A trip to Silicon Valley and TiECon 2015

I am writing this as I am stranded for more than 15 hours in the Airport on my way back to Bangalore from San Francisco. My co-passengers cribbing about the terrible delay. I told myself, this incident should never spoil my joyous mood of having an eventful trip to the Bay Area. I thought it would be great time to blog on my experience.

I’d like to start by thanking TiE Bangalore (Kunal and Sehera) and Venkat of TiE Silicon Valley for choosing Discover Dollar as delegate and sponsoring my travel to US and offering me opportunity to be part of TiECon 2015, one of the most high profile startup event attended by more than four thousand entrepreneurs and covered extensively in Forbes and other highly profile publishers.

The highlight of first day at TiECon was lunch meeting with Walmart CIO Suja Chandra. I was amazed by her depth of knowledge, vision and impressed by her growth story.

I also met dynamic and very charismatic entrepreneur Phil Libin, Founder and CEO of Evernote App. Evernote is now valued at $1 Billion and planning go for an IPO. Most of the information I am writing in this blog was from notes I captured in Evernote app during the sessions. He spoke about Evernote's growth story and changing phase of Data Economy. I had a chance to have pic with him. 

One of the major Keynote speaker at TiECon was Jack Welch. Welch is one of the prolific leaders who served as CEO and Chairman of General Electric from 1981 to 2001. During his tenure, GE's value rose 4000%. He was named as "Manager of the Century" by Fortune Magazine in 1999. Two gem of statements from Jack Welch at TiEcon :

·         I went to India to find low cost but instead found high brains. It was my discovery after Vasco-Da-Gama

• Fifty of Fortune 500 Company CEOs worked for me in the past. As true leader, my real achievement is grooming them

Got a personally signed copy of book The Real-Life MBA from Jack & Suzy Welch

I was very impressed with Vivek Randive's story of starting a company on Information Bus and having all Wallstreet companies as customers. His success with TIBCO and Basketball coaching and how he ended up buying Sacramento Kings. 

I was truly humbled when I attended TiE Youth Session. 13 year wonder-kids were giving gyan on entrepreneurship and sharing their success storeis.

Shubham Banarjee has built a Braille Printer which costs below $350 using Lego (75% lesser than current printers). Intel has funded his project and his team comprises of people from Whitehouse and Harvard University. 

Tanay Tandon is founder at Clipped, a seed-funded natural language startup focused on using machine learning to summarize news articles into bullet-point summaries for faster reading. To-date, Clipped has amassed 280k users with 45 million summarized articles, topping iTunes news charts upon launch. Tanay enjoys working at the confluence of research problems and consumer facing products, with his research in computer vision and ML having been featured on BBC, Forbes, and TNW

Sushil Sudhakar is a thirteen-year old eighth-grader at Keystone Montessori in Phoenix, Arizona. He recently launched his most recent endeavor, Fill-Yo-Dosa, at the Arizona Children’s Business Fair which turned cash flow positive within four hours of launch.

Muthu Alagappan is a medical student known for his professional basketball analytics. After speaking at the 2012 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, several professional teams began to use the company's software. He was given the top prize at the conference, and GQ called his work both "a new frontier for the NBA" and "Muthuball"—an allusion to Moneyball baseball statistical analysis known for revolutionizing the sport. Forbes included him in  "30 Under 30" list of influential people in the sports industry. 

I am also excited by Vivek Wadhwa's talk on how technology is going to bring humongous change in our lives. Talks by Preet Bharara and Vishal Sikka was inspiring.

TiECon ended on high note and loads of enthusiasm. 

I stayed for 15 more days in the States after TiECon and I want to thank my College friend Roopesh Rao for providing me roof at SandHill Road which was world's most expensive place to live in late 1990s. (Even now it's terribly expensive!)

I attended Retail EXPO at PlugNPlay Tech Center, one of the most popular place for Startups in Silicon Valley. I had chance to interact with 20+ amazing startups solving problems in Retail space. I did visit Stanford and visited their Graduate School of Business. I had chance to interact with current students and explore if I can attract them to intern with us. (We did have interns previously from Wharton Business School, U-Penn and IIM Bangalore). 

Later I traveled to Seattle, Washington and met a potential customer who was impressed with our solution. [Cannot share more details on public forum ;)]

I enjoyed my meeting and conversation with my mentor SD Shibulal (Founder & ex-CEO of Infosys) who shared his rich experience on building companies and early days of their journey with Infosys. 

Apart from this I had met a large number of people and companies including CEOs, VCs, Partner companies, discussed potential JVs etc.

On overall, this trip has been so far the most eventful and memorable one among all of my visits to the States. It has opened new paradigms of opportunities, elevated my vision and inspired higher hopes and sense of greater target and achievements.

Discover More Dollars By Killing Overpayments & Revenue Leakages

- by Guest Authors - Hemant & Anup (Founders expatideas.com)

Erroneous payments and Revenue leakages can have a negative impact on an organizations ability to achieve its intended outcome. Most companies have not yet estimated the magnitude of erroneous & Overpayments payments in their programs. Without a systematic measurement of the extent of the problem, management cannot determine (a) if the problem is significant enough to require corrective action, (b) how much to cost effectively invest in internal control systems to correct the problem, or (c)the impact of the actions already taken. Identifying effective practices and providing case illustrations and other information for companies to consider when developing strategies and planning and implementing actions to manage erroneous payments in their programs has become extremely vital.  It is well known in the business world that if you don’t measure it you can’t track it. This means that you can’t determine where you’re at or if you are getting better without measuring. No organization is 100% error-proof irrespective of best systems and processes. Even at 99% accuracy, a company with $2 Billion revenues could possible loose upto $20 Million. Large organizations, often employing third party recovery audit firms for hefty fee to identify and recover lost profits from duplicate and erroneous payments.

Erroneous payments are widespread and has significant problem which is receiving increased attention among organizations of different size and scale which includesprivate sector and publically listed companies too. Erroneous payments mostly include inadvertent errors, such as duplicate payments and miscalculations; payments for unsupported or inadequately supported claims; payments for services not rendered; credits and allowance available from vendors but not accounted for, payments to ineligible beneficiaries; and payments resulting from outright fraud and abuse by program participants and/or employees. They occur in a variety of programs and activities. Erroneous payments mostly threatens profitability, that can translate into serving fewer recipients or represent wasteful spending or a higher relative tax burden that prompts questions and criticism from the taxpayers. Erroneous payments indicate that companies and enterprises are spending more than necessary to meet their goals. Conversely, for companies with fixed funds, any waste of funds translates into serving fewer recipients or accomplishing less programmatically than could be expected.

The risk of erroneous payments and companies’ ability to prevent them will continue to be of concern in the future. Pressures will grow rapidly due to increased costs of spending across programs. Few would argue that the goal of reducing erroneous payments is not a worthy one, but initiative for improved financial performance can yield immediate results. Addressing the problem requires a strategic approach by organizations and actions taken in this direction will reduce erroneous payments. But the question is – where do you start if you haven’t done an assessment before?  The answer – is specific to an industry.

Discover Dollar helps companies to discover hidden dollars by digging deep into their data. As large retailers have multi-million dollars of revenue leakages and overpayments like pricing errors, duplicate payments, unclaimed credits, cash discounts, allowances &rebates from vendors etc. It helps companies to detect and resolve problems of overpayments by analyzing all data sources including unstructured data like emails and contracts where majority of the deal with be negotiated and finalized.

They also optimize their pricing and deals negotiated with vendors by providing insights into promotions and predicting pricing patterns. Overall helping companies to discover more income, margin and profits with any additional investment in operations or sales. Few global players are solving overpayment problems by expensive, time consuming manual audits whereas Discover Dollar has built revolutionary real-time solution leveraging new technologies in big data space. It’s a first of its kind solution to Indian market. Globally overpayment is $10 billion market. Their primary market is North America & Europe but now they are also focused on emerging economies like India & South Asia.

Discover Dollar is looking to expand its technology team and its data Science capabilities for building cutting-edge technological solutions to solve revenue and payment leakages at enterprises. It has plans to open a full-fledged office in the US in next one year. They are also in discussions with many Fortune 500 companies who are facing overpayment problem. After discussion with Discover Dollar, one of the largest retailer in the US realized they have more than $100M potential overpayment problem and now signing agreement with Discover Dollar to resolve it. Similarly many companies including large conglomerates are quite ignorant about the scale of the problem. Discover Dollar has won many accolades including “Top 5 Most Innovative Solution” by SAP in Orlando, “Anthah-Prerana” by IIM Bangalore & TiE Bangalore & “10K Pitch” by NASSCOM and clearly poised to a very successful organization.

The core team includes Subrahmanya Rao (Co-founder & CEO) who is a MBA from SDMIMD passed out in the year 2010 and has worked with an Atlanta based Auditing firm where he had personally recovered multi-million dollar overpayments for Fortune 500 companies. Praveen Kumar (Co-founder) passed out of BITS-Pilani in 2008 has spent 4 years with SAP Labs with a patent filed in Business Objects.

With such initiative let’s hope that companies get richer and contribute towards a better economy.

To reach discoverdollar click here

Original Aritcle was published by Hemant & Anup at http://www.expatideas.com/retail/discover-more-dollars-by-killing-overpayments-revenue-leakages/

Team eXi wishes them success in their journey.

Your support through any of the social groups is highly appreciated, this will also help them grow their network through you.

Changing Face of Retail as seen by Scott Laverty CIO JCPenney

I was an invitee to ‘CXO Master Class’ session sponsored by Kyron Accelerator. CIO of JCPenney Mr Scott Laverty, a veteran with 28 years of experience in information technology shared his thought on the Changing Face of Retail. Here is excerpts of Fire-side chat with Scott where he answered questions from Vikram Ahuja and many startup founders including me.

Q: You have been in the industry for 28 years in Retail Industry, how has retail changed since you started?

Scott: The biggest change in last 30 years has been the “Internet” which is very powerful. For us the change is what they call “Omni-channel” where they differentiated Online vs Store is dimishing.  My view is that it has boiled down to just Retail. In terms of our consumer, she doesn’t care how she is interacting with me as to online or store or anywhere else. She may like a dress somewhere and would take a picture and find them in our store. That’s probably the single largest change – the buying behavior of consumer. JCPenney is 112 years old and so are the channels and infrastructure. What we are trying to do is be nimble, flexible and dynamic for consumer. With our new CEO coming in, he is bringing lot of changes from being rigid to flexible, focusing on customers etc

Q: Interestingly JCPenney was one of first retailer to adopt e-commerce. How you continue to stay on top of competition?

Scott: Infact we were one of the first retail website 20 years ago. We also used to have 400 page catalogue. All that others are now speaking about ‘buy online and pick up from store’, we have been doing that for 30 years. Though we pioneers in starting our website, frankly speaking we lost our way in between. In last couple of years what we have done is brought back our focus on internet and consumer. We have re-done our UI where it was pretty difficult for consumers to navigate from cart to make payment. We fixed major part of UI, we changed our search to accommodate how our buyers do. We also launched our mobile app during this holiday season which was a significant hit. We are trying to make it seamless between online and store. Say one of our buyer wants to buy a shirt and we don’t have it in his size. Now, if I find it in any other stores I’ll ship it directly to him. This is small change, but leads lot of sales. It also cost us more money to ship, but we get life time value because he is happy to comeback. So rather than seeing only transactional view, we look from a broader view of keeping the customer with us for longer time.

Q: How do you balance between New Technologies versus Old school best practices?

Scott: In a large company like ours, IT alone has 600 people. We have many small groups working on innovative ideas. For example one group is working on what can we do have dynamic stores, how can associates spend more time with customers versus time spent on setting up the store. We have a long way to go on this.

Q: How are you striking balance between online & offline stores?

Scott: One of the things we are trying to do is bring balance in product selection in terms of online & in-store. We are trying to converge and extend product offering. For eg: I may have 20 different shirts online but only 5 in the stores. So with online we are giving our consumer classic line extension. The strategy is about providing seamless experience for our consumers, we really don’t worry whether they buy online or in-store. One more thing we did is we started providing sales credits to the store even for a online sale based on items shipped.

Q: How well you understand your customers?

Scott: I want to say we are light years ahead in terms of understanding the customers than everybody now. Our merchant group really invigorated and focused on understanding our customer groups. We have 7 different customer groups based 28 parameters like demographics and buying patterns. Our merchants groups are focused on how to reach them and development team is developing products in line with these groups.

Q: As CIO how do you separate in-house innovation and engaging with startups?

Scott: Great question! I actually worked with a company like Kyron when I was with Borders. I brought 3 startups into my website. I’m pretty much believer of leveraging startups with brilliant ideas. We are trying to change the perception in JCP on innovation, we are opening up for startups and ideas, who visualize and solve the problems differently. I’m excited about ideas which helps us make more money. But at same time we cannot have hundreds of startups doing hundred different things. We are looking for three or four which has high impact, high ROI and can be scaled.

Q: You probably have pitched by a lot of startups. What is that you are looking in a startup you potentially want to engage with? How do startups reach out to you?

Scott: Surprisingly, we are not pitched by that many right now. First I’m going to look is, does it matter to our customer. It has be about shopping experience, it has to effect customers positively. It may be a cool widget but most important is it has to be scalable, practical and really customer driven. We also look at some specific purpose like security. If it’s something which helps me get better sleep at night, I’ll look into it.

Frankly speking, I don’t have time to look into unsolicited emails. Even if you have greatest idea and you send me a email it would be no good. In my view it has to be curated. We would like to work with company like Kyron who can help us find 5 suitable out hundreds of them.