Outliers

Welcome to the Season 2 of the Outliers Podcast. We start the year with a conversation with Bhumika Goyal, a 22-year old computer science graduate with a passion for the Free and Open Source Software movement (FOSS), and is already among the top-ranked Linux Kernel contributors. In a year when a lot of talk is going to be focused on job losses in the country’s over $100 billion IT sector, Goyal’s choice of career and passion for Open Source does appear brave. “I just love the way the open source community collaborates across different geographies and cultures, demographics,” she tells me. “While there is clearly gender bias that works against women in the sector, I am yet to experience it and I believe things are changing.” It’s tough for me to doubt her optimism, notwithstanding all the challenges faced by women in the technology and startup ecosystem that we keep flagging and chronicling at FactorDaily. Everything appears to be working fine until young, female programmers enter the ecosystem. It’s la

So who is Vijay Shekhar Sharma? Depending who you ask in India’s technology and startup ecosystem, the answers will range from “that crazy guy” to “overly obsessed entrepreneur”, “trying to fight too many battles at the same time”, “a desi entrepreneur”, “rags to riches story” and so on. If you ask us at FactorDaily, we’ll perhaps point you to our Code of Conduct that names him as one of the three investors backing our media startup. But this podcast isn’t about what we think of him; it’s about who he really is. And as I sat down with him for this special episode Outliers Podcast Season 1, I realised he’s no different from many important entrepreneurs in these times — at the core, they all want to make it big, are inspired by Elon Musk or such, and are very, very lonely. “When I lost my father few weeks ago, I also lost the only one who understood what I really do. Now, I have no one who understands me, and that will remain a gap forever,” he says.

With over a million Twitter followers and hundreds of thousands on other social platforms, Kiran Mazumdar Shaw keeps a really visible and busy profile. This fan following also brings trolls and critics who can get really personal at times. As I sat down with Shaw, the founder of India’s biggest biotech company, Biocon, to record the last Outliers podcast of 2017, I asked her how she manages criticism and trolls. “From the very start I’ve faced criticism…..being a woman entrepreneur, and trying to build a startup in an area not understood by many,” she told me. “More recently, some retail investors even asked me to step aside and hand over the reins to someone else who understands the business better. There’s even been criticism about my gender, and so on.” “I believe if you’re honest about your beliefs then you’ll be able to take criticism. I don’t hesitate in apologising or retracting what I said if someone points to factual inaccuracies etc..” In this age of extreme and polarized opinions, it doesn’

“When Steve Jobs went on the stage in 2008 to announce the App Store, he showed the first 500 apps, and the five of them were built in this building, in Udupi,” Rohith Bhat, founder of Robosoft tells me as I sat down to record this episode of Outliers in Udupi, a small temple town located some 400 kilometres from Bangalore. What’s really exciting about Bhat’s journey is not just having Apple as an old, loyal customer, but how he is transforming Robosoft into a next-generation company that’s now building new gaming apps too. The Star Chef game, for instance, has been downloaded over 20 million times and has earned revenues of nearly $20 million in three years. But it’s been a long, slow and at times frustrating entrepreneurial journey too. And that’s where Bhat is inspired by the Japanese culture and its companies. If you remember the Outliers Podcast with Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu, even he talked about why Indian startups need to emulate the likes of Honda, and not get starry-eyed by looking at the Silic

Much before startup ideas find their way to colourful pitch decks, the founders, at least the ones with families, seek some kind of emotional, social approval. That approval is not make or break, but important. Who gives that approval? More often than not: the founder’s family: parents or/and spouses. They, of course, almost instantly give their approval because they see the startup dream painted all over the founder’s face — the starry-eyed look of a wannabe founder wanting to change the world. And that’s where it all starts: the long, slow, painful and lonely journey of entrepreneurship. The life of a startup and its founder(s) gets mostly captured through stories of funding, management changes, mergers and acquisitions, and so on. What gets lost is the human aspect of entrepreneurship involving the families who sacrifice their time and emotions, friends and colleagues. Conflicted at times as they are with the founders’ own dreams, bordering on the ethereal, of making a dent in the universe. My story

The American civil aviation regulator’s next-generation collision avoidance system is built on a relatively new programing language called Julia. You can thank Viral, who along with Alan Edelman, Jeff Bezanson, Stefan Karpinski, Keno Fischer and Deepak Vinchhi, built the language the next time you have a safe flight in the U.S. airspace. Like every profession, engineering is also defined by some awesome coders and architects who are known for the battles they pick and the ones they ignore. Shah, who was one of the key architects behind Aadhaar payments system, prefers to stay away from the controversies surrounding India’s biometric-based citizen identity program, as I record this episode of Outliers podcast. If you are someone who believes our future will be shaped by next-generation software and machine learning, listen to this conversation.

The first time I heard of Chitale Dairy was about eight years ago when an executive at one of the top Indian retailers asked me to check out how a dairy in Maharashtra’s Sangli village was using radio frequency tags to track cattle. Back then, most RFID deployments at retailers were bleeding and not delivering on early promises. The dairy, I was told, was using intelligent tracking among other technologies to ensure its annual milk productivity was double the national average. Earlier this month, I traveled again to Sangli to see how far has Chitale Dairy has progressed with technology. From advances in cattle genomics to use of simple, user friendly software as an underlying glue across different processes, director Vishwas Chitale continues to harness technology with precision effect in his dairy business. Listen to this podcast to learn how a 70-year-old milk dairy in Sangli keeps at the cutting edge of technology and, as importantly, steers clear of technology hype cycles.

At 74, Raghunath Anant Mashelkar has spent decades in setting India’s innovation agenda across organizations including the National Innovation Foundation and Council of Scientific and Industrial Research. Now, he’s the chairman of Reliance Industries’ innovation council. As I sat down with Mashelkar for this week’s Outliers Podcast, I was fresh from the last episode about how India failed it’s homegrown hardware innovation such as Simputer. Mashelkar responded by saying that getting the government to become a customer for their products is indeed a challenge for smaller, disruptive startups. “It’s interesting because exactly 48 hours ago I sent a paper to the policy makers, recommending to change the government procurement policies,” he tells me. “If only the government had ordered Simputer(s) as a buyer, things could be different.” He is, in his own words, “dangerously optimistic”. So despite all the scepticism about whether Indian government will actually accept the mistakes and change, you feel inclin

Dr Devi Shetty of Narayana Health is more a pioneer and a disrupter than an Outlier. Shetty, who is widely credited with disrupting India’s healthcare scene with affordable surgeries, is shaping the future of healthcare in the country, too. And while he’s doing all that, he is relentlessly exploring new technologies from 3D printing to artificial intelligence and intelligent software algorithms for delivering more efficient and intelligent healthcare services. At the core of his hospital business is an assembly line approach he has adopted across his hospitals, “In 5-10 years from now, it will become legally mandatory for doctors to get approvals from a software program before they even start a treatment,” he tells me. Few days before I sat down with him for this podcast he made this statement in an interview with The Hindu, underscoring his bold vision for the future of healthcare and the professionals of tomorrow. “Kids who are really good at playing video games will become the best surgeons.” This e

The most significant innovation in computer technology in 2001 was not Apple's gleaming titanium PowerBook G4 or Microsoft's Windows XP. It was the Simputer. This is computing as it would have looked if Gandhi had invented it, then used Steve Jobs for his ad campaign. Source: Bruce Sterling in a The New York Times article published December 2001 Was Simputer ahead of time? Was it a failure or success? Depending who you ask, the answers can be as varied as possible. To understand what happened with what the NY Times once described as the product of the year, I decided to sit down with IISc professor, scientist, and entrepreneur, V. Vinay, for this episode of the Outliers Podcast.

“When you see a door, you should get curious,” says Robert M. “Bob” Frankston, a computing pioneer who co-developed VisiCalc, a spreadsheet program with Dan Bricklin way back in 1979. We are discussing the engineering crisis and what should a young programmer do to stay relevant. “I hate the word coding; it’s like calling writing, typing.” As I sat with Bob for this episode of Outliers Podcast, we discussed everything from the future of computer programming to how algorithms and their masters such as Facebook, Google and Amazon are beginning to take control of our lives. “Algorithms are the new bureaucracy.”

Many of you on the internet might know Professor Anil Gupta from his Ted Talk. But the work he does has far-reaching impact on grassroots innovation. Dr Gupta, a renowned scholar of grassroots innovations, founded Honeybee Networks many years ago with a simple mission: knowledge must benefit the people it comes from. His grouse with academics, who would often get insights from "knowledge rich and economically poor" people but fail to acknowledge or design solutions that would circle back to the poor, became the bedrock on which Honeybee Networks was founded. In this podcast, recorded in Ahmedabad in peak Navratri season (sorry about the background noise), we talked about how grassroots innovators make do with less by reusing parts of devices, designing products that are multifunctional and how some things don't need to be scaled to be successful.

There's something fascinating about the entrepreneurs who stay away from the VC funding frenzy and quietly build their startups one baby step at a time. Doing a startup overall is a crazy, bold thing to do, in the first place. The odds are stacked against you. On top of that, if the entrepreneur decides to bootstrap his or her startup, there is only one word for the journey: brutal. Aggressive, highly funded and ruthless rivals breathe down the neck. They poach your most treasured talent nurtured over long years. In this episode of Outliers, I sat down with Paras to learn more about the Wingify journey so far.

Depending on who you ask in the Indian startup ecosystem, Ashish Sinha, an IIT, IIM graduate and a former Yahoo product manager, could have built an AngelList to a TechCrunch equivalent from this part of the world. For his part, he did try attempting doing these. And he failed. Not for any lack of network or the knowhow, but because he did not agree with the rules of the game. Since Sinha quit his Yahoo job in May 2009, Shradha Sharma has built and scaled startup news site www.YourStory.com to be India’s biggest media platform for entrepreneurs, and AngelList has launched its offices in the country. Over the years, I have had several disagreements with Ashish, especially with the way he paints all media with the same brush and for pooh-poohing reporters who say they are at times constrained by media ethics. He’s an Outlier nonetheless. And an admirable one at that. That’s because very few in India have the ability and the required boldness to critique a software or an Internet product, early enough, so c

“It’s a game of belief,” Manasij Ganguli tells me about getting customers, investors and employees around you. We are sitting in his living room at Noida home, east of capital New Delhi, with his wife Mausmi Ambastha. This becomes “a game of thrones” if the startup idea you’re pitching doesn’t have a global equivalent. For Ganguli and Ambastha who co-founded ThreadSol in 2012, building a network of believers meant facing over 100 rejections, both from investors and customers, in their first year. From getting early adopters of the product, to getting investors see it as a business worth backing, and even convincing early employees — everything boils down to building a network of believers, the husband-wife duo tell me. “We could not point to any proven model in China or the U.S. We weren’t an Uber of anything.” Five years since it was founded, ThreadSol now says its software touches nearly 1 billion pieces of garments produced annually, helping the brands and manufacturers save costs by identifying an

Who wants to be a Unicorn? It's almost every entrepreneur's dream to build a company that crosses the $1 billion dollar valuation mark. For investors too, the starting question is whether a pitching startup can become the next Unicorn. For Ashish Hemrajani, the cofounder of BookMyShow, who started his company in 1999, the journey is all about survival. “First of all, it's (Unicorn) a mythical animal, and an ugly one at that with a horn,” he tells me in this episode of Outliers. “I'm a cockroach; we survive. You put us in the middle of a nuclear holocaust or inside a microwave oven, we survive.” “We come to the trenches everyday, rolling our sleeves, we survive,” he says.

What's the best way to build communities that last? “Do nothing,” pat comes the reply from Zainab Bawa, the CEO of HasGeek. Bawa’s inspiration is Masanobu Fukuoka, a famous Japanese author of bestselling books including “The One Straw Revolution” and “The Natural Way of Farming.” Fukuoka is famous for his “do nothing” philosophy, In this episode of Outliers, I sat down with Zainab to learn about building communities and handling conflicts. She also discussed the need to take the diversity debate beyond just gender, and include the trans genders too.

On Wednesday, we published the first part of Outliers Podcast with SlideShare cofounder Amit Ranjan in which he shared entrepreneurial lessons in building a consumer internet product. In the second part, Ranjan talks about his ongoing assignment with India's government where he's helping build next generation digital products.

Pankaj Mishra sits down with Amit Ranjan, cofounder of SlideShare who now spends time working with the Indian government on building next generation digital products.

In this episode of Outliers, Deep Kalra talks about lessons in building Makemytrip and his views on letting go, and finding a successor.