True Calling

My, my.. it was September 2009 when I last posted a blog entry. Well, we can blame twitter and facebook for that a little bit, but what I realized is that blog posts are effective when you can write from your true voice, and let's say I spent 2009 finding my true voice (and glad to report that it's been found ;)

This blog used to be called "business intelligence adventures" because that was my sole profession when I started this blog back in 2005. Since then, a lot's happened - our company Loyalty Matrix got acquired by Responsys where I spent about 2 years (part of the acquisition deal). Then in 2009, we started a new company OpenI - building on the open source business intelligence project we'd started in 2005, and also to scale the partnership we'd developed with Codemandu, our off-shore partner in Kathmandu, Nepal. It's been great to be back in start-up mode again, and the progress at OpenI is very satisfying and rewarding.

However, life is full of strange but powerful co-incidences.

During my 2 years between Loyalty Matrix acquisition and starting OpenI, I started becoming more fascinated with the clean energy industry, and wondered how I could get in. Perhaps part of it was my own mortality trying to find a way into my profession - I wanted my work to contribute towards more serious issues our world faces today.

Then in February 2009, a funny thing happened:

I was on a short trip to Kathmandu to kick-off a project. Right around then, Nepal was hit by its worst energy crisis, and the government-run power company (Nepal Electrical Authority, NEA) had issued a 16-hour daily blackout ("load shedding"). Needless to say, our software development staff was severely impacted. They bought hordes of batteries and inverters, but when you only have 8 hours of electricity per day, that too in two 4-hour slots, it's hard to adequately charge your battery bank. So we looked for alternatives, and the suggestion was to buy a diesel generator.

Not only the clean energy freak in me cringed at this, but the noise, fumes, etc. would be too much of an irritant to have within an office full of sofware developers. Now, I'd seen a lot of homes and businesses in the San Francisco bay area switching to solar power - so we explored if solar would be an option. Turns out there were about 40 solar companies in Nepal - but none of them could provide us with a solution.

First off, they all focused on rural electrification (which is a noble cause, also helped by government subsidies), and the types of systems they offered were just for basic lighting. We were told "solar can't power up heavy equipments like computer servers" :)

So -- an idea was born. Can we build an organization that can provide solar electricity as a viable backup option for urban homes and businesses in Nepal who need more than just basic lights?


A year after - I am happy to report that we just launched our solar energy company in Nepal - Gham Power - that just does that.

Of course, just like many other entrepreneurial adventures, this involved a lot of crazy things. I attened a Clean Energy certificate program at UC-Berkeley to learn more about solar technology and the financial structures to make it feasible. My wonderful friends Mike McCarthy and his dad Tom McCarthy introduced us to Solar Power Inc, a great solar company (public) out of Roseville, CA - who agreed to become a partner and help us bring one of the best solar technology to Nepal. Friends and family pitched in like never before -- both in the US as well as in Nepal -- to make this idea a reality. We had interesting adventures with the Nepali government, shipping companies, banks, vendors (topics for other posts). We put together a truly kick-ass executive team to run the company in Nepal. It's been a truly amazing process.

And to ensure our work with OpenI doesn't take a back seat to this - we got more help into the company so it continues to excel in its independent course, as evidenced by the new and exciting projects we've had the opportunity to participate recently.

Of course, we have a lot of work ahead of us. I'll probably also go nuts travelling back and forth between San Francisco and Kathmandu. I can't thank my wife and kids enough to be so greatly understanding to let me pursue this (I know I'm stretching the limits of their generosity and kindness). I feel truly blessed.

Being a technology geek, one of the hardest thing for me was to accept that it's okay to pursue what you are passionate about even if you don't have much experience or if that wasn't your area of training in school. Also, being an entrepreneur is about creating and growing companies, not necessarily being involved in running the company. I had severe doubts about what will happen to OpenI (and my personal career as a Business Intelligence software guy) if I went after my solar energy dream, but it turns out, they don't need to be conflicting.

One of the hardest lessons is to figure out how you can focus on your core strengths, and then bring in other smart people as business partners to do things which are not necessariy your core strengths. They probably teach this from day one of Entrepreneurship 101, but it's amazing how easily we can fall into the trap of not applying this to the businesses we build.

So, I am changing the blog title to "Adventures in Entrepreneurship" and will continue to share my experiences (more frequently). I'd also love to hear from other entrepreneurs out there about their experiences (similar and different). At the moment, I am just happy to have found a true voice to communicate, and look forward to sharing new adventures.

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Healthcare Debate Explained on Back of a Napkin

Author and visual thinker Dan Roam does an amazing job of explaining what the healthcare debate is all about, all with pictures drawn on the back of a napkin . Here's a link to his blog where he provides more commentary on this, or you can check out the slideshows below:

Healthcare Napkins All

View more documents from Dan Roam.

I wish the media took a cue from this to put the politics and business aside and actually explain the fundamentals of this debate, instead of all the FUD that's been going on in the townhall meetings.

BTW - if you haven't checked out Dan Roam's work on visual thinking called Back of the Napkin -- be sure to check it out. Good stuff!

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Another New Beginning

This week I completed my tenure as an employee at Responsys and started my new venture OpenI -- a company that provides open source business intelligence software and services to businesses that want to be data-driven in their operational strategy.

I guess you can call me a serial entrepreneur now, since OpenI will be my fourth startup -- last one being Loyalty Matrix, which was acquired by Responsys in 2007. I am happy to say that the marketing analytics technology we built at Loyalty Matrix found a way to express itself as Responsys's own analytics product Interact Insight. It was interesting to see the formal structures it requires in a more established company to release a product -- valuable lessons that I'll surely apply in future product releases. It is also great that Responsys will remain a client of OpenI, so that we can advance this technology in a mutually beneficial fashion (and also that OpenI has a few clients from the get go :-).

OpenI will partner with Codemandu, a software development company in Kathmandu, Nepal that has provided the engineering help for OpenI in the past. Codemandu will help us deliver support and integration work for our clients. So -- if you have software projects in business intelligence, reporting, and/or analytics (or know of someone who does) -- we are here for you :-) Basically, if you are an on-demand company that stores transactional data for your customers, we can help you build an on-demand analytics product based on OpenI -- something you can private-label and up-sell to your customers.

So, needless to say -- next couple of months are going to be crazy, and pretty exciting. Personally, I have a lot of pent-up ideas on making BI more accessible and actionable, and we will be toying around with these ideas in OpenI. And given the nature of open source, these experimentations will happen in public domain -- and so you'll see some fun stuff appear on this blog and OpenI site.

The BI landscape has definitely evolved since OpenI started back in 2005. Most of the big guys (Busienss Objects, Hyperion, Cognos, SPSS) have been acquired by even bigger guys (SAP, Oracle, IBM). On the open source BI side, Pentaho and JasperSoft have done a remarkable job in leading the sector. Plus there has been a great deal of movement in on-demand BI as well - with Swivel, GoodData, and PivotLink, and also at desktop level with Tableau. We will definitely give our best shot to stand on the shoulders of these giants and raise the bar a bit differently.

I recall Sting (lead singer of The Police, for the benefit of our younger readers) say this in a Rolling Stone interview once when asked about his unique singing voice -- something like "Nobody can sing like me -- I'm not saying that I have the best voice in Rock 'n Roll, it's more like someone can sing better or worse, but they can't sing exactly like me"

So, this I can say -- OpenI will be unique in its approach to BI. Stay tuned..

cheers,

Sandeep

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Indians give a Middle Finger to their General Election

No, literally.

See -- yesterday was general election in India, and here is how Amitabh Bachchan describes the whole affair in his blog: 

So when the four of us are asked by paparazzi, to show our fingers in acknowledgment of us having punched our votes, we show it to them. It is another matter that, the Government marks our middle finger with an indelible ink, to avoid duplication and therefore unfair electoral procedures. Showing of the middle finger in the Western world apparently has different connotations. So I guess, in usual fashion, that is all that the press shall flash tomorrow !! And for those that may miss it here is the photo..!!

And in his post today, there are gobs of other pictures of everyone from common citizens to police to celebrities showing their pride in the democratic process. See for yourself

.. and we worry about "hanging chads" :-)

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Donate Blood, Feel Good

I donated blood today at blood centers of the pacific (www.bloodcenters.org). They have this new machine they call Alex. As it draws blood, it separates the RBC from plasma in real time (in this picture I took as blood was being drawn, the packet on the right is "whole blood", middle one is separated RBC, and the one on left is plasma) and it puts the plasma back into your veins. Benefits of this are - more RBC gets collected, blood donor stays hydrated, a lot of time is saved compared to old methods of separating the blood cells later in the lab, thus delaying the availability of blood for transfusions.

But most of all, it feels good.

Find your closest donation center and just go. You will be glad you did.

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Conquerer of Crises

Prayer lamps @ Sankata Mandir - Kathmandu, Nepal

I've been on sort of a hiatus all summer (if you can't tell from the blog posts or lack thereof). Anyway, I worked from our Kathmandu (Nepal) office for almost all of July/August, and also spent quality time with the entire extended family.

It's one thing to read and hear about globalization, but utterly amazing when you are smack dab in the middle of it. Kathmandu is, well, increasingly chaotic. A coalition government is struggling to restore stability, while there are protests of all kinds happening on a daily basis, sometimes going to the extremes of calling a "bandh" (general strike), which mostly means no vehicles allowed on the streets (except for ambulances and tourist buses, after all the local economy badly needs the tourists).

Still, life goes on, people figure out a way to get their business done. For IT-based businesses, these "bandh"'s really don't matter a lot. "High-speed" (usually 128 kbps) connection literally provides the information superhighway to get past the "bandh". Let's just hope no one stops the traffic there.

For logical thinkers, it is hard to explain how the city/country functions at all -- but it does, and has been doing so for quite some time. The rate of technology adoption is just nuts. Entrepreneurship is on the rise. All the while an uncertain political climate looms, but perhaps people have figured out over time -- this too shall pass -- and carry a strange confidence that their families, jobs, businesses will somehow always find a way to survive.

The Sankata Mandir is an old temple right in the heart of old Kathmandu. We got there as I followed my family through lots of temples. I was mostly looking after the kids, not being much for organized religion myself, but hoping somehow this might help our young ones develop an appreciation for the higher powers. Most of these temple, I'm sorry to say, are uninspiring -- but something about Sankata felt different. Perhaps it's the name -- a loose translation will be "conquerer of crises" -- that symbolized the current state of Kathmandu and Nepal.

And so even after all the daily accounts of various "crises" -- I came back hopeful, for just like these prayer lamps in Sankata Mandir, there are enough souls in Nepal that carry a strong yet silent power inside them. While these people claim they don't know what's keeping the place together in midst of these chaos, they don't need to look any further, just need to look inside themselves. I truly hope they conquer all their crises.

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Better Blogging by Chemistry

Elliott Ng, a friend, ex-colleague and fellow blogger, has put an interesting commentary on Top 10 tips from (to) a novice blogger posted by Avinash Kaushik.

My take on it is that a blog's success depends on how effective it is in starting conversations -- which means you either get comments like this, or someone links your post on their blog expanding on the topic -- or simply email the link around with some comments.

Why would someone do that?

Well, only if they actually care about what you write about. And caring is more of an emotional response rather than intellectual one. Scoble, Doc Searls, et al really stress on "having a voice", which happens when you combine passion and get awawy from corporate-speak, IMHO.

Scoble's point on being easy to find is also important -- but instead of going the SEO route, it is more important to find interesting conversations in the blogosphere and participate. If you are an active participator with a unique and compelling voice, the search engines are bound to pick you up.

Personally, I found it helpful to write a post outlining my reasons for blogging -- and to the rest of the bloggers out there, novice and experts alike, I'd love to lob the question -- what have you found to be most effective at starting conversations? Was it different than what you'd initially expected?

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