Nickhil Jakatdar had sold three successful companies before he launched his fourth start-up Vuclip, a California-based mobile video company that has the technology to deliver video content on all types of mobile phones, including low-end feature phones. His 140-people team is spread across offices in Milpitas, New Delhi, Mumbai, Dubai, Shenzhen, Beijing, Jakarta, Ottawa and Singapore. Jakatdar, a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, admits he has a thing for numbers. For this 41-year-old, analysing challenging data would probably be a joy bigger than a relaxing Sunday. He has other self-confessed idiosyncrasies as well (not including the 40 patents filed under his name for his work at his first company Timbre Technologies)—a unique style of conducting meetings, a poker player gut for hiring “good” people, and a clutch of great stories from the time he went to VCs on crutches and a full leg cast.

I wake up at 2.30am every morning (or night, if you prefer to call it that!) after having gone to bed at 11pm the previous night. That’s how my body cycle has always been. I even got myself checked at a sleep clinic once but they concluded that this is my normal metabolism! So, I put it to full use. When it’s 2.30am in California, it’s about 3pm in India, 3.30pm in Dubai and 5.30pm in South East Asia. So it’s the perfect time to get onto review calls with our international offices. My family doesn’t wake up until 6am. By the time they’re up, I’ve got daily updates from my teams across the globe. I have three school going children, a 13-year-old boy, an 11-year-old girl and another 7-yearold boy and our worlds meet for breakfast at 7am. I always have a fixed breakfast of banana nutcrunch cereal and milk. It’s what I eat every single day. Then, it takes me about 25 minutes todrive to office. Since my car has an inbuilt Bluetooth, I’m on calls with my offices outside theUS through my drive to work. 

I believe mobile video will revolutionise commincation and become an important part of everybody's life.

I reach office at about 9am and go straight into our daily 9am to 11am review meetings. This two hour schedule is put into our calendars for the whole year. I’m not a big fan of structured meetings. So, we have one structured meeting everyday in the morning and all the others after that are adhoc, informal ones where I usually call some people to brainstorm, or to dive deep into a topic. These talks could go on from 30 minutes to two hours. To make sure our meetings are effective, we’ve established some meeting guidelines. Every meeting must start with providing context —not just what the agenda is but why it’s important. So, if the objective of a meeting is to look for ways to increase the traffic to our website by five per cent, the person calling the meeting must tell others why it’s so important to do that. Not giving enough context is a universal mistake people make. Almost nobody does it well so we’ve tried to drill it into people across our offices, whether its India, the US or China.

Another big guideline we’ve set for our meetings is to use quantitative and analytical language. For a direct to consumer business like ours, unless you know your business down to the last level of detail, you’re not going to address the problem well. It’s important to bring up data, to base your arguments on it. None of this suggests our meetings are boring! We use humour very effectively at Vuclip. Even in the most serious meeting, we’ll constantly crack jokes to make sure people are relaxed and not tense at all times. Another meeting rule we’ve had to work hard on is making sure the conversation is non-hierarchical. We have a lot of Asians in the company. Traditionally, in Asian societies, there is a tendency to not question your boss. But, a meeting where decisions aren’t questioned is hardly useful. So, I’ve spent countless hours in our India and China offices to make people comfortable with that. In fact, if someone completely agrees with me, I ask them to tell me why they do so. We’ve had to put in a lot of effort because I was very clear that all our Vuclip offices must have a uniform culture. Happily, over the nearly six years that the company has been around, I’ve seen the delta among our different offices reduce to a minimal.

Nichil Kakatdar on the  future of mobile and movies at the Palo Alto International Film Festival 

Building a great culture is possible only if you have good people. I am a pretty good poker player and I think I can read people well. Most people are good interviewees. So during an interview I don’t tend to ask them questions where they can fool me with their answers. I ask them questions where their guard won’t be up. I would typically ask people about the way they grew up. There are a lot of smart people in the world. But what differentiates a really good employee from an average one is their sense of ownership and integrity. And you get a lot of that by knowing how the person grew up, what their challenges were in school, what built that sense of drive in them and what tested them. Moreover, people are a lot more honest when they’re talking about their personal background than their experiences at work, because they don’t expect me to draw conclusions about whether they are fit for the job or not through their personal information. I also ask if they have played any form of competitive sport in their lives. It doesn’t matter at what level. It could even be inter class. There is a high level of correlation between being a very good employee and having played team sports. Of course, it’s not necessary that if you haven’t played competitive sports, you won’t be a great employee.The one thing I can’t stand is people who drop names or show off. If you’re not humble, for me, that meeting is over in the first five minutes. People who have worked with me for four five years have learnt to go with my gut when hiring. I’ve been right about 90 per cent of the times. I also believe that when you have really good people, you should just hire them. Don’t worry whether you have a defined position for them in the company or not. Get them, you’ll figure it out.

I can have lunch anywhere between 12 o’clock and 4 o’clock. But I always ensure that I go out and have lunch. When you go out, it opens up your mind because otherwise you are into your own world in the office. I always try to take someone along with me, whether a colleague, a partner or a customer because I want to understand dif-ferent people’s perspectives. I take my time with lunch. An hour is usually enough time to dig into whatever I want to. While I understand I can’t have the same kind of lunches together with people in our international offices, we have put in place a flat communication structure where people in China or India working at any level can approach me directlyif they need to, without going through their immediate superiors.

I come to visit the India office once every two months or about nine days and I go to China once every four months. As for the other locations that only have one or two people offices, I go there once in six months. We’re otherwise in touch through email and Skype. This constant communication and connect is critical—it teaches you so much. In fact, until a year back, when Vuclip had about 30-40 million subscribers, we had a support email address and number where customers could call in case of problems. That number was my personal cell phone number. I used to get 30 to 50 calls a day. These would come from all over the world, sometimes in languages I didn’t even understand. So we had our own version of English that we conversed in! Now the thing is customers don’t typically call you when they’re happy. They call you when they are upset and I wanted to know what this person cares so much about to pick up the phone and make an international call. It obviously means a lot to them. So we should at least try and understand their problem and solve it. This gave me so many insights into our product. Now, even though I don’t have my number up there, all the support emails come to me along with the person specifically in charge of them. I continue to respond to them if I have to, but I always sign off as the Vuclip Support Team. People don’t know it’s me.

For me, investment firms are not brands. The chemistry I have with the individual investor matters much more."

I leave office at about 5.30pm. Once I am home, I go figure out what the kids are doing, have dinner and spend time with my wife. The kids go to bed by 9 o’clock, after which I go play for this indoor and outdoor soccer league on Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday nights. Last year, I broke my tibia or the shinbone into two pieces while playing in the league. My leg actually bent and collapsed and the bone just cut through. I went through six months of surgery and rehab and a titanium rod was put in place of the bone from my ankle to my knee. When that happened, I was raising series D funding for Vuclip. So even after the injury, I had to go from VC to VC on crutches and a full leg cast. People used to wonder if I was hoping to cash in on sympathy! But, I couldn’t imagine somebody else going for these meetings. It’s my company at the end of the day. When VCs invest, they look for how credible the founder is, and how much passion he or she has. Everybody has a different presentation style. I’d like to believe I’m good at getting my passion through to my audience when I am presenting. Not everybody on my team might be able to do that, even if they are equally passionate about the company. Plus, I’ve done this thrice before for my other ventures. I thought we should put our best foot forward when going for the pitch but that turned out rather ironical in my case!

In an interview sometime back, the investor who we finally got for this round of funding last year was interviewed. He said that the fact that I came to pitch despite my injury (he played soccer too so he knew how serious the injury was), left him in no doubt of my commitment to the company. I had met about eight investors and the round was eventually led by SingTel Innov8 with participation from our existing investors New Enterprise Associates and Jafco Ventures for $13 million. For me, investment firms are not brands. The chemistry I have with the individual investor matters much more. Across my four companies, we had term sheets from very big name VCs but I went with those who others might have ranked lower on the hype scale. But, for me, they topped on the chemistry scale. I like to work with investors who truly let the entrepreneur be. They don’t try to become the founder. I think a good investor is somebody who has an amazing pattern recognition. If an investor has seen 40 deals and recognised the common positives and weaknesses, they can give you feedback on how something similar can play out in your company. That’s a very healthy conversation for me. The first four years of building Vuclip have been very hard though. Mobile video might be a buzzword now, but it took us four years to become an overnight success! What has always kept me going is my belief in what we’re doing. I fundamentally believe that mobile video will revolutionise communication and become an important part of everybody’s life. Hundred million people come to visit our site every month. That’s exciting—it makes me feel that we’re going to change the industry!