All the spreadsheets are driving me nuts… oh yeah.. this is a startup! Every startup has its pains, we have ours too… we want to be the best, we want to get our act together… so we push ourselves beyond our capability! Its 1am and I am still at work trying to post this on the blog…how is that possible???

I like this cliché! It defines who I am and the world in which we live. Change encompasses every aspect of our life and we experience it, sometimes painfully, every second of our day. This is going to be the first amongst a series of posts I am doing on change.

One of the key factors for success in any business, today, is the ability of its stakeholders to initiate and manage change. “Solid as a rock” may not be a positive trait any more, especially in a business environment. “Flexible like Putty”, though it sounds namby-pamby, is the mantra of this generation. I have been working with Fortune 500 clients and helping them manage their outsourcing strategies over the last 5 years. I now head sales at Gameshastra, one of the leading outsourced services providers to the video games industry. In the outsourcing business change can be your best friend or your worst enemy!! The Video Games industry, where there are new products released every week and companies are constantly changing themselves in order to come up with the next BIG product idea, is even more sensitive to this environment. Game developers who have had difficulties in working with external developers across the street now have to interact and work with globally distributed teams. They have to realign their internal teams, figure out new accents and re-invent their processes in order to fully utilize the benefits of outsourcing.

Service providers in this business are facing the pangs of change as well – With the opening up of India and China, vendors in the Western hemisphere are feeling the pressure from their clients to provide enhanced value at lower prices. Indian and Chinese vendors are trying hard to create an organizational culture which marries strong business and operations processes with a western games culture. They face challenges with communication, quality and overall efficiency. At Gameshastra, the management team was very cognizant of these issues when they started the company. The company’s entire strategy revolved around hiring veterans from the games business in North America and transporting them to head delivery teams in
Hyderabad, India. This strategy has obviously paid off but not without its own pains.

Life for an American “born and raised” executive is not easy; especially when they have to adjust to a new environment and culture thousands of miles away (Coach-Class travel does not help either – Especially when it involves being in a airplane for 20 hours, three to four times in a year!!). So, change impacts their lives in a way which can be sometimes hard to imagine!! From a sales perspective, I have to change my pitch with every client in this business. I work with clients who come from a diverse mix; each publishing company has its own processes and “quirks”. Our clients range from multi billion dollar Game publishing giants to small independent studios. There is one message though which does not change in the pitch – Outsourcing is not about short term benefits; “It only gets worse before it gets better.” There is no panacea for the resulting turmoil which accompanies this change; Clients who can internalize this message and plan their journey as partners with their vendor end up benefitting the most.

The electricity over here is strong: so strong that when an errant surge hits the local junction box from the transformer bolts fuse and wiring sparks and melts, Which is what happens when you have a whoppingly large power feedback without functional protection which is why I ended up trying to perform art direction essentially by candle light (or lighter light as the case actually turned out). Kinda like the 4th of July in February. Needless to say not much could be done so I took the opportunity to finish my obligatory physical.
They have a quite logical proposal here: you have to have a physical prior to getting health insurance (or in some cases a job). This does a great job of preventing fraud on preexisting conditions and should be thought of in the US. So off I go with my trusty driver Narsimha (well actually Ravi is my wife’s trusty driver because he like’s kids, is safe, and speaks English: my faithful driver is Narsimha because he knows how to handle the local road situations and what do I care about understanding English?) to the local clinic.
First stop was Illsa; She-Wolf of the SS, who proceeded to stick what could only be constituted as a knitting needle in most developed countries into my arm to withdraw blood. Once this was completed off to have my chest x-ray with absolutely no shielding (thankfully sterility is no longer an issue I worry about, however glowing blue is still optional) followed by a meeting with essentially a lawn gnome who poked, prodded and ventilated my ear canals before waving me out. I guess I am healthy.
Ok: power back so something productive can begin. It is becoming more and more apparent that there is serious passion to become world class artists, programmers and quality assurance engineers here and the only thing holding them back is training and real world knowledge. I am going to start by asking them to tell me what they want to talk about and see what we can develop around their interests and passions. Fortunately there are several key people here who can become evangelists on a lot of the programming, test and art questions that might arise.

I got this on my email newsletter from Will Schroter who is the Founder and CEO of the Go BIG Network, the largest network of startup companies and entrepreneurs at www.goBIGnetwork.com He is also the author of the new book “Go BIG or Go HOME”. This article absolutely true and I work for a startup and see the action everyday!

Leading a startup company is nothing like leading a big, established company. Startups are focused foremost on survival, while big companies direct their efforts toward growth or in the worst case, slowing decline.

It’s natural that many entrepreneurs start companies with a task list that looks a lot like it did at their old job. After all, they’re likely coming from an established career in a big company. Big companies (usually) have the critical infrastructure in place and as inefficient as they may be, workers are free to look much farther down the road.

Startup Founders don’t get the luxury of looking too far down the road. They don’t get to spend inordinate amounts of time on product development or internal policy making. For this reason, a startup Founder’s priority list looks a whole lot different.

Job #1: Get Money in the Door

A Founder’s most important question is “do we have enough money to make it past our next milestone?” If the Founder can’t answer “yes,” then solving customer problems, addressing HR issues, and planning for the long term just won’t matter.

An underfunded company doesn’t have to worry about these issues. That’s because without additional capital, they will soon be out of business altogether! Therefore a startup needs to focus on keeping the lights on before it can even worry about solving day-to-day issues.

It’s not uncommon for a startup to spend far more time selling to investors than it does to customers. While this may feel like a distraction (which it is), it’s a necessary evil that supersedes all other activities.

#2: Sell More Stuff

Aside from raising capital to get started, sales are by far the most important activity any company can spend its time on. A simple way to consider this priority is – if you have sales and a crappy product, you can afford to improve your product. If you have a great product and no sales, you’re dead.

It’s a widely held belief that a great product will sell itself. Sure, great products sell better, but perfection can’t be pursued at the expense of a massive sales effort. Very few products are just so great that they sell themselves and become profitable.

What drives a company forward is its ability to focus its time on actually selling the product in the market, not refining the product in the lab.

#3: Hire Brilliant Staff

Staffing brilliant people sounds like an obvious thing to do, but in practice few people make it a true priority. It consumes more time and energy to hire brilliant people which is why most settle for “good enough.”

A startup’s ability to succeed in the market has everything to do with the key staff members it finds early on. If you’re rushing through your staffing process, pulling the trigger on the first resumes that float through your inbox, you’re doing the company a huge disservice.

Instead, make hiring brilliant staff a priority even if it takes substantial time away from other activities (that don’t involve sales or capital raising!) The time spent finding a better-qualified candidate will be repaid by their more competent execution of important startup tasks.

#4: Everything Else

After raising capital, increasing sales, and hiring brilliant people comes everything else. The trouble is that most entrepreneurs start with everything else and only plan to address the more critical items.

At some point you need to buy post-it notes, answer customer calls, address product problems, and take a shower. But if you put those activities first, you won’t be in business long enough to continue doing them.

The Priority Filter

A good way to help manage your activities is to create a “priority filter”. If you’re like most entrepreneurs, you manage you work through a daily task list that changes all the time. More often than not, you get easily swept into the mundane activities that are calling your attention.

Simply putting your top three tasks – raising capital, driving sales, and finding brilliant people, to the top of the stack can serve as a constant reminder of your priorities.

Unlike simple tasks like “buying office supplies” that have a defined start and end period, your ongoing priorities may seem hard to handle if you just lump them under one big “to do”. The best way to handle this is to create smaller sub-tasks under each, like “call three new customers today” or “create a draft of the pitch deck” that can be accomplished definitively.

When you’re still a startup, every moment you devote to your priorities comes at the cost of getting other stuff done. It’s a zero sum game. Yet the benefit of putting your time and effort into your priorities will provide a much greater return on your time investment than running errands and getting distracted.

You’ve got 80 hours per week to work on stuff – stick to the big items and you’ll be in great shape!

I’m temp art director on a proposal…Wait: Huh?
My life this week is beginning to sound like a headline from Fark (not to self: Call Drew and ask for advice). So where we last left off I was becoming painfully aware that while there is a huge amount of enthusiasm there is very little practical (applied) knowledge of the production process and simple standardized scheduling procedures.

Case in point: we have a proposal with Publisher ‘X’ (NDA’s…everybody becomes Mr. X) who wants to see how good our art ‘Kung-Fu’ is. So the COO (Chief Creative Officer aka Head of art dept.) and I sit down with the spec and look over the requirements. They were cake: they gave us models, a poly count, aspect ratios, the whole enchilada. Then it came time to talk about it with the artists and ask for some sample thumbnails. The samples came in what could be categorized into two flavors: the ‘We should probably use 2-3 million poly’ group and the ‘trouble with anatomical symmetry’ group. Seems that the traditional graphic artist here is 2-D trained and that they are learning ‘on-the-fly’ how to do 3-D efficiently and correctly.
Magically I become art director. Thank goodness it will only be for 2 weeks because I am beginning to miss my project planning timelines. Then it occurred to me: maybe what we need to do is to start structuring some internal training on how to approach game art.
Can’t stop being a teacher. So now along with bidding on some projects Producer-like I’m pinch hitting in the art dept. Gotta say the level of excitement and desire is overwhelming; they just need formal courses and lot’s of applied tutoring. I’m beginning to think I see where this is heading.
Oh: addendum. Never try to get internet at your apartment here. So far I am on week 2 of my captivity to nothingness at home due to (A) first needing a phone line which first needed me to be blessed by the police (see previous blog) and then (B) needs someone to actually put in the line then (C) someone to agree to turn it on then (D) telling the line that internet is approved.
Next time: Project Management by Blackberry…

I had a bit of a ‘Jerry McGuire’ moment at the office today! I wrote this entire article about… well you read it… this is the response I got from Nishant, my Animation lead!
Its about 1:52am right now and I just cant go to sleep. In some ways I feel like “Jerry McGuire”, not sure how many of you have seen it. This email is long overdue and there is a lot of thinking going on in my mind, so, these few words might not be able to capture them all. My thought could be broken and come in bits and pieces, so pardon me if its gets boring or confusing at times. You are free to say, ‘has satya gone mad?’.

After just coming back from a great dinner at Marriott with Monica and Prakash, I am starting to wonder what is Gameshastra all about! Would you be able to explain to someone in once sentence if asked? The only picture that comes to my mind is the film “300″. Its about these 300 Greeks who wanted to win a battle with 1,70,000 crazy Persian warriors! They were defending their territory, and did not want to give up. Now I am not sure about the legitimacy of the story, but, I think its inspiring, intriguing and filled with passion. I see ourselves in the same situation… a decade ago I started my career purely for passion… I literally lived on the streets, works for peanuts just to have my creative hunger satisfied. I look at now, we no longer have the passion to learn…succeed…win…conquer! Of course there are exceptions among us.

Where has the passion gone…where is the madness to create something unique (trust me you create something ‘cool’ only when u are nuts, which is another word for passion). We worry about things that are petty, minuscule, tiny and insignificant. What we don’t realize is the accomplishments we all have made in that last 6-12 months. It requires a lot of courage and (if I may use the word) ‘balls’ to do what we have done here.

I got an email from a senior recruiter of EA, asking me if I wanted to join them at EA, Singapore. I thought to myself and realized, I am probably never gonna get this opportunity to work with a team which has this sheer power and madness to success. I look at art team, trying to struggle day and night to please even the smallest of our clients. I am not forcing them to stay, they realize what needs to be done and are responsible enough to push themselves beyond 24-36hr shifts to make happen! Where else can I find the likes of Lance, who sleeps under the desk and works 2 shifts at a time and Jim, who talks crazy stuff half of which I don’t understand, but still in some weird way I know what he is talking about. Oh did I mention Jason, who is the Santa Clause, every time he is coming back, its Christmas at Gameshastra, we all wait to see what Santa has got in his big bag of games and graphic cards and Chris, every time he walks into a room he is like “Hellooooo I am here” without saying a word. Not to mention the ‘ever pushy’ Prakash who wants everything done in 10minutes, however big or small.

The fact of life is we need them all, and this is like a magic potion which is almost ready, except for one small but significant catalyst, … your trust and faith! You (including me) form the core of this company, any company, and as long as we decide to fight this battle together of becoming the coolest gaming company/making the next big title, nothing….I mean absolutely nothing will come in our way! At this moment the only words ringing in my ears are from the film ‘independence day’… “We will not quietly go into the night! We will not vanish without a fight! We’re going to live on! We’re going to survive!” I can completely relate to what we do at Gameshastra to these 4 sentences. After Goa meet, I stopped focusing on the petty issues, stopped issues bother me, have you?

Everyday I wake to the thought of how to make a difference in team, how to implement a new plan, how to introduce something new into our system… I wake up with thoughts on how to make my clients happy. Imagine a year down the road when we have had one of our original titles out into the market. We don’t have to deal with petty clients!!! We will have the luxury to pick the client we want to work with… at that point your business cards will make a difference! People will know you by the game that you worked on..not outsourced but a real “made in gameshastra” title. I can speak for Bjorn, Jason and myself, we have taken up on ourselves to make sure we absolutely have a seamless and transparent system. No BS! You, as the people have a larger part to play in this, it’s a system setup for you and unless you take the first step of speaking up and wanting to make a change, nothing is going to make a difference. Pls remember something like Gameshastra has never been done before, imagine doing what Activison/EA did within a span of 5 yrs, isn’t it insane? Yes it is insane! Now the question is, is it possible to do something like that? Yes, absolutely. They have made all the mistakes for us and we just pickup where they left off, making sure we learn from their mistakes. The only way we will reach the top, when each one of us, imagines and acts as leader. You are the core team, and for anyone else coming into the company, you are the older and more senior team! You stand as role models and you project an image which is an image of an ideal Gameshastra leader!

Now coming back to square one… What is gameshastra? Is it sheer brute force of gaming in India? Is it the collection of all the insanely passionate people put together? Or is it the definition of “making games”? I don’t know, I cant answer that…its up to you guys to define it, apply it and create it!

Interlude for some nonsense: But first, before I have to tackle the issues pertaining to how to get games built efficiently and well here apparently I have to register with the government. This is I believe revenge for the decades of green card bureaucracy and paper-pushing we have made foreigners in the US do if they want to work in America.
Here is how it goes in India: within 14 days (looks like I’m sneaking in on day 13) you have to complete what I will refer to as the ‘Registration Gauntlet’. First you go to any of the Embassy websites and get a list of everything you are supposed to supply (my favorite = “HIV test from WHO approved organization done within the last 30 days”. Now try to find a WHO approved organization in Redmond, WA). Regardless: I ‘thought’ I had everything and went down to the Police station with my trusty interpreter Rupinder to get this thing finished.
Problem #1- Missing 3 magical forms not listed on the website that just appear out of the either.
Problem #2 – Picture count magically goes from 4 to 5 headshots in the 13 days since I checked the website.
Problem #3- I have absolutely no idea what the police officer is saying to me, yet he feels he is speaking perfect English and is rather perturbed that I keep looking at Rupinder to figure out what is going on.
Time to play the French trump card : “Je suis désolé mais je suis nouveau ici. Ce qui ?”. After that Policeman did not bother looking at me anymore and spoke directly to Rupinder. Works every time…
So we walk out and it looks like we have to return the next day by 10:00am and wait around with all the forms properly filled out, duplicated, and then I can proceed. This is critical because I cannot open a bank account, get a phone, basically do anything without being registered as an alien.
Ok: Day 2. Everything ready and waiting for the Taxi to show up at 9:15. 9:30. 9:45. 10:00. 10:10 he shows up with the ‘Sorry, traffic’ get-out-of-jail-free card (see pic). Make it there by 10:45. Wait around until 11:30 and submit forms. Take thumbprint and give me nothing to try to get the ink off of my hands (now have totally blue hand). Get up with papers and walk 3 feet to another desk where someone looks at my papers and waves me back to the original desk. Goto waiting room. 12:30 get called back into room. Another person looks over the papers and sends me back to original person who looks through the exact same stack that has not left their offices a 4th time. Send me to new desk 3 feet away where new person initials papers on 1st page and waves me back to first person. Sent back to waiting room. 1pm: sent to a new room with a new person who looks over my papers, signs 3 pages and tells me bye bye. Total process less than 4 hours (see my friend Bjorn for a much worse time).
On the positive side while waiting I finished 4 tourneys of ‘ Golf’ on my DS and can now by better clubs in the locker room so finally I may be able to beat Madeleine this weekend. Now that this is little segway is done back to work…

Let me start by introducing myself: Hi; my name is Christopher Erhardt. For the last,

oh, 20+ years I have been involved one way or another in game development. From 1987-

1997 I was focusing on running studios and shipping titles for PC, SEGA, Nintendo and

so on. From 1998 until 2007 I had the pleasure of instructing students in game

Development and production in Redmond, Washington.

Late in the Fall of 2007 due to several circumstances I had an opportunity to evaluate

my life and the world around me. To make a long story short I realized that I needed a

radical change of environment and terminated my position as an instructor in the US and

moved here to Hyderabad.

Insane? Yep…Oh yeah: big time. When I first landed it became apparent that I was

now in a place where I could see the air I was breathing and, well, commute with my neighbors.

But as the cultural shock occurred I began to remember one of the pivotal reasons why I had decided to do all of this: to be involved in a cultural revolution. You see right now I have noticed that the youth of India are beginning to evolve from a rote-based left-brain learning system into something more inquisitive. Couple this with an amazing passion for video games (basically PC due to console cost issues, but changing) makes for an interesting nexus. And, of course, the cows.

So we packed up and (with a wife that likes adventure as much as I do) decided to do some product development out here. Within 72 hours I knew I was in trouble. Game development is in it’s infancy here and as with any embryonic entity this means that development is…really…slow compared to what I am used to. So I guess the first step (after I get done registering with the local governments) will be to determine what my studio teams know,and what they don’t know.

More later…

As we have been wandering aimlessly around the Fort Aguada before the pack up, a gentleman with plenty of grey stuff visible outside and definitely inside asked me what the company is all about; I told him that we are a company making console games. Then he immediately asked me do you have any games for juveniles like me?

A new market to explore?

The privileged pension drawing seniors of the west, and their desire to pass time pleasantly, involved in something, can that be the world of games? They certainly do not like the aim and shoot games / cars which they have seen all their life. Something beyond this? Needs a deeper thought.

As I have reached home, my wife said that she can see goa in the logo!!

I was surprised and took a closer look, it is there;

g(ameshastra in) goa

insync

is how I could read it!

Kudos to Satya’s artistry! And the colours are just fantastic.

Real simple words and sense into beautiful visuals