Guest author: Pratyush Nath – a software engineer in our Gurgaon office
FirstRain India celebrated the Annual Company Event on the 8th of January 2011 to culminate the a series of events we have held over the past six months.
It all started with dividing the India rainmakers into six teams bringing together folks from diverse functions. It has been a great run with the teams demonstrating competitive spirit as well as sportsman spirit all through the diverse events like dance, debate, table tennis, face painting competition etc. The final event was the offsite cricket match on 8th at Surjivan Resorts. It was refreshing to see people come out in large numbers on a Saturday, braving the chill to support their team and of course FirstRain.
Kicking off the event
The cricket match was followed by some great stand up acts as people enjoyed their drinks and snacks in an atmosphere of camaraderie, taking digs at each other and engaging in casual banter.
The winning team
A stand-up comedy act
Overall it was a fun event and a firm step forward towards the punch line we adopted since the build up to this event: ‘It is an exciting time to be a part of FirstRain’.
The FirstRain Gurgaon team
Here’s a great example of FirstRain helping a group of users in private equity. I was able to visit Stuart Jackson at Actis before Christmas last year – on a very snowy, cold day in London. One of those days when I am reminded why I left the UK to work in California.
We met at Stuart’s offices on the South Bank to discuss how his team has been successful with FirstRain over the last year.
Actis is a London based private equity investor that invests exclusively in emerging markets like Asia, Africa and Latin America; it has US$4.7bn funds under management and over 100 investment professionals on the ground in nine offices worldwide.
The Actis investment teams already have very strong local and sector knowledge but, because of their broad emerging markets focus, the teams must also stay constantly abreast of global and regional trends and developments and good information can be hard to find in their regions.
Stuart is Global Knowledge and Information Manager at Actis. He set about solving this problem by partnering with us – his goal is to use our automated market monitoring to provide a richer intelligence service to his internal users around the world.
To do this, Stuart worked with us to set up personalized monitors for his investment professionals in regions such as Africa, Latin America and South Asia where his team has found reliable data sources can be difficult to uncover. He told me “we find the company intelligence we receive from FirstRain highly valuable to our day to day work. The timely delivery of interesting, in-depth articles enables us to constantly refine our investment research”.
Each Actis user has a personally configured monitor set up to provide daily alerts on the developments impacting companies of interest within the region. Delivered by email to each user’s PC or Blackberry, the FirstRain monitors provides relevant research and reading materials every day, saving time and helping to build up a detailed understanding of each region of interest.
I’m also delighted that Stuart’s experience with FirstRain is of a very high quality service provider. “I am pleased with the level of service I receive from FirstRain”, he told me, “and the client service ethos which is demonstrated by my FirstRain support team”.
That’s great for my team to hear – nice jobs guys!
I’m reminded of something I learned a long time ago about relationship dynamics in the workplace – from the Zen master of leadership Renn Zaphiropoulos.
Teamwork is critical to moving fast. I wrote in the past how trust is simply more efficient. It allows people to share risky ideas, make decisions quickly-learn-change, and to be safe so they do so again and again. I have no respect for attacking behavior in the workplace – it’s immature and destructive and hurts the team. I’m frustrated sometimes in silicon valley with the cult of the technical jerk savant (ref The Social Network film – note the object of the cult is almost always a white male – and I guarantee they are not always white). The vast majority of hard working technical professionals are not like that and quality companies follow the No Asshole Rule (ref the book on Amazon) and don’t tolerate the behavior.
Attacking behavior often arises between people who have not developed a conscious relationship of mutual respect and so the relationship deteriorates to one of mutual contempt. This is because the Respect-Contempt imbalance is inherently unstable. It’s too caustic for the one held in contempt to sustain so survival skills require the relationship degrade into mutual contempt.
The leader’s role is to help each person see and learn to respect the strengths of the other, even if their role and contribution is very different. Everyone has a role to play and value to contribute or they would not be here. (It’s also important for us to try to weed out the bad behaviors during the interview process; looking for arrogance and disrespect for others being subtly communicated as the candidate reviews their history.)
The hardest role to be playing is the person who is being attacked by an intellectual bully in the team. I have seen this at the peer level, rarely see it down the power hierarchy these days in technology (good people simply leave) and see it surprisingly often up the power hierarchy. It’s easier to take cheap shots up at your management because they just have to take it – they should not attack back (although that’s a matter of style choice – I know one former CEO who would intentionally verbally obliterate disrespectful employees – but it’s not my style choice).
In all cases my advice to the person being attacked is take the high ground. It’s unlikely to be personal and it’s more likely to be about the other person and some threat they are feeling in the moment than it is about you. I was in a situation recently where this happened to me where I am a board member (it was a very difficult conversation with a member of management) and I worked hard to stay calm, listen, let the energy run it’s course, and then return to the problem at hand.
Respect builds over time, as does trust. And if you find yourself in a contempt-respect or contempt-contempt relationship ask for help. Your manager’s job is to help you with it.
It’s exciting to see the economy come back and companies start to add new jobs – even the usually glum media like CNN is starting to report a coming hiring boom here.
Here at FirstRain we have a number of open positions in very interesting areas. Our openings are both in San Mateo, California and in Gurgaon, India. We are looking for smart, hungry talent. People who want to be a part of a dynamic, fun company doing edgy, ground-breaking work. If you are a potential Rainmaker send your resume in to careers@ignite.firstrain.com
Open positions January 2011:
You will probably have noticed that your FirstRain email monitors changed over the Holidays.
This new style of monitor is designed to help you
i) see the highest impact articles first,
ii) quickly read the ranked highlights for each company or market topic you are monitoring,
iii) highlight key analytics such as management turnover, analyst comments or corporate governance issues and
iv) read them more easily on your mobile devices.
A new year opens up new opportunities and ideas for us all. May I wish you and your family a happy and prosperous New Year. Thank you for being our user.
Best wishes
Penny
Many of our customers are hedge funds looking to both save time and get an intelligence advantage from the web. They are notoriously secret so we can rarely use their names – but even so they will talk with us and share how they use FirstRain.
Liz (her name has been changed at her request) is an investor relations associate at a hedge fund in Greenwich CT. This is a fund that has a long term horizon and applies private equity style investing to the public markets. She shared how she uses FirstRain with us. Her goal is to quickly and easily find intelligence which may be impacting her firm’s portfolio.
“One of my responsibilities it to generate a daily watch report for our research analysts. Each analyst has Bloomberg on their desk, and access to sell-side research, so they can easily screen for major news stories. My challenge is then to help them find the smaller local news stories that might be impacting our portfolio.
We have found that local news and blogs are helpful for our continuous understanding of industries like restaurants and retail – for example seeing a report like Burger King to close three local Plano TX franchises which might change an analyst’s model or outlook.”
In the past Liz would use Lexis Nexis but, while powerful for specific one-off research projects, it does not have the local news and blog coverage that she needs, and does not have an easy workflow to generate news reports for a set of companies every day.
Liz wanted to find a simple, efficient solution to tracking daily local news and blogs about her firm’s critical investments.
Her solution today is to use FirstRain to monitor about 50 names, looking for local stories to build her daily Watch Report from. She simply uploads the names from excel and turns on a daily email monitor setup for her filters.
She says “We found it very easy to import the tickers and generate a daily email which we use to create our Watch Report from. And FirstRain is a fraction of the cost of traditional content providers like Lexis Nexis, or financial platforms like Bloomberg. In the end it was a simple decision for us, based on ease of use and price”.
We have a fun tradition each year around the Holidays – a white elephant gift exchange and a pot luck lunch. This year we twisted it up a bit. Not only did we do the usual fun of each person opening a gift or choosing to steal another, but this time we had plenty of stealing until the iterations finally stopped and then the Surprise.
First, we voted on the worst gift – and gave out some fun FirstRain clothing as a consolation gift to Cory who had ended up with the Snuggie. Then we voted on the best gift – which was a new Apple TV – and gave Dave (who had ended up with the Apple TV) the choice of keeping that or opening a mystery gift. When he chose to keep the Apple TV the mystery gift went to the holder of the second worst gift.
Which would you have chosen? (see below for what Dave missed).
Nick modeling the “worst” gift – the camouflage Snuggie
Jordy doing the Vanna White for the laptop desk.
Nima (not single for much longer…) picking a guy gift – binoculars.
The team chilling after eating too much great food and chatting with our sales offices on Skype.
When Prashant opened the mystery gift – it was an iPad – and Dave was kicking himself!
The other kicker to the pot luck – we probably all gained 5 lbs not only from the bundt cake, dripping ginger cake, thai shrimp, ribs…etc… we also sampled David’s homemade wine and Nick’s homemade beer. Yum.
From Aparna Gupta – Director of Analytics - Reporting from the first Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing in India
While most of my team in California was at Dreamforce last week, I had the pleasure of being a part of the Grace Hopper conference at India’s own silicon valley- Bangalore, in which FirstRain was a scholarship sponsor this year. I have been to one in US few years back and I have to admit the atmosphere, the participation (~600 from 79 organizations), the choice of panels was at par if not better – kudos to the team who put together this very first India edition!
I had great fun interacting with participants on wide-ranging topics like human-machine learning (and why it can never be perfect), future of social networking sites, should exposing children to two or more languages be a norm given its benefit on development of the brain and a fully solar power driven village.
Some general take-aways from the meet which I believe will be useful to all:
o Make your voice heard
o Be ‘aware’ but not hindered
o Have confidence and believe in yourself
And for aspiring leaders:
It’s exciting that the Anita Borg Institute and it’s funding partners are investing in India and I am looking forward to going again next year.
Our team is working hard at Dreamforce this week – if you are there and have not visited us yet stop by! Not only can we share the benefits of the new version of FirstRain with you, we are also giving away a tiny radio for your listening pleasure
As you can see here – the FirstRain team is having fun, collecting leads, talking to prospects and sharing their excitement about our new version which is, after all, simply the easiest, most efficient way to monitor the changes that impact markets and companies! A must for every marketing and strategic sales professional.
We’ll be at Dreamforce 2010 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco next week – the happening place for sales people and the sales ops and marketing people who support them.
We’ll be showing all the hot new capabilities in FirstRain – how to easily monitor your key customers – how to efficiently understand the changes in your market, and their market, that impact your opportunity.
Come and talk to us about how sales people use the FirstRain monitors every day and how our marketing users at major customers have integrated FirstRain into the internal portals – both customer and SFDC – so sales people always have real-time updates on the competition.
And – because we are all about staying up to date – we’re giving away radios that fit in your lapel pocket (they are small but sound great!) so come and pick one up. Booth #1105
