Author: ajayohri

India and the Internet:Workosaur.com

Q1. What has been the story of your career and what message would you like to send to young people aspiring for MBA’s or just starting their careers?image
A1. I’d rather have the reader click through to my LinkedIn profile (http://www.linkedin.com/in/nimish79) to see how my career has panned thus far. However, the interesting bits only start now that I have taken upon myself the challenge to create true value by building a big Internet business – click by click.
Also, I feel it’s too early for me to be dispensing advice to those starting their careers. To each his own dream.
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Q2. Why did you create a web startup?
A2. While I have always tried to spot the right opportunity to get started, my last few jobs have been in the Internet space. And I took to it just like a fish takes to water. Also having set up two Internet businesses and having contributed in different capacities to the other businesses at my previous organizations, starting off in this space was a natural progression for me.
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Q3. What are the key learnings that you have learnt in this short period?
A3.
1. INNOVATE or DIE.

My first initiative, workosaur.com, is a niche job site targeting senior professionals. To exist in the online recruitment industry, which is currently dominated by big players who entered the market early, makes it imperative for me innovate. Moreso because even late entrants with deep pockets have struggled to remain competitive.
2. BUILD TO LAST. DON’T BUILD TO EXIT.
Many Internet startups today are not built on a solid business model. They exist under the assumption that one of the bigger plays will snap them up. When you have such a vision, there is a greater chance that you would fail. Because if things don’t go your way and the bootstrapping costs pile up, you may lose patience, and hang up your boots. So it’s always better to build a business that can go all the way – one that provides tangible value to its audience – so that you can make money at some stage of your product’s lifecycle.
3. WORK HARD.
During the start-up stage, it pays to work hard. For example, I decided to read and learn everything I could – right from managing and hosting a webserver to designing on Photoship/GIMP to programming in PHP/Python to HTMLization to search engine optimization to campaign management and online marketing. I knew enought to be able to do all the initial work myself and was able to launch workosaur.com under USD 1000. If one isn’t willing to do this kind of spadework, it becomes difficult to sustain a start-up which can’t be monetized early.

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Q4. Is an MBA (IIM or Otherwise) necessary for success. Comments please.

A4. In my opinion, an MBA (especially from an IIM) is detrimental to success if one aspires to be an entrepreneur. Given the prevalence of extremely high salaries amongst the IIM pass-outs, one tends to build a comfort zone around themselves. And it’s difficult to get out of. During conversations I have noticed that most of my peers aspire to start up but the superficial comfort zone of drawing a fixed monthly income holds them back. And once you are so risk-averse, it is very difficult to tread the entrepreneurial route.

Also, the comfort in their current job kills the stomach to do spade work. And with this you have pretty much eliminated the key elements that are necessary to be a successful entrepreneur.
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Q5. Whats your vision for your site. Which website is a good analogy for it? Why should anyone visit the website?

A5. The vision for workosaur.com is to be the #1 job search destination for middle-level and senior-level management. My current mission is to aggregate the most Rs. 10+ lac jobs and simultaneously build features that would be of great utility for my audience.
It’s a niche segment and currently there is no competitor operating exclusively in the same niche. The competition comes from multiple channels like the top management jobs on naukri and monster plus print classifieds such as Times Ascent.
We have chosen to serve only senior professionals on workosaur. Once you decide to serve a niche, you are in a better position to give them what they want. (We are like a Chinese restaurant which serves good Chinese food to an audience who has come to eat Chinese cuisine.) Senior professionals who visit workosaur will note that we aggregate only 7-figure jobs i.e. jobs that pay more than Rs. 10 lacs per annum. And we do not provide recruiters any access to our database of CVs unless its in response to a job posting. Thus the need for confidentiality is taken care of. Apart from this, you’d find a lot of nifty features that are built for this audience. Log on to workosaur and try them out.

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Bio:
Workosaur.com is a free job board for senior positions i.e. jobs that pay more than Rs. 10+ lacs per annum. Unlike the other job sites, workosaur.com truly focus on aggregating the most lucrative jobs in India and overseas – Corporate-level, vice president, director and manager positions. Workosaur.com explicitly asks employers to use the job board only for positions for which they can afford to pay more than Rs. 10 lacs per annum, thus making workosaur an aggregator of 7-figure jobs.

Online Banking in India

What made you enter the online market space ? What prompted you to take up this present assignment?

There is tremendous opportunity in the Indian online market space. For instance buying flight tickets and shopping online was not popular a few years ago. Today people realize that transacting online can be safe, cheap, and can be done within a few seconds. Bankbazaar.com makes getting a great loan bargain as easy as buying an air ticket. Customers using our site will appreciate how much thought we have put into every little detail, which will make the process of applying and getting a loan a hassle free experience. It can help them save precious time and money. We expect a large percentage of consumers from channels such as bank branches and agents to migrate to BankBazaar.com .

Today there are a number of websites that claim to give customers instant loan rate quotes, when they actually just collect customer information and sell them to multiple banks and Direct Sales Agents. In such a scenario, we see a need for BankBazaar.com. Our innovative talent pool drawn from the world’s best colleges and companies are constantly seeking the best possible ways to offer an easier and faster online experience for customers.

I took up this assignment because my team is driving pure innovation in India. We are exploring options that no other financial marketplace in the world has ever attempted before and our goal is to build the world’s premier financial services marketplace (made in India).

What is different about BankBazaar for the customer ? What is different for a prospective employee ?

On BankBazaar.com the customer can instantly get customized competing offers from India’s leading Banks and NBFCs on our secure interface. We are the first neutral provider in the world to have innovated in partnership with leading financial institutions to provide this real-time offer capability. This information is

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The World's Largest Analytics Networker

1) What prompted you take a career in science, and what has been the reason you stuck to it, and been a success in it ?

I was doing mathematics for fun at a very young age when my friends were interested in sports, cars and movies. When I finished my master, I was approached by one of the professors to pursue a PhD program. It was in statistics (image analysis, bayesian clustering), and I thought that choosing statistics rather than number theory  or numerical analysis would increase my chances of getting a job after presenting my thesis. At that time, my favorite subject was indeed number theory – I was even published in J. of Number Theory. After earning my PhD, I moved to Cambridge, then North Carolina, then the Internet industry – with a very interesting detour into finance and risk management / fraud detection between 2002 and 2005.

2) AnalyticBridge is the world’s largest network for analytic professionals ? What prompted you to build it, what were the critical milestones, and what is your vision for it ?

It is a convergence of multiple factors. The feeling that the startup I was involved with at that time wasn’t doing well, the fact that I had a large network (thanks in part to LinkedIn) and that I discovered Ning.com (while browsing recruiter networks) on February 16th, 2008 – the date AnalyticBridge was born. I decided to create and grow AnalyticBridge very fast, both through networking, quality content, and significant paid advertising. I hope that within 5 years it will be five times bigger in terms of members, and even more profitable

Continue reading “The World's Largest Analytics Networker”

The World’s Largest Analytics Networker

1) What prompted you take a career in science, and what has been the reason you stuck to it, and been a success in it ?

I was doing mathematics for fun at a very young age when my friends were interested in sports, cars and movies. When I finished my master, I was approached by one of the professors to pursue a PhD program. It was in statistics (image analysis, bayesian clustering), and I thought that choosing statistics rather than number theory  or numerical analysis would increase my chances of getting a job after presenting my thesis. At that time, my favorite subject was indeed number theory – I was even published in J. of Number Theory. After earning my PhD, I moved to Cambridge, then North Carolina, then the Internet industry – with a very interesting detour into finance and risk management / fraud detection between 2002 and 2005.

2) AnalyticBridge is the world’s largest network for analytic professionals ? What prompted you to build it, what were the critical milestones, and what is your vision for it ?

It is a convergence of multiple factors. The feeling that the startup I was involved with at that time wasn’t doing well, the fact that I had a large network (thanks in part to LinkedIn) and that I discovered Ning.com (while browsing recruiter networks) on February 16th, 2008 – the date AnalyticBridge was born. I decided to create and grow AnalyticBridge very fast, both through networking, quality content, and significant paid advertising. I hope that within 5 years it will be five times bigger in terms of members, and even more profitable

Continue reading “The World’s Largest Analytics Networker”

India and the Internet:SimplyMarry.com

What prompted you to enter the internet media space, and what qualities do you think made you succeed in it.

I just loved the internet since I started using it, somehow I always felt this is the medium for me. I created a portal long time back and then joined an internet firm. The best thing about the medium is that the product, marketing, content and sales are close-knit than in any other medium. Another great part of it being it’s flexibility, you can create lot of designs of experiments at almost zero cost, and implied risk.

Whatever little success I have had is because of my passion for the field, which has given me a sound understanding of behaviour of web consumption. I think consumer behaviour is the key here, which has to driven by great data interpretation skills, which is basically the level of understanding of the medium.

What’s your most challenging project ever (anonmous details)

My most challenging project has been the C2C engine success challenge. This is a case of concurrent profiles, threshold traffic, registered traffic, returning traffic and overall site engagement metrics. Now this is tough t build and tough to break as well, still very tough to build. The returning traffic is a component of current traffic, which makes it a chicken and egg story in C2C domain. This is the toughest part, the “engagement metrics” forecasting is the key, and you can never be precise on this, the engine needs to be fueled on scientific data analysis, industry trends, consumer research and believe it or not, lot of heuristics. And if you go wrong, you can waste millions of dollars for

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Interview-Data Mining,Israel-Edith Ohri

An interview with Edith Ohri ,a pioneer in Data Mining from Israel, one of the technologically and educationally advanced countries in Asia.

1) Tell us how you came in this field of work, and what factors made you succeed.
My introduction to data mining was at work right after my MS degree. The CEO of the company asked the IE department to organize the many small customer orders in groups that "make sense" for production, in a remote plant which the company had just opened. At the time, there was no solution available for this request. Whoever got the job was destined to months of laborious work. As a new comer I was assigned that unpopular job. Being new at that place, my problem with it was even greater: I had no knowledge about the production preferences and practices and could not had guessed what to assume and where to focus. This lack of expertise and inability to rely on expert knowledge or past conventions was as things turned out the key for success, as it forced me to rely on objective analysis alone.

2) Most challenging and fun project you ever did (anonymous details).
Every project is fun for me. It is always challenging to crack new complex data especially if previous analysis attempts have little results. In almost every project there is a surprising and interesting twist. I find it every time again very rewarding to discover hidden facts and then rationalize them with the client. Currently I’m working on an extremely large data set that requires farther software development. For me is

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Interview Alan Churchill Savian

An interview with Alan Churchill, SAS Consultant and Alumni of SAS Institute.

Ajay- What’s the latest trend you see in Computer Programming over the next year and next three to five years.

Alan- Silverlight and Flex will be huge and will really enable much more SaaS. The current web simply needs wholesale replacement to make it more usable for business applications. These new RIAs will allow us, as developers, to take it to a whole new level. Expect a massive influx of dollars into web redesign and redevelopment.

Ajay-  Tell us how you came in this field of work, and what factors made you succeed.

Alan- I got into computers in high school (this was very early computing). I loved the sense of challenge that computers offered: they were a big crossword puzzle. I succeeded because I never viewed a problem the way a typical computer person or scientist would view them. As a history guy, I took a more holistic approach to problems. Heck, if you don’t know about a particular theory, you won’t be constrained by it. If you do know it, sometimes ignore it to get the job done, even if it isn’t as pretty.

Ajay-  Most challenging and fun project you ever did (anonymous details)

Alan- I have had many, many rewarding projects. As a consultant, every job is different. However, the spare time project one I am currently working on (figuring out the layout of the sas dataset) is perhaps my favorite due to the complexity.

Ajay- Advice to people wanting to join computer programming as a career- Positive Things, Challenges, Skill Requirements.

Alan- First of all, programming is hard so be prepared to work to be good. Never ever stop evolving and looking for the next thing: you are only as good as your last 18 months of experience.

The career is very rewarding since you are continuously facing challenges that must be overcome. Computers have no patience for mistakes so they require a lot of patience for programmers.

Always, always, always think outside of the box. Approach problems differently. If you hit an obstacle, move around it rather than always trying to burrow through. At the end of the day, it is all about getting the job solved at the speed of business not finding a cool, nifty new algorithm: do that on your spare time.

Ajay- Would you like to visit India for work/travel.

Alan- I honestly don’t like to travel long distances. After a long corporate career flying over a million miles, travel is simply taxing to me and takes me away from what I love to do: programming. As a history major, I love various cultures and would enjoy the beauty and history that India provides but would dread the flight ;-]

Bio;

Alan Churchill has been coding in SAS for over 20 years and worked at SAS as a senior consultant for 5 1/2 years.At SAS, Alan worked on the Microsoft-SAS Alliance and helped SAS customers integrate with .NET. He is also responsible for coding the engine for SAS’s web analytics product. Currently, he is the owner of Savian which specializes in Microsoft-SAS solutions. He lives and works in Colorado Springs, Colorado.