prayag

So, when we were raising Series A, the negotiations with some new investors were getting a little tenuous. I knew and appreciated that investors are professional negotiators and do this for a living. I on the other hand was a first time CEO. So, for some time during the process, I was feeling a tremendous amount of pressure.

So, one morning I come in to the office feeling sick and questing my ability to withstand the kind of pressure a growing company's CEO has to endure. First thing I see is this short email from Alexis "How's it going? How can we help?". I had talked to Alexis and Garry a few months before about raising a Series A but I was sure that famous people in the valley with full-time jobs had more important things to do than check in on a small, pre-series A company with 10 employees.

I welled up. It was the first time in months that I had felt like someone had my back. In the end we were able to raise a successful A followed by a successful B as well but I still go back and read that 2 sentence email from time to time.

Garry and Alexis are not only awesome investors but wonderful human beings.

1. The infrastructure: India doesn't have the tech infrastructure. Take the 3 major e-commerce requirements for example: internet access, online payment and delivery. Even the basic internet infrastructure in India sucks. Most people access the internet over their phones because getting home internet is still a pricey affair for most people. A pretty small number of people have access to credit cards and for those who do, processing payment online is a huge pain. The postal infrastructure is also pretty bad. India post is flaky and other courier companies are pretty bad or expensive or both.

2. Government interference: Indian government is inconsistent, heavy-handed and has very little interest in improving the tech sector. Most state governments are downright hostile.

3. Lack of exit opportunities: Indian tech sector lacks big players who can provide the entrepreneurs and investors meaningful exits. The culture of acquisitions as a meaningful way to get market advantage is not there. Your only hope is sell to a American or a European company looking to gain a foothold in the region (rare) or IPO (even rarer).

4. Corruption and general apathy: To get anything meaningful done in India is a struggle. From getting setup as a company to getting a good internet connection. You have to fight corruption and apathy of the organizations (both public and private) you are dealing with.

5. Labor laws: Labor laws in India are a joke. They are a relic of the socialist times and are heavily biased on the side of the employees. Setting up any type of manufacturing or operations in India is a legal nightmare. If that's not enough, the trade unions operate as a mafia and its downright dangerous to deal with them.

There is a lot of opportunity in India too but until we overcome the problems that entrepreneurs and investors face, Indian tech startup scene would never take off.

http://www.businessinsider.com/2008/12/facebook-get-ready-fo...

You are wrong. It's not clear-cut. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_pay_gap for an introduction.

Are you suggesting that women are not prejudiced again in work-place and in technology?

> You can Google for refutations of it if you want (either 80 cents, or 77 cents) and you should be able to find a dozen decent ones.

I did. Here's what I found:

http://asq.sagepub.com/content/44/3/453.short https://archive.nyu.edu/handle/2451/14253

This guys has a point. Yea women where is the proof that you are prejudiced against except centuries of discrimination? The last western country to give women right to vote was in 1960s. Almost 50 years ago. The fact that you make 80 cents to every dollar a man makes is not a proof of any prejudice but a proof that women are genetically pre-disposed to making less money than men. Also, feminism is bad.

\sarcasm

>I assume most who think events like this are destructive -- would answer that fairness and equality relate to negative freedom: the freedom from someone restraining you from pursuing your goals i.e. we would all be more equal if the only thing which stood between us and our goals were our own skill (or lack thereof).

Because this argument assumes a level playing field for everybody including no intrinsic factors like lack of role models, lack of representation and lack of societal support.

Here's another advice for you, what you are thinking are well-reasoned arguments are all the same arguments that come up time and again in Sociology 101 to being stated in every argument on gender and race related issues on Hacker News. So, go do some research make some new (but probably) misinformed arguments about how we live in a post-gender society instead rehashing the same bigoted crap all the time.

For example, just because a college has different standards of admission for different races to promote diversity is not racism but to give preferential treatment to the group of people who have more social and economic power. That's racism.

BlackGirlsCode is not a racist organization. Actually to the contrary, its trying to improve the opportunities to the most under-represented group of people in tech industry. This is a good thing for the tech sector. To focus on blank girls, this organization can be much more effective in its goal (to make tech sector more inclusive) than if it was a "PeopleCode" or even a "GirlsCode" group.

Is the blog post that explains the thinking behind it. Looks like a pretty cool solution to problem that not many people are thinking about.

I hope this explains what leadgenius does.

We do send out emails to our crowd and give them opportunities for longer work with us. We interview them, vet them and certify them in different skills. Some of them are lead generation, outreach and sales skills. We do this fairly regularly among other things to engage with our worker community and expand them.

I am curious why you thought that this means our interest are not aligned with our customers interests. We would not be in business let alone have that many satisfied customers if we were not.

>1) The start-up acquiring the lead list has the ability to progress the deals to closure.

We help start-ups figure out a process for doing sales. Most start-ups have some idea of how they want to do their sales and we fine tune the process with them.

>2) The start-up acquiring the lead list is able to appropriately break-down their revenue in an easily audit-able/non-modifiable manner to demonstrate which $ came from the acquired lead list(s).

We also provide monthly reporting on the response rates and so on and it helps the start-ups to understand what their ROI on the process is. In general, the money we are charging is small enough that its always ROI positive.