20 years, 200 runs

Dear Sachin,
I know I have been a crabby guy. For 20 years, all I have done is to complain.  Sachin, why didn't you stay till the end and got those 17 runs? Why did you got out early when we needed to chase 360 runs for the world cup? Why do records like highest test score and highest test average belong to someone else? Why don't you play like your earlier days.

And I know you don't like that. All these 20 years you have been trying to keep me happy. Here, keep this Sharjah cup I got for you from Australia. Here are records for highest no of runs and centuries in both one days and tests. Here is the overseas win you wanted so badly. Here is me hitting Akhtar out of the park. And Shane Warne. And Olonga. And McGrath. And Walsh and Ambrose. And Akram and Waqar. Dude, I am trying hard for the world cup. Just wait.

I was 11 when I started watching cricket. You were 18. I don't even remember how quickly you became the synonym of cricket for me and for everyone else in India. I couldn't even realize that cricket is a team sport, not an individual one. Yes I liked Azhar, Jadeja, then I liked Ganguly, Dravid and then Sehwag, Dhoni. But truly speaking, I switched on the TV to watch you, and switched it off the moment you got out. When my mood is so much governed by how you play, I am bound to get crabby when you get out.

But from today I'll stop complaining. Today you wiped out which was probably our biggest shame, and coverted it to our proudest moment that's gonna stay for a long time. You were the one who stopped Anwar from getting a double hundred that day years back, and today you finally put an end to that pinching that every Indian Cricket Fan has been feeling in their hearts for past 13 years.

Congratulations on getting a double hundred Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar, and Thank You very much.
(Photo courtesy: R@VITH)

Sanjay Goel resides on goelsanjay.com

Its been quite some time since I registered domain http://www.goelsanjay.com. And even though moving blogger to your custom domain is only a 10 mins job, I have been lazy enough to not spare those 10 mins.
Anyways, here is my first post on the new domain. All the existing posts gets redirected automatically and the rss feed works too.
Great.

One small poll. Which domain is better?

• goelsanjay.com or 
• sanjaygoel.name

I have registered both. Please mark your preference in the comments.

The next step would be to actually write a post, something I haven't done in 3 months. Its high time to do so, expect a post soon.

Why interviews are so tough?

I often hear this - The interview was as if the company wanted me to build a spaceship, and now all the work I am doing is nowhere better than data entry.
Why do companies take such tough interviews during hiring and reject so many candidates when quite a lot of them are qualified to do the work they offer? Being on the other side of the table for quite sometime now, here is my point to view.

The World is full of boring/routine work - Vikas said that in his post Good Work Bad Work, and I couldn't agree more. Call it 80-20 rule, 90-10 or 99-1, challenging work is hard to come by.

Smart people take challenge in doing the boring work in a smart way - Regular people will do manual testing of their code, Smart ones would write automated testing code, Smart and experienced would know when to do manual testing and when to automate. Companies want smart people because they save their own time and teach the world to do boring stuff in a faster way.

Only smart people can solve difficult problems - So you have been doing all this boring work in your project. The project is deployed now. Suddenly the system has started failing consistently. Who is going to dig into the issue and solve it? The IT industry is different from most traditional industries in one fundamental way. Here, there are problems which average people cannot solve in their lifetimes but a smart one can solve in 10 mins. Smart people are troubleshooters. Companies need troubleshooters.

Apart from these, I believe that there is also another important reason related to human psychology. If the interview weren't tough, the candidate would feel it was too easy to enter the organization. During my job career, I took the toughness of the interview as an indication of what kind of peers I would have, and how good the company is in general. And the companies where I got in too easy were never the best places for me to work.

Some tips for a tough interview:
- Open ended questions are asked to judge your thinking. So Think, Think and Think out of the box. If you give a non-stupid answer that the interviewer has never heard before, thats a big bonus. Giving multiple solutions is also a good idea.
- Be prepared to write code on paper. Writing code really means psuedo code, don't worry about the syntax.
- Every interviewer has his own way of judging candidates, so don't panic. I used to ask only 2 questions to a candidate and never expected to get full and complete answer.

Which Payment Gateway to use in India?

Every internet startup, sooner or later, faces this question - How do I charge money from my customer online? And there comes the ultimate question of which internet payment gateway to use on your website. This is a tricky question particularly in the Indian context, as payment gateways available in India do not come cheap and can have issues with reliability as well.

We were also faced with this ultimate question for mustseeindia.com, and we did our research.

There are 2 types of players in this field, one is a 3rd party service like ccavenue, ebs etc which ties up with many banks, and other is the bank itself providing its own payment gateway (like ICICI payseal). Broadly they are different in the following ways:

• Both players accept all type of Mastercard and Visa credit cards. 3rd party players typically have more options than banks in terms of debit card acceptance, net banking options and other payments modes like cash card.
• Banks are for high volume players. They have lower TDR (the % money they keep per transaction) plans and relatively lower setup fees than 3rd party providers, but if you have low volumes, they would turn out to be expensive.
• 3rd party players have plans as cheap as Rs 5,000 setup fee, but the TDRs can go as high as 7%. They would never go below a TDR of 2.5% approx, which means that at higher volumes, you would need to switch to a bank to get a TDR below 2.5%
• Banks need lots and lots of paperwork, and integration time is usually more than 2 weeks. 3rd party players typically have lesser requirements.

Here is my individual assessment of the players I contacted:

• Paypal : I am starting with this as most people suggest it on internet. Biggest issue with paypal is that it doesn't support transactions in Indian Currency, and hence it adds a currency conversion fee on the credit card. Also, I feel that asking an indian consumer to pay in dollars would turn him away just because of the psychological impact.
• CCAvenue : The biggest 3rd party player in India. Offers variety of payment options which no other player come even close. Heard that it is quite reliable too. They are also the most expensive in the industry. They don't offer any custom plan other than the ones mentioned on their site, and they don't negotiate either (atleast with small players)
• EBS : Probably the second best player after ccavenue. The plans are cheaper compared to most payment gateways. They were very responsive when I dropped my phone no on their site and offered me multiple custom plans as well as some discounts. Somehow I didn't find too many existing clients for this.
• ICICI Payseal : They are probably the only bank who offer to small enterprises as well. If you are willing to spend in excess of Rs 25,000 in setup fees than you would get a better deal here than any 3rd party player. However, 2 issues to note specific to them: Technology reqt of java in integrating their gateway and issues with downtime. I personally noticed their gateway being down for several hours on irctc as well as pvrcinemas recently.
• Times of Money Direcpay : A relatively newer player in the market. One of its clients told me that they still face a few technical issues here and there. They responded pretty late when I dropped my contact no on their site and offered prices similar or higher than EBS.
• We tried contacting to Citibank(Billdesk) but they didn't respond. We didn't talk to HDFC at all as we didn't get good reviews for them.

The final two we shortlist out of these for us were EBS and ICICI. Of these, we decided to go to EBS, because:

• ICICI Payseal had technology dependency on Java. When discussed, they offered another gateway with no such limitation called Nix. But I couldn't find any documentation on that.
• I believe that EBS should be more reliable than ICICI in terms of higher speed and lower downtime.
• EBS offers more payment options than ICICI, though the difference is not that great for this to be the sole reason.
• With EBS, even the plans with low setup costs like their silver plan has reasonable TDR for a small business. Once our volumes are high, we can upgrade to a better plan.

Wedding, Honeymoon ... and back to Business

The long vacation is over. It actually got over some 12 days ago, but getting back to the business keeps you busy enough to stay away from blog.


Ankita is now an integral part of Goel Family. And I thank everyone who was there to witness it. You can find few selected pics of our wedding here.

Keeping in line with the message of mustseeindia.com, We went to Kashmir for our honeymoon. I would find some time later on to write a full post on how great a place it was and how much fun we had. For now, I'll just let the pictures do the talking.

Gulmarg

The remaining photos are here.

With all these sweet memories, now I am back to Bangalore. And as Ankita joins me here tomorrow, we look forward to starting a new life together. Thank you all who have always been there for us. Let the good times keep on rolling.

D-Day Tomorrow

Its almost time. Tomorrow is when me and Ankita would exchange vows to spend our rest of the lives together. And tomorrow is also the day when some 270 km away, my dear friend Vikas exchanges vows with Vinita to start their new life together.

Setting an example in extreme startup efficienby, the mustseeindia.com team has doubled its team within a span of 31 days ;-)

Here's the new team (with 2 potential hires ;-))


Wish both the couples luck as we start a new life tomorrow.

Two great startup articles

Vikas Rana, Founder and CEO mustseeindia.com, has written a great article about our experiences at running a startup, focussing on what we did right. Do check it out here.

Prateek Dayal, Founder muziboo.com, writes about costs involved in a startup.

Both are great articles if you are a budding entrepreneur. Recommended read.