

Why Indian Startups need to get off their asses and learn to program - rohitarondekar
http://indianstartupgyaan.wordpress.com/2011/01/13/why-indian-startups-need-to-get-off-their-asses-and-learn-to-program/

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hartror
I don't think this is limited to India, we have had plenty of offers of
"partnerships" etc from people with ideas. Our response has been to quote a
minimum viable product cost and tell them to go find funding.

Some have come back to us with a budget and things have been built. But
without a dedicated tech team studying the product they have a really tough
time.

The reason we don't partner is non technical people _always_ underestimate the
work required to build, maintain and grow a product. The equity share on offer
is simply not worth the risk but the people with the idea don't see it like
that.

We've had some great ideas pitched to us too, it has been sad to see the ideas
attached to people we didn't want to work with.

~~~
ianl
Its the age old ideas are easy, execution is hard because there are just so
many faucets to the process.

~~~
something
spoken like a true plumber

~~~
neworbit
You're not a true plumber until mushrooms make you grow to twice normal size
and shoot fireballs

~~~
ido
Actually it's the flowers that make you shoot fireballs.

~~~
dguaraglia
Please don't forget that certain type of leaves will give you raccoon-like
tail and ears and, somehow, the ability to fly.

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redthrowaway
I'm floored by the irony of Indian startups outsourcing their software
development.

~~~
gvb
Good. Cheap. Pick one.

In a previous life we outsourced to Indian companies because it saved a lot of
money (on paper)[1]. The good ones seemed competent, but they weren't cheap so
we didn't use them. The cheap ones we _did_ use (disclaimer: limited
experience and observations) were staffed by young, inexperienced engineers.
The code I worked with, I would put at second year CompSci level.

Incidentally, coding standards are quite limited in their ability to raise the
competence level of software.

One example was the coding standard requirement that the number of global
variables was to be minimized. In this particular application, there was only
one global variable. Minimized pretty well... until I saw it was a typedefed
struct, the struct was _huge_ and had several nested structs in it. Abort
Retry [FAIL].

Another example in the same application, there were several (not one, not two,
but _several_ ) funny looking loops that called a function, passing a _bunch_
of parameters. After puzzling through the code, I realized that the code had
failed the McCabe complexity measurement, so they had simply _cut out the guts
of the loop and made it a called function._ That wasn't the worst of it... the
icing was that they _passed the loop counter as a pointer and side-effect
modified it in the called function._ Owwwwwwwwww!

[1] My gross observation was that it took 3x longer to get a job done, but we
paid the outsource company 1/2 as much as the internal engineers. The way
accountants run numbers, the longer it took an outsource company to get the
job done, the more they thought the company saved.

~~~
hartror
Isn't it:

    
    
        Quality, price, speed pick any two.

~~~
redthrowaway
I don't think quality and cheap are compatible. I can't envision a scenario
whereby a project taking a long time will allow it to be done cheaply and
well.

~~~
jarek
Breed monkeys, give them keyboards, wait a million years.

~~~
redthrowaway
Even then, you'd still only get Perl.

------
sandGorgon
ordinarily, I wouldnt reply to this - but this potentially affects my
business, so here goes:

You dont need to be a good programmer to build a great software business.
There are innumerable instances of non-programmers building great business.
And especially while churning out your MVP, you could do much worse than
outsourcing your product and instead, driving sales. There is a bloated sense
of elitism in writing your own code - while I certainly subscribe to "once a
geek, always a geek" personality, the insistence that the CEO/CFO/CXO should
be a coder is not entirely healthy.

I run an outsourcing business and our first few (and currently one) customer
are Silicon Valley startups, some of which got acquired in the course of time.
And we are not expensive - the lowest we have gone is 1/3rd the silicon valley
salary rate for a 10 year experienced engineer (this was when the project was
large enough).

As far as India is concerned, I have had an interesting discussion with
@plinkplonk over here - India has orders of magnitude more people and
engineers than most other countries. So yes, there is a high signal-to-noise
ratio to finding people... not unusual in any large economy. When comparing
skill levels to countries like Eastern Europe, I will admit you have a better
chance of finding good engineers there, just because you need to be very good
to be able to make money like that. [[ Read what I just wrote AGAIN - I didnt
say europeans are better than indians in general. I said YOU would have a
better chance at finding them in a smaller place.]]

I wouldnt presume to go and tell you how to go and find your
employees/outsourcing partners, but remember this: At the end of the day,
India has a huge talent pool - in this day of an overheated Silicon Valley/NY
job market, how do you go about leveraging this talent pool ? Use the fact
that a good Indian salary is a fraction of American salary - these are the
same people who migrate to silicon valley and pull a Vinod Khosla or Ram
Shriram. There is no real truth to the fact that cheap==poor when exchange
rates play to your advantage.

~~~
zaph0d
Just to clarify, the article didn't indicate that the CEO/CFO/COO needs to
learn programming to get off the ground. The non-technical founder can at the
least onboard a technical co-founder or build an internal tech. team. If a
non-tech. person outsources the product, how will he/she be able to figure out
if the outsourcing firm is bluffing or creating bad products?

~~~
sandGorgon
good question - and the answer to that is the way we got our first customers.
We used to do two weeks of work free and if they still wanted to work with us,
the 2 weeks get retroactively billed. These days, we have a sufficiently low
walk-away penalty for the initial weeks.

We never lost a customer.. and we did work with non-technical, although smart,
people.

~~~
zaph0d
A two week trial is fine, but that still doesn't let non-technical people
discover flaws in design/architecture/code.

------
enry_straker
Am i the only one here who finds this post a bit immature?

Any fairly serious startup needs a good business culture for it to grow and
mature, and not just a reliance on technology alone. There have been a lot of
tech organizations which crash and burn not because they don't have a good
tech team, but because of their lack of business acumen. A look at the US
DotCom Bubble should help in this regard.

1\. When the author starts off with "Indian Startups need to get off their
asses and learn to program" he indirectly implies that they don't - without
providing any real evidence to back up his assertion.

2\. The author of the post just bases his generalizations on getting a lot of
emails from potential entrepreneurs. Hell, he should just check out craigslist
to find a lot of folks with get-rich quick schemes with little to no technical
background. The phenomenon of get-rich-quick entrepreneurs in not unique to
any one culture.

If the author and his team does not want to be shocked by such emails, they
should investigate something called a spam filter. It might reduce their shock
reactions.

3\. He draws conclusions like "these folks have no tech capability whatsoever
and feel that technology is trivial and can be outsourced."

Maybe they do, maybe they don't. One cannot generalize an entire country's
tech culture based on a few half-assed emails. I don't consider every nigerian
i meet as a scammer.

4\. If he has just resorted to gross exaggerations, that would be OK. It's his
opinion, and he has every right to it. When he starts by condescendingly
suggesting that potential entrepreneurs learn programming and being lazy and
wondering why such folks get VC-funding, he seems to come across arrogantly.

5\. Outsourcing is a part of the global IT landscape, and India, more than any
other nation, has benefited enormously from it. Every major IT vendor, from
Microsoft to Oracle to Sun to Google has opened indian operations and has
hired programmers by the thousands. Does the author imply that these
organizations lack a tech culture, since they take advantage of indian
outsourcing in a big way? His suggestions seem to suggest that the article's
focus is on internet startups, but he does not mention that. He also seems to
lump product development with internet-based services.

The irony is that the few valid points he makes regarding usability,
Simplicity and performance is completely masked by his condescending tone.

------
kloc
I feel problem in India(not sure about other regions) is that more people get
into Software/IT for money than for the love of technology. We will be better
off leaving technology to people who get it or love doing it.
Convincing/asking people to learn to program will hardly produce stellar
startups.

Then, I think there is no harm for non tech people who see technology more as
an enabler than end goal seeking technical expertise outside.

~~~
dr_
This is very true. In India IT is seen as a good career - it's something
parents encourage their kids to go in to. There are very very few people who
do it because they love technology. It's not common for grade school/high
school kids to go about hacking. If it were, you would see more viruses
originating from India - but they never do.

------
democracy
_Humans love things that are attractive and shiny_

Offline, some people do, online - it's hard to say. I used to perfect the look
and feel of everything, paying designers and wasting hours adjusting color
schemes. What I learned hard way is people do not care about the design much.
I don't have statistics and numbers, but I am sure the majority of people
online do not care much about many fancy things designers like to implement.
The ideal solution is the one that looks and feels STANDARD to anyone who
knows how to use ms office or excel. That's not good news for someone (like
me) who likes to put in crazy hours changing fonts, sizes and colors. However,
it looks like that's what it is. Attractive and shiny goes to the intranet. Of
course, there is a niche for them (hardcore/online games), but not in
mainstream products.

~~~
elbrodeur
You're absolutely right. People don't care how something looks. They care how
it works... but a designer's job isn't to make something pretty; it's to make
something useful and easy. Being pretty should be derived by osmosis -- a
designer or team of designers working hard to improve accessibility, usability
and the experience will usually (but not always) result in something that is
pretty. Or at least appreciably elegant.

Too often designers are relegated to gussying up an already finished product.
That's unfortunate and can be jarring to the user: The designer should help
design the product, and then define how people use it.

------
aniket_ray
Most startups in India worth the moniker of "tech-startup" do know how to
program. I have visited (as a potential employee) or talked to many founders
(as a potential partner) most major revenue earning tech startups in India and
I'd say everyone of them had strong programming founders.

Yes many startups-founders are clueless and have a world changing the-next-
facebook-idea but that happens everywhere, not just in India.

I was part of a non-tech startup once and web was just marketing tool for us,
we did not want to do the website and its UX ourselves, that would be a waste
of our precious time (although we ended up doing it too cos' we were techies
at heart). I think we did a mistake by doing it ourselves.

So no, all Indian startups do not need to learn how to program and most tech-
startups do know how to program.

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elvirs
Is it just me or you also think that the fact that he mentioned and linked to
his company 3-4 times in the article shows that the article was written to
advertise his infinite beta shop?

~~~
acangiano
Marketing, for lack of a better word, is good. Marketing is right. Marketing
works. Marketing clarifies, cuts through, and captures, the essence of the
evolutionary spirit. Marketing, in all of its forms; marketing of oneself, of
your business, of your community, has marked the upward surge of mankind and
marketing, you mark my words, will not only save Hacker News, but that other
malfunctioning corporation called the U.S.A.

~~~
tmcw
Marketing marketing marketing, is what I say. Marketing.

~~~
JanezStupar
Marketing! Marketing, Marketing, Marketing, Marketing, Marketing. I even love
saying the word 'Marketing'. You probably think this is a picture of my
family? No! It's a picture of The Marketing-Team. Bodie, Doyle, Tiger, the
Jewellery Man.

[answers phone] Hello? What? Well if you can't work as a Marketing you're all
fired. That's it, you heard me, fired! Get your things and go.

[redials phone] Hello, security? Everyone on floor 4 is fired. Escort them
from the premises. And do it as a Marketing team. Remember, you're a Marketing
team and if you can't act as a Marketing team, you're fired too.

------
codelust
There is really no blanket rule that will tell you whether it is good to code
it all up by yourself or get it outsourced. Depends really on what is your
shortest route to market at a reasonable cost. Trying to second-guess it from
the outside is a good, but pointless, exercise.

Try the flip side of the question - how many Indian start-ups would have
failed or succeeded if they all built and deployed their stacks on their own?

~~~
abinash
Hey shyam - while there are no blanket rules about anything in life other than
the prevailing law in any country there is always examples that people can
draw from and people always draw from the best examples. Can you give me a few
examples of great companies that outsource their development???

~~~
codelust
Companies that outsource development. Indiatimes and Zimbra? NDTV and Tekriti?

But, I had asked a question in the parent comment - can it be shown that any
of the start ups who failed or the ones who have done well can do even better
if they did the stack internally?

~~~
abinash
Zimbra was a packaged product that they bought - so this example does not
work. NDTV and Tekriti - oh well! Great Online company???? Do they even
qualify?? There is enough empirical evidence from startups that have done well
that they are all built by great technologists and have not outsourced that
core capability. As for failed startups, you will never know as a lot of those
stories just die with the companies.

~~~
codelust
Abinash,

What will qualify as a great company? Is the deciding factor that it does
decent revenue or that it uses a pretty nifty technology stack or is it that
it does decent revenue in which the technology stack is an enabler?

Zimbra - Well, the point is that Indiatimes did outsource it. Guess I gave you
an example that you asked for there. Same is the case with NDTV and Tekriti.
They may not be to your liking, nor am I sitting in judgement whether they are
'great' or not, but the fact is that you can build good companies and
businesses either way - build or buy/lease.

Coming to what you have said, " As for failed startups, you will never know as
a lot of those stories just die with the companies," this is precisely what I
am trying to address. That, you just don't know what their reasons are. Just
like I would not be able to tell you what is best for Infinitely Beta.

~~~
useless007
I find it really strange that the comments made here by Abinash, and those
which he deleted from his blog, have a very different tone. You should have
read the arrogant and immature comments that he made on his blog post. He just
can't delete comments here..

I agree with a poster above, that the blog linked here is written by an
immature person.

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aufreak3
What is wrong with "outsourcing" things that don't fall into your area of
expertise? As far as I'm concerned, a biz savvy guy "outsourcing" his tech job
for a fee is not very different from buying toothpaste from the market because
I don't know how to make a good one myself ... or like consulting a dentist to
figure out which toothpaste is good for me.

~~~
statictype
It's fine as long as what you're outsourcing is not _core_ to your business
model.

If you're running a software company (and the startups referred to in the
article are software startups I believe) then outsourcing the _core_ product
you want to make money off of is a poor strategy.

If you're doing a restaurant startup, then by all means, outsource the
software that runs your place.

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fezzl
Startups can't program.

