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Presentation made at Pluggd.in Hackathon in Bangalore (Nov, 2011)
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The MobStac Story“From Hacker to Founder”
Ravi Pratap @ravipratap#PiHackathon - Nov 5, 2011
says “India’s hottest young startup!”
About Me
• Open source hacker
• GNOME, Mono, libcurl
• Startup guy
• Early employee, Hillcrest Labs, Washington, D.C.
• Co-founder & CTO, MobStac
1999-2001: Open Source Roots
Fascinated by impact of open source on the world
Learnt how to translate idea into product
GUADEC 2001, Copenhagen
2002-2003: CS Graduate School
Dove deep into Computer Science
Strove to become the best at my chosen trade
St. Louis Arch
2004-2005: Morgan Stanley
Programming, sure, but what about impact?
Learnt about what I did not want to do
Radio City Hall, New York
2005-2008: Hillcrest Labs
Learnt the ropes of everything
Product, people, project management, you name it
Seize initiative!
Hillcrest Labs office, Rockville, MD
MobStac: Early Years
Late 2008: Planning the startup
Mid 2009: Moving to Bangalore
Single-bedroom office, 2 employees
11 employees, MobStac office, US corp.
Chased enterprise publishers like Hindustan Times, Hindu, etc. - ZILCH, NADA, NOTHING
Decided that what really mattered is “adoption”
Stuck to our core vision - turned down lots of services opportunities
Experimented a ton: mobile ad server, vernacular rendering, etc.
Jan-June 2010
Oct 2010: Web Launch
Woah, what just happened!
Iterate, iterate, iterate !"
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Traction Led to Rapid Iteration
Product improved leaps and bounds
Learned about real customer needs and opportunities
Improved technology under the hood relentlessly
Moving Faster
Stopped being scared of running out of money
Continued to run experiments
“Made more mistakes”
August 2011: Touchsite Experiment
Tablets are game changers
Figured the user experience could be vastly different from a PC site
Launched at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2011
Things That Have Stayed With Me
Dream big: know where you want to go
Build networks: people are important
Always strive for perfection: don’t ever stop learning!