Delip Andra's Blog

We are hosting a Lunch 2.0 at Minekey on Thursday, September 6th. Started as an informal and regular gathering of Silicon Valley tech workers in corporate cafeterias, Lunch 2.0 has rapidly evolved through word-of-mouth into a national series of events.

In a recent article, Wall Street Journal said that Lunch 2.0 “has grown into a social-networking phenomenon that now draws hundreds of engineers, venture capitalists, and even summer interns to various companies for free meals and conversation.”

If you are in the Bay area and can join us at this event, please RSVP at: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/257418/. Facebook users can RSVP at the event link on Minekey’s Facebook group.

We already have more than 200 people who have confirmed participation and over 150 people have indicated may be. Perhaps, this could be one of the most attended Lunch 2.0 events in the Bay area. So, come check it out.

I am pleased to announce that Minekey has closed a $ 3 Million Series A Round of financing with NEA IndoUS Ventures. Vin Dham, acknowledged as the father of the Pentium chip, joined Minekey’s board back in December 2006, when NEA IndoUS invested part of the money in the first closing.

Let me tell you why we chose to work with NEA-IndoUS. Vin Dham and Vani Kola (founding partners of NEA IndoUS) are topnotch Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. They both have strong operational track records and understand what it takes to create a company of enduring value. As a serial entrepreneur, I understand how important it is to have investors who have been there, done that.

Interestingly, I first met Vin when I pitched the Minekey opportunity to him in July 2006. We were joined by Dr. Sudeshna Sarkar, Chief Scientist and head of the Minekey IIT research team, who was passing through the Bay Area on her way to a conference in Seattle. Vin accommodated our schedule and met with us at his home in Fremont on a Saturday afternoon. He was thoroughly persuaded by Minekey’s vision and market opportunity right from our first meeting. Even amidst their own efforts to fundraise for NEA IndoUS and Vani’s India move, both Vin and Vani took the time to visit and meet with the Minekey research team at IIT Kharagpur.

As a strategic financial partner in the venture, NEA-IndoUS team is taking an active role in helping to steer Minekey through the most critical stages of our growth path. We’re looking forward to collaborating with Vin and the NEA IndoUS team towards to create a world leader in the content discovery and recommendations space. Well, who knows – with the Father of the Pentium chip backing us, could we be the next “Intel Inside” for blogs and websites? Stay tuned.

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.

It has been a while since I posted on my blog. 6 months exactly. Yes …I was quite busy with my 2 Startups.

1^st one: I have blogged about this in this past. It is obviously Minekey, the startup that I have been incubating out of IIT Kharagpur for a little over a Year now. Past 6 months we have made some good progress and witnessed some interesting twists and turns. Over the last one year, I have been closely working with an academic and research team at IIT Kharagpur to productize and bring to market some of the academic research innovations in the Personalized Search and Recommendations space. By May this year, we had developed an Alpha version of a Personalized News Portal based on this technology. We spent the next 3 months talking to Alpha Users, Potential Investors, Customers, Partners and Analyst. While every one was quite impressed with the technology, usability and the features the product offered; invariably every one suggested that we should look at a potential business model of licensing this technology to Publishers and Content Portals to help them surface most relevant content to every user thereby improving the user experience and maximizing their revenue.We took the feedback quite seriously and went back to the drawing board to develop a Content Surfacing/ Recommendations Web Service that could potentially be used by the Publishers and Content Portals. We’ll be launching the service in early 2007. Good News: We just closed VC funding and the First Customer.

2^nd One: >I have finally found some one who I have decided to spend the rest of my life with. Yes …I am getting hitched on December 27^th in India at Bangalore. If any of you folks are going to be around in Bangalore and can make it for the wedding, please let me know your address and I’ll send across an invitation. Look forward to seeing you there.Unlike the 1^st one, we intend to boot strap this startup all the way through and the 2 major share holders are committed to see through all the different phases of evolution of this startup.

I’ll be off to India for business and wedding from Mid December till mid January. Now that these 2 startups are slowly getting off the ground …I am hoping I’ll be able to post more from time to time hopefully in 2007.
Happy Holidays and Wish you all a very happy 2007.

Past several weeks have been quite busy with lots of stuff happening at Minekey. Hence I didn't post anything on my blog. I am hoping to blog more frequently going forward.

We have made good progress on Alpha. Just recently we moved the Software from an Intel Desktop at IIT to couple of Servers in a Data center in Texas. Now we can do all the needed rigorous testing over the next several weeks to see if the Software delivers the promised results.

Also, I attended a few Lectures, Events and Conferences during the past few weeks. I will summarize my take aways in couple of posts shortly.

Information Overload certainly seems to be a key problem most netizens are facing today. Read my earlier posts "What have I been upto lately" and "And finally" where I have touched up on this problem at a high level and I have also talked about some of the experiences/ learning curve some of the early bloggers have gone through.

Bubba Murarka, seemingly a great technology enthusiast (one who is out there to try new products and services) has just posted his experiences/learning curve about reading blogs and feeds at Robert Scoble's blog.

Let's say you are beginner in the blogosphere and have some interesting stuff to talk about on your blog – but, how can you get your voice heard – when there are dozens if not hundreds and thousands of people talking about the same issue?

Blogosphere today seems to be heavily in support of links. Meme trackers like Memeorandum, Tailrank and blog search engines like Technorati rate you higher up when you have a lot of incoming links to your blog. That can often be a test for your persuasion skills and not always a best indicator of how good the content or the opinion you have presented on your blog is. How many friends can you blog roll and how many can you ask to blog roll you?

And then there are user rating/ social approaches like digg for example – where the bloggers can digg the article themselves and hope enough people read the article and vote for it to move it up the chain of authority. As the blogosphere continues to evolve there will be several interesting techniques and methods that would continue to evolve to rank the authortiy of the blogger and the relevance of the post.

On the other hand, for the blog/ feed readers how many blogs and feeds can you subscribe to and actually read win the limited time that we have? How do you keep track of all your friends blogs and also at the same time track some interesting posts from authoritative sources like scobleizer? This is certainly a big challenge for most of us today.

Don't be diasppointed !!! This is the problem we are working hard to nail down at my new start up Minekey. We will be launching to the public in the next couple of months. So, stay tuned.

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.