Category: Business

10 years of Entrepreneurship & 2 Years for Cogzidel


September has become a special month in my Life as it is during this month that I started my career and that too as an entrepreneur. I still remember it was during September 2000 I started my first company in a Ganesh Temple in Besant Nagar during Ganesh Chadurthi. Then I didn’t know I’d have crossed soo many hurdles & would be blogging about it today.

Also my second venture Cogzidel was started during september 2 years back and again I cant believe it has been 2 years. I can still remember both the days afresh.

It was a wonderful journey which was a mix of;

  • Excitement
  • Learning
  • Experience
  • Betraying
  • Managing Cruelty
  • Criticism
  • Appreciation
  • Recougnization

It took me 10 years in life to understand only half what entrepreneurship is and I’m still learning. Now I’ve a past to show people about my performance. But time to redraw my future & this is how I want my future to be positioned or I want to be or I want to do;

  • Become an Angel Investor
  • Become a Business Mentor
  • Become a professor on Entrepreneurship
  • Experiment / Research on Entrepreneurship like
    • Social Entrepreneurship
    • Holding and scaling an Entity
    • Forming a Company with Crowd Funding
    • Run a Public Limited Company

Just understood where my heart is and slowly moving towards the direction of my passion. Finally on this day I’d like to thank all my friends, relatives & my associates who have helped me reach where I’m today.

I wish 2020 will have a lot more to Share than now.

I watch this whenever I’m down


Adidas & Puma Story


Rudolf and Adi Dassler learned at an early age the enormous impact that gold medals had on their shoe business.

When U.S. sprinter Jesse Owens got to Germany for Berlin’s 1936 Olympics, Adi Dassler drove from Bavaria on one of the world’s first motorways to the Olympic village. There he found Owens, unpacked a suitcase filled with spikes and persuaded him to try them. Owens won four gold medals in Dassler shoes.

“Owens’s success cemented the good reputation of Dassler shoes among the world’s most famous sportsmen,” Smit writes. “Letters from around the world landed on the brothers’ desks, and the trainers of other national teams were all interested in their shoes.”

Business boomed and the Dasslers were selling 200,000 pairs of shoes each year before World War Two.

The war exacerbated tensions between the two brothers and their wives. Although both Dasslers joined the Nazi party and signed their letters with a “Heil Hitler” salutation, Rudolf was a more devoted Nazi.

The origins of the split between Rudolf and Adi are hard to pinpoint but an Allied bomb attack on Herzogenaurach in 1943 illustrated the growing tension. Adi and his wife climbed into a bomb shelter that Rudolf and his family were already in.

“The dirty bastards are back again,” Adi said, apparently referring to the Allied war planes. Rudolf was convinced his brother meant him and his family. The damage was never repaired.

In 1948, the brothers split their business. Adolf called his firm ‘Adidas’; Rudolf called his ‘Ruda’ before changing to ‘Puma’.

Second Step to Crowd Funding


After a week of thinking, to and foe changes on strategies we finally decided on two things yesterday;

  • Deliverable to the investor…
  • Business Model for the investment pitch…

Thought that is just a start from today have to plan a lot of parallels and still we have a lot of things to do like;

  • Forming Intermediates (Brokers / Affiliates) to sell the project.
  • Meet more people like Investment Bankers, Serial Entrepreneurs to understand the legalities and challenges we might foresee and work on solutions.
  • Start working on Business Plan to show it to investors.

From now it is going to be interesting as it is going to be a test for our patience, leadership, team-work and skills.

Life with Crowd Funding


It is going to be 2 years and it has been a great two years run. When i sat to prepare on my future plans or next milestone for the company; I realized I’ve been standing on the same foot for almost 10 years. Even with my previous company I started feeling about stagnation and I came our by that time. Now again I’m feeling stagnation and not sure about the Value as a company we are going to office. After much brainstorming i couldn’t think much. I think it is time to jump out of the comfort zone and take some chances and work on some cutting edge projects and slowly step into R & D. After making up my mind to step into next challenge and make life more exciting like how it was during 2002 & 2008 I’ve decided to work on raising funds.

In fact finance is one department which I haven’t explored and i want to try my hands on that too. So, we have decided to work on two types of fund raising;

  • Raising capital through Private Equities…
  • Raising through Crowd Funding.

It has been hardly a week since we have started and after starting it is like opening the pandora box. Every day i’m struck with something and I’ve to work on new tasks to facilitate the progress of core idea. I sleep every day without contention. I feel the day was half complete as i’m not done with my pursuit. But this is what making my life meaningful. I use to have the same feeling when i started my first company & with Cogzidel Consultancy Services. Today I’m happy with the progress of CCS & all those thought of half baked days are making today a contented day.

I’ve lots of personal lessons where perseverance has paid yields… For now i’m working on strategies for crowd funding and withing a week we are planning start our first pilot campaign…

If any of you have any knowledge or information about Crowd funding kindly ping me… I might need your help on it…

From Now my IM tool is Adium


For long I wanted to install an all-in-one messenger tool. But because of work compulsions & other commitments it took a back seat. Now i’m planning to take more responsibility on the entire operations of the company. So after reading a lot of reviews and trying other messenger. I’ve settled for Adium. Following are protocols or IM it supports;

  • AIM
  • MobileMe (formerly known as .Mac)
  • ICQ
  • XMPP (formerly known as Jabber)
  • Google Talk
  • Facebook Chat
  • LiveJournal
  • .NET Messenger Service (also known as MSN and Windows Live)
  • Yahoo! Messenger, USA & Japan
  • Bonjour
  • MySpaceIM
  • Gadu-Gadu
  • Novell GroupWise
  • Lotus Sametime
  • Tencent QQ
  • MeBeam with a plugin
  • Tlen with a plugin
  • Xfire with the XBlaze plugin
  • Skype with a plugin
  • IRC (beta only)
  • Twitter (beta only)
  • NateOn with a plugin
  • StudiVZ-Plauderkasten via Nimbuzz with a plugin

So from now I’ll be available on almost all famous messenger. Ping me to collect all my messenger handles.

Excited with Challenges


It is a Challenge everywhere & it is so much fun having a Challenge. Last couple of week it has been issues of;

  • Delivery Delays
  • Shrinking Profits
  • Server Issues
  • Productivity Leaks
  • Escalating Costs

And can add more to the list. After reviewing the situation the findings are wonderful and after cracking the problem and working on the solution is always the best thing to do. Now I’ve a aggressive plans & programs to improve our performance on all aspects and move up the value chain quickly and effectively.

Working for Passion


For almost a year i’ve been spending more time on drive, shopping & watching movies. I got addicted to retail fobia and my expenses started to shoot-up. Also i started hating what i was doing. For some time my friend Kaviraj & I were thinking of doing something which keeps us engaged and we enjoy doing it.

A week back I got an idea of starting a School for Social Media Studies & today we took the idea to next level. The biggest challenge we have to cross is that this is a part-time initiative & a secondary commitment as we have primary business interest which cant be compromised.

Tomorrow we have decided to give it a start and work on a solution for the challenge. The concept is going to be agile and we have decided to have short milestone & vision and evolve it based on experience & demand.

Also we are planning to make this a community driven initiative and we are open for ideas and we welcome like minded individuals who had passion for Social Media & for teaching.

My goal is to work on a task which is of secondary interest and make it a success. Will share the case study if my initiative clicks.

All about Craiglist!!!


One of the many inspiration i’ve in my life is the evolution of craiglist.org the way it evolved form a email distribution list to world’s number one classifieds portal. I wanted to share some insights about the evolution;

  • Craig Newmark began the service in 1995 as an email distribution list of friends, featuring local events in the San Francisco Bay Area
  • Became a web-based service in 1996.
  • Incorporated as a private for-profit company in 1999.
  • Craigslist expanded into nine more U.S. cities in 2000
  • Four each in 2001 and 2002, and 14 in 2003.
  • The site receives over one million new job listings each month, making it one of the top job boards in the world.
  • The site serves over twenty billion page views per month.
  • With over eighty million new classified advertisements each month, Craigslist is the leading classifieds service in any medium.
  • As of 2009, Craigslist operates with a staff of 28 people.

Its sole source of revenue is paid job ads in select cities – $75 per ad for the San Francisco Bay Area; $25 per ad for New York City, Los Angeles, San Diego, Boston, Seattle, Washington D.C., Chicago, Philadelphia and Portland, Oregon – and paid broker apartment listings in New York City ($10 per ad).

People Justice will be back


Six years i founded a Tamil & English fortnightly magazine called People Justice. Starting of the magazine was purely for passion, self-contintion & fulfill social responsibility. First issue was launched on 14th March, 2004 on Tamil New Years Day. We ran the magazine with great difficulty for 14 months and the last magazine published was on 1st June, 2005.

Today we took all the archives and it is unbelievable that its been 5 years since we stopped. Every moment lives in front of my eyes. Difficulties to bring the issue every 2 weeks;

  • Challenge to collect news
  • Challenge the raise money to publish
  • Editorial work

But we all worked like a unit. After a long Gap i had a discussion with my friend and thought we should have re-launched the magazine again. We obliged all compliance and also obtained the Registrar of Newspapers of India.

Now we have couple of tasks to make things straight and start the issue. As a centiment we are planning to launch it on 14th April 2010 which is Tamil New Year day and also our 6th anniversary.

Wish us luck for our second innings.