Showing posts with label Cluetrain Manifesto. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cluetrain Manifesto. Show all posts

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

JP Rangaswami, Utterly Confused Of Calcutta

JP Rangaswami of Confused Of Calcutta is the guy who introduced me to Twitter, one of my biggest discoveries of 2009: I Get Twitter. He just so also happens to be the CIO of British Telecom that has a presence in over 173 countries. After I exchanged a few emails with him a few months back, I googled him up. Up came a list in some magazine that had Eric Schmidt as number six. JP was number 12. He is big.

Before I even googled him up I brashly suggested he think in terms of coming along to be the Resident Adult on my corporate team: Google's Newest Venture: Google Ventures. Our own Eric Schmidt, I said. And that was before I saw that magazine article that says he is like Eric Schmidt.

The final thing I said on that note was I have no formal offer to make you until my round three. Even then I will only make an offer if I think what I am offering is better than what you got.

My startup raised round one money, most of which walked away in February, just completely pulled out. No thank you, Great Recession. So I have to raise round one money all over again. Raise and burn round one, raise and burn round two. Win the Nobel for the Nepal work. And with round two work and a Nobel under the belt, raise round three. That is the gameplan.


I have been following a few leads for round one, making a few moves. Raising money is an exercise in statistical anomaly. You follow many bad leads to end up with one good one. And there is no way to skip the bad leads.

This is not an exercise in naming and shaming but here is a recent email to Joe Trippi, the Dean 2004 campaign manager.


JP is going to be in town this month later. I just might be able to have some coffee with him. It will be a treat.


Jobsworth



Confused Of Calcutta
About this blog it is only a matter of time before enterprise software consists of only four types of application: publishing, search, fulfilment and conversation ...... identity and presence and authentication and permissioning are in some ways the new battlegrounds, where the freedom of information flow will be fought for, and bitterly at that. ....... we do live in an age of information overload, and that we have to find ways of simplifying our access to the information; of assessing the quality of the information; of having better tools to visualise the information, to enrich and improve it, of passing the information on. ....... Moore’s Law and Metcalfe’s Law and Gilder’s Law have created an environment where it is finally possible to demonstrate the value of information technology in simple terms ..... simplicity and convenience are important ...... we have to learn to respect human time. ...... I have a fervent hope that through this blog, I can keep the conversations going and learn from them. About me I’m JP Rangaswami. 51 years old, married (my wife’s called Shane), three children (Orla, 22, Isaac, 17 and Hope, 10 ). I was born in Calcutta and lived there for nearly half my life before emigrating to the UK in 1980. Much of

Eric E. Schmidt, Chairman and CEO of Google In...Image via Wikipedia

that time was spent at St Xavier’s Collegiate School and College; I was there from 1966 to 1979. Originally an economist and financial journalist, I’ve been an accidental technologist for over a quarter of a century. I’ve spent most of my adult life working in that strange space where finance meets technology, for a number of very large firms. Since 2006 I work for BT, as part of BT Design.......... I’m passionate about the things that interest me. My family. My local church and community. A retarded hippie at heart, I listen primarily to music made in the mid sixties to early seventies. ...... A Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts and a Fellow of the British Computer Society. A Freeman of the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists. ....... I keep thinking of setting up a school from scratch. Which is partly why I’m chairman of The School Of Everything. ....... how work is changing: the paradigms created by globalisation, disintermediation and the web; the implications of virtualisation, service orientation and commoditisation; why publishing and search and fulfilment and conversation are the only “applications” we may need; how telephony becoming software and the wireless internet interact with mobile devices; the terrors of poorly thought out IPR and DRM; the need to avoid walled gardens of my own making; how children now teach me about work; the socialising of information, how it creates value by being shared, how it is enriched, how it is corrupted. ........ Which is partly why I’m chairman of Ribbit. ....... Ever since I read The Cluetrain Manifesto I have believed in the “markets are conversations” theme ...... democratised innovation




Down the line I am going to need someone with great, global experiences who will take care of all the fundamental business processes, so I can be the big picture person, the face of the company, the spokesperson, the visionary leader, the guy who reinvents the company once every four or five years.

It also helps that JP is so into social media. He gets it. He has a passion for the word like I do. He is from Calcutta. Bengali and my first language Maithili are the two closest languages to each other in the grand family of languages, and both are large languges that show up in the UN's list of the 100 biggest languages in the world. My father was a dealer to the Santosh Radio in the 1980s that came out of Calcutta. Amitabh Bachchan was in Calcutta before he moved to Bombay to take a shot at acting. I grew up watching Amitabh, I used to imitate his hairstyle. Calcutta and Mumbai are in a class of their own. I eye the two cities for my global ambitions for internet access for the masses. They would be great places to polish up business models.

The difference between JP and me today is he wonders how and why someone ends up with half a million followers on Twitter. I take it for granted some day I will, some day soon, in a matter of a few short years. Insa-allah.

The beauty of globalization is JP and I can have our maach bhaat (fish curry and rice) and internet too.


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