Building the management team in an Indian startup

It takes a few good men and/or women at the top that are passionate, focused, and work well together and have the right complementary skills to get a startup off the ground. However attracting quality senior management to a startup is certainly a non trivial task. Identifying, attracting and converting senior management candidates in India is time consuming and a lot of hard work.

Here are a few tips to ease the process of attracting senior talent into your startup in India :

Start focusing on the organization early. An entrepreneur needs to quickly evaluate the gaps in his or her organisation and be obsessive about bringing on the "right" senior management team on board. An entreprenuer needs to be intellectually honest about his or her own strengths and weaknesses and look to bring on people who can execute much better than him or her in the weak areas. An entrepreneur also needs to think laterally when looking at bringing on senior talent as there may not be abundance of talent available with direct domain expertise in India. Often, domain knowledge can be learnt. What is more important is the core competencies and values that an individual demonstrates.

One a candidate is shortlisted, convincing them to join can be a difficult task. A credible investor, board member and/or advisor can play a very important role in helping build the senior organization in a startup. Typically, Indian managers harbor entrepreneurial ambitions but are scared to take the leap to join an unknown startup. If there is someone the candidate can converse with whom they find credible that is personally involved with the company, it can really help faciliate thier decision to join. So an entrepreneur must always try to choose the right investors and advisors that can help them build a strong organization. This holds specially true for India and may not be the case in other developed markets where startups are well understood and an entrepreneur can easily attract talent.

Understanding the Internet consumer in India is critical

There has been a lot of "buzz" recently about investing in consumer internet in India. There are VCs flying down to India from all over the world looking for the next big Internet venture for the domestic Indian market. And keeping these VCs busy are a plethora internet entreprenuers with "me too" ideas (internet businesses that have worked elsewhere in the world)- social networking, blogging, travel, peer to peer collaboration, dvd rentals, photo sharing, matrimonials, ticketing, payments, classifieds, etc. As an Indian internet entrprenuer and now most recently a venture capitalist, I have met almost every internet entrepreneur in the country looking to start a new venture. A word of caution to those starting an online venture or to those looking to finance one - understand the "pain" of the Indian consumer that your online business is trying to mitigate. For example, lets take a look at a hot internet category - Online travel. Today, an Indian traveller calls up his or her travel agent (there are thousands of these companies in every part of urban India) and requests a flight or hotel reservation for a desired date. The travel agent does the research and typically calls back within a few hours with several options and fares tailored to the Indian consumer's request. The consumer then chooses amongst the several options given, post which the travel agent will send a person to the consumer's home to deliver the ticket and/or collect cash/check payment. The biggest pain today for the Indian consumer is seat/room availability and transparency (ie. Am I getting a competitive fare?). Collection of inventory and payments is not a pain for today's Indian traveller. And talking to an agent on the phone is certainly not a pain point for most. In fact it is something that the Indian travel appreciates. So a Online travel intermediary that provides competitive pricing of inventory on the website, guarantees availability of the most popular flight/hotel inventory, provides phone service, home delivery and payment pick-ups will win in this market. Online travel companies who insist on remaining purely online and not provide these so called "non online" services will find it hard to survive. It is no secret that internet is poised for a take off in India. And broadband will eventually happen. Entreprenuers who understand their target customer's pain points and come up with indigineous solutions to mitigate thier pains will make a lot of money for themselves and thier investors. Others who try and port US models to India will be in for a rude shock!