Earlier this week our office gizmo factor skyrocketed with Allwin bringing in…

1. A 32-inch LCD TV
2. An XBOX 360
… and hold your breath…
3. A Nintendo Wii !

Yes, we are probably one of the very few owners of a Wii in India. Take a two minute pause to feel extremely jealous.

The gadgets are bringing in major lifestyle changes within the office. Everyone is already at being a gizmo-guitar player with Guitar Hero III, not to mention the Grand Theft Auto and Fight Night and FIFA 07 Soccer face-offs.

On a serious note, each of these games are absolute User Interaction and Usability wonders. Until now, our design and tech guys had only read about the revolutionary changes that Wii had brought in. But now using the Wii everyday itself is a great source of insights into how small and simple ideas change the ease of operation of devices that otherwise could easily be made complex nightmares.

That’s Soumik on the right trying to jam to Cream’s ‘Sunshine of your Love’.

Which reminds me - not sure what we’re doing, or is it just plain coincidence: almost every second person to join PaGaLGuY is a sufficiently skilled guitar player. No, none of them have the long hair or are the rock star types. But in a very counterintuitive way, you give them the guitar and they can pull some serious string!

Naukri.com (Infoedge) CEO Sanjeev Bikhchandani at the PaGaLGuY HeadQuarters!

Now it’s not quite normal behavior for us to show up at office as early as 9 am, unless the reasons are as compelling as an opportunity to meet the man behind one of India’s biggest dotcom success stories - Sanjeev Bikhchandani, Founder and CEO of Naukri.com.

Staying not very far from PGHQ, Mr Bikhchandani dropped in at the PG insane workplace today morning and had a casual chat with the team on all things Internet and business. Some interesting excerpts from the conversation…

On the importance of listening to the client - “At Naukri, everyone including the CEO and CFO make sales calls. It might be an expensive call, but when you talk to the client, they give you insights. That feedback helps greatly in improving our products.”

On Sandeep’s question about site usability and design - “We realised the value of UI (User interfaces) only two years back and since then we’ve recruited an independent UI team with a well-experienced Head. It’s important to have such a team with a Head who gives firm push-back on right and wrong usability.”

On opportunity prospecting - “We always like to follow the money while building businesses. We prefer businesses where the source of revenue is other businesses, like in the case of Naukri, 99acres and Shiksha. Getting individuals to pay is very tough.”

“Google AdSense revenue is like low-hanging fruits from a tree and one should try to catch it by improving focused search, location and time based advertising.”

It was great listening to snippets of the success story that is Naukri.com straight from the horse’s mouth! Above all, it was an honor having Mr Bikhchandani visit PGHQ.

Prof Ganesh Prabhu, Professor of Corporate Strategy & Policy at IIM Bangalore along with Parul Bajaj are finalizing the case study that examines the growth, marketing and product development strategies of Pagalguy for teaching at IIM Bangalore in the future.

It is an honor to be considered case study material and a big thank you to Prof Prabhu and Parul! And this could not have been complete without the enthusiasm of our moderators from Bangalore Prem Kumar and Rajat Saxena, who went out of their way in person to meticulously explain the PaGaLGuY community functioning to the case authors.

Copyright matters permitting, we maybe able to share the case study here in public domain soon!

In order of oldest to newest:

Where is the Money, Honey?

Humans as a resource?

Spreading Insanity over Konkan

Openings at PaGaLGuY - (Highest commented post)

Mom, I wanna be a pilot!

Peek-a-boo - the PG HQ

Some HQ Updates:
We have been growing up at a fast clip and are looking to move over to a new office. We intend to more than double our team in size and are now looking to hire for regional positions as well. If you are interested in any, just send us an email at jobs@pagalguy.com with your resume and a cover letter.

1) Spend only 4 days (Mon-Thu) per week on developing products for PaGaLGuY.

2) Friday is a working day but you can spend the entire day on anyone of your side-projects (open source projects or your own product idea or anything).

3) If your side-project needs some resources like hosting etc or incase you want to turn it into a proper product we are glad to help you out with some much needed resources.

4) If you want to host some events like Devcamp etc or just invite some hackers to code and discuss your side-projects on sundays, we shall offer our office for such purposes and mostly sponsor pizza or something for food.

Honestly we are inspired by Google’s “work 20% of the time on your own project” principle. But we didn’t stop at that. we took few more steps to create an ecosystem around side-projects.  we aren’t blindly following someone either, we did this because we truly believe in the importance of one’s own side projects.

Consider this, most of the hackers are those whose side projects ended up shaking the software world. Like David Heinemier Hanssen of Ruby on Rails fame, Linus Torvalds of Linux fame and many more. One cannot deny the importance of their side-projects and the importance these hackers give to their side-projects in becoming who they are now.

To quote Chris of github fame ” You should always have a side project. Side projects give you an outlet, provide a useful distraction, let you explore new ideas, learn new concepts, and generally give you the freedom to be unaccountable. You don’t have to worry about your boss, or your coworkers, or the damn commentators on Reddit. Just have some fun. Treat yourself.”

“Work on your small project for a few Sundays, declare it complete then move on. Learn another language, or write something else in your new language. Pick up a new web framework or work on flashy effect number two. Add concurrent task execution to your Rake. The more acclimated you get to this process, the more creative your ideas will be. It’s the whole 10% inspiration 90% perspiration thing, and it worked for me. My plea to you today is to start a side project. Scratch your own itch. Be creative. Share something with the world, or keep it to yourself.”

We believe in becoming a place where you can work with the very best on the very best problems. We are now thinking about how this would work across content, graphics, marketers and others. To be innovative is to be leading from the front and this is just one the many more ways we intend to build a rockstar workplace.

The rest of the office has PC based laptops - but then PC users are not as fanatical as our Mac users and the mac fans are now hell bent on convincing more users to shift over to the mac.  I have been holding out with my poor age old Dell laptop, but if the mac gang at the HQ takes over, all hardware would soon become apple compliant.

Oh btw, I was thinking of giving up my laptop - I don’t seem to have too many uses for it anymore.  Most of the office processing has gone online - we use google apps, salesforce, unfuddle and a host of other softwares all of which keep our data out there and accessible from everywhere.  High amounts of processing power is required by developers & graphic designers and the rest of the gang can just cruise on a thin client. That should slash our hardware & maintenance costs and provide us more uptime.

But then, I am trying to be logical et al. Something that doesn’t go too well with the apple fans at work

1) We first chat with people to understand them, their achievements, their goals and make a call on whether PG might be a good fit.  This is not a perfect science, but we are adamant that we will not hire people into the team unless we are very sure they can be a good fit.

Now the term ‘good fit’ means different things for different people - at PG, it tends to mean people who are innovative, not willing to back out from a problem, capable, interesting and willing to learn.

2) Once we have an idea and are comfortable with that, we bring them into the office and have interviews scheduled with them.  Interviews can happen in a day or over a week or in certain cases over a month. A lot of people are involved in interviewing and we need to be sure that we all want to hire someone.

3) We ask people to work with us for a week. This allows people to see the workplace, us, our culture and decision making systems up close. I believe if someone is going to work for us, then they should take the time and effort to understand why we are the way we are and the reverse is true as well. We want to know people in the workplace and also informally outside.

4) At the end of the week, we take a combined decision on go/no go and if all goes well, a new member is added to the HQ.

At all points of time we make it sure to people we hire that they can call it quits at any point of the process. This is important because people can make decisions at every point of their interaction with us and can realize that we are not a good fit for them.

Oh & coming back to deepu’s friend. At the first interview we asked him what he would like to be doing for a week at the HQ.  With some coaxing, he took up the challenge of cloning facebook.com.  At the end of the week, he did it. We asked him if he would like to join us. He did.  If someone asked me what I liked about him - I’d say - he thought big, he didn’t back away from the problem and hell yeah he proved he was capable.

Oh, and he has been the state champ for playing counterstrike. I guess that now we will have to wire up our systems to play some CS to keep him occupied.

1) I make sure I have atleast 30 minutes to talk to someone

2) I usually know their resume by rote because hey, something interested me and so I called them up for talking further

3) I am always on time for these interviews because I wouldn’t like to waste anyone’s time.

4) While interviewing I generally give people a fair idea as to what to expect, the general time frames and I follow up personally taking questions and helping people understand what we do.

While I am generally prepared, I find that people who show up are generally unprepared. I think in this month - of 20 people I interviewed, only 2 had checked out our site. I wonder what they came in for discussing with me. Did they want to check out the office? perks? me get down on my knees and begging them to join? Irrespective of that I do spend 30 mins to an hour with everyone who comes over to meet us. I do it for a couple of reasons - firstly I absolutely want to be sure that the person is the right one/wrong one and secondly you need to be fair. Someone came up and took time off their schedule to meet up with you and it would be terribly unfair if this was not reciprocated.

But then, what do I do with the rest of the people who don’t show up - err well, I am creating a monster black list.  The list of people we should never hire I have a feeling I will fill it up with a few hundred million entries before I give up.

The Taj, Apollo Bunder, Mumbai

It has been more than 6 months since i came to Mumbai for the first time, without knowing anyone except 1 or 2 friends who themselves came to the city few months back. So i am penning down my tryst with Mumbai after coming to the city without any idea of how to survive at a place touted to be one of the toughest places to live. Before leaving to the city i was told the usual horrendous things people associate with Mumbai. “It is ridiculously expensive” , “the city is full of violence” , “the infrastructure there is crumbling” , “the city is full of people who make a living by cheating others”. While few are true to an extent a couple of problems are exaggerated out of proportion.

The first thing that anyone looks for is a place to live. Before coming here i didn’t make any arrangements. I don’t think it is even possible to arrange for a place to live before coming here unless you are planning to stay with your relatives. Just plan to stay with any of your friends or would be colleagues for couple of weeks. Having been through the hassle of finding a house, almost anyone in Mumbai(for example would be colleagues who you are not friends with yet) will let you stay in their house till you find one for your self. I lived with a good friend of mine for almost a month before i found a flat for myself. Else one more way is to find a PG. They usually doesn’t cost more than 5k a month and don’t ask sky-high deposits. My colleague Ganga who joined us 2 months back took this route and right now we both are flat-mates.    So once you come here let everyone of your colleagues and flat-mates and friends know that you looking for a flat. Usually the demand is very high and before long you will be one of the 3-4 guys who are looking to rent a new flat. Don’t even think about renting a whole flat for yourself unless you are born with a silver spoon. A very important decision to make is where to live with mumbai having a lot of suburbs well connected to each other by the local trains(more on these later). Your choice of a suburb also determines your cost of living and how much you need to travel to work. I lived in Colaba (very expensive locality) for few months and later moved on to Andheri(also expensive but less so when compared to Colaba) when i realized i cannot afford the luxury of living in Colaba for long. But now i travel about 40 mins to my work while in Colaba i was just 5 minutes away from office. so make your trade-offs before deciding on where to find a flat. And that’s it really. After that you will call a bunch of real-estate brokers in that area, they will show you the houses, all your would-be flat mates zero-in on one house and before long you will have finally settled down in mumbai . A couple of caveats though. Housing in Mumbai is ridiculously expensive when compared to other places. we currently pay around 25k per month for a fully furnished 2BHK which amounts to 5k per person. My parents live in a similar size flat in Hyderabad and pay 7k per month. Also be ready to pay hefty deposit to the tune of at least 5 times your monthly rent.  Again there are quiet a few places where rents are much much cheaper. For example in Navi Mumbai you can get a 2BHk for around 10k but then had i been there my travel to office would have been much longer. Ok now it seems like you got a decent overview of how to find a place to live in mumbai. You see it is not as fearful as people outside mumbai fear it is.

Once you have settled down the next important thing is travel. Mumbai traffic is same as, if not worse than, Bangalore traffic. Normally one won’t prefer road travel unless it is within the same suburb. Else people use the local trains which is very inexpensive and has very good connectivity between most of the suburbs. For example Andheri to CST is a 40 minute ride in the local train(around 1.5hrs on road) and a monthly ticket for unlimited travel between the stations cost just 125 bucks. However a lot of people use the local trains and more often than not you won’t get a seat. In my case for the first few days i found the travel very exciting. Then for the next few weeks i found it really hard to travel every day standing and putting up with so much rush at peak time. With the help of my colleagues i got to know about a small book which gives all the details of which train starts from which station and when. Now i catch the 9.45 daily train from Andheri to CST. Since it starts from Andheri i always manage to get a seat. See ? Once you get used to it in the first few weeks traveling in mumbai is quick and inexpensive.

With flat and travel taken care of, the next comes the most exciting aspect of living in Mumbai. Coming to food first Mumbai is know for its restaurants. Be it South-Indian, Gujarati, Kashmiri , be it Italian, French, Iranian, Israeli, from the ubiquitous vada-pav to some very special dishes like berry pulav you will find all sorts of restaurants in Mumbai. I may be a bit biased as i really love having variety of food but it is sheer thrill to be able to taste a different variety of food every week-end and it is a luxury only very few cities like Mumbai can provide. Next, places to hang out. Mumbai being a port city has numerous beaches which turn out to be favorite hang out places. My favorite one is marine drive which is just 10 min drive from the office. So apart from restaurants, beaches and movies the best hang out places are undoubtedly the pubs which are the lifeline of night-life. Experiencing the night-life in pubs is something which i cannot put in words. One has to experience it oneself. Mumbai is not short of artists either. whatever form of art you appreciate painting, music, theater whatever there are numerous plays, art galleries, live music shows happening at several places in the city mostly on weekends. At weekends if you want to go out of city you have so many beaches and places to trek around Mumbai. A lot of people go out every weekend.

As i gave you an account of what i discovered in my few months in Mumbai, you must have realized all the warnings i was given before coming here were about surviving in Mumbai. None told me actually about living in Mumbai. Surviving in mumbai is easy. There are standard procedures which you need to follow as i told in the first 2 paragraphs. My estimate is one can easily sustain here with 15k per month. But then what many people outside Mumbai don’t know about is that mumbai is full of life more so than any city i know of in india. I wrote about few of them in the above para. I know of many people who don’t earn more than 25k per month but still manage to wallow in the liveliness of Mumbai. of course whatever costs i have quoted here is from my brief experience and i am neither married nor do have a girl friend.

Daljeet trying to ‘think different’ with the new Coffee Machine!!

Jamming sessions before we left for AIPGM 2008 meet at Bangalore.

Wide Angle shot of the HQ on a Saturday.

Going away present (wah kya kareegari hai!) given by ultra_lord, whom we miss badly! Sonam, MICA se return maar …