Sorry… which company did you say?

Last week was my cousin sister’s wedding. Oooph it was an experience. I generally like to stay off from marriages/functions unless it involves someone close to me. Else I will end up sitting somewhere giving smiles to unknown people :).

I had a few interesting conversations with people, I think they are worth being put here. I am sure most of us would have come across these conversations - except the last one.

Some aunty/uncle.. especially the aunties (that too a bit aged ones) suddenly pop up from no where and ask me..

“Hey do you know who I am?”

In most cases I put on an embarrassing face indicating I have no idea who they are, but in some case I vaguely guess the place they are from trying to save my face.

I am amazed at how so many people tend to ask to same question to so many people. I think probably, they (atleast a few of them) who ask this question, might also not be sure of who the other person is, to cover this up they ask it.

This one is more funnier:

Again, aunties that too the aged ones love to start a conversation this way –

I had last seen you when you were so small / 10 years back. See how tall you have become now.

Ok that’s a nice way to start a conversation, but come on did they expect me to stay that way itself. Even more funnier was this person, whom I am sure I had meet at some function may be an year back, came and told me the same thing, I though of reminding that person that she/he had told me the same thing when we meet previously.

Also some people say that you have become taller than when I had seen you last. Haha, I haven’t grown an inch in the past 3 years. I can accept if they say i have become fat or thin, but not tall.

This one - is an assault on me :(

After all the initial talk they ask me what I am doing now. The conversation some what continues like this:

I heard you completed your studies, so where are you working now?

To which I reply:

I work with a company called Ty fone:

The first reaction to this is “Sorry.. which company did you say?”

Then I try to explain to them that it’s a small startup located at ITPL.

What the hell, I doubt if some of these people know that people also work at places apart from Infosys, Wipro, Satyam….. Their reaction is as if that, I haven’t got a job in any of these companies and so I am working with this small unknown company. How I wish I could have told them on their face that I rejected a few good offers from these companies and joined here. And if I had actually said that, I wouldn’t be surprised if they would have though that I am mentally instable. The fact that it is located at ITPL, makes them feel that may be it’s a good company (thank god we shifted to ITPL from Marathahalli).

How wonderful it would have been if marriages truly happened in heaven :).

Why do startups survive the bigger fishes?

Another interesting discussion and another interesting outcome! My company is working with a large financial services company, on a particular service. They have been involved with us for quite sometime, and I am sure they would have got a pretty good idea of our product. Now the question I got was “What stops them putting up their own team and start work on a similar idea? Why do they have to come to us?”

My though process was, since they being a large company, they would have had enough resources, both in terms of man power and money, they could just take away our idea and start implementing it all by themselves. They could easily bypass us.

But it seams that it was not so. These big companies are too much involved in what they are doing. They don’t have time to think about new ideas or implementing them. Their current work keeps them preoccupied to try anything new (certainly there are a few exceptions). That’s why they turn to startups for new ideas. They would prefer to invest some money to buy this new idea, rather than implement it on their own. The effort involved in starting something new in these large companies (it seams) is nothing short of an experience of getting a building plan approved at your municipality. So the best way out for them is work with small startups, see if their ideas actually work in the market, and if so latter buy them at an extra premium or pay heftily for their services.

Do we have a defined process?

A few days back, I was at a lunch with my team, discussing day to day activities at the company. My company is a products company involved in developing mobile banking applications.

Mobile applications development is an interesting and complex one, considering the variety of platforms (operating systems), form factors and companies involved. Optimizing user interface experience for the user is a critical factor deciding the success of the product.

Now we as developers we expecting a well defined set of process for certain things like security, user interface and blah blah… That started of an interesting discussion.

Since we are developing a new product, there is no benchmark for what we need to do and how we need to achieve it. The product keeps evolving; I myself know how much we have evolved in the past 1 year when we started off to where we are now. There is no defined path/process in a startup. Different people will come up with different ideas on different things. For some things like security, things will get clear, but for some other things like UI and various functionalities we as developers, have completely no control. Some things could be solved by consulting domain experts but ultimately the user will decide the things. The out come of this discussion was, don’t expect things to be defined. The development is a continuous process – a regenerative one. Probably the real development could actually start when the customer gets his hands on the product.

A recent article published by a mobile development expert stated that – “To develop a simple mobile application in 5 languages for 50 different phones, it would require around 7500 builds, averaging around $ 2500 per build”. A scary scenario indeed.