What I am up to?
24 Mar 2009I feel like posting, what I have been doing, actually a lots of things on business side - hiring, finance, business-development, etc.
We are doing good in business, I believe, it's because of our diversified service offerings and our team of talented designers and developers, who are agile, quick and fast learner.
A great culture is an important thing, in fact, it's very important. That's why, we have been very focused on building the same in our office here. When I look back, I see we have achieved things but there is a long way to go.
We are not perfect, for that matter, no one is. The good thing, we are aware of our limitations and strengths, hence, we are constantly working on it. I hope, a constant effort would improve things day by day.
We are planning to have some more people in our team, so I have been interviewing developers from different parts of country. We acknowledge, it's hard to get smart guys stay in Kanpur or get developers from outside of city. But we think, if we share our vision and what we want to do and have been doing, a lot of developers do see things differently, then location becomes secondary thing.
BTW! Kanpur is not as great place to live as Bangalore, Pune, Mumbai, etc are. But it does have good things - less hectic life, earning/expenses ratio is higher here, etc.
According to Paul Graham's essay, bad-location is/could-be one of reasons for startups' failure. It is true, location does matter for many things (not just hiring), but we have chosen to be where we are now, and I think, we have figured out how to achieve things here, we are just getting better at it day by day. But yeah, we do miss things - events, barcamps, apple-store, crowd, talent, etc. Who knows, someday Kanpur would have all that and who knows, we might have played a good role in that process :-)
A lot of people have asked me, why I am not active lately in Adobe Flash Platform (i.e. Flash/Flex/AIR) stuff? Well, it's different phase of life, where I am focusing on other things that would enable us to do a lot of great things that include stuff for Adobe Flash Platform.
I am also busy doing a good project, which does have some challenging work (web dev + flash platform). Also busy doing some hacking once in a while, which is trying to use technology to improve my productivity - like home media/filer server, vpn at office, boxee, etc.
We are looking for some smart guys - interaction-designers, flash-platform-developer and web-developer. If you know someone, who doesn't not mind working from Kanpur, want to work on cool stuff, want to part of our team and help us achieving the visions/goals we have. Please let us know (abdul dot qabiz at gmail dot com). Thanks.