Anoop John

"If you think you can make it out on your own you should at least give it a shot.", "If you think you can, You should", "It is your life, you live only once" - These are some of the sentences that would summarize my opinion about entrepreneurship. I am an entrepreneur and am enjoying every second of being one. I know how difficult it has been to be in a system that does not, in any way, promote entrepreneurial spirit and does what ever it can to stifle the spirit. I have survived this long and I know I shall prevail. Because of what I have faced I have made it a point to do whatever I can to help get other entrepreneurs going.

I have always wanted to run a business where I get a chance to interact with people and it is one of the reasons why I started the PC Sales and Services division of Zyxware. It is very interesting to watch human behavior and very challenging to interact with people through a commercial transaction. I see different kinds of people and different kinds of behaviors. Yesterday I came across a gentleman who was working in a government organization and who wanted me to help him bend a rule to get some extra cash.

I am a confessed and professed night bird. I sit late and I am comfortable doing it. People have been warning me of the possible health risks I might run into as I grow older. However I seem to not be able to help it. Take for an example today.

One of the most important things that a professional education gives a person is the network of alumni. Surprisingly this is one of the least utilized aspects of most professional courses in India. I am an alumni of the College of Engineering Trivandrum or more fondly known as CET (Cee Eee Tee). As with other alumni associations of other professional colleges, except perhaps the IITs and the elite management schools, CET Alumni Association too has not really fulfilled its true potential.

My pricing strategy at Zyxware is to price products as cheap as possible with the hope of building volumes and of building market penetration. We offer one of the cheapest prices for laptops in India and as a result we get queries from all over India. Additionally I don't believe in gimmicks like marking up the prices and giving discounts or giving free gifts as I feel that they amount to deception. In spite of all this people still surprise me with their mindsets about seller behaviors.

Recently we had tried out Mandriva (at Zyxware), one of the many GNU/Linux distributions out there in the market. Like Redhat, Mandriva is also promoted by a company. However the userbase had been primarily European and the acceptance by the Indian community has been meager. I was shocked to see that there was no option 'India' in the list of countries in the Mandriva Live CD.

I woke up early on saturday to go pick up my sister and her husband who were dropping by for two days. It had been some time since I had spent any time with her. I had been to bangalore and visited her place a couple of months back but then I barely stayed home as I had to visit my friends there. This was an opportunity to compensate for that and I think I did that well.

I have been stretched to my physical limits with very long days for the past few days before this 1st. However it has been more than compensated by a series of unproductive days since then. Not that I am unhappy about it :). I needed the break and this has helped me recharge my batteries.

Yet another busy day comes to an end. I spent my morning as a driver as there was a dearth of staff with driving abilities. I came back to office around noon after the morning errands. The whole of afternoon, internet was down and I spent time with the software team. In between when internet connection was live I spent time trying to figure out how to set up raaga.com on Ubuntu 8.04. I had set it up for one of my customers a few days back. I was able to set it up on my laptop today. Now I got to get around to writing an article on this and post it on Zyxware.com.

I woke up early today (relatively) to pick up Anivar Aravind from the railway station. I got there in time and picked up Anivar and took him home. We had breakfast and then sat down to get the press release to the media ready. By 12:15 we were not done and I had to go to P. A. Aziz College of Engineering to see if we could hold a meeting there this friday. I went with Prasad to the college while Anivar and Ashik, who had dropped by, worked on the Press release.