MANIK JUNEJA: So, let's get started. Hi.
My name is Manik, and I'm the founder of Vinsol,
which is a Rails development firm based out
of Delhi, India. And we also do iOS and
Android consultancy. It's a thirteen-year-old firm,
and we have around sixty-plus developers now.
So, I was going to ask this question so
that I could set some context of the talk,
but since I already I think know all of
you, I'll skip these three slides which I have.
So I was gonna ask if there are solopreneurs
or freelance programmers here, or if people belong to
companies with two to five developers, or, are there
product people here. So I would have kind of
changed the direction of my talk accordingly.
OK. So, in my talk, like, it's basically in
three parts. In the first part, I'm going to
quickly tell about myself, so, about my background. Then
I'll be talking about Vinsol, its history, the philosophy
behind its existence, the growth part we have and
why it exists. So those two things would kind
of set the context for the third part, just
like, why, why, why it matters to you, what
value can we provide you?
So, I am an electrical engineer. I learned Basic,
Pascal and C at school. I never realized I
was professionally going to be programming at that point
of time, but I enjoyed working on those languages.
The instant gratification that it brings you, like, you
type something, even if it's like print A plus
B and you get to see it on the
screen, that's kind of intellectually satisfying at some level.
So, then after my electrical engineering, I got placed
in campus. That's the term we use for, like,
college placement in India. And I got selected in
a huge Indian outsourcing firm with maybe fifteen thousand
developers. I was chosen to work on a Y2K
project, which was like the year 2000 problem, where
you're going to, and there's millions of lines of
Cobal code. You go to where year is represented
as YY and you replace it by YYYY, and
you're done.
So that, that was so intellectually stimulating and satisfying.
So I quit that job and I started learning
Java. James Cosling had just released Java, maybe six
months before that time. So, I picked up Java,
changed, switched jobs, joined another huge Indian outsourcing firm,
and I was, I landed in Tokyo working for
a internet startup there which was in the internet
e-commerce space.
So. There, I met this guy who was, like,
the senior Japanese developer. A really very good developer.
Whatever I learned during my career, like, those initial
years of my career, I learned from him. Like,
he's kind of my guru. But, like, the two
of us was, were working on this team in
Tokyo. We had a six person team back in
India. But what we found was that the two
of us were producing much more. We were much
more productive and the quality of our output was
much higher than what we were getting from our
off-shore development team.
So that, that set me thinking, in fact, I
vividly remember what happened when we had our first
code drop from the Indian team. I was working
on my machine, and I see this guy who
I just call my guru. He was like, Batano-san
was sitting like this, and I, I was like,
what happened? He said, Manik-san, just look at this
code. I was like, what's wrong with it? He
said, just come here and take a look and,
it was my first kind of introduction to what,
really, spaghetti code is like. Just like, just look
at it. I can make no head or tail
out of this, where it starts and what method
is called and where I go and what, what
this is totally non-modular. This is the perfect example
of what we can call spaghetti code. So I
realized, OK. But, I mean, subconsciously, somewhere, I felt
humiliated, because these were like people from my country.
Some even many years senior than me, and this
is what they delivered, that I'm sitting with the
guy who has kind of taught me a lot,
and he's like sitting like this, so. Maybe subconsciously,
I was not, maybe, entrepreneur yet, but maybe somewhere
that incident, you know, planted that seed in me
that, I need to change this. I need to
do something about this.
Also, while I was in Japan, I had my
first experience with Ruby. We, we, we were mostly
working on Java, Cobra, Oracle - all that enterprise-y
stuff. But we were using Ruby on the side.
And it was a new language at that point
of time. Even in Japan, not a lot of
people knew about it. But we were using it
for creating some utility scripts, where, part, part of
it we were doing in Perl and some of
it we were doing with Ruby. So, that was
my first brush with Ruby.
And then in the year 2000, I was getting
married, so I talked to my fiancé and we
had this discussion, whether we wanted to live in
Tokyo or live in Delhi, and we chose Delhi,
so I returned back to Delhi. And that is
when I actually founded Vinsol. This was September of
2000. With two developers, one of my colleagues, one
of my college mates joined me, and both of
us started this company.
We had this one Japanese client. It's, it's very
easy actually to start a company if you have
a paying client already existing. So that was, that
was good for us, very fortunate for us. We're
still working on Java, Cobra, Oracle. Whatever little open
source interaction I had had worked with this Ruby
script, which we did, but then due to financial
reasons we decided to move from Oracle to PostGres.
That was really when I saw, like, we'd been
spending millions of yen on, on yen, yens? Yen?
Millions of yen on, you know, the licensing fee
for Oracle. But here we have a fully open
source free database available, which can almost do as
much as - even sometimes, in some cases, more
than what Oracle could do. So that, that was
like kind of my first major interaction to open
source software. So we decided to continue to work
out of the basement of my house for a
couple more years.We would just kind of, you know,
focusing on that single project.
But then we started getting some time available, and
we thought, let's hire some people. So, we hired
a few people and we thought we'd get more
Java projects, but the irony was that, you know,
there are no Java projects for two people team.
Java needs at least ten, twenty, thirty people. You
can't do anything meaningful, like, not a project. Like,
you can be a consultant, but to, to do
a full project, you, you need ten people maybe
minimum. So, that kind of forced us into the
direction of moving towards PHP, which is like on
the string Facebook was launched, and kind of picking,
it was built on PHP, so a lot of
people started asking for PHP projects.
And we looked at these two really good pieces
of software that were available then, Drupal and Wordpress.
And that was where I got more involved in
open source, because we built some custom Drupal modules
and extensions, Wordpress modules, Wordpress extensions, and we were
one of those first companies in that, at that
time to launch what was a AJAX-based module for
Drupal, which was like, we were happy. We were
doing something. We were not making a lot of
money, but it was enough to pay the bills,
and we were able to sustain a six-people team.
But then it was like almost 2005, and I
came across an article on Ruby on Rails in
an online magazine, and I was blown away. Wow,
this is so cool. This is so productive. I
can do so much more in, in Rails in
a couple of hours than what, you know, I
could take days to do in PHP or Java.
And that was like really when I got hooked
onto Rails. And then the tipping point was this
2006 barcamp. How many of you know about, what
barcamps are?
They're not popular these days now, but like, from
2006 to 2009, around that time, they were very
popular. There are these two computer science or programming
variables that we always use, foo and bar. So,
in, in this context, they are not just names
but they are acronyms. So foo was, foocamp was
a conference organized by O'Reilly. It was called Friends
of O'Reilly. F-O-O. So they called it the foocamp.
And it was like the elitist group of people
who'd come to get there by invitation only, of
O'Reilly. And a few people who did not get
invited really felt bad about it, and they wanted
to do something about it, so they started this
thing called bar. So there's foo and there's bar,
and bar has a, is again an acronym. It
stood for Bay Area Rejects. So everybody who was
rejected and not a part of foocamp was, was
now invited or, like, it was a, event, they
called it the unconference. The only condition you had
to be able to attend it was that you
have to present something or help in the organization.
You can't just go and be there.
You had to either present or help organize it.
So it was an unconference. We had a first
one of these in Delhi in 2006. Jonathan Butal,
who is the founder of Slide Share was there,
their company also used to do a little bit
of, you know, Flash Ruby kind of work. SlideShare
was flash-based when it started. Now it's moved completely
to html5, I think.
So, Jonathan and I got together, and we thought,
like, there's no tech community in Delhi. We have
to do something about it. They have, they have
a Delhi office and Jonathan was in Delhi at
that point of time. So we, we organized this
barcamp. And I made a presentation on Ruby on
Rails. 90% of the audience had not heard about
Ruby on Rails. They just didn't know what Ruby
on Rails was, which was good for us. The
presentation was like, it, it, it, there was a
time when everybody who did an introduction to Ruby
on Rails presentation, the title used to be, Build
Your Blog in Fifteen Minutes. So I did the
same thing. It took me thirty, however. So, I
build that blog, did a live demo, and you
know. It was org- it was organized at Adobe.
So they gave us their auditorium and we could
use it, about a hundred people attended, and the
presentation went wild.
And it was like, cool. So we had more
work than we could handle. A lot of people
saw this presentation, and they read about Ruby on
Rails, read about DHH, saw what 37Signals was doing,
saw BaseCamp and they were like, OK. Our product,
also, we want to get built in Ruby on
Rails. And we started getting a lot of inbound
leads. And the six of us, at that point
of time, were like kind of swamped.
And so we also made decent money on the
side so that I could afford to go to
the RailsConf in Europe in 2006. So that's me,
DHH, and Marcel Melina Jr., who what, used to,
I think, work for 27Signals. But one of the
original guys who worked with DHH and released Rails.
Now I think he works for Twitter.
So, the biggest thing there wasn't like, I had
my interactions with open source software. I had my
interactions with contributing to open source software, not just
consuming it. Not just using it, like those small
Wordpress plugins and Drupal modules. I had done all
of that. But what really as huge, when I
was there at the conference was the community. I
got to rub shoulders with DHH, Marcel Melina, James,
Jim Weirich, Dave Thomas, David Black. All these guys
were, where there, and I was like wow. This
is so cool. ANd it was like that, that
whole aura of being there with so many great
developers, people a thousand times smarter than you, you
get to learn so much.
And that, once again set me thinking to, how
can I take some of this back home and
apply it? We, we had just kind of with
that back home and started a small community, but
how could we grow it into something bigger? How
could we really start producing more better software back
in Delhi? So, what that lead to was, like,
I released my first RubyGem. We called it VPayPal.
V was for Vinsol. So it was called VPayPal.
It was a kind of a Ruby wrapper around
the PayPal website payments pro library, a wrapper around
PayPal website pro functionality that PayPal provides. So that
was my first gem.
And then what I also did was encouraged a
lot of our developers to do, you know, to
contribute to open source software, to really play a
role in that community, which I had experienced when
I went for that European RailsConf. And the name
that's mentioned there, number one is Sur Max. He
is a developer that used to work for us.
And if you look at two and three, they
are at, at some point of time, they were
Rails core contributors. And this guy submitted 2162 patches,
which were accepted into Rails core in a month.
That means seventy patches a day. On average.
So, and he won the, this HackFest was organized
by a site called Working with Rails dot com,
which was like very popular at some point of
time. So, so that's something, like, being there with
the community and then contributing and encoring other people
in our company to contribute finally, we got some
recognition, which we were really proud of at that
point of time. We still are.
Like, this was, if, if you look at this,
this is from Obi, Obi Fernandez, the founder of
Hash Rocket. He gave a presentation at RubyFringe 2008,
where this was a slide which showed the competitive
landscape in Rails development firms today, and we were
so happy to see Vinsol right there on the
left corner, bottom corner. We were elated. We were
like wow, are we in this league? So it
was great, like. We were mentioned with ThoughtWorks, HashRocket,
PivotalLabs. These were like, companies we used to look
up to. Can we be like them someday? But
here, like, a guy picks, picks us. And not
any ordinary guy. He's the founder of Hash Rocket,
who feels like Vinsol is a competitor to them.
We were like, yeah. We are doing something. We
were happy.
So. But. Doing all this, like, we had not
spent a single dollar in marketing. The, the only
way we had done all this was blogging, open
source contribution, and regularly attending the RailsConf. So, just
doing all this, we, we came from, like, kind
of nobody, dabbling with Java, PHP, from a basement,
to having a proper office, to help people by
that time. And being counted as one of the
companies in Ruby on Rails services that matters. People
look at us as competition.
And the good thing was, not Indian companies, but
companies in U.S. HashRocket has their headquarters in Florida.
So a company in Florida thinks of us their
competition. Which was good. OK. We've done something. It
felt good.
So, today we are sixty people in three offices
in Delhi. But this'll continue to kind of try
and build that culture and sustain that company culture
that we had set up. So we, we built
our own training tool called VTApp, which has these
tracks, which are owned by the experienced developers. They
curate these tracks. They ensure that they remain updated,
and they also review code by any- anybody who
joins Vinsol has to go through this, do a
six months training on the job, paid training. And
finish all these before had can be ready for
an internal project. After successfully doing that, he's ready
for a client project.
So we, we just didn't want to be like
that, that experience that I had which I mentioned
being in that office with, with this great Japanese
developer, Bakano-san, and he's sitting like this. Really kind
of had that impact on me that I, I
thought like, we have to create something that is
very different. not this huge, twenty-thousand people working in
an office, nine to five developers not really happy
about what they are doing. Maybe code monkeys, if
I may use that term. No. We were going
to create a different company. We were trying to
do something else.
So, gradually, like, all these tools came into existence,
which kind of lead to us, lead us to
where we are today. Even, like, this is a
guy who's just joined our company, and we, we
kind of in, encourage them to still continue to
contribute to Rails core. This is as recent as
three days ago. The last commit. Even if it's
a typo. Even if it's a documentation thing. We
encourage people to go and, after you've finished your
training, read through the Rails code and do a
commit. If you find something wrong in Rails, even
if it's a typo, don't worry. Don't hesitate. Go
and, you know, send a pull request.
So we, we have like these, very, very new
just have started developing kind of guys who are
making these commits. This is Thursday morning, and it,
it's just a, a fix in the comment like,
the comment shouldn't be this. It should be something
else. So we, we kind of have made it
mandatory.
The good thing is that out of sixty people
that I have mentioned, thirty, around thirty are Rails
code contributors. Whatever be the patch. But they've taken
the pains to go through the Rails internals and
submit something. Submit what, whatever it might be. Doesn't
really matter.
OK. So that was a little bit about the
history. About my background. So I'll quickly, like, talk
about some of the clients and verticals we work
in. One of the verticals in which we do
a lot of work is in e-commerce. Maybe because
I released that VPayPal gem, people thought that I
knew a lot about e-commerce, so we just got
a lot of e-commerce projects. So, some of the
recent and kind of more prominent work that we've
done is, we were working on Ideeli, which is
a flash sale site, head quarter in New York.
This was recently acquired by Groupon. So we, we,
we were the development team which was working on
this project.
There were other people as well, but we were
the core development team. I met the CTO of
Ideeli in the RailsConf three years ago, and since
then we've been working together. So I said, like,
no marketing other than just being here and meeting
people.
Dealdey, this is very interesting. This, this site was,
started as a Groupon clone, but really did well.
It is now funded by Kinovich Ventures of Sweden.
And the guy who started this is, the Forbes
magazine recently wrote an article on the ten more
influential or powerful men in Africa, and Sim, who's
a Harvard educated guy from Nigeria, but wanted to
do something for Nigeria, went back and started this
site Dealdey. He was mentioned in Forbes. And then
he has another venture, which even did better than
- like, doing Dealdey, he saw like, this, this
huge vacuum. A lot of deal sites exist, but
there is no really good reliable e-commerce, basic e-commerce
site where you could just order something and get
it in Nigeria, so he had this idea, and
we built Konga dot com for him, which is
now a MIH invested firm. It's a MIH portfolio
company, MIH Ventures of South Africa.
The really good thing about this project, which I
am proud of, is, like, we built this in
two months. We took Scree as the platform, and
then we had to add a bunch of features,
which were very specific to Nigeria. Like, they needed
a wallet. But Spree does not - are you
aware of Spree? Has anybody? No. So Spree is
an open source Ruby on Rails e-commerce application that's
available. So you could just take that. But it
is very limited. Like, the core functionality is very
limited. But you would, again, add extensions and get
a lot more done.
So, Vinsol actually, not only did we work on
Konga and enable all the features that they needed,
but we took the time to extract them and
make them available as extensions to anybody who wants
to use them. So if you go to SpreeCommerce
dot com slash extensions, you can find all these
extensions by Vinsol which are listed here. So we
did Spree Wallet, Spree Bank Transfers, so that people
could do a transfer to Konga and get their
orders fulfilled. Favorite products, admin routes and access, shared
endpoint. Unified, GTP and Pava are three gateways, very
popular in Nigeria. And then point of sale. There's
a typo there. Poiiint of sale.
So these, these are like, and we built, and
I'm really proud of - we not only launched
this site in two months, we were even able
to kind of extract so much and make it
available to the community, to anybody who wants to
use. These are also available on RubyGems. These extensions
and a few other open source projects that we
worked on.
And not only did we release it, we actuality
take the effort and the team is motivated enough
to even provide support on open source stuff that
we kind of roll out. LIke people come and
say, you know, I'm facing this problem. And the
team, the team members actually take the pain of
answering each and every request and closing issues that
unknown people create on GitHub, like this, an issue
with your open source software. The ideal answer, or
the typical answer is, OK, it's open source. Go
figure it out and fix it for yourself. But,
no, these guys have so much ownership of that
open source code that they release then, they said,
no, we'll fix it for you. It took five
days maybe but they did it.
But the point is that that culture that we
were trying to build, and you know, by that,
in every person, I feel we've been fairly successful
doing that. And, and SpreeCommerce was watching all the
time what we were doing, and we became the
second firm, you know, to be labeled as SpreeCommerce
premium partners. There's RailsDog, which is based in Washington.
They were the first firm, because that was the
firm founded by Sean Schofield, who was actually the
creator of Spree. Before creating Spree, he was, he,
he had this consultancy, so he moved over to
Spree and RailsDog became the first partner, and we
were the second partner.
Now they have, like, I think nineteen partners.
Another site we helped build is WeWork. Have you
guys heard of WeWork, which is a cool working
space in, like, ten cities in the, in the
U.S.? Ten plus cities. I think they are even
opening an office here in the West lower end
of Chicago. It's, it's a cool working space, where
you can go there and you know, work, pay
by the day, half day, or get a monthly
office. So flexible working space in WeWork, headquartered out
of New York. So we built their entire property
management system, and we, we also built the collaboration
tool for people who are in that space, physically
working together, but don't know what the other guy
does, what, what his specialization is. So they could
use this tool to kind of get to know
each other virtually, and then find somebody right sitting
right next to you maybe, and you can use
those skills.
Then, this is very interesting. Like, we worked for
a product, and the product got funded by GreyLock,
and then GreyLock asks this client, who's, who's your
tech team, who's doing all the work? Because we
want to get, we like your product so much
that we want to get it done but he
same team. We want to kind of get rid
of our existing website and we want to seamlessly,
I, I built that blog.
So, it took me thirty, however, so I did
the same.
[audio issue]
-very different. It, well, it wasn't like you couldn't
just take any out of box, see the solution
and implement it, so we, we built a custom,
the presentation was, Ruby on Rails was-
[audio issue]
-out of Detroit, Michigan. It, it started by a
physician who helps others prepare for emergency medicine examination.
It's original name was EMQB, Emergency Medical Question Bank,
where you could go and prepare. This is interesting
because it's bootstrapped and profitable, from BaseCamp. And they
were like what 37Signal was doing, DHH, and so
I read about Ruby and Rails, read about-
[audio issue]
And, and over the years, we've done some work
from op- for OpenTable, Disney, Logitech, Best Buy. The
reason I, I'm showing all this is that, which
leads us into the third part of this presentation.
Is, like minimal marketing, mostly word of mouth and
partner relationships. So we've kind of built these partner
relationships with agencies, with other developers here, with development
firms, small development firm services, which has allowed us
to work with clients like these, which is like,
a team that, a company that doesn't even have
a marketing office in the U.S. they can land
clients like this.
OK. So I'll quickly talk about VinSol partnership program.
That's the last part of the slide. Last part
of the presentation. So, who is it for? It's
for Rails developer having more work and less time.
So they need help. Or if it's for smaller
consulting shops planning to scale their operations. The, the
basic simple model that works, is like staff augmentation.
We have a team there, if you want to
use that team to augment what you're doing here,
you can contact us.
There, there are kind of variations of this model,
which I'll skip for now. And for, for agencies,
like we have a model which is the technology
partner. That is how we worked on all those
projects for, like, Disney, OpenTable. We do some work
for Chevron. Chipotle. The only reason we can do
it is that we, partnered with these design agencies,
brand agencies, advertising agencies who, who know a lot
about design, but when it comes to technology, they
need help, so they bring us in as partners.
And then the product owners, this is the most
interesting model. Like, you could build a product or
you could just get your own team. Because, we
could build a team for you. We have the
infrastructure. We've done it for ourselves. We, we do
it for other people as well. One bonus you
get in doing this is like, if you're interested,
you could come and live in India, be with
the team, work with them. I mean, do the
MVP there or do the real one there, and
come back. It gives you two advantages when is
that, the MVP gets done much faster if you're
there, and second is you know the team like
anything, you know each person what its, what his
skills are, what his strengths or weaknesses are, which
is like a huge plus when you have like
just three or four people running the whole show.
And we've even done equity deals. So with these
like kind of product owners who don't have a
lot of capitol, we don't mind doing equity deals,
though you want to start with a pure consultative
model, and then maybe feel that things might work
out, we've, we've also done equity deals.
So, this would help you, you know, kind of
build scale, get scale, or get your product build,
and it would really help me as well. Cause
I, I can, I don't really have to focus
so much on business then, which unfortunately I have
to, in these last few years, because the team
size has grown and there's always that bolts and
pressures or running a business. But I can go
back to, you know, what I love doing, which
is coding.
Thank you.