16

22

STARTREK
PERSON OF THE WEEK

DONE DEALS

BigBasket,

Bengaluru; online delivery

platform for groceries; Mebelkart, Bengaluru; online retail portal;

ne meeting was all it took for Hrishikesh

Kulkarni to start working on the details of
Freshdesk's acquisition of his three-year-old
Bengaluru-based startup, 1Click. When Girish
(Mathrubootham of Freshdesk) made the offer, I called
my team, family and investors. Everybody was thrilled,
and you get a gut feeling, he says. Kulkarni grew up
and studied in Mumbai. He does not have an IIT or IIM
pedigree, but has 12 patents to his name, most of them
related to videoconferencing. The patents have helped
Kulkarni develop products that enable businesses to
collaborate. But Kulkarni is modest about the patents: I
got those patents when I was working for big
companies. These companies are insecure and need to
protect themselves. Kulkarni worked in three startups
in four years in the US. Two failed, one was acquired. He
then worked at Alcatel-Lucent and Logitech and moved
back to India. He calls himself a self-taught engineer. I
returned to India to become an entrepreneur but it took
me ten years to take the plunge due to family
commitments, he says.

founded by Ranjeet Vimal, Nikhil Saraf, Rahul

Agrawal; $20 million from AskMe

$50 million
from Helion, Zodius, and
Bessemer

Roposo, Gurgaon; fashion website; founded by

Avinash Saxena, Mayank Bhangadia; $15 million
from India Quotient, 5ideas.in, Tiger Global
OneAssist, Mumbai; management solutions
provider; founded by Gagan Maini and Subrat
Pani; $7.5 million from Lightspeed, Sequoia,
Assurant
IntelligenceNODE, Mumbai; consulting firm;

Hari Menon VS Sudhakar founded by Sanjeev Sularia, Yasen Dimitrov;

co-founder
co-founder
$4.3 million from New Enterprise Associates,
Orios Venture Partners

OTHERS WHO RAISED FUNDS

Scripbox ($2.5m), Zoojoo.BE ($1m), HyperVerge
($1m), BetaOut ($500k), Shadowfax ($300k),
Edu4share ($210k), VoxWeb ($100k), NDTV
Gadgets, GetLook, Fixy, MSM Box, VanityCube.in,
MassBlurb, Orobind, Twyst.in, Yourstory

Abhinay Choudhari
co-founder

THETHE
TIMES
OFOF
INDIA,
AHMEDABAD
TIMES
INDIA,
BENGALURU
FRIDAY,
FRIDAY,AUGUST
AUGUST21,
21,2015
2015

Source: Tracxn!

EUREKA
MOMENTS

s a student at Delhi
University, Ishita Anand
was part of a team that built
the universitys rst online
magazine. I was in a startup
without realizing it, she says.
At 22, when she was working
on an idea of her own, she realized how difcult fund raising
was. So, in 2013, she started
crowdfunding platform BitGiving. A campaign to raise
funds for the Indian
ice hockey team to
compete in the Asian
Championships
was a success.
Now I dont
have to explain
what my organization is about,
Ishita says.

ISHITA ANAND: GETTING CROWDS TO FUND

China is often regarded by foreign companies as impregnable. InMobi has demonstrated that it isnt.
The Indian ad network has become one of the leaders in its space in China, perhaps the first Indian
company to make an impact of that intensity. The way it has done it, has lessons for all

nubhab Goels rst

venture, soon after
completing his MBA-HR
from MDI Gurgaon in 2006,
failed. I couldnt handle it
alone, he says. Then came the
e-commerce wave, and Goel
wanted to be part of it. But do
what? One night in 2013, an
airconditioner in Goels room
malfunctioned and he couldnt
get a repairman. That
humid Mumbai day, he
and friend Amit Kumar
realized the need for
on-demand home
services, and thus
was born Zimmber.
The venture received funding from
IDG and Omdiyar
last month.
ANUBHAB GOEL: AT YOUR SERVICE

DOUBT

FIRE

How they breached the

In this column, young entrepreneurs ask questions

that they have found important in the course of
building their ventures, and Startrek gets
them answered by seasoned entrepreneurs,
investors and other startup experts

GREAT FIREWALL OF CHINA

Create a milestone-based
city launch plan
What are the best practices
in managing teams in
multiple cities as a company
expands rapidly while ensuring all
teams are independent as well as
centrally aligned and sharing best
practices?

Varun
Khaitan

CO-FOUNDER,
URBANCLAP,
AN ONLINE
MARKETPLACE
FOR SERVICES

The key to effective, consistent and sustainable

city-wise expansion is to have measurable indicators, dened milestones and effective transfer of
knowledge. Ive learnt the below from some companies
where Ive invested and from my own experiences:
First, before you start expanding:
z Build a process-wide key performance indicator (KPIs)
framework; this is the foundation
z Set up processes and document them
z Try and computerize as many processes as possible
Then, each city roll-out should follow a structured script:

z Create a milestone-based city launch plan

z Create a city launch team which goes from city to
city to launch. This team can be a
mix of people from existing cities
or a specialist launch team. It must
contain one recruiter who goes six
weeks ahead of the rest of the launch
team. In the rst four weeks, the
team should execute the milestones
which have been set; in parallel, the
recruiter should hire people locally.
From around the fth to the tenth
week, the city launch team should
transfer the processes and knowledge
to the local team
BEING CHINESE: It's goal-setting time for InMobi founders Naveen Tewari and Abhay Singhal, CFO Manish Dugar, their Chinese team, and its head Jessie Yang, at Beijing, in January

services companies trying to do that. The business has to be built by the Chinese. And trust
the local person to take the right decisions.
For the launch of its latest product Miip
in China earlier this week, all invites went
out on WeChat. At the event, Tewari spoke
his entire seven minutes in Mandarin, something that the company put a lot of effort
into. And unlike in the Miip launches in the
US and India, where Tewari hogged the
show, in China, most of the time was given
to Jessie Yang, head of China operations,
and Bill Qiu, head of business development
& publisher relations.

Sujit.John@timesgroup.com

LET'S LEARN THE CHINESE WAYS

aveen Tewari is now a regular invitee to what China

calls the G20, a select group
of internet companies that
come together to discuss the
future of the internet. He
represents InMobi, the Indian mobile ad network that he co-founded
in 2007, at these meetings, sitting alongside
the heads of some of the biggest internet
companies in the region, including Tencent,
Alibaba, Baidu, Huawei, and SoftBank.
The G20 is a quasi-government initiative,
and InMobi is invited because it is the second
biggest mobile ad network in China; Tencents
WeChat is the Goliath in the space. InMobi
entered China in 2012, and reached the No 2
spot in barely two years. But since WeChat is
an app that serves ads within itself, InMobi
is seen as Chinas biggest independent ad
network, one that serves ads across a multitude of apps.
Tewari says he has never felt in the G20
meetings that China wants to keep out external folk. The preconceived notion is China
is hard to crack. But China has evolved a lot
since the early days of banning Google. They
feel they have to open up or be left behind. All
the big Chinese companies are coming to India Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, Xiaomi and
they have global ambitions. They realize it
cannot be one-sided ambition, he says.

As Indians we are fascinated

by the Western world. But in
terms of demography and
sociology, China is exactly like India;
only the political system is different.
So we can learn more from China than
from the US. Chinese companies are
aggressively coming to India. They
know mobile so well that they will
know how to capture market share in
India. For our own survival, we need
to learn from them. We cant make excuses like I dont know the language.
Take Paytm, they are also learning
from China, given Alibabas involvement with them.

Leader must be global-local

Abhay Singhal | CO-FOUNDER, INMOBI

a Chinese mindset. Its a very different culture and we just dont know the language, says
Abhay Singhal, InMobi co-founder and chief
revenue officer. He remembers the first time
he landed in China. Nothing that I was used
to could be accessed in China no Gmail, no
Hotmail, no Yahoo, no Google; most of the
familiar apps dont work. Customers would
invariably ask for my QQ number, which was
the biggest messaging service (now its called
WeChat). They dont work with email, or
phone numbers, he says.
The Chinese are hierarchical. The boss is
God. So communications have to be top-down.
The whole system is extremely aggressive
and everything moves fast. Indian systems
and processes cannot handle that. The sales
folk are so aggressive that in China we give
commissions for every transaction, not periodic bonuses as elsewhere, Tewari says.
Singhal notes that Chinese work at least
one-and-a-half times more than Indians.
China knows that the only way to succeed is
to move fast. So you have to multiply all your
definitions of scale by 10x in China, he says.
Singhal is clear: Never send Indians to
build your business in China. I have seen IT

Build a Chinese mindset

Globally, InMobi has a network that rivals
Google and Facebook, but Tewari describes
the company's success in China as unbelievable. We have grown ten-fold in China in
the last three years. Our popularity in China
is ten times that in India. All big customers
there know what InMobi does. And it shows
the openness of China, he says.
Tewari and others in the InMobi leadership are convinced other Indian companies
can be similarly successful, but they note that
it has to be tackled differently from many
other parts of the world.
The most important element is to acquire

Given the need to localize, the leaders you

choose for your Chinese ops have, obviously,
to be Chinese. It must also be global quality
talent, says Tewari. Yang has an MBA degree
from MIT and has worked at several global
companies, including McKinsey. Qiu studied
at MIT, and worked at McKinsey and Baidu.
There are lots of such talent. They are
expensive, but extremely ethical, aware of
Western ways of working, and have good control over the English language, says Singhal.
Yang says she lived in the US for ten years,
so she has a global view. But thats not good
enough. You have to also know the local market really, really well. China is the most dynamic mobile market in the world. Alibaba
and Tencent are among the worlds biggest
internet companies, so theres huge local competition. This means we have to move very
fast, adapt, she says.

China at the same time as we did globally,

and in some cases, like with our native ad
service, we launched first in China, he says.
The payment infrastructure in China is
dominated by mobile wallets like Alipay and
WePay. So partnering with wallet players is
critical for commerce. For tracking and analytics in the domestic market, Chinese advertisers are most comfortable with local players.
So again, InMobi had to identify the best of
these local analytics players, and build deep
technical partnerships with each of them,
allowing them to extend their targeting and
optimization capabilities to advertisers working with them.
Our product and technology has always
been ahead of competitors. Every quarter we
bring a new product, says Yang, explaining
why InMobi has been the most successful international internet company in China.

JV not a good idea

The company says you should avoid a joint
venture if you can. In some areas like media,
communication, messaging, and money transactions, the country will not allow an independent business, and you will necessarily
have to do a joint venture. But in all other
areas, it is feasible. It becomes easier to execute if you are independent. Few JVs have
been successful in China, says Tewari.
But you will require a license if you plan
to go as an independent company. This delayed our entry by 5-6 months, made it a little
uncertain. But eventually, you are masters of
your own destiny, Singhal says.

Create for China

No government interference

Mobile is by far the most dominant screen in

China, which is the worlds biggest and most
dynamic mobile market. No wonder the product you deploy in China has to be hugely customized. Piyush Shah, InMobis chief product officer, says initially the company would
launch products and services for the English- speaking audience, and then take it to
China. But we realized quickly that doesnt
work. The Chinese appetite for trying out
new things is very high. So we started
launching new products and services in

The common perception is that the Chinese

government is like a big brother constantly
watching over you. Tewari says nothing
can be farther from the truth. We have
never met government officials, except at
the time we needed a license to set up the
company, he says. He goes on to note that
India-China collaboration is a big new
trend. Its a new world order. We are similar countries, hungry, aggressive, mobilefirst. So China is a land of huge opportunities for Indians, he says.

Rehan Yar Khan

GENERAL PARTNER,
ORIOS VENTURE
PARTNERS

Lastly, to ensure quality sustenance and improvement

post launch:
z Set up a city monitoring team which ensures standard
compliance across cities. You can use a compliance
framework like ISO or Six Sigma. This framework should
be a key part of the process.
z Hold regular calls/meetings to collect learnings across
cities and upgrade processes
z Maintain a knowledge Wiki and keep it updated
z It also helps to have inuential members from a city
work in another city for some time to exchange best
practices.

Make employees believe

they are part of a mission
Even after raising $500k - $1.5
million kind of seed rounds,
startups find it difficult to hire for
key positions. There is a big mismatch
between what they can pay and what
these executives are being paid at larger Avinash Saurabh
or more fund-rich startups. In such a
FOUNDER,
scenario, what kind of hiring strategy
ZOOJOO.BE, A SOCIAL
WELLNESS PLATFORM
should a startup follow?

You have to bring key hires on "mission" salaries not "market" salaries. For this to happen
you have to set out to shape the market and
aspire for something bigger than just doing dhanda.
Zappos took this approach even when selling shoes.
In India, Team Indus uses this method to,
sometimes, hire at 10% of their
market salaries!

People love to be part of a mission that

is larger than life. This is why open
source thrives. Think of it people write
for Wikipedia for free, stay anonymous
Sharad Sharma
and yet love the experience. Foradian, in
CO-FOUNDER,
Bengaluru, has leveraged this dynamic
ISPIRT
brilliantly. They've gone open source, hired
some good people and prospered. Bottomline is that if you become a missionary entrepreneur,
attracting others who buy into the quest becomes a
lot simpler. All this sounds counter-intuitive, perhaps
even crazy, to a traditional businessman but it works
like a charm. Try it!

BEAUTY CLICKS
On-demand
beauty services
have emerged
as one of the
hottest new
sectors of 2015.
These startups
aggregate
beauty service
providers who
deliver the
service at
customer
homes

More than

Of these,

75

STARTUPS THAT HAVE

23

startups were created in the space over

the last 12 months

RAISED MONEY

have created
good traction with
consumers

OF THE

23
8
BENGALURU

7
MUMBAI

4
NCR

2 2
PUNE OTHERS
Source: Tracxn!

Yuvraj
Singh

Vyomo

StayGlad

Backed by
cricketer
Yuvraj Singh

Sahil
Barua,
Tracxn Labs

GetLook

VanityCube.in

Undisclosed
angels

Undisclosed
angels

The Home
Salon

Belita*

*Except Belita,
all the startups were
funded in 2015
Most of them report an
average ticket size of
around Rs 1,000

Sahil
Barua

STARTUPS THAT
SHUT SHOP
z Orange N Lemon
z Beauty On Call

Venture Nursery

India
Quotient

z BeautifyMe
z GetMyLooks

OTHERS WHO ALSO COMPETE

WITH ON-DEMAND STARTUPS
PURPLLE

ZIFFI

NYKAA

Focuses on
Lets
Positions
beauty
consumers
itself as a
beauty
products and book spa and
appointments salon appoint- e-commerce
at spas
ments online
site