René Seifert – Entrepreneur & Global Citizen

This entry is about events, in the broadest sense and how they are linked together. Arun Katiyar, CEO of SEraja would be much better able to explain that broadest sense. So let me give a kick-off on it with my “narrow sense”. Well, yesterday, an exciting event for me was to meet Arun in his office in Bangalore at Miller’s Road for an extraordinary challenging exchange of thoughts.

But let me start with a few preceding events, which were all related to finally meeting Arun. How I got to know about SEraja for the first time happened through an event, namely reading the Esther Dyson report which featured the young company prominently. I put it on my list of companies to meet. Then, as an additional coincidence of events, during a due diligence about development-capacities for consumer-centric internet platforms in India, I ran into Bangalore-based Aztecsoft, who were at that time already engaged by SEraja. They were professionally secretive, just making hints on the work they were doing, not compromising the SEraja’s stealth mode, but eventually told me after the event of the platform-launch who they were working for.

In order to get more insight about Arun and the company, the logical event was to look at the corporate website, and – what else – google both of them. I learnt that Arun also used to be a journalist who is still writing his blog on a regular basis. Also, the event of searching revealed that the prominent Indian podcaster Kamla Bhatt had just interviewed Arun for her show a few days before. Needless to mention in this connected and intertwined world that Kamla and I had been in contact before and she had already commented on my blog during the riots following Rajkumar’s death – also an event by the way, a very significant one for the recent history of Bangalore.

My subsequent event consisted of downloading the 18 minutes MP3-podcast to my iPod and listening to it during my flight from Bangalore to Mumbai. This gave me a perfect preparation to meet Arun as the finally intended event of the entire exercise. Events, events, events, wherever you look. In their definition far broader than the most likely understanding for all of us.

Talking to Arun, he told me that the idea for SEraja was conceived by Prof. Ramesh Jain, who during his courses at the University in California, had identified together with his students from a rather abstract level 4,000 parameters which determine an event. Hence, as I tried to highlight rather like a layman in the previous paragraphs that everything can be considered an “event” which by definition is determined as something which happens in the time continuum. And this is everything. The risk of everything is, though, that it can turn oddly in to nothing. Arun’s challenging task now is to bring the “rubber on the road”, i.e. transform this abstract concept into a tangible service which will be used by real people because they perceive that it makes sense to them, that it creates value for them and helps them in their lives.

We went on speaking about selective realities, the concept of truth and constructivism, in the nutshell the ability for people who use the platform to formulate their own opinion on an event. Let me quote from a company’s self description the scope:

“A birthday, a graduation, a conference; festivals, games, promotions; a visit to a museum, a day spent with Mom, the launch of a new product; an unfortunate earthquake, even a tsunami, an unimaginable terrorist attack.”

The ultimate idea of SEraja consists in not just having these and other events as separate data items side by side, but have people connect them, refer to them from their very subjective point of view and drive the transition from information to knowledge. Or let’s push it to the edge: to reality.

In one of my favorite role-plays during an innovation-process, a model can help creating wonders by simply “disabling” all existing economic constrains and ask the question “what would Croesus do?” In that case, Croesus would possess unlimited computation power and devices which both trace trace and record every action, every connection, every relation, everywhere and anytime. What a hammer! But on top, now to get deliberately in the space of science fiction, in such a way that it would allow you to put yourself in anybody else’s minds in that past moment in time who had witnessed the event and seen it through their very eyes. Outrageous. Well, there’s a movie exactly about that: Enter “The Matrix”.

Ok, so let’s start our controlled approach down to earth again. As technology today, is (thank god) a far cry from enabling that, the obvious necessity of a service like SEraja is active participation of its members. Who log-in, post, blog, author into the wiki, upload soundfiles, movies etc. and at the same time build these relations between events by categorizing and tagging them in a purposeful way. Or how the company would explain itself:

What we are saying is this: while it is great to have public publishing systems, it has become necessary to have something like a blog of events that can be searched, sifted and used to produce independent insights into events. Think of it as a Wiki of events that people can add to and produce deeper meaning and insights for the next visitor. Or think of it as an EventWeb — where people publish events, associate images, audio, video, text, tags, maps and landmarks with the event, regardless of whether they have the data or it is available elsewhere on the Web, and leave it behind for others to enhance with their own thoughts, ideas and reports (if you are thinking `Wisdom of the Masses’, you are on the right track). Finally, imagine an engine that lets you accurately sift through millions of such events and populate your calendar with just the right ones!

User participation, not just once, but ongoing, relentlessly, again and again stands at the heart for the success of this platform. And Arun’s job is to develop the right triggers for it. No mission impossible, but certainly challenging. “The most ambitious” of all event tools, was understandably the assessment of Esther Dyson’s report.

The good thing for Arun: He is not alone, he has a team which is a vested mix between internal staff and outsourced resources, adding up altogether to around 35 full time employees. How much money do you need for that? The answer is interestingly: It depends. If you are located in the Silicon Valley or in London, you might need in such a pre-revenue scenario for sure something around US-$ 5 mn. Not so in India. Exactly US-$ 1mn was the seed capital which Rajesh Jain invested, adding “don’t come back to me, I won’t give you more.” So quite a long runway you can come along in India for a start-up which will be soon on tour with investors and VCs targeting US-$ 8 to 12 mn for its growth. Not unrealistic these days.

Make no mistake. This is an India company, but the product is deemed for a global market. In that regard, SEraja in exemplifies something new, and something really fantastic. Here my “7 Steps how to build a successful company in the Flat World”.

1. Start in India.
2. Do whatever can be developed and managed in and from India.
3. Do those things outside of India, where the country is not yet great (e.g. design of user interface).
4. Employ smart people and sufficient in numbers to gain momentum fast.
5. Get proof of concept in the Indian market.
6. Go shopping for growth capital internationally.
7. Scale globally.

Bottom line: You will need a fifth of the investment you would need “in the west”. It will tremendously decrease the risk on invested capital. Or turning the equation around: India will provide for the same amount five times the runway to take off with the company. And that’s the event every entrepreneur is working for and every investor betting at.

Enough about events for today. Yet, Arun and I have planned one together. As we discovered that we have a common background in radio, Arun as a station director at Radio City, and me as a presenter and head of marketing at Bayern 3, we agreed to meet when I’m back to India next time. Two men and beer. Nothing in this world can top the link of this event :-)