Democracy For Nepal: Larry Ellison

Showing posts with label Larry Ellison. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 22, 2014

Diwali Party: My Prepared Remarks

सर्वप्रथम त सबै जनालाई तिहार को दिपावली को मंगलमय शुभकामना
डिल्ली भट्ट, अन्जन श्रेष्ठ र म परमेन्द्र भगत को तर्फ बाट
घर घरमा लक्ष्मीको वास होस्, आफ्नो घर देश छोडेर डलर को खेती गर्न निस्केका हामी सबैलाई आ आफ्नो लक्ष्य प्राप्त होस्

एक हप्ता अगाडी एका विहान हामी तीन जना डिल्ली भट्ट, अन्जन श्रेष्ठ र म अन्जनजीको गाडीमा चढेर शनिवार Rockaway Beach पुग्यौं, sunrise अथवा सुर्योदय हेर्नाले शक्ति प्राप्त हुन्छ भन्ने कुरा वेदमा भनिएको छ भनेर अन्जन जीले भन्नुभो। मलाई त हो जस्तो लाग्यो। मुड फ्रेश।

मेरो सांस्कृतिक पृष्ठभूमि मिथिला हो। मिथिलामा हिन्दुले पनि मुस्लिमले पनि छठ मनाउछन्। छठमा सुर्यास्त को र सुर्योदय को पुजा हुने हो। दिवाली को छैंठौं दिन छठ हो। सबैलाई छठको पनि शुभकामना।

यो दिवाली पार्टीको एउटा theme छ। त्यो theme हो नेपालमा आर्थिक क्रान्ति का लागि न्यु यर्क को नेपाली समुदाय को रोल, न्यु यर्क को नेपाली समुदायको आर्थिक क्रान्ति का लागि High Tech Entrepreneurship को रोल। त्यो High Tech Entrepreneurship मा न्यु यर्क नेपाली समुदाय का आम नेपालीले खेल्न सक्ने रोल।

नेपालमा आर्थिक क्रान्ति भनेको के? मेरो परिभाषामा नेपालमा आर्थिक क्रान्ति भनेको double digit growth rates year in year out for 30 years हो। यानि कि नेपालको अर्थतन्त्र वार्षिक १०% अथवा त्योभन्दा बढी का दरले वृद्धि हुनुपर्यो ३० वर्षकालागि। आगामी ३० वर्ष त्यति गर्न सक्ने प्रधान मन्त्री पास, नत्र भने फेल।

त्यसमा न्यु यर्क का नेपालीको मात्र होइन, सारा प्रवासी नेपालीको ठुलो र निर्णायक रोल छ। त्यो भनेको एक पटकको नेपाली, सधैंको नेपाली नै हो। राजनीतिक अधिकार बिनाको नागरिकता पनि नागरिकता हुन्छ कहीं! राजनीतिक अधिकार बिनाको नागरिकता त पन्चायती नागरिकता हो। प्रवासी नेपालीलाई पुर्ण नागरिकता नदिने हो भने नेपालको आर्थिक क्रान्ति disturb हुन्छ। द्वैध नागरिकता (dual citizenship) भनेको brain gain गर्ने सर्वोत्तम तरिका हो।

दुनियाको राजधानी न्यु यर्क। प्रवासमा न्यु यर्क को special स्थान छ। न्यु यर्क का नेपाली न तात्तिदा सम्म काठमानडुमा NRN movement लाई seriously लिइएन। तर न्यु यर्क का नेपाली ले आफुले आफुलाई नचिनेको अवस्था पनि छ। हनुमान नजागेको अवस्था छ। मस्को मा ३० जना नेपाली millionaire छन् भन्ने सुन्छु। न्यु यर्क मा त्यसो भए कमसेकम ५० जना नेपाली millionaire हुनुपर्ने। किन छैनन्? हामीले सोध्नुपर्ने प्रश्न हो यो।

High Tech Entrepreneurship को कुरा यस्तो छ। Receptionist को काम जहाँ पनि उस्तै उस्तै हो। तर Google मा स्थापना काल देखि काम गर्ने receptionist जब Google IPO भयो, त्यो receptionist रातारात millionaire भयो। सबै कम्पनी Google र Facebook होइनन। ती category A कम्पनी भए। तर category B कम्पनी पनि हुन्छन। बिलियन डलर सम्मको मार्केट value सम्म पुग्ने। Category C कम्पनी हुन्छन, 100 मिलियन मार्केट value सम्म पुग्ने। Category D कम्पनी हुन्छन, 10 मिलियन मार्केट value सम्म पुग्ने। Category E कम्पनी हुन्छन, एक मिलियन मार्केट value सम्म पुग्ने। मेरो tech team ले एउटा client कालागि बनाएको एउटा app December मा त्यो client ले मिलियन डलर मा बेच्यो।

मेरो team अहिले एउटा Augmented Reality Mobile Game मा काम गर्दैछ। यो हाम्रो अन्तरिक प्रोजेक्ट हो। आफैलाई गरेको, कुनै client का लागि होइन। We think we are in a strong position to end up a Category B company in a five year time frame. We are raising some seed money right now at a million dollar valuation. We are projecting 5,000 dollars invested in our company right now should become a million dollars in five years. But sometimes tech startups fail. Then what? I made it risk free for some of my friends who came in. I said, should the company fail, I will have 12 months to give your 5K back to you. But should it succeed, and your 5K does end up being a million dollars, I get 5% of that growth, I get 50K, you get 950K. Some of my friends took it.

यदि यो investment opportunity तपाईं लाई आकर्षक लाग्छ भने गफ गरौँ। मेरो सम्पर्क नम्बर हो 917 512 5445 र मेरो इमेल हो paramendra@gmail.com Tech startup गर्न खोजेको म एक्लो होइन। अन्जनजीको पनि एउटा दुइटा idea छ। Tech startup गर्न चाहने अरु पनि कोही हुनुहुन्छ भने हामीले तपाईं का लागि सक्दो गर्छौं, सम्पर्क गर्नोस्।

यस सन्दर्भमा मैले डिल्ली जीलाई एउटा कहानी सुनाएँ। When Oracle bought PeopleSoft a few years back for a few billion, Larry Ellison paid his lawyers $100 million in legal fees.

न्यु यर्क जस्तो ठाउँमा millionaire बन्न नसक्नेले नेपालको आर्थिक क्रान्तिमा ठुलो योगदान पुर्याउन सक्छ जस्तो मलाई लाग्दैन। तर यहाँ सफल entrepreneur बन्न सक्नेले नेपालमा FDI (Foreign Direct Investment) लाने बाटाहरु खुल्छन।

फेरि पनि सबै जनालाई तिहार को दिपावली को छठ को मंगलमय शुभकामना

(To be delivered at the Dilli Bhatta Law Firm, 18 East 41st Street, Suite 1105, New York, NY 10017, October 23, 2014, Thursday evening)

Sunday, July 27, 2014

Silicon

Larry Ellison on stage. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The number one destination for tech startups on the planet today is San Francisco. No, it is not Silicon Valley which continues to be home to the top tech companies in the world like Google, Apple and Facebook. Why did the center of gravity shift? Because the engineers wanted the city lifestyle. Most engineers who work for companies like Google in Silicon Valley tend to live in San Francisco.

Guess which city really has the city lifestyle? New York.

Boston used to be number two after Silicon Valley. Not any more. New York City has wrested that number two spot. Although Boston continues to be strong. Austin and Seattle are also strong spots.

But the Silicon Valley ecosystem is to be envied. One generation of successful entrepreneurs invest their money and wisdom into the next generation of entrepreneurs. That cycle goes on. You have to have several generations of successful companies to end up with the ecosystem that Silicon Valley has.

London and Berlin are also coming along. Bangalore in India has a decently rich density of developers. Chile has experimented with replicating the Silicon Valley thing. Israel has a vibrant tech ecosystem.

Geography matters less and less. India’s answer to Amazon - Flipkart - just raised a billion dollars. They are not in the Valley, or even in the US.

In New York City the primary tech action is in the Flatiron District. There is also a pocket in Dumbo. But Long Island City also has potential, I think. When Cornell establishes its tech campus on Roosevelt Island (New York City’s own “Stanford”) LIC will be a major attraction. Rent is substantially cheaper just because you crossed the river.

Culture is supreme. Silicon Valley’s strongest point might be that failure is celebrated there. Risk taking is probably the top quality in an entrepreneur. Failing is an essential part of the process. If you did not fail, that means you did not try, you did not take the plunge.

The big venture capitalists in the Valley raise their big money in New York City because this is where the pension funds and the like are.

FourSquare, one of the most celebrated tech startup stories to come out of NYC, has an office in San Francisco because they can’t afford not to hire some of the talented developers there who don’t want to live anywhere else. On the other hand, by now Google has a major presence in New York City. They just so happen to own the largest building in the city. It is because Google makes its money from ads. And guess where Madison Avenue is! But it is beyond that. Google has a major engineering presence in the city, as does Facebook, as does Twitter.

Silicon Valley is an attitude, it is a culture. It is about moonshots, as Larry Page might put it.

I routinely go to numerous tech events in the city. If someone makes the mistake of showing up in a suit, he immediately gets labeled a “suit.” I think there is something to be said of casual clothing, but you can not capture the essence of Silicon Valley in jeans or in a hoodie. Larry Ellison, probably the most colorful character to emerge in the Valley, has been wearing suits forever, that is his way of giving the finger to those who wear the casual stuff like they were uniform. You wear what you are comfortable wearing. That could be jeans and a turtleneck, the Steve Jobs way, or a suit as worn by his best friend Larry Ellison.

Software is eating the world, Marc Andreessen, the father of the Netscape browser that launched the web era, famously said in a Wall Street Journal article. There is so much still left to do that I expect the feast to go on for decades and longer. That is my way of saying one Silicon Valley is not enough, if it ever was. My answer to the famous question if Silicon Valley can be replicated is, yes it can be replicated. New York City is as good a place as any to build a tech startup.

Angel investing is a major aspect of a successful tech ecosystem. You seek some basic funding from friends and family. You need a basic prototype to be able to take a stab from the professional angel investors. And then there is crowdfunding. I see that as a majorly positive trend.

I think doing well as an entrepreneur in the New York City environment is a necessary precondition to being able to contribute to Nepal’s economic revolution. Brain drain is a pre-Internet, pre-globalization term. Today the work is so much more interlinked that you can be many places and contribute many places. There are global solutions to many local problems in Nepal.

Sunday, August 11, 2013

Investment Opportunities

Borderless Investments (Photo credit: mars_discovery_district)

(published in Vishwa Sandesh)

Investment Opportunities
By Paramendra Bhagat (www.paramendra.com)

Your checking account gives you zero interest. The money is safe, but it is not growing. Your savings account famously gives you 1-2%. It is practically zero. Government issued bonds are safe but they also give returns in the 4% range only. That has been Madonna’s favorite thing to invest in. She did not need the money to grow, she knew she was going to make plenty of her own money; she just needed it to be safe.

If you invest in the American stock market in a sample basket of companies, say in a fund that is tied to the S&P 500 or the NASDAQ, in the short run you might lose or gain money. A few of your stocks might do spectacularly well, or might see a spectacular nosedive all the way to the company going down the tube and your losing all your money. But if you are not going to speculate daily, if you are not going to walk in and out every few years, if you are going to leave your investments for the long run of something like 10 or 20 years then you can expect an annual return of something like 10%. At that rate your money doubles every seven years. So 10,000 dollars will have become roughly 40,000 dollars in about two decades.

The mega recession of 2008 busted two major myths. The big one was that governments don’t go belly up, because people will always pay taxes. But country after country in Europe did go belly up. Another myth though a casualty of ups and downs in the housing market pretty regularly saw a major jolt was that real estate is a good investment because no matter what you will still have your house. Well, what if that house now has a value of half of what you paid for. Was that still a good investment?

The real estate sector in Nepal is a major hindrance to productive avenues of investment. People go abroad, do hard labor, they save, and they send money back to Nepal. Quite a lot of that money goes into real estate. People really like the idea of owning a house. It gives them a sense of belonging. There is this one small corner of the earth that they own. That brings solace. And since buying a house in Nepal is not like buying a house in America where you keep making rent like payments for 30 years, buying a house pretty much leaves you high and dry. Perhaps people feel once they have enough to eat, buying a house is next, and some day they might buy shares in companies. As the Nepali economy matures there will be more productive ways to invest than buying a piece of land and putting a house on top of it.

Things get wilder. A hydro project in Nepal might give an annual return of 30%. At that rate money doubles every two and a half years. So your 10,000 dollars will have become two and a half million in those same two decades. As in, a 30% growth rate is substantially more than the 10% growth rate.

I think it is a very good idea for Nepalis in New York City to invest in hydro projects in Nepal. You keep getting returns for 30 years at a handsome rate of 25-35%. I think that could mean a retirement scheme to many people.

My Nepal Hydro 20K Seed Fund
Virtual Mall

But not even 30% is wild enough. The first person who invested in Google put in 100,000 dollars. The two Google founders (they were PhD students at Stanford) were on to see a professor of theirs. A friend of the professor happened to be sitting there. He overheard the conversation. That sounds interesting, let me just write you a check, but I have to leave now, he said. That money became a billion and a half dollars in about eight years. At 10% money doubles in seven years. If the money went from being 100,000 dollars to 1,500,000,000 dollars in eight years, what kind of growth rate is that? You do the math. Looks to me like the money grew 15,000 times.

But then Google founders are rare people. It is hard for them to show up, and it is very hard to get to meet them at that early stage. And most people will not, do not recognize them at that early stage. I mean, Yahoo did not. Yahoo at the time was what Google is today. The Google guys wanted to sell their search engine to Yahoo and be done with it. Yahoo refused to buy. We already have a search engine of our own, they said.

If you have 100,000 dollars to invest, put 10% of that into a checking account, which is practically cash, and put 10% into something high risk and high reward like an early stage Google. Investing is a spectrum. You play partly safe, but partly you go wild with the money. But then some people go largely wild. When Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle and my personal favorite character in tech, was worth 100 million dollars, he still borrowed money from the bank for his personal expenses, since he knew his ownership of Oracle would grow much, much faster than whatever the bank charged in interest, and he was so very right.

I think pretty much every Nepali in New York City has the option to invest at least a thousand dollars. You bring together 100 people and that is 100,000 dollars. That is not big money, but that is no chump change either. All should attempt financial literacy. Good investment ways come with some practice.