(From 2008 to 2011, a doctor friend of mine, Amit Paranjape, and I ran BharatHealth, a healthcare startup, which failed. In conversations about startups, I would often mention learnings from this experience. For a long time, Shashikant kept asking me to write an article about it, and when I kept putting it off, we finally decided to do it as an email interview.)

Please provide your academic and professional background before starting up.

I am currently a co-founder and CTO at ReliScore.com, a startup focused on helping companies filter job candidates based on evaluation of actual job-related skills. I advise a couple of fintech companies and a Govt of India initiative for startups.

In the past I’ve worked for large companies, and small; I’ve worked in India and in the US; I’ve seen a successful exit, and I’ve seen a dotcom failure; I’ve done product development, and I’ve done research; I’ve written consumer software, and I’ve written enterprise software; and I’ve been a developer, I’ve been an architect, and I’ve been a manager (but hated it).

I’ve done my BTech in Computer Sciences from IIT-Bombay and a PhD in Databases from the University of Wisconsin, USA. I am an inventor on 18 US patents, 2 European patents, and 1 Japanese patent. I’m interested in a number of areas of computer science, including: highly scalable systems; distributed and fault-tolerant software systems; text search, information retrieval, and analysis of unstructured information.

You took a sabbatical after leaving Veritas/Symantec. What were your plans for this period?

I had gotten bored of my big-company job, and I was lucky financially to not have to worry for a few years. So my plan was to just work on things that I found interesting.

As a result, I spent a couple of years doing a bunch of things: I worked on my Hindi song lyrics website . I helped Meeta (@meetalks) set up her movie reviews site. I started https://punetech.com because I felt that the tech community in Pune needed a forum like that. I consulted for a few friends’ companies.

How did you come up with the idea for BharatHealth? Who were your co-founders at BharatHealth?

The doctor friend came up with the idea. He felt that a web-based system to capture all the health records and interactions between a patient and a doctor could revolutionize how healthcare is conducted, especially in case of chronic problems where the care requires lots of little tweaking over the long term. (Note – chronic diseases are defined broadly as conditions that last 1 year or more and require ongoing medical attention.)

He approached Amit Paranjape and me and both of us liked the idea. That’s how BharatHealth was born.

Who were the target customers of BharatHealth? What problems did BharatHealth solve for those customers?

It’s easier to explain with an example. Let’s focus on diabetes patients as that was one of the first verticals we targeted.

Our initial target customers were doctors providing long-term diabetes care. The idea was that the doctors would offer BharatHealth to each of their patients. In the beginning, the patient’s basic history, the doctor’s current diagnosis, and medication protocol would be uploaded to the system.

After this, on an ongoing basis, the patient would keep uploading blood sugar readings into the system as recommended by the doctor. The doctor would check this on a regular basis and if any problems were noticed, they would recommend adjustments to the medication.

Similarly, if the patient had any non-emergency questions, they could just ask it in the system itself. The doctor would check the system a few times a day and answer any questions. This was much better than the patient having to come to the clinic and wasting a few hours, or calling up the doctor on the phone. More importantly, the doctor would be able to see the full history of the patient right in front of them along with the question so the answer would be quicker and more accurate.

We felt this was a win-win scenario.

What were your initial hypotheses for BharatHealth? 

We felt that this would:

• Improve patient outcomes because of better availability of patient history, symptoms, medication
• Decrease the amount of time spent by the patient waiting in waiting rooms
• Increase the throughput of the doctor because the system would allow answering a question in 30 seconds, whereas the same question on the phone or in person would end up with at least 5 minutes if not more.
• Patients would be happy to pay the doctor for the use of this system
• Doctors would be happy to pay us a cut out of #4
• Once a system like this was up and running, we would be able to monetize it in various other ways

What did the early version of the solution look like? How long did it take to get the first version in the hands of the customers?

This was at a time (2009-10) when touch phones hadn’t yet become common in India. Hence the system was a web-based system. We expected that all doctors and most patients would access it from laptops or desktop computers, while a small fraction of the patients would use smartphones to enter their test results and questions.

We built the system using Python+Django. It took a couple of months to get the first version to the customers.

How did you reach out to the early customers for BharatHealth?

Quite early we decided that this would be a B2B2C solution. We focused on getting doctors as our customers, and the doctors would ask their patients to join the system. In other words, we would never be selling to the patients directly.

We used our doctor co-founder’s connections to reach out to doctors in Pune, and made the sales the old-fashioned way –  by meeting them, showing a demo, and asking them to join.

What were some of the early marketing channels you used? Did you also have a sales team?

We only did direct sales. We did all the sales ourselves. The idea was that once we had figured out how to do the sales ourselves and streamlined the pitch and process, we could then hire a sales team. However, we never reached that stage.

What was the customer feedback of initial versions? Did any feedback surprise you? How did the initial feedback shape your product roadmap?

I’ll answer this in terms of general “customer reactions”. We ran into these major categories of customers/potential customers:

1. A small number of doctors quickly understood the pitch and started using the system. They were generally happy how it worked and how it helped them and their patients.
2. A number of doctors said they liked the idea but they did not think it would work in their situation because of one of these reasons:
   • They felt that a good fraction of their customers were not tech savvy and would not be comfortable using a web-based system
   • They would need to teach their receptionist to use the system, and that would be impossible
   • The system was in the cloud, and they didn’t think the internet was reliable enough
3. Some of the doctors liked the system, sounded enthusiastic about wanting to use it, but when it came time to start using the system, they never got around to it, because always some higher priority thing came up and operationalizing this system kept being pushed lower on the todo list.

What were some of the hardest challenges in terms of product, marketing, sales and the market itself?

An experienced entrepreneur had told us that our product required behavior change on part of the doctors, and that would be very difficult. We never really appreciated how big of a stumbling block this was. In retrospect, I feel that a number of the problems in points #2 and #3 in the previous answer all stemmed from the fact that behavior change was required and our product did not provide a big enough incentive for driving that behavior change.

Speaking of incentives, based on our initial market validation (with about 5-10 friendly doctors) we felt that the significantly increased patient convenience and potential improvements to medical outcomes would be strong incentives for doctors to use this system. However,  once we moved past our friendly doctors, the impression we got was that in most cases, “Can this system get me new patients” was the more important question on their minds. And since we did not do a B2C play, our answer to that question was No.

Another problem we ran into was that doctors are used to the pharma-medical-representatives style of sales, where there is lots of hard-sell, lots of money flowing around, and royal treatment of doctors, and without that kind of a sales model, we were not very effective at selling into this market.

Another problem with this market (or the way we were selling the product) is that every doctor wanted customizations to the product to incorporate their own workflow into the system. While this is true of the early stages of any B2B product, I felt that this problem was more pronounced in case of doctors, because most of them have high-throughput practices with workflows that have been optimized over the years, and getting them to change those workflows would require too much behavior change. We tried hard to build a very flexible system that could easily incorporate the requested changes via configuration, but in many cases we had to give up on the customer after a number of rounds of changes.

All these reasons that affected our ability to sell to individual doctors were multiplied by N when we tried selling to hospitals. In the former case, we had doctors who didn’t feel they could convince their patients (and receptionists) to use the system. In the latter case, the problem was compounded because we had hospital administrators who had even less confidence in their abilities to convince doctors (who would then have to convince patients).

BharatHealth came up at a time when mobile phones were ubiquitous, but smartphones were just starting out. How big a role phones played in your solution? Would a smartphone have helped in some way?

In this sense, we were too early to the market. A few years later, when touchphones were truly ubiquitous, the resistance to our solution would have been much lower. Without the guarantee of an always-on smartphone with every patient, the (mental) barrier to entry was too high, and as a result the behavior change required was too high.

What were the signals that indicated the product is not working as per your team’s expectations?

While we made quick progress with the initial set of doctors we had talked to, we soon found that expanding past this inner circle was quite difficult. As we approached more doctors, we found that the meetings and demos went quite well (according to our possibly inexperienced judgement), and they sounded positive about the product, but getting them to take the next step was difficult.

In many cases, in spite of positive feedback, we would not be able to get them to set up their account on the system. There was always a plausible reason for it; some emergency that came up, or some other higher priority activity because of which they wouldn’t have time to learn the system. And in the cases where we got them to create an account and learn the system, we found that they wouldn’t actually sign on patients.

As a result, growth just slowed to a crawl.

At what point did your team decide to pause efforts on this product and company?

During a long stretch of low/no growth, Amit and I were involved in some unrelated initiative (part of our PuneTech work), and we hit upon the idea for a different product in a space that we understood much better (hiring for software industry) and we felt it would be easier to sell because we understood the potential customers and their motivations much better (having worked in that industry for 20+ years each). As a result we decided to stop BharatHealth and ReliScore (our current startup) was born.

Last decade saw significant improvements in technologies like smartphones, wearables and machine learning. You mentioned smartphones would have lowered barriers for adoption. What healthcare problems, that you are familiar with, can now be solved in a better way with new technologies?

Since I moved to a non-healthcare startup, I haven’t really kept close tabs on what all is going on in the healthcare tech space.

The potential for use of smartphones, wearables, and machine learning in healthcare is huge. You pick any aspect of healthcare and it has the potential to be revolutionized by these technologies.

However, the challenge primarily lies in the “behavioral change” that I mentioned earlier. This falls into two categories: preventive healthcare vs acute healthcare.

Preventive healthcare could be applied to everyone, and it could have a huge impact on the world. However, getting people to start using an app and/or providing it with the data it needs is not easy. Most people are quite lazy about taking steps now to prevent future problems, especially if it involves a payment. And if it doesn’t involve payment, then there is always the concern about how the company will use the data and whether privacy will be preserved. As they say it is easier to sell aspirin not vitamins. Because of this the companies most likely to make good progress in this area would be those like Apple, who have: 1. a good brand image, 2. an app or device that is already in people’s pockets, and 3. the data entry is minimal-effort, ideally zero-effort.

For acute healthcare (i.e. solving a problem you have right now, i.e. aspirin instead of vitamins), doctors and other providers have to be in the loop (given the current state of technology and regulations), so this involves handling behavior change and incentives for those players. As is clear from our failure, this is not something I understand well, and I haven’t yet seen a compelling model from someone else.

Since you faced challenges with B2B2C model, which seems to be the primary route to market, what are your thoughts on using the B2C approach?

I think the right kind of B2C approach could succeed, but the focus has to be more on psychology, incentives, distribution, rather than the technology. And would need deep pockets also. We considered pivoting to a B2C model, but we decided that we neither had the expertise nor the budget to pull it off.

You mentioned, you thought about B2C pivot, but didn’t work on it for a variety of reasons. Do you remember what some of those B2C ideas were?

We thought of a lot of ideas, only some of which I remember. For example:

1. Allow end-users to capture their medical history and reports, and enable easy sharing of this data across patient, doctor, pathologists/labs, family (e.g. NRI children), and for second opinions. 
2. Same as #1, and get medical insurance companies to offer discounts to patients who show good control over time.
3. Allow end-users to capture their medical history, and allow them to ask questions to our team of doctors
4. Same as #3 but have software triggers and/or doctors looking at the data to warn patients of potential problems that they’re ignoring
5. Same as #3 but allow the patients to suggest which doctors they would like on the system and use that to create pressure on doctors to join.

How long did you work on BharatHealth, from starting work on it, till deciding to stop working on it? I could add it to give some idea of  commitment for new entrepreneurs.

Approximately 3 years.

If a new entrepreneur wants to explore this space again, what advice would you give?

I would say this:

• Focus on psychology, incentives, distribution, rather than technology. Technology is the least of your challenges. Ask yourself if you can do the first 3 to 6 months of your startup using just WhatsApp and an Excel spreadsheet and you personally handle all the customers. You’ll be surprised at how often this is possible.
• To be able to do #1, steep yourself in the culture of this domain. Talk to doctors who are not your friends, hospital administrators who are not your friends, and so on.

The post Learnings from Building a Healthcare Startup in India appeared first on Navin Kabra's Blog.

A Liberal Arts degree, which in the west is one of the more common routes to higher education, is relatively new and mostly unknown in India. The defining aspect of most of Indian higher education is the early specialization—students choose a stream (Science, Commerce, Arts) after 10th, and a branch (Computer Engineering, Mechanical, English, Psychology) immediately after 12th. Liberal Arts colleges are springing up in India to fix this.

What is a Liberal Arts degree?

The idea is simple—students get admitted to the college after 12th not only without having to specify which branch they want to specialize in, but also without having to specify the “stream”. In the first year, they can choose to do any courses they find interesting out of a wide variety of courses from all the traditional streams, and more. Only after having spent the year sampling various subjects do they have to declare their specialization. This is their “major” and they spend the remaining 3 years focusing on that. And depending on the major, they can end up with a B.Sc., B.Com., or B.A. degree. In addition to their major, they can also declare 1 or 2 “minors”, which don’t have to be from the same stream. So, for example, a B.A. (Psychology) student could do a minor in Entrepreneurship, or Biology, and a B.Sc. (Computer Science ) student could do a double minor in Economics and Entrepreneurship.

Unlike traditional B.A., B.Sc., or B.Com. courses, most Liberal Arts colleges offer students the option of getting a 4-year degree, so they have enough time to explore multiple areas of study through the minors and electives.

Why Liberal Arts?

Liberal Arts degrees have two advantages over more conventional courses. First, if your child is unsure of what they want to do after 12th, then this is a great way to decide, as opposed to picking something that the parents like. Second, lots of people feel that in the fast changing world of the future, where AI is going to automate more and more tasks from traditional jobs, it is dangerous to be too specialized unless you’re one of the best at that. In other words, it’s fine to do a traditional engineering/medical degree from one of the top colleges, but if you can’t get into one of those, then a Liberal Arts degree better prepares you to succeed in an uncertain world. Engineering might be better for the short-term, Liberal Arts might be better for the long-term. One third of the CEOs of the 500 largest companies (Fortune 500) are Liberal Arts graduates.

Dheeraj Sanghi, professor at IIT-Kanpur, ex-dean at IIIT Delhi, director of PEC Chandigarh, JEE almost-topper, and someone who’s been closely studying the higher education system in India, says that if he was a student today and could choose to be in any college/degree in India, he would pick Liberal Arts in Ashoka.

Liberal Arts in India

Pretty much everybody agrees that the best liberal arts college in India is Ashoka (in Sonipat, near Delhi, est. 2014). Top class faculty, most with PhDs from some of the top universities in the world, great infrastructure, and a focus on what makes sense for a modern higher education degree.

The second best is probably FLAME (in Pune, est. 2015), Pune. I get the impression that FLAME seems to be rather strong in business and finance areas, and relatively weaker in the humanities areas (e.g. history), but still it is far better than most other places you could go to get a rounded education.

After Ashoka and FLAME, the choice is probably between Azim Premji University (in Bangalore, est. 2010), SSLA (Pune, est. 2004), and a recent entrant, Krea University (Sricity, near Chennai, est. 2018).

SSLA (Symbiosis School of Liberal Arts) is the oldest Liberal Arts college in India. They have the right vision, and the current director is a great person, but I get the feeling that they have challenges with faculty retention (and I suspect that the quality of faculty isn’t as top-notch as you’ll find in Ashoka, FLAME, Krea, and Azim Premji). And being a part of the sprawling Symbiosis empire comes with its own advantages and disadvantages.

Azim Premji, and Krea both have the potential of becoming at least as good as FLAME, but they are still very new, so there is the risk of teething troubles.

The other new colleges worth checking out might be Jindal (Sonipat, near Delhi), because their law college is quite good, so they might be able to do a good job of the Liberal Arts college, and Auronya (Puducherry), because Indira Parikh (ex dean IIM-Ahmedabad, and founder of FLAME) is involved.

Shiv Nadar University is another college I keep hearing about. They give a lot of flexibility to students in terms of the different electives, courses, and minors the students can take. However, it appears that they don’t have a Liberal Arts program, and students need to enroll in a specific stream/branch. (Someone please correct me if I’m mistaken.)

Here is a list of other colleges with a Liberal Arts or similar program which I haven’t yet evaluated. If you have opinions on any of these, please leave a comment below.

• PDPU, Gujarat
• Karnavati, Gandhinagar
• NMIMS, Jyoti Dalal School of Liberal Arts
• SRM, Amravati (AP)
• Rabindra Bharati, Kolkata
• DY Patil, Pune
• MIT, Pune
• Manav Rachna
• Women only: SLE, Shri Shankarlal Sundarbai Shashun
• SPPU (Pune University): new 3-year BA (Liberal Arts) program starting from 2019.
• Normal/Traditional Arts colleges that have a good reputation: Madras Christian College, Christ University Bangalore, LSR (Women), TISS Bombay, St. Stephens Delhi, Loyola Chennai, St. Xaviers Bombay.

What about jobs?

What do students do after a Liberal Arts degree? What kind of jobs do they get?

Frankly, I don’t have an answer to that. Most of the Liberal Arts colleges in India are quite new and there isn’t much data about what the students end up doing afterwards, especially in the long-term (which is where liberal arts is supposed to shine). Many of them (60% for example in the case of Ashoka) end up going for further higher education, usually abroad. Some of the top companies are also recruiting these students from campus. Anecdotally, I know that a lot of these students are doing really interesting work afterwards.

But it would be safe to say that the answer to the question of “What to do after the degree?” is much less clear for Liberal Arts than for conventional degrees. This is a new frontier, and nobody knows the long-term value, so I would say this is a high-risk-high-reward situation. If your background isn’t privileged enough that you can handle some uncertainty for some years, I wouldn’t recommend this option. (Speaking of privilege, the fees at these colleges tend to be high, for example, approximately ₹10L per year at Ashoka. But most of them also have financial aid programs that can help in case someone can’t afford it.)

Next Steps

If your child is in 10th or 11th std, both Ashoka and FLAME have a short residential summer camp for 10th and 11th std students to get some exposure to what is Liberal Arts, the various subjects, the faculty, and the teaching styles. I would highly recommend it. Let your child experience what world-class teaching looks like. My son, who hated history as a subject until 10th came back a huge fan of history after doing Ashoka’s Young Scholar program, and it is now one of his favorite subjects. And he will be joining Ashoka this August. Details of these summer programs can be found here and here.

If your child is in 12th, and my description above sounds interesting, you should start applying. The application procedures of most of the schools I mentioned above starts in November-December, and continues in multiple rounds until the summer.

Improvements/Corrections welcome

This article is work in progress. If you see any mistakes, or have suggestions on how to improve it, please leave a comment below, or get in touch with me at navin@smriti.com

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“Does God exist?” is a bad question.

“Do people who believe in God behave better or worse than those who don’t?” is a far more useful question, isn’t it?

This was a relatively shallow take on a much deeper article I’d read a few days earlier. Very quickly, my friends started poking and prodding at it in the comments, which made me realize that I wasn’t going to get away with a shallow take, and I would have to dive deeper to support the point I wanted to make (which was basically my take-away from the article).

The article itself is a bit heavy for me; I don’t have the appropriate Liberal Arts background, and I was unfamiliar with many of the terms used there (hermeneutics, intersubjectivity). But, I think I got the overall gist of the argument, which I’m reproducing here. (Knowledgeable people, if you find places where I’m mistaken, please post corrections in the comments below.)

I see this as a rationalist atheist’s guide to thinking about God/Religion/Spirituality. The basic idea, I think, is this:

Let us assume that science is right and the universe is fully driven by the principles of science, and with enough knowledge of all the universal laws and enough computation power, we could predict the results of all actions and behaviors. However, we don’t know all the universal laws, and even if we did, we certainly don’t, and will not have enough computational power to do the computations.

Human beings are very complex. And human societies are even more complex. In the absence of our ability to perfectly model either of those, what kinds of rules of behavior should a “scientific” or “rational” person formulate? Specifically, if we formulate certain rules of behavior for a person in society, can we predict the effect of those rules across long time-frames—over generations? (Spoiler: No, we can’t.)

Let’s approach this from a different angle.

There’s a survival-of-the-fittest evolution happening at tribal/societal level. Tribes/groups/societies that have certain beliefs and hence follow certain rules of behavior survive and thrive, and those that follow other rules die out. This process has all the key characteristics required for evolution: natural selection, genetic drift, mutation and gene migration due to genetic admixture. Repeat this over long-enough time frames, and you can start thinking along these lines:

Old traditions that have survived long enough have important properties that are key to survival of the society as it exists today

This is true, even if you, as a rationalist thinker do not see the connection. Because, the connection is beyond your computation capabilities.

We can follow up that thought with this one:

Beliefs drive behavior. So, traditional beliefs, even if they’re objectively untrue, even if they’re provably false, have value in terms of the behaviors (rules) they’re driving, which can have important properties that are key to survival of the society as it exists today.

And thus, we reach

If a belief has survived in various different societies for thousands of years, it has value (in as much as it results in society as it exists today), even if the belief is provably false

Does this mean that we should uncritically accept all traditional beliefs and rules? Certainly not. There are things wrong with society as it exists today, which are driven by traditional beliefs and rules. But, these problems cannot be fixed by purely rational thought processes, because purely rational thought processes are not powerful enough to even model the problems, forget fix them.

There are lots of things wrong with lots of traditional beliefs. Also, many of them were responses to situations and problems that just don’t exist today because of modern science, medicine and technology. But I want us to acknowledge that there is a lot right with many of them in ways that are not obvious, and we need to re-view them with this new lens. For example, this thought process has helped me better appreciate the reason for homeopathy’s existence.

Anyway, here’s the original article that inspired this thought process. Good food for thought, if nothing else.

The post When thinking about God/Religion/Spirituality “truth,” isn’t important appeared first on Navin Kabra's Blog.

This is for the others, who did not. Remember these things:

• A bad rank does not reflect on your capabilities or intellect. The system is screwed up. There is too much luck. Do not adjust your self-worth downwards just because you did not get into a top IIT
• IIT isn’t the only path to success. The reason IITs have such a strong brand is because in the 70s/80s/90s, there were very limited options for smart-but-not-rich people in India. Today, the situation is different – we have other colleges that are also good; we have better jobs/roles/salaries in Indian industry; and it is now much easier to go abroad (for higher studies, or work) without an IIT-tag. Dheeraj Sanghi, who is arguably one of the most articulate experts on the state of IITs and engineering education in India, points out this list of alternatives to IITs.
• Engineering isn’t the only way. Increasingly for students in India, non-engineering options are looking more and more interesting. Dheeraj Sanghi (same guy from the previous bullet point), has said that if he were to choose today, and had the choice of any college in India, including all the top IITs, he would choose to do liberal arts in Ashoka University. (Pune also has a couple of good liberal arts schools – FLAME and Symbiosis School of Liberal Arts.) See also this article of mine about “quitting engineering”.

Most importantly: Do not give up.

• You worked hard for the last few years, and that hasn’t yielded the desired result. But don’t give up. Not succeeding in an entrance exam is just one play in a much, much larger game. Over the long-term (10+ years) continuous learning, continuous self-improvement, and hard work will beat ranking, college brand, and raw intellect¹ every time. Over the 25+ years in my career (in India and US; large companies and small; tech and non-tech) I have seen a number of IIT-ians go into mediocrity due to over-confidence and laziness, and a number of people from tier2/tier3 educational backgrounds succeed phenomenally (sometimes, this is in spite of not having the same raw intellect¹).

I also encourage 12th standard students to take a gap year, and consider going to the US for undergraduate studies (if you’re rich).

Footnote:

¹ Note when I say “raw intellect” here, I mean the specific kind of intellect that the JEE selects for – ability to quickly solve difficult math problems & puzzles, or speed of grasping complex math/engineering issues. There are of course many other types of intelligence, and even more types of capabilities that the JEE does not filter for; so I am definitely not implying that only people who clear the JEE are intelligent.

The post Planning your career after a bad JEE rank appeared first on Navin Kabra's Blog.

It’s a long article, but worth reading. Even if you don’t agree with the New York Times’ slant (that Uber is being evil), there are still enough interesting points in the article.

Here is one example of manipulation: when Uber wants more drivers in a particular area (to avoid surge pricing – so that customers get rides in that area without having to pay more), Uber’s managers send text messages to drivers encouraging them to go to that area. This doesn’t always work, so this is what the managers do:

Some local managers who were men went so far as to adopt a female persona for texting drivers, having found that the uptake was higher when they did.

“‘Laura’ would tell drivers: ‘Hey, the concert’s about to let out. You should head over there,’” said John P. Parker, a manager in Uber’s Dallas office in 2014 and 2015, referring to one of the personas. “We have an overwhelmingly male driver population.”

Uber acknowledged that it had experimented with female personas to increase engagement with drivers.

And there are many more in the article.

Here are some interesting takeaways for me:

• If you aren’t aware of the findings of behavioral economics, how those techniques are used in gamification, how big companies are using these tricks to manipulate their customers (i.e. you), and in Uber’s case their contractors (i.e. the drivers), then you really need to read up.
• This trend is going to increase. Everybody, from your social networks (e.g. Facebook) to your TV (e.g. Netflix) to your shop (e.g. Amazon) are trying hard to manipulate you, and it appears, soon your employer will start doing the same.
• It appears to me that one of the most important things we need to teach our children is the ability to resist such manipulation. We teach them to avoid smoking and to drink in moderation via strong messaging. Maybe we need to do the same with apps.
• Throughout the article, there is a mention of the fact that “Uber experimented with” some or the other (manipulation) feature. This is an extremely important aspect of modern software/app development. It is called A/B testing, and I am surprised that most people – including senior executives in the software industry are not aware of it. In the old days, if a company needed to decide whether to introduce some new feature in the software (e.g. give the driver a pop-up message indicating how close they’re to getting a bonus), and if yes, what should it’s configuration (at what percentage of completion should the driver get the pop-up message), the experienced people in the company would take a judgment call. However, modern software development prefers a more data driven approach: implement the feature, expose it to a subset of users, and compare these users’ behavior to that of others on various metrics. This helps you decide what features to implement in the software.
• Overall, I do feel that the New York Times has taken a rather harsh anti-Uber stand in the article. I mean, the neither are the drivers babies, nor is Uber a monopoly, so it is unclear to me why Uber acting in its self-interest is so evil. However, there is a danger that if Uber continues to succeed and competitors like Lyft don’t, Uber will become a monopoly and that could be very dangerous.

The article is interesting for another reason – instead of generic photos or illustrations, the article actually has interactive simulations of the situations it is talking about (e.g. customer demand, driver availability, waiting times etc.), and you can actually modify the parameters and see their effect. I hope we see more of these kinds of intelligent interactive illustrations.

The post Uber Plays Psychological Tricks on its Drivers: What should you learn from that? appeared first on Navin Kabra's Blog.

If you know someone who has completed an advanced academic degree this year (PhD, MD/DM/DNB, MS/MBA/PGDM from a top university, or scored well in a competitive exam like CA/ICWA/CS/CFA or IAS/UPSC, please have them nominate themselves for the “Maheshwari Scholar Awards” that are given every year by the Maheshwari Vidya Prasarak Mandal, Pune. Deadline for applying is end of October. More details are here: http://mvpm.org/upcoming-events/

Why?

Because it is important to have such role models for the youngsters in the Marwadi community.

As a community, we are not really known for valuing education. Some sections of the community value education, but there are lots who actually look down on eductaion. Jumping straight into the family business instead of “wasting time in college” is quite a common occurrence.

So, people who have outstanding academic achievements should be highlighted.

I can vouch for the fact that the selection procedure is extremely well-designed. The jury consists of seriously accomplished people from each of the major academic fields, who are actually qualified to judge the achievements of the applicants. (I was a jury member last year, and I was one of the least qualified people on the committee.) I can also vouch for the fact that the selection is purely on the basis of academic merit and there is absolutely no interference in the selection procedure from the MVPM management or sponsors.

If you know someone who completed their degree in the last one year, please urge them to apply. Don’t underestimate the effect such role models will have on the next generation.

And if you have Maheshwari/Marwadi friends on WhatsApp/Facebook/Twitter, please re-share this.

The post Apply for the Maheshwari Scholar Awards 2016 appeared first on Navin Kabra's Blog.

This is the article is written by Nishchala, who took a gap year after doing her 12th Std in Pune, India, got a lot of interesting and valuable experiences, and later joined New York University (NYU), where she is now a second year student. She hopes that this article will nudge other 12th Std. students and their parents to consider taking a year off before college.

Update: After this article was published, Nishchala had this further update: “My experience with the gap year also greatly helped me get scholarship for NYU. In case any undergrad students are looking for how to get their applications to stand out in order to attain scholarships, a gap year might be an interesting place to start.”)

When I finished 12th grade, I had no idea what I wanted to do. The year seemed to have spun into such a blur of fast forward motion—with relentless examinations, endless stress, unnerving conversations with adults on my future—that by the time it was time to apply for college, I felt lost. I didn’t feel mature or skilled enough to leave home and jump into the even more tiresome rat race of college. I remember struggling to write my CommonApp essay in October—I felt like I was missing something.

Around December 2013, about a month before college applications were due, my dad—knowing how lost I felt—suggested that I take a gap year: a year off before starting college—no school; no classes; just a year to take a break and do whatever I wanted. Initially I was completely opposed to the idea. Why would I waste a year of my life? To top it off, I didn’t personally know anyone who had ever taken a gap year—what would people think of it? What would colleges think of it? It seemed like an outrageous thing to do. But finally my dad convinced me to read up on it before jumping to a decision.

Researching online on the gap year shifted my thinking. Although a gap year wasn’t all that popular, there were quite a few people who had done it, and their accomplishments that they published online were inspiring. In fact—and to my surprise—I found that many colleges in the US encourage students to defer their admissions and take a year off before starting college. Big shot universities like Harvard and MIT actually write, in their admission letters itself, that students should seriously consider taking a year off (you can read more about what Harvard has to say about gap years here). Harvard writes that its students who took a gap year “are effusive in their praise. Many speak of their year away as a ‘life-altering’ experience or a ‘turning point,’ and most feel that its full value can never be measured and will pay dividends the rest of their lives.(…) Virtually all would do it again” (Harvard). After filling out notebooks with lists weighing the pros and cons of a gap year, and after reading as many articles I could get my hands on, I felt inspired and finally decided that I too would take a year off before going to college.

The decision was definitely not easy; there were times when I questioned whether or not I had made the right choice. The majority of the reactions that I got from my relatives and friends was coated with absolute disapproval. And the constant Facebook updates of my friends celebrating their newly found college lives only made it worse and made me feel like I was behind. But by the end of the year, I felt so refreshed and fulfilled that I too could proudly say that my gap year was a ‘life altering’ decision.

In the larger scheme of things, a year here or there doesn’t really matter. Of course though, taking a gap year has its risks. If you don’t use it well you might fall into a year long pattern of laziness which can be difficult to get out of. But if you do use it well, the effects can be rewarding! Since college applications are right around the corner, it is the perfect time for students to think about taking a year off. To help with this thinking, I’ve written about my year as an example. Although—please keep in mind—there is no such thing as a “typical” gap year since you can do pretty much anything; the sky is the limit! Below are brief write ups about the activities that I did during my gap year, and my overall experiences:

Fellowship with Make A Difference

In 11th and 12th grade, I used to volunteer as a teacher with the NGO Make A Difference (MAD); I would teach English to a class of 10 underprivileged children at the SOS center in Pune. So during my gap year (starting from early June 2014), I decided to take this a step further and applied to lead the education program—called ‘Ed Support’—for MAD in my city. My responsibilities as Ed Support fellow entailed recruiting a team of 60 volunteer teachers and 8 volunteer interns. Our team worked over the academic year (2014-2015) to teach English, Math and Science to approximately 120+ underprivileged children in shelter homes in Pune.

My fellowship journey has undoubtedly been one of the most brilliant and meaningful experiences I’ve been a part of. I had never before led a team at that scale, and I had never before felt like I was making such a positive impact on society at that scale. The sheer work that was required to establish the base for MAD Pune—we had about 850+ applications in 2014—meant that almost every day of my year went into working on the Ed Support program: conducting teacher trainings, interviewing applicants, reviewing classes etc. The journey was challenging, even frustrating many times, since the problems of poverty that the children were trapped in seemed too deep and too complex for a bunch of volunteers in their 20s to solve. But the experience taught us compassion, optimism and resilience, and how to take challenges one day at a time. In addition to this I got to scratch the surface of positive leadership—how to connect with people, motivate a team, skillfully resolve disputes, how to innovate—and learn brilliant skills that would help me throughout life.

Part Time Job at “Expression & Freedom Speech and Drama Academy”

In addition to my work with MAD, I was doing a part time job with E&F Academy (from February 2014 onward). I worked as a teacher assistant, and mentored several classes of students ranging from ages 8 to 13 who were learning poetry and drama. I wrote the annual script for the drama class, helped design the annual poetry, speech and drama curriculum, created weekly lesson plans for classes as well as designed the annual poetry book which was a collation of poems written by the students across the year. The classes provided a spectacular platform for me to channel and share my passion for drama and poetry; I learned the art of how to make teaching more creative and interesting by incorporating the magic of theater and poems. Furthermore, mentoring the classes helped me loose my inhibitions and transformed me into a more confident, creative and self-aware person.

Working on bits of the E&F curricula was a part of most of my days over the year. Having a paying part time job heightened my sense of responsibility, organization and accountability; it was not only an invaluable experience to include in my college applications, but it also equipped me with life skills which will stay with me when I get a professional job later on.

Shadowing PhD Students Majoring in the Field of Biological Sciences

For about a month and a half (from February-March 2014), I went to Chandigarh to shadow PhD students who were researching in the field of biology. After 12th grade, one of the potential majors I was thinking of pursuing was biological sciences, but I didn’t know exactly what that would entail, nor did I know which field of biological science I wanted to pursue; I wanted to get a first hand experience of what exactly researching in the field of biological science meant. What would I do on a daily basis? Would I have to work alone or with people? What kind of lifestyle would I lead? What kind of jobs could I get with a biology major, and how would they look like on a day to day basis?

To attempt to answer these questions, I went to IISER and Punjab University where I met with students pursuing Masters and PhDs in different fields of science. I got a chance to shadow, interact and ask them questions about their research experience and overall experience in their careers. The exposure was eye opening; research in the field of biology was extremely different from what I had in mind—it was nothing like what I imagined I would be doing when I used to study biology in school. I quickly realized that research was not an area that matched my personality, and perhaps it was time for me to think of a different field, or perhaps a different major entirely.

The year of down-time I got, away from the conventional lifestyle of school and classes and college applications, gave me perspective. Having that extra time to heavily focus on helping the underprivileged—a cause that I now know I want to continue working for in my career—and getting that extra time to teach my hobbies to my students at E&F—as well as learn from them—would not have been possible without the gap year I took. I felt like I had accomplished something real and meaningful for the first time in my life.

By the end of the year I felt rejuvenated, bold, and better equipped to handle whatever was to come next. I was ready to jump back into the rat race of fluctuating GPAs, examinations, deadlines, projects, college major selection, identity crises and everything in between. Even more, the time off made me feel more connected with myself; the choices I made over the year, the kinds of activities I engaged in and my journey of leading such a large team sculpted me and taught me skills and lessons that no school textbook could ever teach.

I remember hearing a quote from a play that went something like this: “It’s important to know what you want to be when your grow up, but it’s far more important to know who you want to be.” In our monotonous routines of school, examinations and classes, we often forget this. My year off implored me to introspect on what kind of person I was, what I wanted to do, and where I wanted to go. And now that I’m done with my first year of studying in New York University, I feel a transformation within me, and I can confidently say that I made the right investment in myself by choosing to take that year off.

So whether you ultimately decide to take a gap year or not, I urge you to—at the very least—consider the value it may add to you; the possibilities of all that you can do with your year might mark the beginning of a journey truly exciting.

Useful Links

A few websites I found helpful while researching on gap years:

• Thinking about Taking a Gap Year
• Should I Take Time Off?
• Stories of Past Gap Years
• Most Cited Gap Year Articles (American Gap)

About the Author – Nishchala Bhandari

Nishchala is going to begin her sophomore year in NYU. Her major is undecided, but she’s leaning towards Economics. She loves to photograph, listen to music, bake, read and travel. She is also weirdly obsessed with staplers. If you have any questions for her, you can contact her at nishchalab@gmail.com.

The post My Gap Year after 12th Std appeared first on Navin Kabra's Blog.

By making your child stay at home after 12th, you’re just holding him/her back. The only reason to keep them home is if you cannot afford a hostel.

The greatest increase in maturity, exposure, worldliness, and in general the skills needed to make it in the real world, happen when the child starts staying away from the parents. The values and culture of the parents are important for the child when the child is a child, but at the age of 17, it is time to let them experience what other people think like, that there can be thought processes that are different from their parents’ but are equally valid.

I would like to state here strongly that there is huge value in staying away from home. Trust me. Or don’t – instead take the word of Child Psychiatrist Dr. Bhooshan Shukla, who recently said this:

One sincere advice to students finishing their 12th std from Pune.

If you think you are any good, think beyond Pune. get out of this city and parental home and explore world.

Getting ALL of your educatuon in one city, entire life in one locality with same bunch of friends is a serious HANDICAP.

Globalization will chew you up, spit out the bones and you wont even know it, happily sipping coffee at Vaishali and eating Sabudana wada.

Wake up and run away….save your youth and your life.

Source

I’ve been preaching this to my friends/family for the last 15 years, and have heard a number of excuses from them as to why they don’t want to send their child away from home. Here is a sampler of those, and why I believe they’re wrong:

“But the hostels are so dirty!”

It’s the parents who’re often more squeamish than the children about such things. In any case, children adjust pretty quickly, especially when everybody else around them is in the same situation. And, let them go through a little hardship, a little inconvenience. It builds character.

And if you really, really want your child to be a 5-star-and-AC-only kind of a person, then go ahead the set them up with a posh apartment near college – you’ll find enough other children in a similar situation who’d be willing to share the rent. That’s still better than staying at home. (Although, I would still say that staying in a hostel is far better.)

“What will s/he eat? The food there is so bad!”

Are you kidding me?! You’ll withhold important personal growth from your child because s/he is too delicate to eat the same kind of food that millions of other kids eat? Please raise more resilient children.

“It’s so much cheaper if s/he stays at home”

It’s so much cheaper if s/he doesn’t get an education, but you don’t want that, right? Like I said right in the beginning, if you really can’t afford it financially, then staying at home is perfectly acceptable. But in many cases, this is not true. And the “so much cheaper” argument is simply a different way of saying that you don’t really see how much value is added by staying away from home.

“If it was a boy, I would consider it. But for a girl in a big city, I don’t know…”

Instead of protecting your daughter from the outside world and keeping her safely ensconced at home, you’re better off teaching her the basics of how to take care of herself, avoid shady situations, shady places, shady friends, and to take good decisions.

Also, most parents won’t say this to me directly, but I know that in some cases, clearly there is a concern that the newfound freedom will allow the girl to indulge in “inappropriate” behavior. The answer to this is:

1. Accept the fact that times have changed, and this generation’s values are going to be very different from yours’. Trying to impose your values on your child will actually cause more problems than the “inappropriate” behavior itself will cause.
2. Trust your daughter. You’ve taught her values for 17 years, and you have to hope that they’ve taken root. It is now out of your hands. If she’s gotten the right values, sending her to live by herself isn’t going to cause any problems. And if she has not, then keeping her at home isn’t really going to prevent the problems.

And, by the way, your child is almost guaranteed to have a girlfriend/boyfriend, whether you know about it or not, whether you like it or not, and whether s/he ultimately goes in for an arranged marriage or not. Just accept this fact, and things will be easier for everyone concerned.

And the worst mistake (which I’ve seen parents make) is to choose a not-so-good college near home, instead of a good college that’s away from home. That’s a double whammy – denying the child good formal education (academics & reputation & connections of a good college), and good informal education (staying away from homw).

Side note: If your child is considering engineering, and is confused about which branch/college, this older article I wrote might help

The post After 12th please send your child away from home – preferably a hostel appeared first on Navin Kabra's Blog.

Summary: Most Indian finance websites give a ridiculous explanation for this phrase. This phrase, which is found in all insurance advertisements in India, was mandated by IRDA, and it means basically that: “insurance is the product that is being sold by this advertisement, and not any thing else.” The intention is to prevent advertisements from being misleading, and trying to trick consumers into buying insurance while advertising something else (like investment). As of November 4th, 2015, this requirement has been removed by IRDA.

Background

I’ve always wondered why every insurance ad states, “Insurance is the Subject Matter of Solicitation,” and what exactly does this statement mean. Clearly, many other people have had the same question. Because a Google search revealed that many, many websites claim to explain this.

However, I found that all the explanations seemed a little silly. Here is an example:

The Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority has made it mandatory for insurance companies, agents and brokers to announce clearly in all their communication that insurance is the subject matter of solicitation. Translation: insurance isn’t a ready-made standard product like say, a bar of chocolate, that can be sold outright, it has to be discussed, understood. The right offering suited to your specific needs and requirements has to be considered taking into accounts, the terms, conditions and exclusions. Companies can only “offer to sell” it. And what changes with the addition of this simple word?

By way of including this small line, insurance becomes a product that you-the-customer must evaluate carefully after you have understood all its features, rules, conditions and exclusions. The onus of buying an insurance policy with its terms lies with the customer solely.

Or, to quote this Quora answer:

So the meaning of Insurance is a subject matter of solicitation is that Insurance is a financial product which buyer has to ASK FOR, it cant be sold.

Similar answers exist on many other websites. In fact, you could search the internet for hours and find articles and articles that give this same explanation.

Doesn’t anyone else see that the “translation” makes no sense – grammatically or legally? Words have meanings – especially in legal contexts. You can’t just make a sentence mean anything you want it to mean. How does “insurance is the subject matter of solicitation” end up meaning “insurance cannot be sold, the customer must ask for it”?? And even if the sentence did mean that, doesn’t anyone find this totally ridiculous? Have you ever “asked for” insurance, or have you mostly just bought one of the products that the insurance company has in their portfolio? Are our lawmakers really this stupid? And if they are, how come nobody is pointing to any proof (a law or a regulation) which mandates this?

It just bothered me so much that I decided to start digging until I found out where this phrase originated, and what was the intended meaning. I just don’t believe that our regulators are idiots who make up bizarre regulations just to mess with us.

Going to the Source – IRDA Regulations

Being a big fan of going to original sources, I tracked down this phrase to the “IRDA (Insurance Advertisements and Disclosure) Regulations, 2000” notification. (Here’s a pdf that I got off the IRDA website.) This is a document that regulates what advertisements related to insurance can and cannot contain. An important purpose of these regulations is to ensure that advertisements should not be “unfair or misleading.”

Here is what regulation 9 says:

1. Identity of advertiser — Every advertisement for insurance shall:

2. (i) state clearly and unequivocally that insurance is the subject matter of solicitation; and

3. (ii) state the full registered name of the insurer/ intermediary/ insurance agent.

I should note that this entire document is about the rules governing who can advertise insurance, and how. Nowhere does it say anything ridiculous like “insurance cannot be sold; customer must ask for it.” In fact the whole document is mainly about how to sell insurance without misleading customers. It’s clear to anyone reading this document that selling and advertising the sale of insurance is perfectly legal.

In fact, reading the whole document in context (especially when read in conjunction with regulation 2(d)) it is quite clear that:

• “solicitation” in this case means the advertisement itself, and
• the purpose of this line is to ensure that the advertisement makes it clear that insurance is being advertised and not something else.

The second point here makes a lot of sense when you see an actual life insurance ad – a lot of it is focused on the returns you will get if you don’t die. Without this disclaimer, you would think the product being sold is an investment scheme, right? And that is precisely what this warning is supposed to prevent.

“We make it sound like the primary purpose of this scheme is the the returns you will get if you don’t die, but please don’t forget that the real product being sold here is the insurance cover you’re getting – the money you will get if you do die. But we’re going to say it in such opaque jargon that even websites that claim to give you expert financial advice don’t understand the warning.”

In any case, on November 4th, IRDA published an amendment which removed 9(i) from these regulations, so future advertisements are no longer required to have this phrase.

Moral of the Story

So, here are the morals of this story:

• Don’t believe everything you read on the internet. Even if lots of websites agree with each other. Especially if lots of websites agree with each other – that usually means (these days) that they all pretty much copied from each other.
• Going to the original source is a powerful way of getting the real story. I do this every once in a while – I read the original wording of laws (e.g. defamation laws), or court cases, or other legal documents (e.g. India-US tax treaty) – and I always find the results quite instructive.
• The government/bureaucracy is not filled with idiots. They don’t just make up random things. There is always a reason, if you just look at things from the correct angle. So, if something seems idiotic, chances are that you did not understand it properly.
• Note to finance startups/companies – I know that your articles and blogs just exist for SEO purposes and as far as Google juice is concerned, quantity is king, but could you please at least have some sensible finance person take a look at your content and sign off on it to check that you’re not repeating incorrect information?

The post Real meaning of “Insurance is the Subject Matter of Solicitation” or how everyone on the web can be wrong appeared first on Navin Kabra's Blog.

Today we decided to go to the RTO office in Pune, all by ourselves, without an agent, and get ourselves duplicate licences issues. The process was surprisingly painless.

Unfortunately, the procedure is not really well documented on the web, hence I’m writing it, for the benefit of others:

• If you’ve lost your licence, you’ll need to file an FIR with the local police station, and bring along a copy of it. If you’re just looking to replace a tattered old licence, just bring that old licence along.
• First download and print Form LLD from the rtopune website. Fill out this form.
• Attach two passport size photos to the form with a paperclip.

As far as I can tell, you don’t need any other documents.

Land up at the RTO office. The official timings for this are from 10am to 2:30pm, but when we went, the 3 relevant windows opened at varying times between 10:15 and 10:35. So I suggest you land up at 10:30.

Ignore all the agents who will keep accosting you from the time you enter the gate. They’ll make it seem like it’s impossible to get anything done without an agent – ignore them. Go to Block C. Get the official to check your account in their computers, and sign your form. Then go to Block B, pay fees. If you’re just replacing a lost smartcard with a new one – you’re done. If you’re converting from old-style license to a smartcard, you need to get your biometrics done. After that you’re done.

When we went (at 10am) there were no queues at any of the 3 windows, so we could have been done in less than 10 minutes. However, the Block C person was eating something at her desk so we had to wait a few minutes for her. Then the fees window opened at 10:30. And the biometrics window opened at 10:35. So we were done by 10:45.

If you land up there by 10:30, I think you should be done by 11.

Remember though, parking is a pain there, so might want to go Uber or rickshaw. Except if you’re Sarika (for whom, primarily this article is written, and who owns a building next-door)

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