Published May 9-13, 2023
56
Crisis and Crux – 1
We all go through difficult times in life. These crises are pivotal moments in our lives; how we react shapes our future. We can allow these difficult times to become stall points or we can convert them into boosters that take us to the next level. Here’s what I had written: “Each one of us will face stall points at some time or another in our lives. We need to recognise them, and then work to get out of the negative zone. It is at times like these that we need family and friends around us. Each of us can do much more that we imagine; our attitude towards stall points will determine the heights we can climb.”
One approach I have found useful in dealing with a crisis is to get to the root of the problem and identify that one action which will get us out of it. While there can be many options, there is always that one thing which matters more than everything else. Richard Rumelt calls this the crux: “The crux of a mountain climb is the hardest move or segment, and you practice getting over that crux in order to accomplish the climb. The advice that comes from that is, “Don’t attempt a climb if you can’t handle the crux.” In business or national-security terms, that means, “Don’t tackle a problem if you can’t handle the hard nut at its center.” The successful strategists ask, “What’s the crux of these problems? Can I get through them? And if so, which of these problems is worth putting our resources toward?””
During the summer of 1994 when I was working on the image processing software product (Image Workbench), I had come to the painful conclusion that the time it would take for me to sell enough copies to create a profitable business would be far too long. I had spent more than 18 months building the software and trying to sell it to research institutions and hospitals. But I had to recognise the crisis: while the demos were great, there was no pressing need for it, and the ones who were interested had to go through a long purchase cycle. While I loved my creation, the crux lay in killing the project and moving on. Until I closed one door, I could not open another. It wasn’t an easy decision. Only after I quit could I start focusing on the idea that became IndiaWorld and my first entrepreneurial success.
Another crisis came in late 1996 when I had to change the domain IndiaWorld was using. I came up with a new one but it was not working. I could see two years of hard work and my early mover advantage being washed away. Once again, it was a crisis moment. I could either persist in the hope that things would change or try something different. It was during those tough months that I came up with the idea of using Indian domain names for different verticals: Samachar for news, Khoj for search, Khel for cricket, Bawarchi for food, and Dhan for finance. This was counter-intuitive: rather than asking people to remember and bookmark one domain (as portals like Yahoo did), I was asking them to go directly to their specific interest area. The strategy worked wonders, and I was out of the crisis.
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Crisis and Crux – 2
In the early years of Netcore (2000-2007), I kept coming up with new ideas – and kept failing. I was unable to convert any of these pioneering projects into commercial successes. It was very frustrating because after IndiaWorld, I thought of myself as having the Midas touch. I began to doubt myself and wondered if I would ever make anything that would work. As I lived through those troubled times, I realised the crux lay in bringing in new leadership. While I was good at coming up with new ideas, I was unable to build what customers would pay for. I could create a good R&D unit, but not a profitable business. For that, I needed a new leader at the helm whose strength was sales. It wasn’t an easy call for me because it meant I would need to step aside. While I didn’t know the term ‘crux’ at that time, the most important action was to replace myself as CEO. That was the turning point for Netcore.
In later years, Netcore has faced many existential crises. TRAI’s increase in SMS pricing hurt our business and had us looking down a black hole. Gmail’s inboxing algorithm change was another big challenge we faced. Our international forays did not result in notable success and we struggled to diversify our revenue stream beyond Netcore. The rise of app-focused marketing automation players blindsided us. The SaaS way of selling and content-led marketing posed a challenge to our traditional in-person sales approach. Each of these crises made Netcore stronger. Going through each of these periods was not easy. There are times when one feels trapped in a maze without a way out. But in every one of these scenarios, there was a right way out – a crux we had to conquer.
In life and business, we will always face difficult situations – some caused by us, while others could be forced on us by external circumstances. In these moments, it is important to take a step back and think through the options we have, and then identify the crux – that which is most important and actionable. We are making the decision with imperfect information. We have to trust our gut because we have no way of knowing how that decision will shape up. If we do the right analysis and can identify the crux correctly, we have a far greater chance of success than making random moves or hoping for our luck to change.
Of course, the first requirement is to realise that one is facing a crisis. Denial of reality will not enable us to exit from the web we are caught in. One question I ask myself when I find myself in a crisis is: what would I do if I was not afraid? I have always found this to be a question that widens the options available, and thus a better pathway to finding the crux and climbing the mountain. In any situation, there will be some decisions which are consequential and irreversible – the key is to identify the smallest such unit, so we have some flexibility going forward. Life’s good times are never forever, and neither are the bad times. We cannot avoid or run away from life’s crises; what we can do is to train ourselves better to identify the crux and move forward.
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Ideaflow
I am an ideas person. Given a problem, I am very good at coming up with ideas. Most will not work, but a few of those end up with good future potential. At the ideas stage, I try not to restrict the incoming flow of the possibilities. I will take my spiral writing book, commit myself to sitting in one place without distractions, and keep writing until I can think no more. Of late, I use the downloaded songs in the Amazon Music mobile app along with my Bose headset to filter out all extraneous sounds and noise. The key is absolute concentration – to just let the ideas come and list them without worrying about filtering out anything. At a later point, I will then distill these ideas to a smaller list for sharing with others.
It is the same way I have been writing this series. I had started with about 20-30 topics to write on. Over time, the list has kept growing. Every so often, I sit, think deeply, and add some more topics. When I need to write, I will pick a few topics from that list. Even as I have written close to 60 posts in this series, I have a list of another 30-40. Little did I know that this series would go on for this long! This was the same approach I had taken with the Proficorn series. I had started with a few stories from my entrepreneurial journey, and the list kept growing – eventually reaching 100, and enough to make a book of the ideas!
The mistake I have seen others make is that they focus only on the good ideas when they are thinking. It is extremely difficult to determine early on if an idea is good or not. And at times, not-so-good ideas lead to better ones as one thinks them through. The aim should be to let the mind wander and write down everything – to capture the “ideaflow”. Usability and actionability is a call that must be made later.
I recently came across a book that echoed my thinking and approach. This is from “Ideaflow” by Jeremy Utley and Perry Klebahn: “The most useful measure of creativity we’ve found is as follows: the number of novel ideas a person or group can generate around a given problem in a given amount of time. We call this metric ideaflow. An organization with low ideaflow is in trouble because it’s running out of an essential resource. Its leaders know there’s a problem, they can see that progress is stalling, but they can’t quite pinpoint the scarcity starving it of its potential. While the proper execution of ideas is crucial, ideaflow is the foundation, the essential force that drives all future success.”
This is a point reinforced by David Kelley in the foreword of the book: “What we tell them [our students] from the get-go is to ignore good and bad in the early rounds and shoot for lots of ideas instead. To go for volume before judgment around quality can set in. This notion of separating idea generation from idea selection can come as quite a shock. What these students learn, and world-class creators already understand, is that it’s hard to distinguish good ideas from bad ones before trying them out to see what happens. Without a reliable process for real-world experimentation, it’s hard to know which novel solution is worth pursuing in the first place or how it might be improved later. The surefire approach is to create as many scrappy solutions as possible and then test them rapidly with real people.”
So, the next time you face a problem, challenge or crisis, do not constrain the flow of ideas. In fact, as you find yourself thinking about a problem, ideas will pop up from unexpected sources or even at unusual times. Note down every idea that comes. The shortlisting process can be done later. In the words of Thomas Kennedy: “Ideas lose themselves as quickly as quail, and one must wing them the minute they rise out of the grass-or they are gone.”
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Parenting
If one has kids, there is no greater responsibility than parenting. As a friend told me (and which I wrote earlier), “Parenting is about giving roots and wings.” I have been thinking about my role as a parent in the past few weeks a lot more because come August, my son Abhishek will be going to the US for his undergrad education. After 18 years of being together for almost every day, time and distance will separate us. Bhavana and I will not be there for the micro-decisions that he will need to make daily. He will be a free bird.
Thinking about his future brought back memories of my own growing-up years and my parents. As I think back, they gave me a lot of freedom to make my own decisions. They were (and still are) always there for me. They saw me failing as an entrepreneur after my return from the US but let me fight my own battles. They saw the pain of broken partnerships but let me figure out the exits from them. They saw me fall time after time through my career but let me pick myself up. I always had the comfort of knowing they were there – a safety net of sorts – but they kept their distance as I made my own choices, some right, many wrong. Because they knew that was the only way I would learn. They had given me the roots; I had to grow my own wings to fly.
Bhavana has been a wonderful parent to Abhishek; it is she who has shaped and moulded him. The right combination of appreciation and firmness, the ability to say No to requests she thought were not right, the push to do things which she knew were important, and also letting go so he could rise. I have learnt a lot just watching her make these calls – almost instinctively but with a core consistency that has resonated through Abhishek’s life.
During the applications process for going abroad, through the years I have seen parents agonise and push their kids to “build the CV.” More than for the child, it is a make-or-break decision for them. And as I look back, I remember my parents letting me make the calls on where to apply and which university to choose. We did the same with Abhishek. While I was there to offer guidance, he made his decisions. There was no external counsellor in the process. He took advice from many, but knew that eventually he would have to bear the consequences of his decisions. He took a bet with his Early Decision university – and it worked out for him. The only advice I had for him was that he should pick a good US university and while there are many great ones, the top 25 universities were all pretty good when it came to education. Half of his education – like mine – would come outside the classroom.
Parenting is one of the hardest responsibilities because we are moulding another person. It is important to remember that the child is not our clone; there is a distinctive character, a mix of nature and nurture. The best that we can do as parents is define the boundaries and let them free. As they grow, we have to find the intersection points with their lives. And then they go, it is time to get on with our lives – and get ready for the second mountain.
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Second Mountain
A few years ago, I came across a book by David Brooks, “The Second Mountain.” The title and description grabbed my attention: “Are you on your first or second mountain? Is life about you – or others? About success – or something deeper? The world tells us that we should pursue our self-interest: career wins, high status, nice things. These are the goals of our first mountain. But at some point in our lives we might find that we’re not interested in what other people tell us to want. We want the things that are truly worth wanting. This is the second mountain. What does it mean to look beyond yourself and find a moral cause? To forget about independence and discover dependence – to be utterly enmeshed in a web of warm relationships? What does it mean to value intimacy, devotion, responsibility and commitment above individual freedom? In The Second Mountain David Brooks explores the meaning and possibilities that scaling a second mountain offer us and the four commitments that most commonly move us there: family, vocation, philosophy and community. Inspiring, personal and full of joy, this book will help you discover why you were really put on this earth.”
I have started thinking much more about the next phase of life. In August, Abhishek will go to the US for his undergrad education. After 18 years of having him as part of our daily life at home, things will be different. It will be back to how it was in the years before he was born. It won’t be easy to adjust and several friends have warned me about the “empty nest” syndrome. It is in this context that the “second mountain” idea that David Brooks talks about comes in. What do I do with the rest of the years that I have? (I will be 56 in August.)
There are some obvious answers. Netcore’s continuing growth is my top priority. In no business can one rest on past laurels; any single mistake could be fatal and consign one to the “living dead.” There is a lot to do – new markets to conquer (US and Europe), new problems to solve (AdWaste), new products to add (by ourselves or via acquisitions), and new paths to chart (going public). The journey to building an enduring, great company is a continuing one, and I can still contribute a lot to Netcore as we go onward from $100 million ARR to much greater heights. So, Netcore still remains as the first mountain – my life as a serial technology entrepreneur.
A few years ago, I had thought of creating a foundation for freedom and prosperity as the second mountain. While Nayi Disha failed and the political path is now closed, the core ideas have stayed with me. It is something I will think about more in the coming years: how can we change people’s minds so they demand more freedom and less government intervention? As I wrote, “Freedom is the bedrock of prosperity. With every new leader in power, liberty has been diminishing and government control over the economy has been increasing. Since the leaders in power are unlikely to increase freedom and reverse the anti-prosperity measures that are still widespread, it is up to the people to lead a political and economic revolution if we are to make Indians rich.” Maybe there are ways to bring about change outside of the political sphere – this is something I need to think about more. India needs institutions for generations yet to come – something US entrepreneurs and philanthropists have done so well. Somewhere out there is my second mountain to find to climb.