René Seifert – Entrepreneur & Global Citizen

It's funny to see how journalists copy & paste topics from each other. I realized that when I was featured in the SPIEGEL some 15 months ago and a flood of interview requests followed up. Similarly appears to me a current interest in virtual PAs (personal assistants) from India in the German media. I have read myself quite a few articles about e.g. GetFriday or YourManIndia in the last weeks. But I guess the issue both as a journalistic topic and a service worthwhile to consider has been magnified by the success of Tomothy Ferriss' "The 4-Hour Work Week". The book is all about efficiency by outsourcing as much as possible into a self-functioning and self-healing personal eco-system.  Hereby, such a personal assistant in India at reasonable cost can help booking travels, doing research, online shopping etc.

Funnily, in the aftermath of the media coverage a few German friends asked me if such a service would make sense for the German market. My take on that: Certainly, one could create demand for it, I don't see the Germans in that respect different from US-Americans where the service has gained traction. However, I rather see a supply side problem with German skills in India. To put it quite narrow: As soon as German language is required to get a task successfully done, I see significant quality issues. The number of Indians who are so fluent in German is not that high and those who are up to the level will easily get a job in an ever higher-valued and hence higher-paid job. So early on, one will get into nasty operational, quality and especially scaling issues.

So if I had to make a call as an entrepreneur or investor, I would make a pass on such a business proposal. Yet, if the task can be narrowly reduced to pure English skills, well, then the world is flat and the service can be targeted anywhere.