About Me

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Mumbai, India
I run an IT Security consulting firm based out of India. We started off from scratch in 2001 when I was 21, and have offices in Mumbai, Bahrain, and UAE. The idea behind the blog is to share the stories of how we run the business, the deals we make, the deals that break, the heartburn, and the sheer joy.

The Ultimate Startup Guide

The Ultimate Startup Guide is an e-book that provides answers to all your questions related to starting and growing a business in India. Everything you wanted to know about entrepreneurship in India from ideation to registration to marketing to hiring. The book contains a large number of practical examples, anecdotes, interviews, and motivational material to help you get started, and to grow rapidly in a booming Indian economy. If you've got the idea, this book will help you through with the execution and realize your dreams. Here are some of the key questions you will find answered in this book:
  • When starting a business, what are the legal issues involved?
  • What form of incorporation is better suited to which type of business?
  • What tax issues are involved?
  • How do I start a business and what are the pitfalls?
  • How do I market my business in the absence of significant funding?
  • How do I get funded?
  • What are the basic accounting concepts I should be aware of?
  • What is a business plan and how should I build one?
The brief table of contents of the book is as follows:
  1. Getting started
  2. Ideation
  3. Forms of Enterprises
  4. Funding
  5. Basic Accounting and Taxation
  6. Import and Export Licensing
  7. Trademark and Patenting
  8. Rules for NRIs and Foreigners
  9. Building a Business Plan
  10. Marketing on a Shoestring
  11. Website and Branding
  12. Women Entrepreneurs
  13. Templates
To order the Ultimate Startup Guide - email me at kkmookhey@gmail.com.

Details of the book are:
Title: The Ultimate Startup Guide
Author: Kanwal Mookhey
Pages: 150
Additional: Companion CD contains numerous templates for building your business plan, calculating cashflow, preparing profit and loss, and balance sheets, preparing invoices, your resume and profile, marketing material, websites, contracts, and many other useful and motivational material.

Sunday, July 16, 2006

Power(less) Point(less) Presentations


PowerPoint presentations have become a necessary evil. Any serious presenter or speaker knows that PowerPoint can do as much harm as it can aid a good talk. I came across this brilliant case study by Edward Tufte on what can go wrong with PowerPoint. He highlights a seriously flawed presentation of the analysis done by Boeing of the Columbia space shuttle disaster. Some of the highlights from the study are:

  1. PowerPoint is a highly inadequate tool for scientific and technical work. The attempt to fit single ideas into one slide can result in highly edited, ambiguous and misleading statements. PowerPoint does not do well at displaying scientific notation and units of measurements. All serious and technically detailed work must be presented using formal documentation such as word processing software.
  2. The use of PowerPoint exclusively for reports, proposals and white papers (instead of formal reports) is highly frustrating to the consumer of that information and is to be strongly advised against. This is a good point. I used to think that the ability to present an entire report in PowerPoint, as the big 4 consulting firms often do, was accepted practice. I think Word, and even Excel offers far better reporting capabilities than does PowerPoint.
  3. Information tends to get filtered and presented in relation to the bureaucratic heirarchy of the consumer of the information. For instance, as reports travel from middle to senior management, important information could get filtered. Or it could be pushed lower down PowerPoint's slide and bullet heirarchy to the extent where the original meaning of the message is lost.
  4. It is easy to present contradictory ideas in the same slide. The title of one such slide that Tufte uses to illustrate this point is in almost complete contradiction to the bullet points made lower down in the same slide.
  5. Slide overkill is almost unethical. When you begin making your entire talk into PowerPoint slides, you often lose the essence of what you are trying to say. I don't know which is sadder - presenting a 100+ slide talk or sitting through one. I guess the only exception is training programs, where the slides serve also as study material. In this case also, the best option would be training material as handouts and PowerPoint slides.
It's worth reading through the entire article and the comments that follow.

Another good article on PowerPoint presentations is Guy Kawasaki's 30/20/10 rule. One of the best sites of them all on presentation is Garr Reynolds' Presentation Zen.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Isn't this one of the things Tim Brown of IDEO who talks about Innovation in his recent book?

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