Delip Andra's Blog

Well, it has been 8 months since I last posted on my blog. As a Founder/ CEO of a company that provides a widget for bloggers, I have run out of excuses to defend my inconsistent blogging behavior. I realize that most good things in life need some discipline and getting into the habit of blogging regularly is no different. Perhaps it’s never too late to get that going, especially NOW, when there are so many interesting things going on in my life and there is no way to share them all with each one of you other than to post on this blog. How else, can I explain my tardy responses to some of your emails and phone calls .

Past 8 months have been the most interesting in my life. While, things were very hectic with my 2 startups – they were quite exciting too.

My personal startup has been a great ride so far. I am really fortunate to have been married to a wonderful and supportive woman.

My professional startup Minekey, which I have been working on for the past two years, has come a long way. During the past 8 months, we have made tremendous progress at Minekey.

During this time, Minekey got its own existence and identity. We set up our offices at Sunnyvale, California and Gurgaon, India. We were able to attract a great entrepreneurial team at both Sunnyvale and Gurgaon. Some of the former team members, who had been part of the early Minekey team at IIT but had graduated and since then been working for leading global companies in India, came back and joined us – Umar Shah joined us from Symantec, Gaurav Sahni (a.k.a. Rave) joined us from Lehman Brothers and Himanshu Baweja (a.k.a. Frosty) joined us from Trilogy. During a time when there is a huge talent crunch in India, we have indeed been very lucky to attract top IIT Computer Scientists to our team. Between our IIT Research Centre and the Gurgaon Development team, we now have around 15 top quality Computer Scientists working to put together technology that lets Minekey users discover the most relevant content. We are fortunate to have Gaurav Bhatia who relocated to India after living an working in the US for 15 years. Gaurav leads our team in India. In Sunnyvale, California, we have assembled a highly entrepreneurial team with great experience in online media. James Ryan, Alex Gault, Raymond Rouf and Rajiv Doshi have joined Minekey team to spearhead our Marketing and Business Development initiatives.We also completed a beta trial of Minekey Product with over 1000 bloggers during this phase and we have received some really good feedback. Our Engineering team is really working hard to get all these implemented over the next 2 releases coming up in August.

Minekey was also selected as Proto’s Asia Top 25 companies. Check out the detailed coverage about this event by several leading bloggers from India.

Even, without any marketing efforts Minekey was able to attract some level of attention from Analysts and Media during the past 8 months. Also, several bloggers from all over the world talked about us.

We are getting ready to launch Minekey finally next week. We are really looking forward to exciting times ahead. Stay tuned for updates.

I attended TiEcon 2006 held at Santa Clara on May 12-13. TiEcon is the World’s largest Entrepreneurs Conference. Over 3000 delegates attended the Conference this year and the theme was “Disruption and Convergence – Entrepreneurship Unlimited”.

TiEcon 2006 featured several distinguished speakers and panels covering a variety of topics in depth and breadth. I attended the Keynote speeches by Shashi Tharoor (UN – Under Secretary General), John Doerr (Kleiner Perkins), Arnold Schwarzenegger (Governor of California) and David Lynch (Hollywood Producer).

Shashi Tharoor spoke about Disruption and Convergence in the Global Political Scenario. Shashi emphasized that the primary reason for terrorism today is the fear induced by lack of awareness. He was quite up beat about the role technology can play to improve the situation. He urged the entrepreneurs to work on delivering technologies at the bottom of the pyramid to bridge the digital divide. In this context he mentioned about Nicholas Negroponte’s initiative at MIT to deliver a $ 100 lap top.

John Doerr, the World’s most famous Venture Capitalist was interviewed on the stage by Michael Malone, an ABS News Columnist and a Silicon Valley Veteran. I was very impressed with John’s Social focus in the areas of Education, Social Entrepreneurship/ Micro credit, Pandemic Flu Prevention and Green Tech. He presented some interesting pics forecasting what Global Warming could lead to …Gosh!!! There were very few areas in Bay area and Mumbai I could spot above the water in those Pics. John urged Entrepreneurs to really focus on areas that they can make an impact on the Society and solve some Global problems than building yet another inconsequential Enterprise Software Company. He emphasized on the need for Innovation in the Clean/ Green Tech areas relating to Energy, Drinking Water etc., John pointed out that while about 5% of the World’s Population lives in the US; US accounts for over 25% of the Global Energy Consumption. If developing nations like China and India were to start consuming Energy in a similar fashion, the planet would be at the brink of a disaster. He spoke about the inspiring work by Muhammad Yunus in the areas of Micro credit. John also quoted Tom Friedman extensively. One of the quotes I really liked was that the Solution for Global Terrorism will most likely originate from Silicon Valley (than Washington DC), when entrepreneurs come up with a technology that would reduce the demand for Gasoline globally and bring down the prices to $18 per barrel …Well, I said to my self …Long live Innovation …Long Live Silicon Valley …

Arnold Schwarzenegger enthralled the audience with his electrifying presence and spoke about making California the World’s preferred destination for entrepreneurs. While I often heard a lot about the “Great American Dream” – Perhaps, here was a live example. Arnold spoke about his story from being a Teenager in Austria to a World’s Body Building Champion, Successful Realtor in LA to the best paid actor in Hollywood and to top it all becoming the Governor of California, the Fifth Largest Economy in the World …all this in a single life time and that too being an Immigrant!!!! Isn’t that very inspiring? Arnold said this is only possible in California!!! I was impressed with his Passion and understanding about the current situation in California and what’s needed. Arnold spoke about he turned around the Debt situation in California; how he would like to improve the Infrastructure (like Roads etc., which is currently under capacity) to gear up for the Population growth. Some thing interesting he pointed out was currently we can not unload the Cargo fast enough at the Ports in California because that would increase the traffic and block all the roads …He emphasized a lot on the value of Education and improving the Education Infrastructure in California. He also spoke about his mission and travel plans to Market California to the Global business community.

Some of the Panel discussions I attended and liked are:

• “Ramping it up with Low bucks” moderated by Jeff Clavier from Softtech VC which featured Entrepreneurs, VCs and Angels discussing about Bootstrapping and early stage investments

• “Web 2.0 – Why now” moderated by Mike Arrington from TechCrunch which featured Entrepreneurs from hot Web 2.0 startups

• “Internet Search” moderated by Bill Burnham which featured leading Search veterans from Google, Yahoo, Ask and Efficient Frontier

Guy Kawasaki mesmerized the audience with his presentation “The Art of the Start”, even though he over ran the allotted time. The concluding Keynote was by David Lynch, who spoke very passionately about the power of meditation and its practical value in daily life. The panel touched up on several areas relating to Creativity, Consciousness, Quantum Physics, Neuro-Physiology and Psychology and the connection with the ancient Indian Vedic Sciences. My take away from David’s speech that will stay with me for ever: “If you keep searching for Happiness around; you’ll never find it in any place – because Happiness is not in any place, it is inside you. Meditation is that technique which helps you discover the bliss with in”. Thank You David for such an enlightening and passionate speech.

As I promised in my previous blog post that I’ll use the blog to keep you all updated about what’s happening at my end …Here you go…

After I left Euclid (the 1^st start up I cofounded, just 3yrs after my undergrad) in July 2004, I took about a year off …practically did nothing on the business front …but dabbled with a lot of other interesting things.

While the list is certainly quite long, some of the unsuccessful attempts include:

1. Learning to play guitar
2. Learning Hindustani vocal music from the Maestro Ali Akbar Khan (I actually enrolled for a quarter at his school and drove long miles several times a week)
3. Setting up technical finishing schools in India to help bridge the IT talent supply chain gap (between the quality of in take Industry expects and the quality of the engineers being made available by colleges esp. Tier 2 and Tier 3 engineering colleges)
4. Promoting the concept of Health and Wellness through a chain of Ayurvedic Cafes – “Starbucks for Ayurveda”
5. Setting up an Online Learning Community – “eBay for Learning”
6. Setting up Grameen style Micro Finance program at my home town in India (I read and researched a lot about Grameen, Micro Finance and Social Entrepreneurship programs around the world and I am a big fan of Prof. Muhammad Yunus)

Some of the successful ones include:

1. Spending 3 months of quality time with my family in India
2. Cofounding and launching Jayakrishna Foundation a non-profit initiative with my family members to serve the underdeveloped rural areas in and around my home town in India
3. Training to be a Phase 1 Art of Living Teacher (and all the voluntary work associated with it)

(Note – Most of you who have been mailing me – Are you married? Kids? Nope – not yet. But, I don’t know whether I should put that in the unsuccessful or successful bucket:-))

During this time, I realized that each one of us is truly gifted with some things and it is very important for us to honor these gifts and share them with the world. The principle of nature seems to be – those who have more shall be given. So, it’s all about realizing the gifts you have and honoring and putting them to good use!!! This is Swadharma (more on this later).

Technology is some thing that I am very passionate about and I decided to get back to business to do another startup. As a second time entrepreneur, I wanted do things a little bit differently. Having been closely involved with defining, developing and launching products for over 10 years – I have realized that the work that happens in Product Development Organizations around the world is mostly just good Engineering!!! Where as, most of the disruptive inventions and innovations are born out of Academic Institutions and Research Organizations. I am a big fan of all the success stories that sprung up from Stanford and PARC …few notable ones among them include Apple, Sun, Yahoo and of course the one and only Google.

While, I spent the first decade of my career delivering products and services for businesses – touching the lives of millions of Consumers is some thing that I have always been very passionate about. So, I decided to do some thing for Consumers this time.

During the time I took off, I used to spend a lot of time on the Internet to read, research and keep track of a lot of different things covering my professional and personal interests. Gosh, I was spending tons of time searching for information and going from site to site!!! Of course, I had lots of time to do that. I wondered if people all over the world were facing a similar problem – spending lots of time searching for information and hopping from one link to another to find that. To my amazement I found a Pew Internet research study that said people esp. in Corporate America were spending about 2.8hrs a day searching for Information. There you go – solving this pain became the core idea for my next start up!!!

Next few months went into thinking hard and discussing with various Friends and Advisors on – How do I solve this Information Overload problem for users globally by connecting them to the most relevant information? Is it by a method of intelligent search? Is there a way I can help them Search less and Find more? Is it possible to develop an Infomediary who understands my interests and can get me the latest News around the Web and the World?

I wanted to see if there was any research being conducted in this area at IIT Kharagpur (School where I did my undergrad; Check out this CBS News 60 minutes coverage about IITs). I found Dr. Sudeshna Sarkar was doing some cutting edge research work in this area for the past several years. I got in touch with PPC (Prof. Partha Pratim Chakrabarti – Dean of Sponsored Research and Industrial Consultancy and a renowned Computer Science Guru) and then we worked on putting together a deal with IIT KGP.

PPC and Sudeshna helped me put together a team of 8 brilliant guys and we have been working hard during the last six months. So the past 6 months it has been a lot of travel back to India (3 trips) and I spent half my time in India during the last 6months; and of course almost 7 trips to KGP and 45 days on the Campus. The progress we have made is amazing!!! Working with the team and IIT on this piece of cutting edge technology has been really a great experience. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

So, that’s how my new startup Minekey was born. Do check out Minekey’s web site (www.minekey.com) and the blog (read the blog post on why we chose Minekey name). We currently have the Alpha version of the Minekey product and we will be launching the Public Beta around end June. Stay tuned.

Update: We are launching the Minekey Service on April 17, 2007. Some of the old blog post links may not work. The new link to our blog is www.minekey.com/blog.