Career Manifesto

The last two points of the manifesto are the best

"9. Don't expect to be perfect. Focus on doing right instead of being right. It will simplify the world enormously.
10. If you plan on showing them what you're capable of only after you get promoted, you need to reverse your thinking. "

Focus on doing right. Well said!

Update

We have been chugging along, "in the zone". Team forming and sustenance is such an important thing for every project (an organization in general), that iterating it multiple times doesn't hurt. The authors of Peopleware do an excellent job explaining this (I think this also has been repeated a zillion times).

One of the real administrative hickups is the financial setup. Setting up a bank account has been a nightmare. There are so many banks these days, but most of them don't keep up their word nor do they provide any kind of good customer service.

A pretty good list of house er.. office rules that seems to work can be seen in this coad letter. We should try out some of it here.

Recipe to make Google?

Steve Yegge - "When friends who aren't at Google ask me how it is working at Google — and this applies to all my friends at all other companies equally, not just companies I've worked at — I feel just how you'd feel if you'd just gotten out of prison, and your prison buddies, all of whom were sentenced in their early teens, are writing to you and asking you what it's like "on the outside". I mean, what would you tell them?"

Now how can we recreate such a thing? What is the recipe? Wouldnt all companies benefit being in such a free state?

The First Signboard!

A lot of people find it very difficult to locate Indygo just because there is no signboard in front of the office. So thats not the case any more... we now have a signboard and I designed it in "Gimp" :)

Till now, I didnt know that gimp can open/edit and save in photoshop format. Great going Gimp!

Update: Posting a better image than the previous one with the office in the background .

Compensation

I don't think I can say it any better than Joel and Eric. What they have said makes perfect sense and I think, the only thing to think about is how these principles can be applied to the indian scenario, where market is quite crazy with quality degrading quite a bit.

If you have any thoughts about how this might work differently or might not work for the indian situation, please do comment.

Funding Application

Some of the questions which are a part of the YCombinator's application for funding are worth answering for anyone thinking of a startup. So what I am doing here is filling up the application even if we might not be eligible. The questions seem to be real thought provoking and I will not have answers to all the questions.

• What is your company going to make?
• Please tell us in one or two sentences something about each founder that shows a high level of ability.
• What's new about what you're doing?
• What do you understand about your business that other companies in it just don't get?
• What are people forced to do now because what you plan to make doesn't exist yet?
• How will you make money?
• Who are your competitors, and who might become competitors? Who do you fear most?
• How long have the founders known one another and how did you meet?
• What tools will you use to build your project?
• How long will it take before you have a prototype? A beta? A version you can charge for?
• Which companies would be most likely to buy you?
• If one wanted to buy you three months in (March 2007), what's the lowest offer you'd take?
• Why would your project be hard for someone else to duplicate?
• Do you have any ideas you consider patentable?
• What might go wrong? (This is a test of imagination, not confidence.)
• If you'll have any major expenses beyond the living costs of your founders, Internet access, and servers, what will they be?
• Are any of the founders covered by noncompetes or intellectual property agreements that overlap with your project? Will any be working as employees or consultants for anyone else?
• Was any of your code written by someone who is not one of your founders? If so, how can you safely use it? (Open source is ok of course.)
• Please tell us something surprising or amusing that one of you has discovered. (The answer need not be related to your project.)

[Answers in the comment section]

Employee Referral Scheme

If you know somebody who is looking for a job and you think is a good fit for Indygo refer him/her. If (s)he accepts the offer and joins us, Indygo will pay you a huge bonus, a percentage of his/her annual CTC. The terms are -

• You have to be an indyan when you refer your friend
• The person should join before the offer presented to him expires
• Three percent of the annual CTC will be paid to you as bonus on the successful completion of his/her three month (90 days) employment with Indygo
• Directors cannot claim this bonus

So tell your friends who you think can be a good indyan and bring them our way.

Risk averse

One observation that is both bad and frustrating is that we as a people are very risk averse. I can understand the position of a guy like me with mouths to feed and a family to run, but a guy just out of college still wants to get into a place where there is not much hope of working in what interests him.

I guess there are two aspects to this. One is the prestige about working in big companies. As Paul in his wonderfully written essay says "Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy."

The second and the difficult one is the sense of "not always true" security in big brand names. This is again due to the fact that the next jump will fetch them a better rate if they are jumping from a bigger brand name. If life is all about money, then I dont think we have to write software to achieve it.

Wikimapia

We are on wikimapia. Its amazing to see what can happen in a social environment with the right tool. Really love it!

You can see us right next to Netakallappa circle right bang in the center of the map.

Indygo is looking for Indyans

Indygo is a company which believes in agile methodology. We believe in small and simple (may be in someways less). We believe in the famous "kiss" principle from the Unix tradition. We believe that one needs passion to create anything worthy. We believe that money is only the byproduct of providing something of quality to the end-user. We believe that customers are the kings and queens. We believe that we can exist as a small fish more effectively among the whales and sharks. We believe in teams which can complete each other's sentences. And we are looking for people who believe in what we believe.

We are in the process of creating a team which will excel in providing such services that will make the customer happy. We want to foster a culture and grow an environment where the team feels at home. We will strive to provide a place of work which will enrich the life of those working.

We are looking for a senior java developer and a webapp UI guru. The senior developer we are looking for, is somebody with about 4+ years of experience, with good product development know-how, and well versed in the web application development in java technology. The attitude matters more than the techiness and good communication is definitely important. Needless to say, one has to be excited to work in a startup environment.

We are on!

Today, we signed the papers for registration. We are officially now called as "INDYGO SOFTWARE SYSTEMS PRIVATE LIMITED"

Update:
Indygo is born. We received our incorporation papers today (Jul 13).