Mentorship Breakfasts
OPEN Silicon Valley Monthly Breakfasts provides a terrific opportunity for entrepreneurs and industry professionals to meet with Experts in their respective field, in a relaxed, informal setting, to build relationships and get valuable Business and Career feedback. Participatants deliver an elevator pitch for 30 to 60 seconds, and the guest mentor provides immediate feedback, enabling fast, effective, accessible mentoring and relationship development. Like some other OPEN events, the partipating in Monthly Breakfasts is available to to all OPEN SV members free of charge. If you are currently not a member and would like to become one click here .
Breakfast Committee for 2009 – 2011:
Mentorship Breakfast Review: Yusuf Zia
What: OPEN-SV Mentorship Breakfast with Zia Yusuf
When: 8:30AM, Friday, May 13th 2011
Where: Main Street Café, Los Altos, CA
Attendees: Six OPEN-SV members
Zia Yusuf invited six OPEN-SV members for a mentorship breakfast event at a café in picturesque Los Altos downtown. Zia is the President and CEO of Streetline, Inc that is revolutionizing the way we find parking especially in busy downtown areas. Their technology helps cities grow “smart” with smart-parking infrastructure that plays for the advantage of user and enforcement.
Zia jokingly said, “I’m in parking business.” He joined the startup firm a year ago after ten years at SAP AG as an Executive Vice President. At SAP, he had the opportunity to work with many well-known corporate leaders. Zia was included as a success story and in a book by Jeffrey Pfeffer’s. He told, Pfeffer wanted to study how people became successful despite not having the background in the core business.
OPEN-SV members asked Zia several questions about career transitions and what to consider before making the break what is working for them. Zia told he didn’t take the usual route of climbing gradually corporate ladder. He made big transitions in his career. After college, he joined the World Bank fostering healthcare in South Africa. He left the World Bank to pursue MBA at Harvard to prepare himself to get into Institute of Foreign Service. After MBA, he instead joined Goldman Sachs & Co in investment banking that he did not enjoy much. He worked ten years at SAP, and decided to leave SAP when he was up for a promotion before taking new responsibilities.
Zia told he decided it was time to do something new, and eventually joined Streetline after soul search. The change was tough and risky, but he knew he can always go back to big corporations. He had to make adjustments in pay, corporate budgets and expenses. He thinks one should consider changing a job when it becomes too routine, not too interesting or challenging enough, and when not providing personal gratification anymore. He finds innovative work at Streetline very rewarding.
When asked what were your initial few to-do’s at Streetline, Zia listed: learn what company wanted and had to do, understand the customer’s pricing power, and analyze the skill set of the present team to identify who was doing a good job. He feels good about helping build smart-cities. Zia then explained technology and demonstrated the free Streetline application on his iPad.
When asked how to keep work interesting, Zia said first and foremost it is essential to keep your finances in good order — to have the liberty to walk away if and when desired. Always have enough, so you are never in a situation where you don’t have the choice. Work because you want to be there, not because your finances require it. You know it’s time to move when work becomes routine and non-challenging.
On leadership in product management, he advised to develop prototypes and take them to potential users and customers for trial. Observe usage and get feedback from users. A product manager should become voice of the customer. It may be even helpful to play videos of actual users or usage in front of management. To foster your objectives in a corporation, one should find natural allies who can advocate your ideas. Start with identifying key people and decision makers, and engage them early. With sets of gives and takes, you don’t really need to win all the battles. If you find resistance to your ideas, back off and try a different path or defer part of ideas, and come back to original objectives. Zia says, there is no substitute to working hard.
OPEN-SV members thanked Zia Yusuf for his words of wisdom and for his time from his busy schedule and hosting the event. We wish him success at Streetline.
Review by Arif Shamim
Highlights from Past Breakfasts:
Breakfast with Arif Janjua:
Arif Janjua invited the OPEN-SV members for OPEN Mentor Breakfast at Palo Alto Hill Golf and County Club. The topic was, “An insider’s view into Management Consulting”. This event proved to be a great opportunity to learn about management consulting, managing career options after college, and about adding valued credentials for yourself.
Arif told us briefly about his own career transitions — starting out with degrees in EE complementing by an MBA from Haas. He told us about his technical, marketing, business development, and consulting experiences at Gemini, AT Kearney, Gould Electronics, Saraide (acquired by Infospace), iDrive, Strategic Decisions Group, and last six years at Boston Consulting Group. Arif said he will consider leading another mobile tech startup changing the world.
With his vast experience in technical and management consulting, Arif advised on diverse issues especially consulting. He explained three tiers of consulting business – management consulting, implementation/professional services, and tech/IT services. The top-tier management consulting comprises of services offered by likes of McKinsey, Booz Allen Hamilton, Bain & Co, and Boston Consulting Group where they advise clients at executive level on strategy and change management to improve companies’ performance. There the revenue per consultant is the highest – at around $500K/year. The information technology implementation and HR management consulting, as provided by Delloite, Accenture, PWC, usually has consultant revenues at approximately $300K/year. The third tier functional consulting companies, such as, Tata, IBM and Infosys provide services by consultants actually doing the technical work.
Arif listed out pros and cons of working in consulting industry. The three main advantages are working in fast paced environment where learning curve is steep, working with the smartest people coming off from top schools in the US, and working with executives facing variety of strategic issues at diverse companies. Cons include lots of travel, time away from home and family, and pressure to get up to speed fast, act and please the customers.
At management consulting firms, the consultants are generalists. They get assigned to and advise all across verticals irrespective of their personal interests, unless experienced in healthcare or biotech industry.
Career at top consulting firms is on fast track — two years experience leads to Project Leader role, an additional 2-3 years lead to Principal, and then next 2 years makes a Partner. If consultant doesn’t meet performance at each level in above timeframe, they are let go. Those experienced ex-consultants remain in high demand and able to make lateral move back to industry.
Arif told, most of the hiring at top-tier consulting companies is targeted primarily at top undergrad and B-schools. On the east coast, of course, it’s the HBS, MIT, Wharton, Duke, and Dartmouth. Among others schools are Kellogg and Stanford, and often Haas, UCLA and Univ of Chicago. The advanced degree (eg, PhD, MD) hires are usually limited to medicine, healthcare, biotech as those candidates often need to develop business acumen on the job.
The discussion turned to MBA: if, when, from where, and part-time or full-time? Arif summed it that an MBA is usually the best way to create value options for yourself. MBA helps develop structured thinking abilities and problem-solving approach. Those strengths open up career options in diverse industries and different roles. Arif thinks it’s best to go full-time to B-school after 2-4 years of work experience, depending on personal situation. Management consulting companies only hire full-time MBAs from best schools. After MBA, he recommends joining a different industry than in which one was experienced after undergrad.
For people looking for upward mobility in the same company or industry, Arif thought it is better to spend time networking, taking finance, accounting and marketing courses, and enhancing interpersonal skills. Those skills help in management and operations functions. Management looks for people with intellectual power, analytical rigor and good interpersonal skills to do bigger and better things.
All attendees thanked Arif Janjua for sharing wealth of information including sage advice on MBA and a rare insider’s view of top management consulting companies and career.
-Review by Arif Shamim
Faraz Hoodbhoy is the founder of PixSense, Inc., a successful Silicon Valley startup that provides a mobile social media platform offered by mobile operators to their subscribers. Faraz is based in Santa Clara and has been an active contributor at OPEN-SV events. It was about time to invite him to host an OPEN-SV Mentorship Breakfast which was attended by eight OPEN-SV General Members.Faraz mentioned that entrepreneurship runs in his family and that he is a 3rd generation entrepreneur. During his undergraduate program at Rensselaer, he had to put school on hold to work developing software in Pakistan for 3 years. He returned to complete his BS in Industrial & Management Engineering. He went on to hold positions at Microsoft, Cap-Gemini Ernst & Young, Unisys, and at Clickmarks where his focus was in mobile enablement & integration of enterprise applications. Faraz recalled being inspired to start a company while attending OPEN-SV and TIE events on entrepreneurship in the early 2000s.
After a series of failure-to-launch ideas, he and his high school friend and business colleague, Adnan Agboatwalla, started focusing on the idea of managing digital media captured by mobile devices. In 2005, with much guidance from their mentor, Anurag Mendhekar, they formed PixSense, Inc. PixSense started with a development arm in Karachi, Pakistan. Within six months, PixSense had 15 people, all funded by personal savings.
Faraz said that it would be impossible to even think of setting up offices in Pakistan without his co-founder moving back to Pakistan. Without the “inherent alignment of interests as co-founders”, overseas operations in Pakistan could never have been achieved. Faraz offered a quote from Anurag, “Successful ventures require ‘good luck’, but ‘good luck’ is a function of being in the right place at the right time; and that is not a random event.” Faraz also said that “perspective, awareness and focus” are critical assets when considering how to turn ideas into reality and suggested that is nearly impossible to acquire and hold these by individually. He stressed the importance of mentors before and during the process of becoming an entrepreneur. Faraz said that for him it was critical to have not just one, but several mentors, and the ability to be comfortable with the fact that most mentors do not necessarily provide answers, but rather, provide the “sounding board of rational thought.”
When asked what investors consider before committing capital, Faraz suggested that investors invest in “people, not technology”. Other obvious factors include financial and market analysis concerns, including real TAM (total available market) analysis, but an equally and possibly more important gauge is the founder’s own commitment. If founders are unwilling to invest their day jobs on their new venture, then it is unfair of them to expect investors to invest millions of dollars into helping them follow their dreams. Having gone through multiple funding rounds, Faraz is of the opinion that dilution is “an academic discussion”; the reality is simply that one shouldn’t seek funding at the wrong time. He said, “Go to VCs when you don’t need them to survive, but rather when you need their investment to actually grow your business.” Also, he said he has made many friends among VCs and understands their hesitation at funding new ventures. “VCs need to make 10x returns to justify their existence, so only go to them if your company can deliver such returns. A profitable business that doesn’t have the potential to scale to 5~10x or more on original investment isn’t a bad thing at all, it’s just not venture-capital fundable.”
Talking about PixSense’s success, he said it provides “sticky & addictive” mobile social apps that yield value for everyone in the mobile ecosystem, from operators, to infrastructure vendors, to ODMs, to end-users. Faraz said that the process of critically understanding and addressing the motivations and needs of stakeholders – operators, vendors, and subscribers – is easy to pay lip service to, but very hard to translate into real-world business and technology strategy and tactics. Faraz said it took many years of trial and potentially catastrophic errors to materially understand the problems and limitations that each of the players face, and only after they understood the complex inter-related problems was a PixSense’s technology-based solution relevant.
Today PixSense has millions of subscribers around the world, generating significant revenues for PixSense’s customers, PixSense’s partners, and most importantly, PixSense. Faraz said he greatest learning to-date is that “the principal of ‘aligning everyone’s incentives’ cannot be limited to an intellectual discussion, but rather must be treated as the foundation of everything you do in business if you want long-term, sustainable growth”.
When: Thursday, March 25, 2010 — 8:30 am Click to Sign-up
Monis had a very lively discussion with the mentorship session attendees and he introduced the main idea behind Naseeb as a social networking platform for Muslims. He highlighted the different aspects of social networking that were considered crucial in driving successful early adoption of Naseeb by users. He discussed the role of early investors like VFrog, Ron Conway and Reid Hoffman. At the initial stage, it was estimated that it would take $80K for Naseeb to take off. After the launch in October 2003, the early user registration touched 20,000 and soon jumped to 100,000 users in 2 months. 60% of the current user base of Naseeb is from US. The birth of the Rozee job portal came out of a need by Naseeb to hire new employees and it soon grew into an independent business catering to the employment hiring needs in Pakistan. It took substantial amount of time and effort to convince the VCs about investing in a company based in an emerging market like Pakistan in the face of volatile news coverage of the socio-political developments in Pakistan. ePlanet came into the picture in this phase. He discussed Pakistan having the 3rd fastest internet usage growth in the world with 18.5 million internet users and 90 million mobile subscribers with more than 50% under the age of 19. He announced the upcoming re-launch of Naseeb. The users will then have the ability to manage 3 personas (social, matrimonial, professional) with privacy controls for each of them. He answered an interesting array of questions. The importance for entrepreneurs to set a time frame to test the viability of the venture was discussed. The ins and outs of approaching VCs was discussed along with the role a seeding strategy can play in the successful early adoption of social media ventures.
(Write-up by Azhar H. Zeeshan)
Breakfast with Faysal:
Faysal started off with introducing himself and how early on he was involved in a venture acquired by Synopsis. Recently at CMEA, he has led the successful growth of Solyndra and A123 in the clean energy space. He discussed his concentration in ventures related to energy materials. The recent trend of new ventures going down the acquisition path was discussed. Previously, the IPO launch could take 4 years but in this economic climate the IPO cycles have increased to around 10 yrs. Nowadays, more focus has been on IP based business models in the MicroChip market ventures that can survive on royalties rather than competing with major players with just one product. For software ventures, he emphasized the importance of discovering sales channels while the speed of execution is considered crucial for social media ventures. In this market, VCs consider it acceptable for social media ventures to concentrate on driving more customers in early stages and then working on revenue generation and monetization. He mentioned Pixazza as a successful venture employing crowd-sourcing models to monetize based on generated transactions rather than click based models. The criteria used by VCs in gauging the value of a venture was discussed and how the track record of repeat entrepreneurs is considered in this respect. Coming highly recommended by somebody VCs trust in their networks can also play positively in favor of entrepreneurs seeking VC investment.(Write-up by Azhar H. Zeeshan)
Shoieb Yunus started off with an introduction of his career with an emphasis on the transition to being an entrepreneur. He discussed his first venture and the valuable experiences that helped him be a more cognizant entrepreneur. The benefits of mentorship during his early ventures were highlighted. The push to get out of the cube and engage with people from the industry yielded tremendous results for him. He discussed his current venture called Vpype and how important it is to be vigilant of the competitors and to keep evolving. He also gave tips about the early stages of a startup when it is really important to clearly identify the “What” and “How” of the idea an entrepreneur is trying to launch successfully. In order to make quick strides in this pursuit and get some validation, it is important to share the “What” with people. He also highlighted aspects of intellectual property to keep in mind and ways to engage with major software vendors for obtaining licensed copies of their software at no cost.
(Write-up by Azhar H. Zeeshan)
Breakfast With Rehan:
Mentor: Rehan Jalil , President & CEO at Wichorus
When: Tue, Dec 21st, 2009 – 8:30 AM
Where: Parcel 104 , Santa Clara, CA
The following is an exerpt from the summary sent to attendees
Rehan met OPEN members over a Monday morning breakfast in the middle of valley.
Like previous OPEN breakfast mentors, he too stressed working full-time with undivided attention on the idea to make a successful venture. Rehan told us that engineers have deep, specific insights in to technologies. Aspiring entrepreneurs need to utilize their core expertise, focus on a problem to be solved and come up with differentiating solution.
Valley is all about innovations, and there are many successful entrepreneurs available to build relationship through social networking. Aspiring entrepreneurs need to reach out to them and share their “cool ideas” with solution(s). Mentors can then help refine ideas.
Reflecting back on his efforts to lauch WiChorus, Rehan told us he started with with little seed money and subsequently raised more money through marquee venture capitalists in the Silicon Valley, like Redpoint, Accel, Mayfield and Pinnacle.
Rehan is upbeat about the future of mobile-Internet where high-capacity networks with efficient managed spectrum and low-cost will enable technologies and solutions of the future.
When asked if he sold too early, Rehan smiled and quoted Rockefeller, “I never sold too early.”
(Write-up by Arif Shamim)
Date: Saturday, Oct 31, 2009 – 8:45 AM
Location: Symantec Cafe, Mountain View, CA
- Open Communication and buy-in from spouse on tough finances and time away from family
- Get involve in your new venture full-time – part-time seldom become a big success also make sure that rest of the founders are also fully committed
- Decide upon a timeframe and backup finances (6 months for venture, and 3 months to find a job in case unsuccessful)
- Team must include members with management acumen to devise formidable business plan to pitch to investors
- TAM (Total Available Market) – ensure business plan identifies sufficient TAM such as not to become a mom & pop’s operation and your product idea should service sufficient portion of it
- Don’t wait for a working product – proceed forward with concept and approach investors with a solid business plan
- Rely on friends and networking to validate the viability of your product and feature details
- Focus on customer feedback in defining and refining your products.
Raghib found his calling to go found start-up after he got tired of big corporation politics. He reminded us Cavium was not his first attempt for a venture as an entrepreneur , and previous one failed to materialize because of lack of full time commitment. Raghib was introduced to Syed Ali, and synergy of their management and technical expertise led to an actionable, successful plan.
With a core team, they put forth a business plan to create a multi-core processor as an eventual product. Cavium targeted a focused coprocessor product first and delivered an initial working product yielding revenues within nine months after funding. A proven product gave them footing in the market. Investors felt confident to commit further capital.
Cavium worked closely to define the other products roadmap and features that were later well-received by the market.
Today, despite having 450 employees, Cavium is still a lean organization — without any dedicated receptionist.Several members exchanged ideas with Raghib. He stressed full-time effort for success. Risk-taking shouldn’t be difficult for immigrants who typically start from scratch in the US. He explained neat ideas need to accompany a solid business plan. He identified where some ideas seemed to be lacking sufficient TAM. Raghib explained that VCs are always in search of a good team, and typically will invite for meeting when presented with an idea with good business plan.
We thank Raghib for his valuable insights, sharing his success story, and answering specific questions from OPEN members at the breakfast.
Breakfast With Bari:
Former Sr. VP for World Wide Consumer Marketing, McAfee Software
Date: Saturday, Oct 31, 2009 – 8:45 AM
Location: Hobees Cafe, San Jose, CA
- finding job in this difficult economy
- moving up in corporation
- making lateral move across functions in same company
- utilizing work experience in starting own venture.
The session could have been titled, ’What They Don’t Teach You at B-schools?’. Bari asked participants pointed questions and provided direct feedback. He got down to the business quick and suggested valuable specific actionable items to get results. That gave a lot to ponder about before making next moves.Bari contends in this market environment most companies and hiring manager cannot afford to hire to train. Hiring managers and entrepreneurs are extremely selective. They are looking for individual who can hit the ground running, and produce results – now. Candidates may want focus on and pitch their core competency in this job market.
Sharing his thoughts on moving across functions within the company, Bari stressed on a candidate to seek out contacts, develop relationship, express interest, and show knowledge in that area. He said, “Don’t apply for a job, make the job come to you.” Until you have evidence that you can land the job, don’t apply for internal jobs through usual process. HR usually notifies current manager. That may have negative consequences if the person were to remain in current position.
Ensure “higher-ups” know about you, and are happy with you. Among the higher-ups, peers, and juniors; the higher-ups will always have more say. Bari suggested going out and having meaningful lunches with members from across functions.
We thank Bari for taking his time out, sharing his corporate experience and thoughts.
(Write-up by Arif Shamim)