What I Learned

I recently read about VC firms asking the founders of potential investee company to register in a developed country for the ease of doing business in general, and for friendly corporate tax in particular. In that scenario, profit making startups doing business in India become tax payers to a foreign country when foreign funds invest in those companies. That looks like win-win for all as these companies create jobs in India and hence create individual Indian tax payers while they pay relatively less tax to a foreign country and increase profit for the investors. There is no doubt India needs to improve on ease of doing business and have a business friendly tax regime in addition to drastically reduce corruption and bureaucratic processes. We also need to strengthen our laws for intellectual property rights. Recently, in the budget this year, Indian finance minister announced gradually reducing corporate tax to 25% over 4 years to rationalize it. This is welcome. That s

I have the good fortune of growing up in a remote village in backward part of backward Vidarbha region of India, then settling down in a tier 2 city like Nagpur, after working and living in metros like Mumbai and New York earlier in life. I call it ‘from the bank of a pond to the shore of the Atlantic’, or in Marathi, ‘ Takya chi paal te Atlantic chi paal’ . :-) I still travel to all these places often. Below are a couple of silent observations. For years, every time I travel to my village, I see it more-or-less the same except for a few small changes here and there. It is somewhat like just a couple of new brush-strokes in a still painting, though these have increased of late. On the contrary, every time I travel to Mumbai, I am amazed at the changes happened and happening all around me. Another striking difference is, may be a result of this ‘activity’, is that I see people in metros always running after something to ‘achieve’ in spite of already having achieved a lot and

We recently had to painfully let go one of our star performers at Harrier for a reason other than her performance and behavior. Reason, she said is can’t even make a day-trip to visit a client, not even with a colleague, as her father has restricted her to travel overnight in train without a family member accompanying her! We could have sent her by air if we could afford, but this was a fundamental issue of who decides whether she will travel or not for office work! We understand the scary atmosphere created by stories in media about crimes against women and her father is justified to be concerned about her safety, but this sounds like stretching it a bit too much to put a blanket restriction on her overnight travel. Further he seems to have said that she is free to do what she likes after her marriage. So, it seems that he is less worried about her safety and more about his duty to keep her safe only till her marriage, as after that, it seems, it is someone else’s duty to worry abou

Why software services and products don't go together? Harrier was started in 2004 as a software product company with 'Harrier Stockpile', our flagship product for computing and maintaining market indices. We painfully transformed ourselves as a software services company focused on solutions for global financial services industry, to be afloat after financial meltdown in 2008 though the product bug refuses to go away. Wise-men and elders have always said that it is extremely difficult to run products and services businesses together at the same time as it requires different 'mindset'; though I always felt that we can develop products with people on 'bench' (team members sitting idle) while offering services for quick cash flow. I feel sorry for myself that it took me 10 long years to be convinced that these are two different ballgames though the reasons I have are more than mindset. Below is my learning. First assumption is that any business is