Starting a company in a garage -- a metaphor most commonly associated with high-tech startups in Silicon Valley, has attracted a lot of entrepreneurs since the early days of technology, including myself. And very often, it was more than a metaphor. In the early 80's when I was still dreaming of joining the MD/PhD program at the School of Public Health at UC Berkeley, it was this dream of being able to build successful technology companies in one's own garage that eventually distracted me off my main course and into the realm of software technology.
So it is not surprising that after participating in a fairly successful transaction associated with the acquisition of Trigo Technologies by IBM, I found myself back in the proverbial 'garage' except that this metaphor had evolved. Our version of the 'garage' now is a virtual world that extends beyond national and continental boundaries. zAgile's incubation, from the first moment on, has involved people working from remote locations, in various cities and countries in South America, on various R&D concepts. This was important to us from the beginning because it resonated with the core theme of the company. This level of virtualization also opened up opportunities for us at a global scale. Anyone anywhere could participate in the incubation of this dream. zAgile's garage is virtual and without boundaries.
So in November of 2005, I returned home from Mallorca and embarked on a number of parallel efforts, finding myself -- 'still in the garage':
Networking -- Each week I dedicated some amount of time in the Silicon Valley, either at networking events sponsored by organizations like TIE (The Indus Entrepreneur), SVASE and VentureLabs, or meeting former colleagues and friends to get some early reactions about various ideas and strategies. I found these events, workshops and meetings to be very useful in early stages because they helped structure my thinking and the pitch. Listening to myself and other entrepreneurs, I realized that we easily become consumed with the idea or the product but do not spend enough time or mindshare figuring out ways to articulate the problem that we are attempting to solve. Defining and quantifying the problem that zAgile would solve became the most difficult task of all, along with developing the 'elevator pitch'. Simple questions like "what problem does this solve" and "what $$ savings can be measured" were not so simple. It is always a lot easier to just tell people how cool the idea is and why you are so passionate about it. Through some combination of workshops focused on these topics, sponsored by organizations that I mentioned, along with sessions with some of my close friends who each brought a significant depth of experience in building startups and being an entrepreneur, I was able to get a lot of help in the early stages.
Biz Plan Summary -- I began to research and develop content for the business plan -- the usual stuff such as market size, target customers, potential revenue sources and competitive landscape. This early exercise was mostly for me to satisfy myself that there was enough there to justify investment of my own $$ and sweat equity. The real business plan would have to wait until I needed to go for someone else's money.
I found that researching competitive landscape for me was a very gritty exercise. With the passion you carry about your ideas, the last thing you want to see is that someone else has already implemented it and you weren't even aware. And so it was, as I spent hours surfing and reading about similar offerings, I came across marketing literature from one company that completely knocked me off my chair. It was as if I had written it. I couldn't believe that this concept was already in place as an enterprise product. Sweating profusely and feeling quite shaky, I scoured through the entire literature that I could get my hands on from VA Linux System on Sourceforge Enterprise. It took some time to realize that marketing literature aside, there were fundamental differences between our approaches and capabilities related to tools integration and interoperability. Other than this 'seemingly' close encounter, there was no one else who offered a comprehensive set of integrated and interoperable tools. Most of the landscape was filled with rich and deep but 'lifecycle-stage' tools, i.e. covering specific stages of a Software Engineering Lifecycle. Not only did I have a concept for providing a much more comprehensive and integrated toolset, I could also integrate their tools (and anyone's for that matter) more effectively than what they were able to achieve. I felt a sigh of relief. I kept moving forward.
Team -- I started to explore various outsourcing partners to create a team that could start developing some prototypes -- a quest that a few months later (and incidentally) would lead me to South America. I had managed a number of significant outsourcing projects in India in my career but because of market saturation, rising salaries and high attrition rates (not to mention relatively poor physical infrastructure), I was not so inclined to go back there. India, in my mind, was at a bubble stage. And that bubble was 3-4 years away from bursting. Recruiting for talent there had become a crazy exercise because it was a way for people to get 20-30% jump in salaries and they could do it as often in a year as demand for their skills allowed. Loyalty was in short supply. Even after accepting an offer, the chances that the person would show up for work and stay were less than 100%. Furthermore, unlike the Silicon Valley culture where it is still very easy to find people who want to risk participating in early stage ventures, Indian society is still very conservative and most of the people prefer financial and career stability and traditional lifestyles. While this is changing now at a fairly rapid pace as India starts to become a consumer of technology products and services (as opposed to a mere service provider) -- it still wasn't enough to support my endeavors. Moreover, since I was still in the stages of figuring out the product and technology that I needed to build, it was too premature for me to make significant formal commitments (and investments) to any service provider.
My focus therefore turned to Eastern Europe, and in particular, towards exploring opportunities with university students and recent graduates. This demographic had been particularly active and prolific in its contributions towards open source software. I felt that I could leverage their enthusiasm and creativity for new technologies as well as their experience with open source tools. In turn, I could make up their lack of maturity by engaging more directly with them and more actively guiding them. This way we could accomplish a lot in the early stages and I would still be able to manage it through my own funds.
I used various means to expand my network in Eastern Europe so that I could establish some viable connections for my purpose. I was able to come in contact with teams in Romania and Ukraine. While there is tremendous amount of talent available in these countries with rapidly growing tech sector, my options were still limited to establishing relationships through service providers and the costs did not offer any significant advantage. It became obvious quickly that cultural and language issues would prevent me from engaging directly with individuals, at least in an effective manner. And contributing to that was another factor -- trust. There isn't much trust for outsiders in those cultures and therefore people aren't so willing to sign up for ventures or entrepreneurs with whom they do not have any personal relationships or some level of pre-built trust. I had planned on visiting countries like Romania, The Czech Republic and Hungary during the summer to explore these opportunities and at the same time also attend the European Semantic Web Conference in Budva, Montenegro in June, 2006. But eventually I backed out of that adventure (and trip) because I felt quite insecure about evangelizing my vision in countries where I was told people are likely to be wary of my 'gypsy' looks. And they don't trust or like gypsies :)
Technology & Product -- Most of the time, during this stretch however, was spent on researching tools and technologies related to the semantic web and open source tools for software development. Spending hours, days and nights installing and configuring these tools gave me a clear appreciation for a business model focused on supporting them for medium and large enterprises (similar to what SpikeSource and other companies were developing). The open source world is tremendous in its contributions of creativity and content across all domains but you often are also encountering "open sores". And your business cannot depend on such technologies without appropriate expertise and support through some reliable channel.
Name & Branding -- And I also started thinking of names for this venture. That was also not an easy exercise. I thought of planning 'naming' parties to solicit inputs from friends. I tried to list out various qualities associated with the concept and the venture to see if they would lead to something cool and creative. Here I discovered, through agonizing efforts, that every possible sequence and combination of letters in every possible script or language had already been registered as a domain. If I could think of it, it was already registered. For some existing domains that I found to be expiring within a few months, I waited. But that wait proved worthless. Renewals were automatic and people were holding on to them. I made some feeble attempts at trying to purchase some names but the asking price was too prohibitive. I knew that whatever name and branding scheme I could come up with, the first guy we hire as the marketing exec is going to change it--so why blow any money now on something so transient. While strolling through my garden in lazy summer afternoons with a glass of wine, over the course of several weeks, I came up with a short list that I found viable as names for my venture. I registered all of them quickly, figuring that to be the first critical step. I wasn't sure about any of them but a decision wasn't too critical at the time. At least I had a hold on the possibilities. This strategy proved somewhat fortuitous as, completely out of the blue, someone one day offered to buy one of the names I had registered. The transaction took three days to execute and only a few minutes of my time overall -- but I was $2500 richer. It more than paid off for hanging out in the backyard deliberating endlessly over names and drinking lots of wine in the process.
I wanted to reflect agility somewhere in the name or the theme of my venture, so I kept trying some scheme that would include the word agile. Once again, there were a lot of businesses and domain names already registered with that scheme. I went through the entire alphabet and finally found the letter 'z' that would serve the purpose. No one had used it yet.
And so the venture became zAgile.
I quickly registered the domain zAgile.com and sometime in September, went online and used bizfilings.com to register zAgile Inc. as a Delaware corporation. A logo and a website later, which my friend Leo Cheung put together for me rather hastily as I busied myself with travel arrangements for South America, I had a 'real' company. I also needed business cards and wanted a palindromic ("California Street, San Francisco, California") address, so I signed up with a virtual office provider who had a facility on 101 California Street in San Francisco, put an express order for biz cards at Kinko's, and I was all set to formally represent my venture to any and all, as I left for Santiago de Chile.
Delta flight 147 heads towards Santiago
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