Saturday, March 3, 2018

GOOGLE SPECIAL ....Learnings from Google


Learnings from Google

Naiyya Saggi, founder of BabyChakra, on being part of Google’s accelerator programme and how it has helped a baby care venture think big

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are probably the technologies (and hashtags) that will define our generation. In all the buzz that surrounds them though, the major breakthroughs come quietly from a gargantuan source: Google. Its six-month Launchpad Accelerator Program gives access to cutting-edge AI solutions within Google and beyond, early emerging technologies and unparalleled opportunity to interact with top ventures.
BabyChakra was created with the aim of supporting parents through pregnancy and parenting. Today, we are India’s fastest growing app and website for parents and seamlessly integrate content, connections to the right community and recommendations on products for a new mother or father. The ability to match millions of users to each other or to experts, products is driven by machine learning. (Machine learning is the use of AI to let systems learn and improve from experience without being programmed) As we scaled, we found ourselves tackling more complex issues. The application to Google’s Accelerator was driven by this need to rapidly scale our own knowledge base and integrations.
Our experience blew us away. First the diversity: startups from Brazil, Hungary, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Nigeria, South Africa etc were present in our cohort. These startups cut across fintech, edutech, healthtech, gaming and ecommerce. Some ventures were large, mature ventures (one of them had raised a Series E), others were smaller with seed funding. However, all were selected based on their market and domain leadership and their path-breaking use of AI.
Second the diversity of mentors matched the diversity of ventures. Each venture had specific mentors: ours were Adam Berk (a champion of the Lean Startup movement), Jonathan Lewy (a prolific investor from Mexico) and Gideon Marks (a Silicon Valley veteran originally from Israel). Apart from our primary mentors, we had sector/ problem statement-specific mentors too. All the problem statements we shared had been solved by them multiple times (such as tips for reducing app size, optimising for low network areas, data scarce settings optimisation) and as a result, we were able to leapfrog multiple levels in the two weeks we spent there.
Perhaps the biggest highlights were the daily talks by industry veterans. We heard, for instance, Vint Cerf, the co-creator of the internet, on the future technologies he was excited about (and yes, localisation, multi-language and building for women is key, not to mention, building internet connections for inter-planetary connections (ie Mars).Chet Kapoor (founder of Apogee, sold to Google) told his candid story of scaling Apogee to selling to Google. Dan Arielly spoke about in applying behavioural economics to product and design thinking. The highlight for our team was the frank conversation Eric Schmidt, former Google CEO, had with all our teams on building companies to scale. The one message that stood out: approach growth as a company-wide mission and as a goal by itself.

Here are our three takeaways from Google Accelerator:
Look under the Hood: 
We live in a world where technology makes life easy. We work hard every day to ensure that our users have an easy experience using our platform. One of the most counter-intuitive pieces of advice was: while we continue working hard on making a user’s experience easy, communicate to the user that we are indeed working too hard. To truly build a relationship with a user, encourage them to “look under the hood” and see the effort and the process by which we were helping users.

Ecosystems for the Win: 
One of our mentors, Chris Hueur, advised us to constantly think about ecosystems we were building in and could leverage as we grew. For instance, the internet really expanded at the time when mobile phone was commercially launched. While the two inventions were happening in parallel, they were not built to intersect. Serendipity was stronger than intent though, and the two technologies bumped into each other and exploded.

Product is More Emotion than Technology: 
The core of BabyChakra is personalisation: we help parents get the right content, access to community of parents and experts and products. However, personalisation is a holy grail, one that many massive companies are trying hard to solve. Coming as most startup founders do from an engineering or business background, we would talk about how to build on our tech stack and improve functionality and accuracy in relevance. The response to these questions surprised us. A mentor flatly told us: “Product is less about technology and more about emotion.”
The biggest takeaway was the incredible excitement everyone had about our solution. Every individual we met asked us our plan for global expansion and pitched back to us how simple yet essential our solution is. For a young venture based in India, tackling a new problem, especially one with no parallels in the Unites States, this feedback was incredibly exciting. 

ETM  25FEB18

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