Episode 4: April 11 to April 23
Sorry for the delay in Episode 4. I was flying on Thursday and was terribly congested. As a result when we landed I couldn't adjust the pressure in my ears. The next thing I knew the pressure difference had ruptured some blood vessels in my ear. It was not fun. Enough about my excuses... let's get back to the story.
April 11th
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After months of negotiation and searching for a new office in California, our lease falls through. Urrgh... this was so upsetting. Unlike most startups the landlord was not concerned about our financials (the $15MM we had raised certainly helped here), but rather he was concerned about our power usage. Engineers at Riya typically have 2 or 3 computers and as many 23-inch screens as they need. We use a lot of power. It was unfortunate we lost the lease, and with a few more people joining us in a few days we would be 19 people in a 1700 sq foot office. As summer was approach it was getting hot. Ann had already been through hell and back on the India lease and the first US lease. She was as bummed as anyone that it fell through and just doubled down and tried even harder to get us a new space fast. I have never been more impressed with Ann than how she handled this adversity. (FYI We just got into a beautiful new space with a great landlord over Memorial day and almost 100% of Ann we are paying 1/2 of what we were going to pay in the deal that fell through).
April 12th
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At 7:55am, Azhar sends out this email
>>While we have fixed many issues, added a few features, we have not been able to get a fully stable and reliably working build so far. Many of the issues are coming up now and mostly show up in large accounts or when you play with system long enough or when you hit a "bad" node.
>>We have not been able to get a fully stable/no issue build now that we have more information/data. I just emailed out a list that I will call and refer to as P1. We need these issues fixed for us to move forward. Please give all your help to Neelesh and Nikhil in finding/fixing these bugs. Almost all the bugs are non-consistent and hence hard to catch. However, overall they happen in enough accounts and across enough machines/nodes that they turn into much larger issue. You will typically and most likely will not see them with our small test sets/somke test at all. You really need to work/play with large sets to see them. Some of the issues happen only on a single machine out of 64 cluster and hence they do not show up for many of us.
>>Let's work on getting all these issues FIXED by Monday, which means we need to work through this weekend. I know we have all have been working very hard and have had some breathing room for the last few weeks. Now, let's roll up our sleeves again and get this thing rock solid. Call me if you have any questions.
How long does this go on? How successful is our engineering team in resolving issues? I must admit there were times I wondered if we would ever stabilize the system. In my last company we never did. The first month was hell, but after that they really got the system stable. During the Month of May our systems had 100% availability and on average we only get a handful (less than 10) customer service emails each day. Our engineering team recovered well from the bugs and did it in a way that allows us to focus on new features now instead of being constantly pulled back to fixing old bugs. Sandeep and Nikhil were to of the leaders of efforts to stabilize the system. Ben and Andy, however, were the "heavy". They just wouldn't stop harping until the system could stay up without any reseting or rebooting. I was glad to have all four of them on my team.
April 13th - 14th
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I spend almost all day in a conference room with Azhar and Burak debating the pros and cons of choosing to focus on just one strategy. We realize that Riya has three main choices to focus on in terms of adding more features. We can add more:
a) Organizing features (which may also include a desktop client)
b) More community features (like a Flickr)
c) More Search features as our initial vision articulated
The answers don't seem very clear at this point. We debate and debate various options. Several times we get sucked back into the allure of doing all three of these things (a few features at a time).
In the meantime, Tara and Uma have basically done the mockups for almost every concievable direction we could head in the direction of.
Azhar, Burak, and I reread as many web conversations (blogs) and email conversations about Riya as we can. There doesn't seem to be any obvious trends. It was very frustrating. We concluded the seeions with no conclusion.
April 15th & 16th - Tax day
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I board a plane back to India. Vijay and Deven were still in Mumbai from having gone with me the last trip. They were there visiting Vijay's grandma (Nani) and grandpa (Nana). They had originally planned to come back early but Deven was enjoying seeing his cousins a lot. I on the other hand really missed them. It is an odd thing but being in our home in California without them was very lonely. In a weird way not seeing them when I'm on a trip was easier than not seeing them when I come one and see their clothes and Deven's toys, etc. I missed them sorely.
I land in Mumbai on Sunday night. Deven sees me in the morning and can't stop saying Papa, papa, papa, papa... I'm so excited to see him. Of course when he realizes that I have to fly that morning to Bangalore (where our office is) he is not happy at all.
April 17th
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The official reason I went back to India was to hire a new head of customer service and work on some budget items with Kaushik. Unofficially, I believe that for a remote office to feel connected the CEO has to go there often.
The same day I landed, Sowmya our head of HR (for both US and India - eventhough she lives in India) already had some great candidates lined up. Sowmya btw is a superstar. I have 100% trust and confidence in her. She used to run my HR for Andale and helped us build from 10 to 170 employees in India. She has a very high EQ and negotiates with vendors harder than anyone I know. I could not run an office 12,000 miles away without her.
Sowmya shows me three candidates and immediately one jumps out. Dinakar gets the job. He really impresses Azhar by actually answering two of the three programming tests we give to our engineering candidates. At Riya we want out customer service team to be more technical so that they can truly trouble shoot customer issues before escalating to engineering. However the whole CS team is strong. Mario did a good job there. Vijay Rao and Amit Dubey manage to impress as well.
April 18th
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For a startup I firmly believe in cost controls. Most of the time people only revisit costs when bad things start happening (missed quarterly earnings or cash is about to run out). I believe in doing it every month or at least every two months.
Kaushik, Sowmya, and I (with Ann, Azhar, & Burak on the phone for a few hours) spend the whole day going through the budget and seeing were we are wasting money. We find $2K a month in un-needed expenses in the India office. We set a new policy to only buy refurbished machines for internal HW use. We renegotiate and say 15% on a few big line items. Because of these changes it seems that we will be ahead of plan in terms of cash for the year. This is good. Cash is everything in a startup. Your adventure ends when cash ends. As a CEO or founder know where you are every day. At each company meeting I typically show our cash balance and show all employees the P/L for the last month. I want them to see where the expenses are going and how much more revenue we need to break even. This transparency help everyone to understand why certain decisions need to be taken.
April 19-21th
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Again I spend two more days thinking about the strategy and with Tara and Uma building more and more mockups. Tara is in India for Barcamp Bangalore which is a big success. Riya sponsors it to help build the community here in Bangalore.
As you are probably getting a sense, I like to schedule my activities in 1 and 2 day chunks instead of a few hours here and there. It is just more efficient to really get everyone in a room and work a problem hard with few distractions. Most people get this level of focus once a year or once a quarter in an offsite. I try to do it every week.
April 22nd and 23rd
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On the evening of the 21st I fly to Mumbai and see Deven and Vijay again. I spend the weekend there with Vijay and her family. Deven and I have a great time going to Juhu beach. On Sunday night we fly back.
By the 24th I'm back at work... I still have to solve this strategic decision. Fortunately three breakthroughs / insights occur in the next week that lead me to the spec for Riya 2.0.
Munjal,
thanks for sharing your experience, it is extremely insightful. I wish letting employees know the cash situation was a more widespread practice. I believe keeping people uninformed is a dangerous game.
Great blog!
Posted by: Olivier Ansaldi | June 04, 2006 at 08:57 AM