When you are running a start-up, holidays are the last thing on your mind. With so many things on your plate every day, and having to wear so many hats, you end up running out of the number of hours you can afford to work on a day, to get the things you want to get done, done. And unlike ...

I took my longest vacation after going solo and starting the company a couple of weeks ago. That was a two week vacation out of town and it was the longest by far for the last three and a half years. The last time I took some time off, which was just three days and left my team directly working ...

This year was off to a bad start. So far I've had to let go of two people in my team. One was let go for disciplinary reasons. And the other was let go for performance reasons. However both those were some of the hardest decisions to make and even harder to execute. For a small company, the greatest asset ...

My wife decided that she was going to tender her notice for her job and that she was going to spend sometime being a full time mother. She wasn't enjoying her work anymore and our kids are growing up pretty fast. I cant blame her that she wants to savor every moment of their lives. Sometime back I wrote about ...

In my last post I mentioned that the team was being let go. We had no business, and no clear idea on what we wanted to do. Our first intention was to keep working on our product based business that we built, but that required funds. And at that point we were pretty exhausted.My partners started talking to a few ...

For a while me and my business partners have been discussing ways to get out of consulting. Consulting is a pretty lousy way to earna living with its own set do problems. One issue with consulting is that you can never predict the workflow. There are times that you are crazily overloaded with work and the there are really dry ...

The cash flow woes of my sole client seems to be continuing. More than that, he is now running out of projects. So we are heading towards a permanent death of cash flow and it seems that with that my business might also wind up! My client hasn’t landed any new projects and the ones we are working on are ...

I've been driving my Kia Sportage 2011 for about two weeks now. I thought o recording my first impressions of the vehicle before it grows on me and I take the new features for granted. Amazingly I put my money down without test driving. So you can say it was a love at first sight over it's looks. Peter Schreyer's ...

It's almost mid April. New year is just a day away. And we have wrapped up the first financial year for the company. Well, not a full financial year. We've been operational for eight months of the financial year. That's 2/3 of the year. While my accounts are not yet ratified by my auditors, thanks to the online accounting solution ...

February is almost over and it’s a bit late to be publishing the goals for this year. But as it happened, these goals were there on my mind, just that I never got around to putting them down in writing. For the last year, in January 2010, I laid down some targets (wonder why I didn’t call them ‘goals’ back ...

Watched this interesting TED talk by Jason Fried of 37Signals fame, author of Rework (which I am in the process of reading). He is one of the guys who is not afraid to say out loud what he thinks, even if it is against the conventional wisdom. My intention with this post is not to explain or transcribe what he ...

When I started out my company I has this un-written principle, where I said I was not going to hire from the companies that I previously worked at. Since I was still in very good terms with the management of those companies I didn’t want to create any frictions in those relationships by getting their people. But as we grow ...

This is something that I have been thinking a lot about lately. I am in the process of building a company, and I want to build a great one at that. And I am going to be honest. I am clueless on how to go about it, technically. So, the approach that I am taking is to build a company ...

I have blogged about us getting a new office. And since last Thursday, we've been there. We have a small office warming function. We didn't invite a lot of people, just had the team and family. We had a small religious blessing at the start and then we kicked off our work. We were all settled in and work started ...

AS I had mentioned in my previous posts we are setting up a new office. I am now a veteran in setting up offices. This is the third office I am setting up from scratch, and the second one for my self. So it makes it much more pleasurable. Now that the lease is finalized (I mentioned we settled for ...

We are getting into hiring mode again. The whole reason behind our decision to set up a new office was because we wanted to have more space to get more people in. Looking back at my team one thing that is pretty obvious is that we lack diversity in certain dimensions. I mean, we come from different back grounds and ...

Maybe it is too early to talk about managing growth for a young company. After all, we are barely starting up, and still in the process of getting things in order. We are still working from a room in my house and haven’t even got a proper office yet. But, it is something worth while talking about as it is ...

I read the above article on the freelanceswitch blog. This is a topic I had touched upon earlier. I figured I would link to that article and write my comment in this blog. It made sense to visit this topic again as I have made some significant progress on the path I had mentioned in my last post.I have made ...

I have not been an early adopter when it came to gadgets. He primary reason being, I've always had this internal dialog with a hard time justifying spending money on the latest toy to come out. I had this envy of the new gadgets when I was younger but as I grew older I was content with what I had. ...

In my last post I mentioned that we were trying to convert our business to a product based business. And we built a beautiful product. We launched on time, got a ton of press coverage. We were featured on National TV programs in USA, Germany and Korea. Got reviewed in over two dozens of tech blogs. Our app was downloaded ...