Mindtree Consulting is into a lot of things, including IT services and R&D services. They said that, encompassing those services, they also provide testing services and they use testing as their “way in the door” of a client. Upon hearing that, Dave looked around the room for me; we were just talking about my business plan the other night on the bus.
Their philosophy is to “Choose the right customers and work closely with them." They go to very specific industry segments and dig deep, instead of being “all over the place.”
The speaker talked about the four stages of offshore journey:
1. Bystanders, who either do nothing or are still in the initial investigations (50-60% of Fortune 1000).
2. Experimenters, who are usually in 10-20 person projects (25-30%).
3. Committers, who are usually in 30-50 person projects (5-10%).
4. Full exploiters, who are usually in large scale apps (less than 5%).
FinEye
I already heard about FinEye in the Carlson Ventures Enterprise. Gary, who is our VC-in-residence, had used the company as one of the case studies that the CVE class analyzed; FinEye is one of the portfolio firms financed by his fund. Later in the semester, he invited the CEO Paritosh and his brother-in-law Praful to speak to us along with a couple of other entrepreneurs. After that panel discussion, I chatted with Paritosh for a while about how he created the company and how it’s structured.
FinEye, being a startup, was in a small office. We crammed into one small conference room and a good number of us lined the walls. Paritosh had done the first half of the presentation and had handed it over to his associate, when he backed up and noticed I was sitting on the floor. Then he recognized me. I was surprised he even remembered me.
Since I already have a detailed background of the company, I was able to ask Paritosh about other things, like how he’s able to manage remotely (which was the subject of my paper for another class). He said it takes a lot of trust in your people. He added that, since he didn’t know anybody in Bangalore, he was very fortunate to have found the people and management team that he has.
People in the company have flextime and they work long hours. So, even though the majority of the employees are MBAs and CPAs, the company has the feel of a software startup. As Mani said, "[Paritosh] knows how to run a tight ship."
I asked if I could see a demo of their website application, which I wanted to see since the first time I met him. So they gathered us back into the conference room and gave us a demo. It’s a nicely designed site, but I don’t know much about the financial market and the requirements of the potential customers, so I'm not a good judge of the usability of the pages. They don’t have a marketing or sales team yet, so they probably haven’t done much marketing research yet.
I later talked to Robbie (who’s in the financial field) and he thinks it’s a good idea. It’s interesting to take a look at a company from two different perspectives – one as an example of a startup and another as an example of offshored operations.
Observations, insights, and lessons learned
Holy cow! A Dutch expat in India. :-) more pics
We couldn’t help but compare Bangalore with Delhi. As Robbie and Todd said, “Everything is better in Bangalore.” The sarees are more beautiful. Even the cleaning woman in the street wore a beautiful shimmery green sari under her work jacket. Most women wore strings of white jasmine-like flowers on their hair. The same flowers decorated busses, instead of the gold and red ones in Delhi. And they had Holstein cows! Delhi had brown cows. Bangalore had granite; Delhi had sandstone. Even the signs on the backs of the trucks were slightly different. In Delhi, trucks were painted with “Horn please,” although I saw one that said “Horen Plesse.” In Bangalore, they said “Sound Horn.”
Years ago, one of my coworkers at Microsoft decided to move back to India. He was homesick. He said that the food was better in India and that India was so much more alive, so much more colorful. I didn’t quite understand why he would give up a good paying job and all his unvested options. Now, I do.
I’ve heard of US companies that try to bring spirit into the workplace, but I didn’t expect it in an Indian company, like Mindtree. Maybe it’s another way for them to move the focus away from costs and other monetary measurements.
Microsoft seems to be a client of almost every company we’ve visited. Granted that different groups decide on which vendor they use, it’s still surprising that a lot of these companies have worked with Microsoft. I wonder if they’ve done only one small project and still say that Microsoft is a client.
All these companies are beginning to sound alike.
What would happen to US companies that outsource everything? India could be the next world economic power. We see Indian companies moving "up the food chain." What would prevent companies from just setting up in India from the start? Maybe the naysayers, those in the US who oppose offshoring, make some sense.
Would these sourcing companies’ margins go lower when MS increases their hiring in Bangalore? Aren’t these companies worried that there would be greater attrition as Microsoft lures away their best people? And with more MNCs setting up shop in Bangalore, there would be more competition among sourcing companies since they won’t have to spend resources to get customers from abroad; the MNCs are coming to them.
Artisans building a temple complex. more pics
As we drove around, I noticed that the women are segregated from the men on the busses. Yesterday, I asked our tour guide why, but he got interrupted and he never answered my question. Rohit answered it today with two words, “active hands.” He said it happens so often, and once his wife had turned around and slapped a man who groped her. But that reaction is uncommon because most women would just be quiet out of shame. Rape victims and abuse victims tend to do the same. It's violation, only to a different degree.
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