Am I Theranos or not?

If you just raised hundreds of millions of dollars for your company at billions of dollars of valuation...and your company is not making any meaningful revenue then you might be wondering...Am I Theranos or not?

PMM and PM. What's the difference?

For those of you who don't know, I carry the title of a product marketing manager at work and I often ask the question about the difference between a product marketing manger and a product manager, especially in the enterprise world. Here's a version of my self response.

Our job as product marketing managers is more about geting a product out that is sellable. A product that we will be excited to sell to a customer if we were sales people. And that's primarily what we care about. Just making it sellable. Our focus is to do all the stuff it takes to sell it for a month, a quarter, a year and so on.

Product managers on the other side should focus on geting a product out that is usable. A product that they will be excited to use if they were the end users. And sometimes there might be conflicts. We need to collectively think through the details to get something out that has the right mix. The worst thing we can do is to get a product out that's neither sellable nor usable and there are hundres of examples for such failures in the market.

You might ask why sellability (when is this going to be an official word!) and usability are different things. It kind of defies commonsense. If a product is exceptionally good at what it does and is a pleasure to use, wouldn't more people buy it? Unfortunately the answer is no because it's an enterprise product and not a consumer one. The key difference is that in the consumer world the buyer and the user are the same person or has the same persona. You buy a music player to use it yourself. But in the enterprise world the buyer and the user are completely different people. They have different goals, different day jobs, different priorities, etc.. It's the reality of the market.

And guess what's happening these days? Enterprise IT is getting consumerized, which I think is really a good thing. So, we all better change.

My Master Teacher

In the Indian epic Mahabharat there's a story about a phenomenal master of archery, Drona, and how a young tribal lad, Eklavya, gets inspired by the aura of Drona and aspires to be his student. However, Drona is the master teacher of the kingdom teaching only the sons of the kings. Eklavya gathers all the information he could about Drona, makes a clay statue resembling Drona and assumes the statue to be his master. He practices archery every day and night standing infront of the statue for the rest of his life.

When I first heard this story I thought to myself if there could be anyone in this world who would inspire me in a similar way. I thought it would be impossible, only until I learnt about Steve Jobs. Once I moved from my rural village in India to Boston for my higher studies in early 2000, I would skip classes, stay super late just to see the videos of Steve Jobs do his magic on the stage in keynotes again and again. The first thing I purchased once I got a job in Boston was a PowerBook. Not because I needed it but only because Steve Jobs was behind it. He's the Drona for me and I'm sure for millions of others like me. Only a handful of humans in the history of our planet ever had such a positive impact on our civilization.
Well done Steve. I wish peace for your family and friends.

Can I login into you?

Doesn't really matter whether you say yes or no today because it's only AD 2010. But we are not far from the days where you would say "I can't believe that my best friend wanted to login into me during the blind date she set up for me!"

What does logging into you really mean? For starters, it's a way for others to see and hear exactly what you are seeing and hearing in real time. It can also include advanced features such as ability for others to observe what you are feeling in realtime by studying your body temperature, heart rate, brain activity patterns, etc. You get the idea.

No. I'm not smoking pot and I think it's a real scenario from a not so distant future. Five billion people on this planet today have cellphones and very soon more than half of them will be capable of taking a photo or video with the cellphone. Imagine a technology that can shoot and transmit stereo HD video with voice in realtime embedded into these devices you own. Anyone who has access to this realtime video is kind of logging into you.

Do you want to guess the industry that would first invest in such a technology. Yes, you guessed it right. It's the industry that still accounts to more than 30% of rich media content on the Internet. Porn.

Now sit back and imagine what you would do with such a technology. Login into your favorite Hollywood star, login into your friend for her wedding instead of attending the celebrations, login into the archives of yourself form your past, login into the that guy having...

PS: Apple already have several patents on "automated mood recognition" for handheld devices.

How well do you know yourself?

What would you say if someone asks you "Hey! What kind of person are you"? Not in an interview, but in an honest situation probably after a few drinks. And what do you think your friends would say about you? Not in front of you but at those parties that you missed or even better at that dinner your were not invited to.

Do things you say about you match with the things your friends say about you? You might think that you are very close to people and your friends think that you are too intrusive. It gets complex when you expand beyond friends. Your hiking partner might perceive you as a dare devil and your boss perceives you as exceptionally risk averse. Conflicting views huh!

Does this mean that we have multiple personalities? May be it just suggests that the perception of your personality varies on who you talk with - thyself, your friends, your family, your boss and so on.


Wouldn't it be nice to know how people perceive you? Corporations spend millions of dollars to answer this. Why can't we as individuals start thinking in those lines?

End of the day, I think it would be an interesting world if you can know thyself as people know you. Here's your business idea - develop a software application that asks your friends (from Facebook?) to define your personality type and presents you with anonymous results. Any investors or software geeks who want to take a stab at this? The dating sites can benefit from such an application. They still make a match based on who you think you are and not based on who you really are (those eHarmony ads!).

PS: Blogged from Acela train (yeah! it finally has wifi) on route to Boston from NYC, after looking at this stranger sitting in the next row on who I almost had a “personality opinion”.

A drive in a sexy car

There was once this guy who always drove a sexy car only to realize that the car didn't have an accelerator or brakes. It always drove at a constant speed. The only thing this guy had control over was the steering wheel. He was on his way to a destination which was very well known because all paths led to it. However, he could take any path he wanted to.

The paths are very loosely defined even though some are known to be lengthy and some are short.

The scenery, traffic, weather and occasional companions vary in every path. His challenge was navigation only until he realized that navigation was his opportunity. Think about it.

Star line and finish line are defined but the length of the path isn't. The car always drove at the same speed and it can never be stopped before the finish line. It can be steered very well though.

Isn't LIFE like that. The car is time and the driver is you. You can neither accelerate the car nor slow it down. All you can do is steer it until the finish line. You can make the journey more interesting by steering the car through interesting paths or by driving along with other interesting cars. It's all in your hands.

Now, where can I find the best GPS?

Blogging from 35,000 feet above sea level. Flying 2.0 is here to stay.

Even the Wright brothers would have never dreamt of this - people sipping wine and communicating with the rest of world while flying at 35,000 feet above sea level across the American continent in the middle of a night. Virgin America made it a reality for me.

Even though it’s been about three years since Virgin launched its designer airlines in the US, I never got a chance to fly in one. I’m finally sitting in one right now flying to Boston from San Francisco and, you bet, I’m pretty impressed. The experience is only short of being spectacular. I’m amazed with the amount technology and design present in the cabin. From interesting 2D animated safety instructions (remember fight club?) to a sleek multi-purpose personal touch screen, there’s uniqueness screaming all around. This WiFi enabled (powered by gogo) PC friendly cabins make flying in other US airlines (except for JetBlue and the likes) feel like a ride into the past.

There’s nothing new about having WiFi in the cabin (I used it in Lufthansa five years ago). But it’s the speed and reliability of the service along with many functional features in the seat that awes me. One interesting feature I saw is a passenger-to-passenger chat feature on my touch screen. I question the usefulness of it unless you are with a big group or belong to the curious clan. I did manage to find a chat partner from seat 9D for a few minutes though.

We for sure are living in an era of exponential advancements. I continue to wonder what people 30 years from now would get excited about.

A documentary film on just any thing. Almost.

If I were to ask you to make a list of topics for a new documentary film what would the top 10 be? I'm sure poverty, war, politics, culture, aliens and all sought of things would fill the page. But how about a movie on Helvetica. Yes, Helvetica, the font. The ubiquitous font we see everyday on almost everything we read from billboards on the busy streets to the signs on trains and buses.

I'm not a typographer by any stretch of imagination but know about fonts a nano bit. And I never thought about a feature-film length documentary on Helvetica. I was amazed to learn that one was made and was more fascinated to see it. I'll now have more appreciation for the letters every time I read a billboard or a signpost.

This made me think about The Long Tail (Chris Anderson coined this term in Wired first). There's an audience almost for everything and the new flat digital world can help you reach them with out much sweat.

If there's a movie and an audience for Helvetica, the font, I'm sure we can find audience for all the crazy topics we have in mind. How about a digital documentary production company that focuses in making films on topics that fit the long tail? Here's your business idea.

What should I see when I visit Earth?

One of my colleagues was going to India and as usual I gave him a twenty minute run down on Devata's version of Lonely Planet for India. I told him what to see and what to do in his one week of off time in Hyderabad and Delhi.

Later that day I was walking with a friend in Harvard Square and a thought occurred to me. What if a colleague from Andromeda galaxy told me that he's visiting planet Earth for 40-50 years and asked me what he should do when he's on Earth. What would I recommend? Pause and think about it for a moment.

Well, I can recommend many places to see - deep oceans, golden deserts, rugged mountains, tropical jungles - or ask him to experience various things - falling in love, making friends, hating someone and taking revenge. And of course, things to do - making love, parenting a child, and so on.

Immediately, the obvious thought occurred to me. Am I doing everything that I want my alien friend to do in his 50 years of life on Earth? Would I recommend him to spend hours and days sitting in front of an object primarily made out of sand (the computer!)? Would I ask him to be a product marketing manager and sell security stuff? Would I ask him to blog or read a blog? May be I would. May be I shouldn’t.

Even though I love my job, the thought started bothering me a bit. I would not recommended my friend to be a product marketing manager, but I would recommended him to dream and live his dream. It’s been a while since I dreamt. What are you dreaming today?

What do you talk when you meet an Ex-President of a country?

If you are wondering that the title is quite hypothetical you might want to think again. Interesting things happen when random dots connect.

Today, I had the privilege to meet and talk with Dr. Jamil Mahuad, Ex-President of Ecuador, well known in the international community for preventing a war and settling the dispute between Peru and Ecuador in 1998 through a series of negotiations with Peruvian then President Fujimori. He seemed more of a scholar than an ex-politician of a country struggling with poverty (38% plus).

In our chat, we discussed about the concepts and frameworks for negotiation and how they can be applied to some of the tough challenges in India such as the Kashmir dispute. Overall, it was a delightful experience.

Curious on what random dots connected for me to meet Mahuad? Well, the dots include a law school newsletter, my mentorship with our VP, an interesting guy at Cisco, politics in a marketing group...oh boy! I can keep going forever.