NextDrop

It’s funny, most people (and by people I mean media, investors, interested onlookers) just don’t know what to do with us.  Tech people say we are too social, social people say we are too tech.  What box do we fit in? What sort of company ARE we anyway? Are we a social enterprise? Are we a tech startup?  Are we trying to make money or trying to save the world? PLEASE TELL US YOU ISLAND OF MISFIT TOYS! That’s really what we are (and so fitting for Christmas)- the island of misfit toys.  I couldn’t tell you what box to check because honestly, those definitions keep changing every day, I can hardly keep up.  But at the end of the day, the classification all comes down to money.  How you get it and what you do with it.

All organizations around the world create value.  The more capitalistic leaning organizations try to capture that value monetarily.  For example, Google captured $17B of their value monetarily last quarter.  The American Red Cross captured $3B of theirs last year. Does that mean that Google provides 6x more value for the world than the Red Cross?  No- it just means they do a better job of monetarily capturing it.  That’s not good or bad, it just is.

Funding structures inform how a company operates.  If you need to pursue grants, you need to tell funders at least a year in advance exactly how you are going to spend the money to hit the milestones that they set.  Which is fine, if you know exactly how you are going to hit your goals a year from now. I would argue that if you are a fast moving tech company, you should never be able to predict exactly how you are going to spend that money to hit that goal a year from now, even 6 months from now.  If you can do that, I don’t think that company is moving fast enough in the agile framework.  Innovation isn’t happening at a rate that would make it competitive in the pure tech startup space.  So the reason the startup wouldn’t qualify for grant funding isn’t because it isn’t making the social impact it said it would (because it would actually do it in half the budget, half the time), but it just outgrew the plan it had in place a year ago for the way in which goals would be accomplished. In the grant world, line items matter. Not so much in the investment space- we give you money, make us more of it. Period.  Again, not bad or good- it just is.

So us.

We move fast and break things. I can’t tell you how we are going to be operating even 3 months from now, but I can tell you it’ll be radically different (and by different I mean better faster stronger) from today.  We put humanity on a more positive trajectory. We believe in good design.  We know what you, the user, wants before you even know you want it.  We will never offer a technology we don’t genuinely believe will help solve a problem you have.  Another thing- we don’t make up user problems.  (Personal pet peeve).  We believe that if you create tremendous value in the world, the money will follow.  And we plan to capture a significant portion of that monetarily (just to be clear).  We love creating, innovating, and pushing the boundaries of what is currently possible. We are those crazy people you sit next to on the bus/train/plane that are talking to themselves,head-phoned in, as they vigorously scribble chicken scratchy doodles into their beat up notebook (ok that may just be me).

But that’s where we are at right now.  The Island of Misfit Toys.  Otherwise known as Team NextDrop.  And I don’t think it’s going to get any clearer in the future.  We will continue to be those outcasts in this tech/social/whatever else is out there world. Which is fine by us.  Misfits are awesome.  Because I said so.

And hey, if you want to a part of this misfit island, we are always looking for people to join our tribe and hack with us.

Happy Holidays

I read Seth Godin’s definition of “tribe” a long time ago, but didn’t have anything to relate it to.  At that time, I remember wishing I had a tribe, something I felt so strongly about, something that I felt connected to.  I was sitting in San Francisco the other day, reading Eric Schmidt’s book on Google, when I realized that NextDrop had become my tribe.  I belonged to a set of like minded individuals who were intent on using startup frameworks to hack real world problems dealing with governments and citizens.  Most importantly, we are a group of people who believe that the why is just as important as the what and the how, and at the end of the day, company culture trumps all.

So my biggest challenge: How do I get a like minded group of individuals together to hack problems in this space, but more importantly, how do we create that environment for them to thrive? Those Smart Creatives?   And most importantly for the discussion, how do we do that in emerging markets across the world? How do we do that in India? Kenya? Indonesia? Given the education systems, and the parental structures, and the cultural barriers, how do we a) find those smart creatives and b) create a space for them to..have fun? Feel like they are doing things that actually matter? Feel like they are expanding their minds, (and very selfishly, expanding my own realm of possibilities) to move this tribe to really change the face of government and citizen interaction as we know it?

That seems to be top of mind for me right about now.  It’s a very interesting problem to have.  But I think if we can solve this problem and have NextDrop become the haven for smart creatives around the world, the rest will take care of itself.

Any inputs welcome.

This is what happens when I can’t think of a better title.  And when you realize that half the company wasn’t even a part of NextDrop when that was posted (which is completely crazy, let me tell you.)

 

Things are fun.  Crazy, awesome, fun.  It’s a great time to be working at NextDrop (and guess what, we’re hiring! And if you’re awesome and you don’t see a matching skillset, we’ll make a job for you anyway- yes, that’s how we roll). ANYway. I digress.  The point is, it’s been awesome times at NextDrop High.  I have to say, one of my proudest moments at NextDrop came last week, when we were presenting to the Chairman of the Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board (because, yes, we now meet with them on the regular!) and they saw their own data for the first time.  And they started to DO something about it!  In the meeting itself, making plans! YES! Making change! One government utility at a time! It was…incredible.  It was such a rush.  And the best part? They were asking us for MORE STUFF.  More data, more analytics, more predictive models.  When does that happen?  Apparently when you work at NextDrop.  And for the record, they’re a great group of people- they really want to make good things happen.  I love working with them.  Backing up, we actually signed an MOU with them in May to monitor their water supply, and it’s been a wild ride ever since.  If you live in Bangalore, you should be hearing about us soon.  We’re making a push to recruit residents (because actually, the utility itself is asking us to collect citizen feedback- so cool, right?) And if you just want to say hi, or want to re-imagine the Bangalore water supply network, let us know/drop us a line!

Another cool thing happened when I started talking to all the people that work at NextDrop.  I wanted to crowdsource a vision statement for NextDrop- why do we exist? Why does everyone want to work at NextDrop?  And it was crazy how similar the answers were.  And it was pretty enlightening too, because I didn’t think about it before.  But.  The main reasons people love NextDrop are that you basically have the freedom and learning/growth potential of a startup, but the incredible real world impact of a traditional non profit.  They basically said they loved it because it was the best of both the worlds.  The vision for NextDrop was not just an external one, but an internal one as well.  (Not your typical vision statement eh?) Learn something new every day right? Who am I to argue with organic sentiment?

But that made me so, SO happy.  When I quit my job and moved to India about 3 years ago (and wrote this first blog post) I don’t think I could have imagined, in my wildest dreams, what a great group of individuals NextDrop would comprise of.  And now, when we’re working as a unit, I still blows my mind thinking about what the sum of our differences can create. It creates magic.  Pure magic.

And it’s just beginning.  I still feel the same way I did 3 years ago.  Scared. Not sure if I’m doing the right thing.  But I do know one thing now that I didn’t think about then.  That we have an amazing team.  And we’re only going to get better.  We work hard, we make lots of mistakes, but we learn from them, and we get better for it.  We stick by each other in good times and bad, and we help each other out.  It’s such a rush.  I’m so honored to be a part of something great.

And I think that maybe, just maybe, we’re going to put a dent in the universe.

I can feel it.

I feel like that’s what all the good CEO’s do.  And who am I to argue with tradition?  Except the problem is that it’s pretty hard to truly capture what it was like at NextDrop in 2013.  Not gonna lie, it was a tough year.  But we survived.  The best way to describe it is to compare it to my first two years in undergrad.  I went to UC Berkeley and did my undergrad in engineering, where your first two years were filled with things called “weeder courses“.  These courses were literally designed to make you fail (or at least try it’s very best to).  To be fair, when I was the graduate student instructor for one of these weeder courses, I finally understood the point- the professors were only trying to create a normally distributed curve, and the test was written to challenge those that were at the top.  But that’s pretty much how I think of the last two years at NextDrop.  The weeder years.  But when you get to upper division courses, it’s still hard, but nowhere as difficult as the first two years.  I don’t really know why, because the material is more challenging, but maybe it’s just because…you’ve survived.  You know you can survive.  I think you’ve also developed the coping mechanisms for working in uncertainty, and stress (pretty much all the time).  You’ve developed the framework for success.  That’s how I feel about where NextDrop is.  I think we’ve paid our dues, and we’re leaving behind our weeder years.  We’re getting to the fun stuff now.

Anyway, I thought I should somehow try to describe what the weeder years at NextDrop felt like.  In December, Quijano asked the Exec team to write down month by month, what was happening at NextDrop in 2013.  This was what mine looked like:

Jan- Meeting Desh, realizing we need money
Feb- Start asking for money
March- Asking for money
April- Begging for money
May- Really frickin desperate for money
June- Please, I will sell my left kidney for money
July- WE GOT MONEY! Moving to Bangalore
August- Trying to get some more money in India
September- Now that we have money, lets use it!
October- Lot of Progress on the utility side
November- Learning more about our customers
December- Customer systems in place, valvemen systems in place, Bangalore office

This was Devin’s

Jan – Reservoir monitoring. Bangalore pilot. Fixing.
Feb – Celery (periodic tasks). Outbound calls. Incoming SMS. Fixing.
March – Missed call! Valveman report. Billing.
April – GeoDjango! Maps! Bhargav!
May – TESTING! YES!
June – South Migrations. Caching. Telephony handling!
July – Valve areas state changes. Pipe damages (leakage squad)!
August – Utility dashboards. Supply Durations.
September – Feedback loop.
October – Supply Schedules. Geocoder!
November – Predictive analytics. Modular Feedback 2.0.
December – DevOps. Backups. Water clock.

Personally, I like QJ’s the best (But he stopped in September- apparently life at NextDrop stopped after September for him)

jan – 424 emails!
delivery reports for how many messages were being delivered. believe it or not at one point we weren’t sending messages to landline numbers that didn’t have a 0 before their number
zero customers in areas
presentations for BWSSB
India Water Week submissions
customers who are deactivated but paid

feb – 550 emails!
fund raising – Unitas
emails about tech fixes
will poole teaches us about increasing returns
twitter india
devin forks the nd repository
mapping and sweeping
charging residents in bangalore
experimenting with PPP for company operating system
valveman reminder sms
using data to scheduling areas to bill
QJ aspires to be a hacker
sms receipts
deactivations because we’re sending incorrect messages
experiments with customers using advertising books to refer other customers
reservior level monitoring contract
forbes 30 under 30
creating dashboards to quantify good areas
integration of ODK collect

march – 414 emails!
fund raising – Khosla
accepted to speak at IWW 2013
meeting with Rutvik from Inventus capital on scaling sms products
experiments with kirana shops billing
experiment with advertising in movie theatres
mapping, mapping, mapping – billed all the areas where we launched customers correctly
no more excel for data collection
mannually transfering customers based on geotags
anjana sends out the last ‘customer’s launched email’, the thread had started on 17/9/2012, there were over 3296 customers acquired, and 50 messages on teh conversation and this was the end of the customer service team acquiring customers on hand bills
pronita commits to nextdrop
pitching to the BWSSB
GEODJANGO integration
MISSED CALL customer acquisition systems
april – 480 emails!
fundraising – IAN
reservior monitoring MVP
HD1 center billing partnership
city view map – pretty map
billing getting approvals from valvemen team
talking about websie updates
vagrant
realizing we have customers in unmapped areas!
We got a postcard from a customer saying everything should be in kanada
Bhargav joins!
Madhu shadows utility engineers
Devin starts watching pycon videos
experiments with price sensitivity in bangalore
Anu starts to learn python!

May
fundraising – Venture East
Our first interactions with GSMA
Srikanth and aadhar
time studies on HD1 centers and people paying there
Intro to the World Bank, India
working on Bangalore expansion
Testing the code

June
fundraising – Soc+Cap closed!
valve monitoring emails
experimenting with intern team in Bangalore
e xperimenting with value added service of collecting other bills
first interactions with KUIDFC
nextdrop advertisements on local hubli+dharwad channels
NUWA visit
AngelPrime
hubli interns big push for geotags
paid utility contract from Hubli

July
looking into feedback
progress in NE3
geotagging customer before launching them
bhargav begins developing utility product
Devin and Pronita meet in California
survey on water tanker prices MVP
looking at ez tap
fundraising – mumbai angels nextwrok
coverage report
valveman customer referrals
SalesForce foundation
franchisee opportunities
exit interviews with first set of bangalore interns

august
pronita arrives in India! starts to crack billing
training second set of bangalore interns
trouble shooting geotagging in bangalore
NextDrop GameClock gives us insight to our representative resources
overlapping polygons makes it difficult to recruit customers
missed call for leakages
second application with GSMA for grant
Hubli EE changes and wants to provide the service to the city
integration of supply schedules to our application
meet with some Mumbai angels
finish off geotaggin in Hubli+dharwad
switch over to ZenPayroll
backlog in bangalore customers
entire team meets with AngelPrime
manual send sms to customers
feedback loop mvp

september
Peter Thiel schools NextDrop with CS183
nextdrop_secrets
feedback mvp experiments

I think Pronita and Nishesh decided to do theirs in person when we had our meeting so I don’t have it, but I think you get the idea.

Also, I’d like to state, for the record, that just like my weeder years at UC Berkeley, I was probably a horrible person to be around.  I’m really surprised that I still have co-founders and a staff actually (i.e. they didn’t mutiny).  Being a boss is really hard, and I must admit that I did a very poor job last year, in general.  What with the stress and all.  It really hit me when one of my employees gave me feedback- he said hey Anu, it would really help if you just asked how we were doing when you got into the office.  Wow. WOW.  I didn’t realize it, but it had gotten so bad that I wasn’t even treating my own people like regular human beings,  I was so engrossed in my work.  (Thank you SO much Melwyn for bringing it to my attention, I hope I’m doing a better job this year!)  But I think that was my takeaway/learning from last year.  Sometimes, especially during your weeder years, you as a leader forget that you have an entire organization to take care of.  Not just externally, but internally as well.  And at the end of the day, organizations are human.  Very human.  And if you abstract that out, and treat your internal organization like a machine, bad things happen. (I know, that totally sounds like a no brainer, but let me tell you when you’re in the thick of stressful situations, its funny how many things you stop doing…)

So I’d like to apologize to my team and thank them for sticking with me through trying times.  Speaking of team, I should probably write out who works with us now in 2014!  But lets make it fun- this is how I see each of them

Quijano: He’s our Co- founder/COO.  He’s pretty awesome and in undergrad he used to help me with my engineering homework.  He was definitely one of the smartest people I knew at Berkeley, and that’s saying a LOT. The coolest thing about him was that I knew he could be making so much money at other jobs using his brains (read: financial sector), but he turned them down to learn about the water sector (as evidenced by turning down his Amex internship to work with the San Jose water utility).  I think that takes serious guts.  In undergrad I knew I wanted to start a business with him (in the very very unlikely possibility that I would be running a business…)

Nishesh: He’s our Co-Founder/VP of Product Develop.  Nishesh is probably one of the most solid guys I know, and he’s the guy anyone on the team goes to when they’re having issues.  I would even go so far to say he’s the rock at NextDrop.   But besides his internal rock-ness, he’s the go to guy for anything related to governments or utilities.  So all of that, “What, you’re working with governments and utilities?! Not possible!” We have Nishesh to thank for disproving all of that. (Sorry girls, he’s getting married next month :)

Pronita: She’s our Co-Founder/Chief Growth Officer.  Pronita is awesome because I truly admire the way she relates to people.  We used to do dance together in college (that’s how we met) but then we sort of became travel buddies, and then she was also the other person in college I knew (in the very very unlikely possibility that I would start a business) I wanted to work with her too.  She’s an absolute boss when it comes to anything relating to customers, or making NextDrop come alive.  Seriously, some of the stuff she comes up with, I’m just like..whoa.  Yeah- lets do THAT.  She brings the flesh to the NextDrop skeleton

Devin: He’s our Co-Founder/Software Engineer.  Devin is a friend of Quijano, and when we met, Quijano told me that he knew the next Bill Gates.  And then I met Devin. And I was sold.  And then in true startup style, he dropped out of college and started NextDrop with us.  Seriously, look out for this guy.  He’s 20 and he’s a powerhouse.  Devin comes up with stuff, and I just think, holy CRAP.  That’s awesome.  Why are you so smart?

Thej: He’s our Chief Technical Architect.  Thej sort of does a lot of amazing things, but mostly, he is just a really really cool guy.  Did you know you can find his name on the new Mozilla Monument in San Francisco? Yeah.  Enough said.  I love working with him, because every time I leave the conversation knowing so much more than I did before.  And that’s not just work related- about the world, politics, feminism, history, you name it, he knows about it.

Bindu: Bindu runs operations in Bangalore, but that’s really code for doing lots of important things at NextDrop.  She’s pretty much responsible for any progress we’ve made in Bangalore re: utility contracting stuff.  I also really admire her because when I hired her, she told me she doesn’t work weekends, and she holds to that rule because she wants to spend time with her daughter, and her family.  I was like…YES.  Because she gets it done during the week.  And I respect her for that. I’m trying to learn from her actually.

Bhargav: Bhargav develops with Devin and Thej and he’s just pretty awesome.  I know I say that a lot but it’s true.  His attention to detail is amazing.  It’s fun because he hides little details on our dashboards!  He was teaching me front end development stuff recently, and we had a great time going through the D3 documentation to pick out visualizations for our customer service team.  I got to see how he thought about design, and it was really really cool.  Loved pair programming with him- especially on front end stuff.  Keep on being amazing Bhargav!

Kavya: Kavya works on our customer service team, and I love the way she interacts with customers.  She has a way of gleaning information from them without even asking!  It’s the absolute best (I like seeing her customer service entries, she never asked this stuff, but she writes it in there! So Great!).  She also has great ideas on how to improve our customer experience, which I love hearing about!  I think she really has fun with customers, and I think customers really like that! Love having her here!

Madhu: Madhu works on valvemen stuff in Bangalore, but codes on the side (Yeah, I’ve seen your commits to the NextDrop code repository Madhu- go you!)  If you want things done on the valvemen side that you think are impossible, you ask Madhu.  It’s a lot of firefighting, and it’s a difficult job, but Madhu keeps it under control.  It’s great to have him on our team!

Aseem: Aseem also works on the valvemen side, but we hired him as an intern 2 years ago.  He worked at NextDrop through college, and now works here full time.  In a very Nishesh sort of way, he’s just a solid guy.  If I want something done, I have no doubt in my mind that Aseem will do it, and not only that, deliver amazing results.  It’s very rare to have people that you can forget about what you told them because you KNOW they’ll do it and they’ll do it on time- Aseem is one of those people.  Pretty much the best!

Fanus: Fanus works on the valvemen side and the thing that I remember about him was being amazed that he learned English just from watching movies! I was just floored.  You really wouldn’t be able to tell.  “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish”- Steve Jobs, I’d say that definitely applies to him.  Wonderful to have him on our team!

Melwyn: Melwyn works on the customer side and like Aseem, worked through college with NextDrop and now works with us full time.  It’s been a joy to see Melwyn grow-  the types of questions he asks now and the level of thought that he has now is leagues above where he was before.  He has so many great ideas- just yesterday he saw my bus ticket from London and he asked- hey Anu, why can’t we just do this in Hubli? See- McDonald’s advertises on the back, and these are the people who would use NextDrop- the public bus users! YES.  He asks the best questions, and gives me good feedback (he’s the one who had the courage to tell me hey Anu, this is how what you do makes me feel, do you think you could change that? So great).  Keep doing your thing Melwyn!

Anjana: Anjana works on the customer side, is pretty much the one who keeps us in check fiscally, and her story is interesting.  I was recruiting at a college where she was working as industry recruitment director, and at the end, I met the kids and I wasn’t really interested in hiring any of them.  She came in, and convinced me to have a coffee and talk to her about how they could improve their system.  By the end of the conversation, I knew that I wanted her to work for us! And..well, the rest is history :)  She is the enforcer who makes sure we abide by the rules and when we’re not, she definitely yells at all of us (and I mean ALL of us- I have not so happy WhattsApp messages from her as well).  Which is awesome.  Keep on keeping us in check Anjana!

Prabhu: Prabhu works on the customer side and his story is pretty interesting as well.  He started off as a part time rep that went door to door to recruit and bill for NextDrop.  I clearly remember that he would come to the office early to pick up phones, and come back late to deliver the phones back to the office. I was really impressed.  And one day, he took the time to get his ideas translated from Kannada to English, and sent us all an email on how we should run marketing campaigns in Hubli.  I was sold.  We hired him full time to work on the customer service team.  Keep on learning and making us get better Prabhu!

Amit: Amit is our newest team member, and he works on both the valvemen side and the customer side.  The thing I remember most is that he asks the most insightful questions.  That’s what got me at the interview too.  It felt like he was thinking 2 steps ahead and asked the right questions.  I hope you keep asking good questions Amit, I love it! (And make sure people are giving you good answers- especially me!)

Ok! Now you know the ENTIRE NextDrop family!  Feel free to drop us a line, or if you’d like to be adopted, I’m sure we could find a job for you too (especially if we think you are cool).

No seriously, that is really how we hire people.

Ok done plugging NextDrop careers.

What do we have planned for 2014?  Well, for one thing, we’re going to try and keep things updated more regularly here on this blog.  But in short, I’m excited because I think this is really where we get to do the cool stuff.  The fun stuff.  The big stuff.  The opportunities are in front of us, now it’s up to us to work our butts off to make it happen.  I think that’s the best possible position to be in.

#GameFace

 

Recently, NextDrop went through the transition phase that every startup/social enterprise that is working with State run entities goes through. Transfer or changing of utility/government officials. All the rapport and trust you built over the past 2 years winked out in a flutter. As it so happens, while I knew this was inevitable eventually, this change of guard in Hubli caught me completely blindsighted. Here I was; happily preparing for my trip to the US, ready to recount to anyone who would listen, that working with government entities in India isn’t fraught with delays, glacial pace and reams of paperwork; content in the knowledge that I had readied everything for my absence for the next three weeks. All the while, though, something was pecking at my brain, telling me I had forgotten something. Something major. And this ‘major’ unleashed itself on me the day before my departure. The new Hubli Water Board Executive Engineer had taken charge and had summoned me to his office.

What ensued was precisely how one should not begin a partnership with the new administator of the state utility. Therefore I decided that the world must learn from my mistakes. Here are the most crucial things to consider when a new administrator assumes charge of government entity you are working with:

1) Prepare during the transition phase – My cardinal sin was to not prepare for the new arrival during the transition phase. Once you find out that your current counterpart is about to leave, there are two things one must do. First, find out what the priorities of the incoming engineer/manager are. Second, ask your current counterpart to introduce your service/work to the newcomer. A bonus would be if they introduce you as well but that is expendable as long as your services are given a proper foreword.

2) Paperwork, paperwork, paperwork – In India, you cannot easily find an exhaustive list of all the documents, permission and letters you need to have before you have an ironclad blessing to operate, especially if you’re working with the municipality or a state run utility. As a result, the paperwork we had, while sufficient for the previous administrator, was found grossly lacking  by the new incumbent.
In my experience, it is best to check with utility staff in charge of budgeting and finances what additional paperwork you need to establish your legitimate right to work with them beyond question. If ever in doubt, best is to preempt and get that paperwork in advance. If you think no one is going to ask for it, trust me, that will be the first document they’ll demand.

3) Be the host, not a supplicant – If you have received a good foreword and favorable reviews from citizens and users of your service, then you are well set for a productive first meeting. However, you should make first contact. What I should have done is to call on the new engineer and ask for a meeting. Even if he did not acknowledge it right away, I would have marked my presence in the register. When he finally gives you an appointment, invite him to see your office and learn about the work you have been doing successfully for the past x number of years. This is especially significant if you are doing anything related to technology.
Most administrators view technology as a daunting opportunity. While it sounds oxymoronic – it is anything but. Even the most ‘luddite’ utility managers see technology as the great emancipator. A pill to kill all ills. However, they may be extremely wary of it since it obscures their operations within a black box with a fancy looking User Interface. The closer they are to on the ground operations, the more wary they are. As a result, being transparent about how your technology does what it does in layman’s tongue, will go a long way in increasing their comfort level both with you and your services.

4) Get educated – first hand – By educated, I mean internalize his vision, priorities and motivations for the office. During your initial discussions, try and gauge if there is a fit between your services and his goals and mandate. That will define your focus area and further opportunities to support his targets. You can be the instrument for his and ultimately the utility’s improved performance.

5) Establish your credibility – At the beginning, any administrator will have a lot of questions about your company. What are your motivations behind doing this work, where is the funding coming from and most importantly how much money you are making. These are especially pertinent for startups/social enterprises. His skepticism is completely understandable. In countries like India, there are throngs of peddling salesmen trying to sell junk to the government. So the administrator’s first instinct is honed to be extremely skeptical. In order to establish your credibility, you must be willing to answer his questions honestly. Some of these might be beyond the boundaries of standard due diligence but that is the price of his trust. For example, I had to pretty much lay out my balance sheet and details of my marginal costs in front of him. The rewards, however, for such transparency are also commensurate. Once you have his trust, he’ll start to incorporate you in his vision. And that is the place you want to be!

I bet everyone is just really excited that it’s not just me posting on this thing (finally!) right?  Yeah, our team is pretty awesome, and have really amazing insights that I thought should be shared with the world at large (or at least internet-dom for starters). I thought it was time for a post from me though, mostly because I was getting a bit nostalgic since it’s been a little over two years since I officially became CEO of NextDrop.

Good News: Company has not been run into the ground yet.

I digress though.  What did I want to talk about today?  I wanted to talk about company culture, because I think it’s probably one of the most important factors for startup success.  Why do I think this?  Greatest influences on my business life thus far: books like Good to Great, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose, and learnings/slideshares/conversations with people who have actually done stuff that I want to do, like Chamath Palihapitiya and Fred Destin.

How have they influenced NextDrop?  In a few ways.

Everyone Learns Python.  Yeah, Even You, Civil Engineer

I remember around January, Quijano approached me and Nishesh after a team meeting and basically said that we would suck as a company if we all didn’t learn Python. (Ok maybe not his actual word choice, but that was my takeaway).  Of course Nishesh and I were terrified because…well..IT’S PROGRAMMING.  I am a CIVIL ENGINEER.  That was WHY I chose civil engineering, and not..Computer Science or something.  Same with Nishesh- Water Engineer and POLICY.   Totally not what we signed up for.  We tried to push back, but Quijano was adamant.  Luckily we both secretly (but not so secretly) sort of think Quijano is a genius, so we decided to just go with it and…learn Python.  Best decision EVER.  Why?  Think about what we’re actually doing at NextDrop.  We’re using simple technology to solve complex social problems.   The hardest part is understanding what problems need to be solved, and how we can solve them.  But the other really important part is knowing what technological solutions are available in your arsenal to solve these problems.  Without an intimate understanding of your system, there is no way you can accomplish this.  Also, it saves a TON of money on development, because in this early stage, most of what is going to hold you back is programming.  So if you have all key people focusing on the biggest barrier to moving forward, then you make the most progress.  I know I know, you’ll probably argue that everyone should be focused on what they do best. Sure, in an ideal world yes.  But in that ideal world, we would also have all the technology we want developed in an instant and we would have all the data we need at our fingertips.  Without data, we have nothing.  Plain and simple.  And speaking from experience, let me tell you this is what makes or breaks you as a company.

Again, I would encourage everyone to adopt this policy.  I’m currently working on a program that more accurately breaks down/visualizes our valvemen data so that we can make more informed decisions around our valvemen incentive program.  Really stoked about it actually!

Hire People You’d Want To Hang Out With

It’s pretty simple actually.  You’re going to spend most of your waking hours with these people.  If you wouldn’t even want to be friends with them, chances are, you wouldn’t want to work with them. No matter what their resume says.  This goes even beyond work though.  I think it also self selects for people who believe in your vision and mission.  Chances are you hang out with like minded people.  At least for me, I hang out with all sorts of people, from different walks of life.  But the thing they all have in common, is that they think what I do at NextDrop is pretty neat.  They get it.  They may not want to do it themselves, but they get the vision.  The most important thing I can do is make sure I populate NextDrop with people who jive with the vision, and are working at NextDrop to build a new reality- one that doesn’t exist today.  And have a really good time along the way of course.  As long as that is your motivation, I’ll probably want to hang out with you and we can hire you at NextDrop.

Fail Fast, Fail Often, Learn As Much As Possible

The Hacker mentality and the Lean Startup.  Let me tell you, another thing that really influenced my personal life greatly, and all of us at NextDrop, was the essay, How To Be A Hacker along with Eric Reis’s book, The Lean Startup.  In short, the life of your company is determined by the number of experiments you run, and the number of learnings you can acquire within the lifetime (i.e. burn rate) of your startup.  You’re probably going to be wrong, so just be nimble, and as soon as you know you are incorrect, pivot.  Putting ego aside, just look at the facts and do what needs to be done to achieve our goals.  Pivot or persevere.  It doesn’t matter, as long as we know we are headed in the right direction.

Those are the 3 major takeaways regarding culture I wanted to share/learned along the way.  Personally, it’s been an incredible journey, and in addition to just being really thankful that I get to work on solving really interesting problems, with the smartest people I know, I’d have to say I’m a pretty lucky person.

I also wanted to say thank you to everyone out there, reading this post.  It’s been two years, and with all of your support, we’re still alive and kicking.  We wouldn’t be where we are without you, and I wanted to make sure everyone knows how much we appreciate it all.

So thanks, from all of us here at NextDrop.