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 It's
a Friday evening in Los Angeles as I sit writing this. I am exhausted-having
just completed my twenty-fourth meeting in three days. That is not
a typo, two dozen meetings so far and more tomorrow. And with that
exhaustion is a certain elation.
Because more than a dozen of these may very
likely result in business for a company I have an interest in. Three
days where no one we met said "No".
I sit here thinking-here's another nail in
the coffin for that old adage that you need lots of money to get
business globally. The cost of this exercise basically included
lots of e-mail to set up meetings, two round-trip air tickets, a
few nights at a cheap-that too desi-owned if you please-hotel, and
a few hundred dollars to be at a trade show. Around a lakh of rupees
perhaps.
What's been surprising was not so much the questions asked of us-though
those were piercing enough. We had prepared loads of presentations,
references, demos. That, strangely enough, we were never asked to
strut out. Not once.
A couple of times, when I offered to show the
laboriously put together powerpoints, I got the same smiling answer-''Oh,
we know Indian companies. We know you guys can do software.''
Never mind we were presenting products, not
services, and that too at market prices, not labour arbitrage. The
brand "Indian software" is right up there, and its right
out there too. In the minds of buyers as far apart as Ireland, Israel,
and Indiana.
Dear Mr Narayanamurthy, Mr Premji, thank you
for bringing us here. Dear rest of us, now is the time to ride these
coat-tails. Before the rampant price-crashing on services tarnishes
this image too.
If you have the products, take it to a trade
show out there-meet with potential buyers and distributors-and if
your stuff is special enough, you will quickly see yourself being
wooed by potential partners. Perhaps even acquirers-we had three
unsolicited offers of investment in these three days.
The question I come back to is this: do we
as a country have the products to take out globally? I am afraid
I do not see too much in the pipeline.
Nasscom released its report a few weeks ago,
gloating that the Indian it services business grew by 22 per cent
last year. Strip the dollar inflation out of that and you're talking
of an industry growing by the mid-teens in percentage terms. Am
I wrong? Aren't our cement and consumer durables industries growing
faster?
Should this anaemic growth rate not be a wake-up
call that we need to move to the more lucrative part of the business-from
the back-office to the front-end?
Our ability to build good stuff is not perceived
to be in doubt. Not by our potential customers at least. So are
we the only people in the world who believe that we can't build
good software products?
Many people we met asked about the war situation
in India. Forget Bush, Vajpayee, Musharraf and our government's
inability to do pr for itself in the political world-this lot of
buyers is completely on our side. I certainly don't see a Pakistani
company getting the kind of reception we did.
A friend once asked a big shot at Infosys why
they didn't consider building a product brand. ''Oh, because it
takes $200 million,'' he was told. Another VC repeated this same
mythical number to me. With all due respect gentlemen, that is utter
balderdash.
It may take $200 million over five years, or
even 10. It might take even more money. But you would have turned
much more in revenues from your product over this period, and you
would only have spent this amount from your accruals. Are you seriously
suggesting that each successful software product company in the
world started with $200 million in the bank?
It is not that the world now has a level playing
field for us to be on. That field is actually tilted in our favour.
Are we going to fritter away this advantage too?
Mahesh Murthy, an angel investor, heads
Passionfund. He earlier ran Channel V and, before that, helped launch
Yahoo! and Amazon at a Valley-based interactive marketing firm.
Reach him at Mahesh@passionfund.com.
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