Active Learning in India

Startup Profile – KitnaDetiHai.com

In partial fulfilment for requirements of the course

CINE: Understanding Creativity, Innovation, Knowledge Networks And

Entrepreneurship (2014-15)

Submitted to:

INSTRUCTOR: Prof. Anil Gupta

ACADEMIC ASSOCIATE: Ms. Anamika Dey

By

Prasant Kumar

On

2nd March 2015

INDIAN INSTITUTE OF MANAGEMENT, AHMEDABAD

About the company:

The website aims to remove the taboo around salary disclosure and enable people to make informed choices about their career by giving access to actual salaries & pay-slips of companies across levels. It aims to remove the reliance on false numbers quoted by media and other speculative information to make important career decisions.

A sample result of getting salary information is shown below

About the founder

KitnaDetiHai is a startup by Vinod Chandrashekar. A graduate of NIT Surat, Vinod has been tinkering with innovation for long. He won KVPY scholarship for innovation during his undergrad and worked with National Innovation Foundation (NIF). He designed an automatic bicycle lock with the help of the stand itself, which was also keyless and ergonomic – hence by just parking the cycle it got locked. It won the 1st prize!

A free-wheeling conversation with Vinod charts his startup journey that can be valuable for other budding entrepreneurs too, in the flowing pages.

· Hi Vinod, can you narrate the genesis of your startup

My friend hated his job and during Friday Night get together it used to get out of control. When I asked why you don’t just quit the job if you hate it so much, He was like "uh quit the job" as simple as that, do you know how much bank loan I have from my Bschool.

“Dude, you went to one of the finest schools in the country. I'm sure you make enough to cope up for everything.”

Make Enough? Shows me the Payslip and is that what you call enough.

Seriously?! This money you could have even earned just continuing your regular job. Next few years is gone repaying the loan and then I married, I'm going to remain white collar for life.

This got me thinking as to what most of us even (NIT & IIT grads) do with our definitive years after college.

Let’s say in general

· we finish our undergrad by 21

· 21-23 goes into slogging for CAT preps. (most cases some do crack by 21)

· 23-25 goes into Bschool with heavy loan (15-21 lakhs for IIMs - Goes primarily for placements)

· 25-29 Loan repayment tenure needs to keep a steady job

· 29 onwards married

Now has a family and cannot afford to take risks and additional societal pressure continues being employed, most times for the rest of the career.

This entire cycle kills entrepreneurship.

If only people knew what they were after, they could have probably made better career choices. Many could have turned tech entrepreneurs who could have created a lot more jobs.

For a 2 hour movie or for a meal, we review and share so much. Why not for Salaries, which is our bread and butter!

Look up prices in many sites just to save a few hundred's over mobile purchase. Whereas for one year of blood and sweat, when HR says this is the best in the industry they are no accurate sites to refer to ask for a fairer deal.

· What were the alternatives to start up which were given go by, that is job offers or some other engagements, PhD prospect or whatever...

I always felt alive when I was creating something, whether it was a simple window stopper (using umbrella mechanism) or designing better ergonomic locks. So for the same passion pursued mechanical engg. and won KVPY scholarship, INTEL Science Fair et al in the field of innovation.

So then at Campus chose to work at Automobile Major for a project which took the world by a storm as it was frugal engineering and innovation at its best from what sources I read. 2009!

But the manufacturing shop floor was like a lethargic sick govt org, solving problems took backburner and all it mattered was politics – I knew the organization was lining itself up for a disaster. Then I heard of other jazz Consulting career ( articles after articles I read highlighted every day you get a new problem to solve) I knew this was it what I wanted to do. And that too even without an MBA. Hell yeah!

My heart was still with innovations which I had built, Aniruddh a fellow KVPY scholar knew some a VC at CIIE and put me in touch with me.

At 21, was my first meeting with a VC at IIMA – CIIE cell. The conversation which I had was one of worst, instead of hearing out what I had built – The VC blatantly told me.

Oh! You are a mechanical engg genius, not much margins in cycle locks – Do something with the turbine blades.

I knew right away, for a VC it was all money and nobody cared for original or a unique innovation.

Decided to take-up Consulting, ended up slogging creating decks with checking font size, alignments nothing more than a glorified back office clerk. The term I used to describe my work in front of the team. And my Manager ensured he could plot a way to get me out by labelling me as too much lost in his own thoughts.

Moment of Clarity:

1. Just because ISB & NYU stern grads joining at high salaries doesn’t mean the job ought to be something awesome. (Credential bias in human brain was acknowledge)

2. If at all I fancied pursuing anything post MBA it was consulting, and I already got a taste of it and knew this is not what I want to do. And a Facebook page called Consulting Rehab gave me 100 other supporting data-points and all were genuine consultants. Probably post mba I could have hoped for little better client facing role, but the hours of slog I thought it was not worth it.

Perfect job doesn’t exist you have to create your own.

If there was one job where I won’t feel brain-dead is to work on creating stuff.

But the mechanical creation had its own limitation of capital to set it up and location bound.

So the biggest leap was to convince myself that the Industry I should looking to create epic shit (as jobs puts it) lied in the Internet Industry.

This was particularly hard given, I avoided writing code all my life and thoroughly despised it as such “DRY STUFF” and had never written a single line of code.

The thoughts in my mind kept haunting me like that of the Birdman’s movie. You will never make it in here, people start coding from primary school, how could you even rationally think of matching their level forget even competing with them and outsmarting entrepreneurs in their domain.

Given the MBA option ruled out, it was a blessing in disguise.

1. I get 2 whole years to fiddle around.

2. Debt kills Innovation and Risk taking ability. (Loan debt was avoided)

1st Startup:

As much as loved to create, I loved cinema more. For its appeal to be part of ourselves and my role-models and muses where more often where characters from cinema.

I wanted to immortalize these role models and proudly showcase them to the world!

Fan-art merchandising of cult movie characters. MeraBaap.com

The vendor at Tirupur who took orders, goofed around for several months wrt printing constraints etc. etc. and eventually returned the cheque by that time there were several players into the market.

Startup got shut down! And there could always be copyright infringement etc.

· So, tell me more about how was the team formed, what were the initial hiccups, did family support or resist

My first teammate Ajay I met in bus journey in Bangalore, he was speaking in broken Kannada with heavy American Accent. Thanks to Bangalore traffic it gave us ample time to know about each other.

I had just learnt he had dropped Columbia undergrad and was travelling to India to explore a more spiritual side of things and wanted to spend time with his grandma in Mysore! Both his parents were doctors and belonged to top 2% in America and we discussion revolved around how money is a mere no and we were discussing ways in which we could work on meaningful things.

Again met him at the Google Conference, at the moment shared an idea of how we could save life’s during road accident (another app we built called Mishapp auto emergency alert)

And we were clear, on a life saver application we will give out for free. And when there was no money involved and team was putting in best efforts to solve a genuine problem. That formed the foundation for next project KitnaDetiHai

Where we now also have Gaurav, who is an IITD –CS guy as a part of the founding team. Teams were formed more on the passion to solve a social problem.

· Was there a mentor which guided you at all stages

A lot volunteered but we sensed their where primarily after equity, we have been very cautious in this front.

· Have you filed for any patents

No

· Have you raised any funding

About to start that process.

· What are some of the innovations in your company that you have implemented/tried

Machine Learning algorithms in Curation of Salaries and Banning Bad Apples!

· How did you go about testing for your product and did anybody make significant contributions

We tested it in Major Bschools, 2.5k users in a month with solely word of mouth promotion.

We were also lucky to have super kind friends at various Bschools who helped in spreading the word and building the database and getting initial tracking.

· Please tell me about some of the challenges being faced

Collecting Data, Initially for 7 months we wanted people to upload payslips as the no’s on ink won’t lie. But the user adoption with it was hard. Even the thickest of friends would refuse.

We knew it had to be Google Forms to collect data anonymously and use technology for Curation. And later to use LinkedIn API and that’s the only login way ever possible.

· Do you have a dilemma that needs to be resolved

Nothing specific.

However seeing through the data we have, we think at IIMs women might get better jobs. By and large wage equality doesn’t exist across gender the gap is very huge! There has been a lot of news in the recent past of Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO passing comments as to women should not ask for pay hikes, and NYTimes women editor getting fired when she asked the board she is paid very less compared to other colleagues!

The discrimination in gender pay is universal and India ranks one among the worst.

UK last week passed a bill for equal pay for men and women,

India on paper does have an equal remuneration act of 1976. But none of the company follows it.

In US: Under the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (NLRA), all workers have the right to engage “concerted activity for mutual aid or protection” and “organize a union to negotiate with [their] employer concerning [their] wages, hours, and other terms and conditions of employment.”

Obama even supports salary transparency:

http://www.npr.org/2014/04/13/301989789/pay-secrecy-policies-at-work-often-illegal-and-misunderstood

· Do you have any inspirational quote that keeps your morale high!

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.

Thank you very much Vinod, and wish you the very best for your endeavors.

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