george tziralis log

Getting from a couple of entrepreneurs to a team of 5 or 20 employees is one of the most difficult tasks startup founders are facing. I call this the transition from being a doer to becoming a manager and then, eventually, a leader. In this post, I will try to provide some reasons why, next to some practical tips that you might find useful in handling such a transition.

Entrepreneurs are, by their very nature and before everything else, doers. You don’t really have that many options when you start with a team of, say, another one or two partners to pursue your crazy world-changing idea; you have to do pretty much everything by yourself. This indeed is a healthy approach and it seems to work pretty well to begin with it, especially in the pre-product, or also in the pre-revenues early stage of a technology company. However, heroism is neither sustainable nor efficient and a company is a living organization that needs to evolve to persevere.

For that to happen, granted everything is going well, the team grows and the entrepreneur realizes herself switching roles from, say, coding to hiring developers and from selling to clients to motivating employees to sell instead of herself. This does not come free of emotional baggage, imagine the parent at her child’s first day at school. Yet it is only desirable and the founders have to mature and live with it, actually learn how to embrace the new reality and build a team entrusting its members to perform, rather than micromanaging everything and feeling guilty just because they didn’t “contribute much” in every single irrelevant task.

The founders’ time does not grow proportionately to the size of the team, so some rules need to be put in place for the company to operate seamlessly and continue reaching one target after another. It is of utter importance to realize that you as an entrepreneur should offload micromanagement and every single minor task on their entirety, also not to feel paralyzed or kind of bad about it. Your time still is the company’s greatest asset and you should treat it like that by investing it in what matters for building and growing your company; tasks like bug detecting and making coffee should definitely not classify as such. In this context, here are some practical suggestions on how to run your team if that’s the case.

Set up 3 target outcomes per week for each employee. Remember to focus on outcomes, as opposed to tasks, which are each member’s job to figure out. Discuss openly and share these outcomes to all team members every Monday morning. Next Monday, everybody gets 2′ to share his progress with the team. If she hasn’t managed to tick all 3 boxes by Friday, she has a full weekend to finish everything, but she definitely has to do so by Monday morning. After all updates, share the targets for the next week. Be strict with your team, uniformly to everyone, if you want to get everybody to perform, for them to be happy in the long term as opposed to feeling relaxed in the short term.

Now, zoom out to the company level and write down 5 clear -ambitious yet tangible- targets for the ongoing month. Have these on a white board in front of your desk, to remind you your core priorities beyond day to day hassle. At the end of the month, write down which ones you succeeded at and which ones you had not, next to the ones you define for the new month. Put these, along with your basic operations metrics and core finance numbers in one page and share it with your investors, these are sufficient to get them engaged and updated. If you are lucky enough to have no investors, do the same exercise to summarize and share your updates with a virtual investor, for example assign this title to an advisor or friend and ask him to keep track of you. Keep in mind that in any case you benefit the most out of this process.

All these might sound far too simple to you; and simple they are, for simple rules are the ones that work and daily scrutiny cannot bear anything less simpler. I believe that such tips and practices might enforce a much required discipline in a young startup that will help it survive past the early growth stage. More importantly, these may ring a bell to founders feeling or acting in similar ways, and I hope this post is of value to make them act against such problems, as indecision usually leads to worse results. What’s more, far from such tips being cast in stone, I look forward to hearing your suggestions and experiences on what works and what doesn’t in taming the beast that a founder’s transition from doer to manager to leader is.

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I have lately been a witness to a growing contradiction in the local startup ecosystem. With this post, I would like to call this discord out; I hope it might be of value.

By nature, entrepreneurship (or life, if you will) is about finding the right balance in a growing variety of issues. In the local ecosystem’s case and in my limited experience, entrepreneurs are struggling to strike the right balance between the local realities and the promised startup land. Admittedly, this is a tough task.

On the one hand, local realities usually stand for a disheartening context. Short-sighted perspectives, or the lack there of, along with a “nothing happens here” mentality, typically suggest a status that you have to escape from so as to start a business. You cannot escape from reality though, and it’s a fact that you have to understand, value and embrace the local conditions before you can take over and move ahead.

At the same time, the promised land, typically taking the shape of a valley, does own a growing mind share in the community’s collective consciousness. Ideas are valued at millions by inception, customers at thousands are eagerly awaiting for your new unknown product while investors grow in trees, or at least that’s what you get to believe should you be fantasizing the startup life.

This constant oscillation between the lack of any ambition (due to local conditions) and utopia (or the discontent of realizing its absence) frequently leads to confusion, not only in words but mostly in expectations and the actions that follow as their result. Being by belief and profession an advocate of almost irrationally ambitious targets that break limits and fuel the passion to go after them, I still have to draw distinct borders between what gets you out of bed in the morning and what makes you feel accomplished back before you sleep.

It takes time to find the right balance; stable balance is the outcome of trials and errors, most importantly the suffering of going through them. In my understanding, the entrepreneurial community in my region has yet to complete this process and evolve to reach the calm waters of knowing thyself and its environment, therefore fertilize the existing reality with the desire to improve it, as opposed to following mirages in the distant desert haze.

When one is confused on what to do and which path to follow, a textbook is a reference of value. And there is a textbook on how to create and grow a technology startup in mature ecosystems. There are clear rules on how to set up a team, raise money or not, develop a product, then build a business and eventually a company on top of it. There are well documented do’s and dont’s that take into account a big number of successes and failures, forming patterns that could not have been developed overnight.

In the local context of almost no success stories of reference, there unfortunately are no textbooks but common sense. In the social setting that the economy is, I do believe that the latter is the building block for the former, yet what lies in between is a big list of mistakes that one has to experience and survive from, rather than outsourcing the pain to the shared experience of the many to proceed beyond it.

Yet it’s not only about mistakes. Comparing apples to oranges and your startup to a global giant will probably lead you to get drunk on the cool aid, skipping your very own unique taste and the competitive advantage of putting it to work. I truly believe that there are special local facts and figures, traits and qualities that remain to be further explored and highlighted, leading to a more efficient approach to creating a technology startup, right under the warm sun where you are reading this.

There is a difference between imitation and evolution, the latter works. For the entrepreneurial ecosystem to deliver against its bold promises, it needs to evolve beyond any references to its dysfunctional past or gloomy context, as well as any comparisons to other ecosystems catering to different needs from different starting points. To do that, a different startup model is of essence, playing up on special strengths and working around local strains, while separating universal rules from the localities which created them.

Shaping this new model and writing up the local textbook of technology entrepreneurship is a daunting task on a long bumpy road. Yet some of us are experiencing it, the hard way day by day. I urge you to continue doing so, and share the lessons learned along the way. After all, for a new species to mature it takes time, trials and tech; also, to enjoy the ride.

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You cannot expect from a child to be financially sustainable. Yet the next generation is a society’s biggest asset. Societies have early been mature enough to realize this and shape forms and structures (from families to student loans) to help children grow up and get educated, enabling them and the society at large to reach their true potential.

Take this to startups. You cannot expect from a young company to become sustainable from day one. Yet startups might mature to serve as an economy’s biggest bet and the foundation of its economic future. Have both societies and economic players realized these, are they helping young companies to have a shot at changing the game, for evolution instead of folding to happen?

Eventually, are we helping children based on the promises of what they might achieve, but judging start-ups based on the facts of what they have already delivered? My take is that -in immature ecosystems like the current one in my region- the answer is a disturbing yes. Yet, unfortunately, it can’t work like this, and one can see the results (or the lack thereof) everywhere around her.

A startup’s life, just like a child’s one, is a path from expectations and promises to actions and results. And it’s a fact that, no matter how greatly efficient you are, the process of moving on to the next step and maturation takes time and the right amount of support. Imagine the opposite scenario, what would you expect to happen if you leave a child alone in the forest? Say that you get back and you find her alive six months later, would you judge her on the improvement of her algebra skills or how much money has she made?

In mature entrepreneurial ecosystems, facts-based judgments of a startup’s activities get postponed pretty much until the IPO. I’m not saying that venture capital rounds blindly take place under lack of revenues, traction or early data suggesting great future prospects. But I’m saying just that, required inputs and plans serve as suggestions and hints that a great team is on track to deliver a disruptive product in a growing market that will eventually make economic sense, opposed to already available solid data that will make a financial analyst suggest a company’s stock.

I have met with a number of local people on an investor’s end who indeed have the greatest of intentions but have yet to realize this very fact. Start-up investments cannot but be promise-based and promise-driven, with facts supporting but not fully “reasoning” -in a traditional sense- such a decision. It may sound a skin-deep, irrational or even unprofessional approach; I assure you it is exactly the opposite.

With the Openfund, we have made what we consider to be a serious attempt on breaking this vicious cycle and operating with a different, promise-based mentality within an ecosystem that does not. It is true that it is far from easy to be the only player in the local market doing so, especially when you are strictly limited to the very seed side of things. That said, we are comfortable that change is bound to happen, and we are devoted in continue playing a growing role towards it.

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I recently returned from a trip in wonderful Istanbul, I spent three days there. It was my first time in the city that used to be called ‘the City’ before NYC existed and my second time in Turkey, so I’d like to put here some rough thoughts of mine, next to some amateurish photos.

First, some context. I’m Greek, thus I’m not supposed to have Turkey in my list of places to be. I don’t know much about modern Turkey, either; the country always was a big grey area in all the maps I got to study during my school years.

That said, I experienced a weird affinity during my stay in Istanbul. If you skipped the language part, everything looked and felt like being in Athens. Actually, also many words were pretty similar, I saw numerous ones I used to consider Greek with Latin spelling, and vice versa. Well, I’m probably overstating things a little bit, however I cannot help but share that I felt like brothers and sisters with many Turks I got to meet with and we had far more to share, compared to, say, Brits or Germans that we Greeks tend to relate with.

There is a great wall somewhere from north to south, across the Aegean; let me call it the “Aegean Wall”. Due to it, we weren’t capable of looking at each other. I believe that, if we get close enough, we may end up looking at the mirror instead, no matter the time lag.

To give a telling example, there are two different stories on the origin of baklava, and maybe there will always be. But, to be honest, I don’t care that much about the origin part, DNA probably got mixed enough throughout the centuries. What I do care about, though, is the very fact of, say, baklava as a delicious proof of our similar cultural identities and recent historic trajectories, and this is something I’d love to further explore and exploit.

Our grandparents were fighting each other. There are open wounds, still. For example, we both still waste a year of our hopefully productive life in the army, and we pay a significant part of our GDP in building virtual weaponry. I, for one, hope that this won’t be the case for our grandchildren as well, and I’d like to work towards that, sooner rather than later.

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In my short career, I’m privileged enough to get in contact with a number of people in the local entrepreneurial ecosystem. With most of them being aspiring or already in the game entrepreneurs, a common question that arises is -no surprise here- how to raise money.

That’s more than fine, and it’s actually part of our job at the Openfund. What is not equally good or acceptable however, is the typical way that an entrepreneur approaches this process, or at least that’s the typical way that many entrepreneurs I get to contact with think and feel. In this context, I’d like to take my fair share and attempt to shed some light on what I consider misconceived or not.

Here’s the approach I usually get to observe. An entrepreneur comes up with an idea, puts a lot of hard work behind it and she makes some good progress. Now she has a business plan in place (though this is lately becoming rare to observe), some rough prototype or a working product, or maybe a half baked business as well. The maturity is not the point here, what I want to focus on is the very moment that she decides to go after fundraising. And here’s how she perceives it.

“I value my idea/product/company at X euro, I’m willing to give Y% if you want to invest.” That may sound fine to you, but -well, to my short experience at least-, it is plain wrong. And this is not bad due to being stubborn, or pre-defining a price that should be defined by both participants of the transaction. It is by definition a wrong approach to take on this problem, and here is why.

You are not into this game to get a valuation of your company, or take some money and run. You play to do more, faster. And the basic question that you need to address is what you want to do, when you want to get it done and why it makes sense for both you and your potential partner to enter this game and do things according to your plan.

Remember, partnering in a company implies that each partner’s personal interest now falls behind the company’s interests; for one to succeed, the company needs to succeed in the first place and that has implications in both sides of the negotiation table. With this perspective in mind and solely based on the company’s interests, valuations and percentages cannot but naturally occur. But, instead of the previous ‘popular’ approach, here’s my humble advice on the questions that you need to address and how to build your story when you go after fundraising:

“Until now we’ve done this and that, this shows that there’s some traction and early market validation to the product and also, more importantly, as a team we are the best fit to make it happen. This is the market that we target at and it makes sense to go after it because it’s huge and growing and underserved so far. To serve this market, these are the steps that we need to pursue within the next X months so that to reach targets A & B etc, and to get there we estimate that we need to spend Y amount of money. So we want to raise that much for a Z percentage of the company, keeping a sufficient stake for the investors in the subsequent rounds that we need to raise to bring the company to its potential and finally get to an ipo or acquisition.”

To me, this approach draws a completely different picture, while bringing the right mentality on the table. If you used to feel uncomfortable with its implications, fear you not. Founders are the single irreplaceable asset of a start-up company; at the end of the day them becoming unmotivated is the worst case scenario for every potential investor.

I hope you can relate to the above differences quite soon and you will be more efficient in your fundraising efforts by capitalizing on some of the above; in any case I’m keen to read your experiences and comments.

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The core problem of a small market is, well, it’s size.

I’d personally call it as one of the two major problems of the local business ecosystem, with the latter being the risk-avert mentality. Let’s keep risk phobia out of the picture for now; I’d like to dig a bit further into the market size issue.

Many will argue that size is not that much of a problem; yet underestimating a problem is a safe way to make it a real one. For example, in the greek case, a pretty popular perspective goes along the lines of “aren’t 11 million clients enough for you?”. The answer, unfortunately, is an emphatic no; and here’s why.

A shallow market has numerous implications into your business, many of which are not easy to detect at first sight. I’ll attempt a short and incomplete summary here, while also trying to provide some more or less obvious workarounds where applicable.

- Market
Even if you create consumer products for the mass market, arguing that the whole population stands as your target is, well, naive. Well-known and already mature products target specific demographics and end up getting just a piece of the pie; assuming that you’ll perform better will probably lead you to mistaken decisions.
In fact, you need to start with a small set of clients anyway, to optimize your product and validate the market need; however it remains a question if the size of the market that you finally address is big enough for your company to grow beyond being a family business. With market size being the amplifier -or precipitator- of your efforts, a balkanized market is far from the place to be.

- Product
Products are not entities separated from their environment. On the contrary, they cannot but embrace customer needs in a darwinian process which lets them -and the ecosystem- to evolve. If the environments’ constituents are innovation averse and shortsighted within their comfort zone, ground breaking products cannot get used and mature, and start-ups get essentially trapped under a vision cut but the very limitations of the market itself.
In this context, rare successes remain within the local boundaries, further fueling the introvert status quo, thus also partially canceling their disruptive nature. In short, product development for a local opportunities often ends up to be self-fulfilling on the market’s limitations, and you’d better break all those in the first place.

- Team
Great expertise cannot be made by anything than extreme focus, heroism is not a sustainable work ethic after all. It takes time and commitment to develop a specific skill; the only way to become a world-class expert is to put years of hard work on a very narrow vertical. Guess what, this is not what you end up to get while doing pretty much everything to serve the various shallow needs of the local market and sustain your business. And, due to this very cause, you also cannot find people with exceptional skills to partner with; not affording to built expertise results to an ecosystem not affording to innovate, a shallow talent pool is a safe path to remain uncompetitive.

After all, a small market does not only affect your business with regards to its target size, but also ends up to be a brake for the product and team development as well, essentially acting on all core parts of your operations.

Is there a solution? To me, there is; by reverse engineering the problem. Instead of effectively spreading your resources thin on serving those numerous yet shallow opportunities, you’d better break the vicious cycle and focus on a single very specific need. It will be hard at the beginning, as you will be leaving money on the table and you’ll struggle to survive. But, you will finally be able to take the time and create a unique product, innovating against the international competition thus enabling you to go after bigger markets. At the same time, you will also be building top level expertise within your team to stand up from the crowd at a personal level.

Most of the above may sound apparent to many of you, but I’m unhappy to realize that they have yet to reach common sense in many european markets. And, like every problem, the very first yet truly important step into solving it us realizing it’s existence and essence. No matter if the tips and tricks and jacks of the trade provided are sound and applicable in your very case, I do hope you now have a more spherical understanding of the problem at it’s core and I’m looking forward to learn more by your approach and solutions.

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With all the buzz, chatter and meta-discussions of what it takes to build a great company, aspiring entrepreneurs end up to exaggerate the ‘prerequisites’ and magnify the skills, capacities and luck needed to an extra-terrestial level, after all being more avert or frightened than excited to start-up.

While there are no universal laws applicable when it comes to anything social (which is a hard thing to accept for those of us with a quantitative background), I strongly believe that there are some patterns worth decoding on what it takes to start-up and I’d like to attempt and break these requirements down, based on my humble and very limited experiences so far.

To me, at the end of the day, it’s quite simple; it all ends up to three major constituents, there they go:

i) A rock star and fully committed team
The latter is the most important one. Let’s face it, startups do not succeed at once; they need to change, pivot and adopt a number of times before positive signals start to emerge. In nature (I plan to follow up with a post on evolutionary startonomics), a new form of life is not likely to survive and someone who only has skin in the game but not her very existence aligned with her startup’s success is naturally expected to quit after the first existential turmoils. However, success may be waiting for you right after the next turn, and only those absolutely committed end up to experience it.

ii) A big market
People usually tend to focus on, for example, the number of clients required just to sustain their business and perceive this group as their target market. The fact is, success spans a wide spectrum and sustainability is at its low end; that low that almost nobody cares about. To put things into perspective, let’s take an example from the enterprise software market. It’s usual for inexperienced entrepreneurs to attempt creating a product targeting at a market of, say, 5 potential enterpise users, arguing that if they get one they will be able to sustain their businesses, and if they get more they’d be ‘really’ successful. In practice, though, one often needs to contact 100 potential leads to get 10 meetings and finally a single paying client. Do the math on your chances to survive when you target 5 clients, then go create a product for a much bigger, international clientele.

iii) A clear way to make money
Again, there are cases suggesting the opposite. In general, though, it always helps to start with a crystal clear plan and a straightforward way to monetize your business. There are markets being already saturated, subsidized or commoditized, after all far from viable for a new product to make business sense. To avoid such a trap in the first place, you need to validate your assumptions with market experts, also get feedback from potential users on what you are up to and their willingness to pay for such a service, one way or another. The earlier you’ll get money in the discussion, the more honest and valuable your feedback will be; put this into good use.

Take a moment to think about it, I bet all of the above are far from infeasible after all. Come up with your complementary team and idea, satisfy each one of the prescribed essentials and do not mind about anything else to begin with. When you get these into place, you will already have reached a stable balance; work hard and rest assured that things will converge to working solutions and recipes for success instead of anything else.

And, if you still believe that this post mostly adds to the chatter instead of paving the way to a tangible solution, then go apply; the Openfund call is open till June 30.

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Spreading thoughts and ideas on doing business and running a business serves as a driving factor for the ecosystem to grow, and that’s what a couple of friends aim to trigger with a new collaborative blog.

The attempt goes under the name Manylogue and envisions to become what I’d describe as the equivalent of Harvard Business Review’s blog for Greek fellows — a far from easy and rather ambitious target to accomplish.

In this context, I’m happy to contribute with a limited number of posts that you also may find of interest. Here’s the first couple, while I’ll be updating this list with more to follow.

- A good read
- Authority, and its limit

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I gave a short talk a week ago trying to address the question of how to become innovative. I tried to sum up and put in a few slides some very basic thoughts of mine out of my very limited experience thus far, and came up with a pretty rough -if not hasty- presentation. To some of you most of its contents may sound profound, however it seems to have hit a chord, so here I am providing more details, a short paragraph per slide.

Misconception - No matter of academic definitions, our perception of innovation is pretty well summarized into the omnipresent symbol of a light bulb. To me, that mirrors a twofold problem. First, it refers to the mythical figure of Thomas Edison, which typically triggers the “I’m not that good, so I don’t try” reverse halo effect. Second, it concurs with the symbol of idea, suggesting this as the most important part of innovation. I disagree, innovation (also entrepreneurship, or most stuff out there if you ask me) is mostly about execution and persistence, not the initial idea conception.

Meta-study - As a result of that common perception, people tend to actually stay seated on a sofa and perpetually think of what kind of a greatly innovative idea they can come up with. However, waiting for the bulb to light does not lead to innovation, but rather typically to passive stagnation instead. Essentially, the same applies to most of the books studying innovation; people end up being discussants, not practitioners and that’s far from being innovative after all. Let me also stress that your target should not be to get or blog or brag about a third party story of someone else, but you to be the star and lead your own story, with your satisfaction guaranteed.

Complexity, oversold - Having read a ton of books on how to innovate is not a prerequisite at all, plus it ends up not to help as advertised. The more books you read the more accustomed you’re getting to the idea that innovation is a rare outcome of rocket science happening elsewhere and I’m happy to report this as a serious deviation from truth. Things are simple and common sense always prevails, keep this in mind when trying to approach the layers of artificial complexity introduced not by innovators themselves, but by solely external observers of this creative process.

Initiative - So, what’s innovation after all? To me, it’s most important part is taking initiative, everything else in comparison being almost irrelevant. That’s easy to get underestimated, but it does require a fundamental change of mentality, switching from being a passive viewer of other people’s reality to being an active participant and co-shaping it, or —to provide a more tangible example— from lying on the sofa to stand up and start working on your computer. I consider this u-turn the very most important step towards becoming innovative.

Hands on - You aren’t supposed to solve an imaginary problem, or provide a working solution to one you don’t master, you actually cannot. Go find a real problem, study it in detail to become an insider and talk with the experts if you are not yet one (but don’t get deceived by expertise - challenge everything with your common sense before accepting it as a fact); you need to find out what doesn’t work and why it doesn’t before you prescribe a realistic solution. Since you do that, don’t get afraid of the hurdles ahead, just break down your work into small feasible parts and go execute one after another, keeping in mind that with each step you make and each hurdle you overcome you are building your competitive advantage.

Focus & play - People tend to complain or put up fights on issues they are not able to have any impact on. To me, that’s an unfortunate utilization of a very limited set of resources, time being the most critical one. To make (innovative, or not) things happen, you need to solely focus on those problem’s parameters that you can shape, leaving anything else aside, or just monitoring the potential external effects to the things you’re attempting to control. Then, you are ready to play, and the real fun begins. Start, and get the most out of each step, this is first and foremost a learning process. Also, do consider your -much expected- failures as part of the process, the most painful of ways to learn your lessons. Finally, improve yourself and repeat, you’re getting there.

Deliver - When you end up being innovative, remember, innovation is not an end in itself or a target per se. Your objective always needs to be solving a real problem, providing value to the people getting to use your working solution and getting back a small part of this value to sustainably keep going, no matter if you end up being or called innovative after all. And if you’d like to keep a single line out of this long piece, just bear in mind that, buzz aside, innovation alone shall not be your target, initiative and action to make things happen shall be.

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Let me start with this. Incredible is a vast understatement.

I happened to spend about a week in India, given the chance of a friend’s wedding. I mostly spent my time in Delhi, also visiting the cities of Agra and Jaipur. As expected, the trip turned out to be quite of an experience, to say the least. And I’d like to take the opportunity and share with you some photos - mostly of low quality- I took across the trip, next to some traveler’s thoughts which may turn to be an interesting read.

Misery, or not
The indian people are extremely, almost unsustainably poor, yet utterly adorable. Living standards for most people in the places I visited are well beyond what a european will consider viable. Living in a tent by the end of the street, or just under a blanket, seems to be common for a really big number of people; access to public toilets or concerns for personal hygiene are almost exotic.
Moreover, this part of the society seems to have fully accepted their status (‘karma’), or maybe they’ve never learned about a different way of living before. As a result, they’re not really motivated or educated to work hard, they rather prefer sleeping under the sun, staring at the sun or talk with each other. However, this tends to change lately, as big chunks of the population move to the cities or get access to a TV. Still, this is far from a smooth transition, many of them remain really confused before switching to a more modern way of life.
Life, at the same time, gets celebrated, a lot. Take weddings, for example. Every indian wedding has numerous functions, typically around 7, while the celebrations last about a week for everyone to participate (or just get bored enough). If you consider also the vast number of weddings -famously about 20 thousands everyday- taking place during the ‘wedding season’ in Delhi alone, you can get a picture of the mood every night around the city.

Chaos, or Self-organization
On an abstract level, roads of Delhi are totally chaotic. There are no lanes, drivers use their horns instead of flash lights when they want to make a turn or overtake another car, and half of the -many- vehicles are bikes, rickshaws and motor-rickshaws; you can imagine the mess. What’s even more frightening were the vehicles moving in the opposite direction of the highway; I faced some such occasions and, judging from people’s reactions, that wasn’t a rare event after all.
However, and while one would expect this chaos to result in many and much dangerous situations, it was not. Actually, to my surprise, I didn’t see a single, minor or not, accident during my stay there. At the same time, the space allocation in the streets was close to optimum, a system of intelligent self-organized agents functioning with a minimum set of rules, in a very efficient way.
This also has a time dimension. Things in India happen to take shape the very last moment before the hard deadline, in a much more steep fashion than my fellow greeks tend to define as ‘the greek way’. For example, the Commonwealth (what’s in a name, really) Games take place in October in Delhi, and there were stadiums still at their foundations and the whole city centre under reconstruction; I’m pretty sure though everything will be in place on time (or just the very last night before).

Opportunity
Numbers in India are hard to imagine. For example, Jaipur’s population gets doubled every decade, now at 6 million. Biggest mobile operator adds almost 3 millions of new subscribers per month (indeed, Indians obsession with their mobiles is outstanding, rickshaws and mobile was a usual combo). A huge and immature yet very price sensitive market awaits to be explored and conquered, imagine a population the size of the US escaping the poverty level in the next 10-15 years.
What’s even more exciting is the new generation of, let’s say 100 to 200 millions, well-educated, english speaking, and hard working Indians, willing to change their country, or the world in general. If China has reshaped production across the world, India is probably on track to reshape the services sector.

Apart from geopolitics or the very big picture though, India provided me with a very tangible lesson of altruism. I used to consider happiness a relative feeling; people feel better the better they are, compared to those surrounding them. India taught me however that this relativity has specific boundaries and is only applicable locally, where the differences essentially turn out to be much limited after all. You definitely cannot be happy with such a hardship around you, so you’d better work towards improving, next to your own life, the lives of people around your and the society at large.

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