Rendezvous with Carol Bartz – Yahoo! Global CEO

I just met Carol Bartz at a very cozy and well organized meet by Yahoo! India.

She is cool!

Carol spoke extempore and without a mike (in an effort to be closer to the small audience) and articulated the Yahoo! global vision.

‘Yahoo! is all about you and me and how people communicate and get together’. If that were the case, what about social networking I asked her? She like the question and was clear that Yahoo! was making an honest and hard working effort to stitching the 600 million + unique visitors they attract (whoa!) and we would see start seeing stuff soon.

Someone asked her how easy it was to work with Microsoft and she said – ‘it isn’t'! Yes, she knows The big Bill and Steve Ballmer and that helps.

What was impressive was how she explained the synergy between Yahoo! Search and Bing – the MS search platform. Bing is the king of crawling and web indexing and that’s what they (MS) do best. Yahoo! builds on that base, saves on precious resources involved in servers and crawlers and bandwidth and then throws up the search results in its own special ‘Yahoo’ way that helps its visitors. Also, search on Yahoo! is not branded, so the visitor at Yahoo! experiences the best of search with complete affinity to Yahoo!

Carol came across as a person in command, very experienced and determined to make Yahoo! shine and how.

Most importantly she explained that the Internet and the massive positive impact it will have on people hasn’t even been understood yet (much like printing presses that much later led to novels)…so the best is yet to come!!

Way to go Yahoo!

Value lies in the eyes of the beholder..

I must share one of the most amazing experiences I have had that to prove this.

While I was building contests2win in 98, Pepsi Mumbai became a regular client of ours and we did quite a few campaigns with them. A gentleman called Ranga was the head of Pepsi Mumbai and was quite the taskmaster. He was so demanding and detailed in his requirements that my colleague Salil and I ( just a 2 man team) used to literally cry. We couldn’t say no to his business and yet could just about meet his expectations.  We used to dread dealing with him just because he always found something more that we should or could have done. The incredible twist to the tale was that all our services to Pepsi were free – our model was getting promoted by Pepsi in their ads, so all this torture did not even earn us any money.

Fast forward 6 months. In my first VC funding meeting with E-ventures (a VC firm), Neeraj Bhargava – one of the partners asked me why I wasn’t making money. I replied that the idea and concept  of c2w was literally the first in the world, and that brands would take a lot of time to understand it to pay us. He then asked me who my team was and I said – just 2 people. Neeraj finally asked the question I dreaded  the most – who was our most repetitive client and his/her contact number? (This is standard diligence in funding – the VC’s will speak to your regular clients). I mumbled and answered – Pepsi Mumbai headed by Ranga. In my mind I assumed that this discussion was over. Ranga was not going to be kind about us and / or our work.

Neeraj immediately called Ranga in my presence and began an interesting conversation with him – Do you deal with c2w? How is their work? Do you like the team? He then asked – why don’t you pay them? Ranga replied something that made him get up and walk out of the room. A few minutes later he came back.

He looked point blank and said this ‘Alok – Ranga told me that he loves your ideas and work’.  On being asked why he doesn’t pay c2w, Ranga said that Alok never asks(!!) and that Pepsi was worried if there was something fraudulent about c2w… coz they (Pepsi) never get anything  for free!! Finally Neeraj dropped the atomic bomb on me… He had asked Ranga if he would ever consider working for c2w with Alok, and Ranga has replied – ‘Of course! It sounds very exciting’

That’s the day I understood that value get created without the creator even knowing about it.

Ranga’s positive feedback was one of the reasons for c2w getting funded. He became c2w COO 2 months later and went on to create Mobile2win in China that was acquired by Disney.

Create with your best effort and let the world value your work – you will be pleasantly surprised!

Children need to fall to grow up..

Situation:

2001 dot com bust. At contests2win.com, we had 2 months of cash left to survive. I was desperate. I knew I had a great idea and had to ride out this storm. So I assembled my core team and requested a meeting with Renuka Ramnath – then CEO of ICICI Venture – our principal VC for financial help. I was going to beg her for money.

We met in the lobby of the Oberoi (now the Trident) in Mumbai – the sofa was small and so I was sitting facing Renuka, with my team members standing.

I started mumbling about more money and rambled on for a few minutes. Renuka looked at me, smiled and said ‘Alok, when we have children, they need to fall to grow up. As parents we can easily hold them but don’t. Allowing them to fall is what is good for them’

That’s all she said. The message was clear. Fall. Stumble. Get hurt but get strong.

My team and I were shattered as we walked out. Yet something had been triggered inside.

We struggled, beat ourselves to death and survived. Almost 10 years later, we are miles ahead of those horrid times, and that advice remains unbelievably hard to beat.

Our Clients are our VC’s..

Situation:

2003 – Post dot com bust.

My co-founder GK (Gopala Krishnan) and I had launched a mobile business called mobile2win in China and India and were gaining solid traction. We had been awarded the Indian Idol business by Sony India and also were getting business in China from China Mobile and China Unicom etc.

However, there was no cash to grow. It was always a hand to mouth experience. The business needed a strong cash injection and VC’s were the guys whom we both knew so well, and could surely help us.

The VC’s were broke. They were so bruised by the dot com crash that they just wouldn’t meet anyone. Some of them were bankrupt (like our VC in contests2win.com – a firm called Eventures India)

I remember distinctly sitting in our dark conference room and brooding, when GK looked at a large poster of logo’s of brands we used to work with – it was always in our conference room as a testament of our partnerships.

I remember GK’s eyes gleaming when he looked at the logo’s and said ‘Alok – we have been meeting the wrong folks. Our VC’s are our clients – Not anyone else. You need to double up your efforts by getting business from clients. Stop wasting time chasing VC’s and get the business funded by business cash flow – not investments. Investments will never happen now. Business will always happen’

We did exactly that and grew the business to comfortably raise VC much later.

In 2006, mobile2win was acquired by Walt Disney in China and mobile2win became the best deal in my life.