: Rajesh Jain

We have chosen 11 winners. Each of the winners will receive a copy of Atanu’s book “Transforming India: Big Ideas for a Developed India” soon.

The winners:

1. FirstBallSix
2. Aaren
3. Mockingbuddha
4. Sushil
5. Umang Saini
6. Prakash
7. Rakesh Babu
8. Pratik Mhatre
9. Jeevak Kasarkod
10. Anshuman Goenka
11. Abhishek Puri

Congratulations to the winners, and thanks to everyone for having participate. Hopefully, the process of thinking about what India needs and getting these ideas to policy makers in government will continue.

Over the coming days, I will reproduce sections from the winning entries.

Thanks very much for the response to the Big Ideas for India Contest. There were 150 responses in all to the 13 questions. I want to thank you all for the participation, and apologise in advance if you thought your answer was better than one of the winners we have picked. There is always a subjectiveness in the process of judging. I hope that you learnt something thinking through the challenges we face in India, and that you will continue to explore the topics going ahead.

A couple points to note: The winning entries do reflect in many ways the bias Atanu and I have towards what needs to be done in India. Also, we did the judging on April 22-23, so a few entries that came in later could not be considered.

As Atanu and I sifted through the entries and the diversity of responses, we realised that it wasn’t easy picking the winners. In retrospect, I should have probably asked the questions in one go, asked you to pick one or more questions to answer, and then provided a structure for the responses – outline the pain point, propose the solution, and do so in about 300 words. These are learnings for the future that I will keep in mind.

I am more than convinced that India needs big ideas and dramatic transformation going ahead, and it is our generation that has to help in that process. We have to pick one of the two national parties, and participate in the system. The 2014 elections will come at a critical time for India’s future. We have three years of groundwork that can be done in creating awareness and driving action in the chosen areas of our specialisation to bring good ideas to life.

I will announce the winners tomorrow, followed by reposting excerpts from the winning entries (including a few that were sent directly to me and therefore did not appear in the comments).

To the winners: I will get in touch with each of you personally to ensure that I can send a copy of the prize (Atanu’s book) soon to you.

From a series of two posts last year:

I was talking to a friend recently on the problems of early-stage investing in tech companies India:

• lack of  serial/successful entrepreneurs whom investors can bet on
• limitations of the digital (Internet and mobile) marketspaces (in terms of revenue opportunity) in India
• dearth of risk capital (from angels and VCs)
• not enough mentors to guide early-stage companies through the challenging initial years
• poor digital infrastructure (broadband, 3G) which limits scope in the domestic market

In this context, it is no surprise that the whole investment cycle has shifted: angels act like VCs, VCs act like PEs and PEs like banks. There are many entrepreneurs who start off, but end up in  struggle because of limited capital. So, can something be done about this?

In India in the tech space, only a few companies end up getting funded. My guess is that out of every 100 companies that start off, less than 5 end up with adequate capital to build their business. So, what can be done to change this?

What many of these early-stage companies need is a combination of capital and management expertise. For this, they should be willing to give up a significant stake – provided they have not managed to raise capital for an extended period of time (say, a year). In this situation, the product/solution already exists. But it has not succeeded in the market for a number of reasons: the idea itself could be bad, the lack of money makes for decisions that are not optimal for the business, the company is not able to hire the people, or the business model itself needs some change.

In this scenario, what the company needs is a combination of cash and top-notch talent. Rather than go down the path of the “living dead”, the company should be open to bringing in an entity or a group of people which takes up 40-50% stake and can also help drive the company’s execution process. Money required will be about Rs 5-10 crore ($1-2 million). This will provide a lifeline for the company in the short-term, and an opportunity to succeed in the medium-term.

This week’s links:

• Crafting Best-in-Class Business Intelligence: from strategy+business.
• How Genius Works: from The Atlantic. “We enlisted some of America’s foremost artists to discuss the sometimes messy, frequently maddening, and almost always mysterious process of creating something new.”
• The Unlit Social Graph: by Lawrence Coburn. “Much like the Dark Web, there exists network upon network not yet graphed by Facebook, waiting to be mapped, organized, and optimized for communication.This is the unlit social graph, and this is where Facebook is vulnerable.”
• 2 New Books on Entrepreneurship: reviewed on 800-CEO-Read. 6 Secrets to Startup Success: How to Turn Your Entrepreneurial Passion Into a Thriving Business, and The Entrepreneur Equation: Evaluating the Realities, Risks, and Rewards of Having Your Own Business.
  
• India as a soft state: by Chandan Mitra. “A weak Government; a Prime Minister besotted with Pakistan irrespective of its hostility towards us; a complete disconnect between the vocal section of the urban elite that has arrogated to itself the title of civil society and the vast rural community; an increasingly irresponsible electronic media pushing the case of anarchism while pursuing commercial gains; and a flabby, largely corrupt political class served by an equally incompetent and venal bureaucracy, have combined to make India lose its sense of direction.” Also see: Is India’s growth economically sustainable? (from WSJ)

For your vacation last June-July, we travelled to China (Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Shanghai). You also did the two annual trips to Surat where SaifaliMasi and Niyati (who is just a year older than you) live. We also went to Lonavla to attend my cousin’s wedding. The times when we travel are the ones I love because it maximises our time together.

On most days, we get our 45-60 minutes together every morning after you wake up at 6 am. Our morning time ends with me giving you bath. Which reminds me: this year, you better learn to bathe on your own. And hopefully, you will also start sleeping in your own room – I know you love your Mom and cannot be without her, but every kid has to grow up!

Your Mom is the centre of your life – as she always has been. Watching the two of you together has always been an absolute delight. Now, with your snappy answers, it has become even more fun. You are not afraid to take her on – in a way I never could!

Your world is one of being in the present moment. You can’t read – though you can do enough pattern recognition to browse Amazon.com on your own in search of beyblades. You can barely write – and yet you don’t forget the important things. Your body clock works better than the ones that tell time. Your lose yourself in the world of your TV characters for half hour every evening as you have dinner – Chotta Bheem, Ninja Hattori, Doraemon and the absolutely obnoxious Oggy and the Cockroaches.

Yours is a wonderful world. It is one that I love to get lost in every so often. Are you ready for another game of Hide-and-Seek?

Happy Birthday, Abhishek!

You are currently learning swimming. And you are quite good at it. Your instructor is impressed by your enthusiasm and yet you push your relatively smallish body to do more. You learnt Skating in the first half of the year – and actually won a second prize in the competition at the end.

Your Sports Day came and went, and, well, you completed the two races. Let’s leave it at that. In your Annual Concert, you were a Magic Fish. Earlier this year, you did a good job in class speaking about the Golden Toad as part of a project on extinct and endangered Animals. Now, your school project is on old Bombay with the class mothers frantically doing all the work. I wonder what you will do.

School for you is from 8 am to 12:40 pm. From August, you will be in first standard, and will be in school till 2:40 pm. Life will change then. Maybe, you will need to do some homework. Right now, on the rare days that you need to do some writing on the weekend, you are quite good at not just delaying it right till the end, but also stretching it to an extent that tests your Mom’s patience to the extreme!

Continued tomorrow.

You are an only child, and as such have the concomitant benefits. But you also have no shortage of kids around you – Siddharth and Maya (my sister’s kids who are 9 and 7 years, respectively) next-door ensure you don’t miss the presence of siblings as you grow up. Siddharth is your idol and you learn an incredible number of things from him.

At school, you have made some very good friends. One of them, Vibhav, stands out. The positive about your school is that being co-ed you are growing up with a healthy respect for girls! Given your still-somewhat-mild manner in school, everyone is your friend!

Talking of school, it is good  that your handwriting has improved dramatically, along with some progress on the drawing front. Many months ago, tired of waiting for accolades in class from the teacher, you asked me to take some stamps that you could give yourself at home. The titles – Fantastic, Keep It Up, Excellent, Fabulous, Very Good, and your favourite and most sought after, Neat Work.

Continued tomorrow.

Until a few months ago, your likes included trains and aeroplanes, cash registers to play with, Geronimo Stilton books to read every morning and stories from Jainism. Few of those interests remain. Now, you are a walking encyclopedia on beyblades and mobile phones. One of our regular conversations is which model should be my next mobile phone. You have become my research assistant!

Over the past six-odd months, the soft, quiet baby has become an aggressive, boisterous kid. You are willing to answer back – and have sharp replies ready for every occasion. Your inventive brain has become very good at making excuses when they are needed and justifying errors when they happen. You even question and argue with your Mom – so much so that she sometimes rues the loss of innocence.

Of course, that was to be expected. That world was fun while it lasted. And we better get used to a new, improved kid at home!

Continued tomorrow.

Dear Abhishek,

This Tuesday on April 19, you will be six. I have used every one of your birthdays to write a letter to you capturing key transitions in your life and my own impressions watching you grow.

Now that you are older and can understand much more, I told you about my letter and asked what I should write about your likes. Here is your list from a couple weeks ago: beyblades, 3D puzzles/models, Angry Birds on the iPad, taking photos on my Nokia E71, mobiles, skylines, Juju biya (the thin yellow blanket that you sleep with), Govinda pizza, doing aarti at home every night and Mummy’s thapthap (light patting so you can fall asleep).

It didn’t take much time for you to rattle that off. If I had asked you the same question at the start of the year, there would probably have been no more than an item or two common. And I guess I can say the same for how things will be a year from now – or even a few months from now. That’s how fast your world changes.

Continued tomorrow.

From a post a year ago:

If there was ONE thing you could Change about India, what would it be?

Middle India Apathy towards the nation. It is almost as if most of us in Middle India (young, educated in urban India) have switched off from trying to make a difference to what we see happening around us. It reflects in the voting percentages in urban areas, in the quality of candidates that we see contesting for elections, in the deteriorating quality of life in cities in India, and in the debates that we have for what India needs to become.

What is India’s Greatest Asset?

I also think that Middle India is the country’s greatest asset — if it can get its act together. The Rich don’t really care to bring about Change — they are beneficiaries of the existing system so status quo is good enough for them. The Poor cannot bring about Change. It is we in the Middle who are the country’s hope. We have the benefits of education, growing incomes, material benefits that are more than what our parents had. We need to get more engaged in defining our country’s future.