 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. We also do iOS and Android consultancy. It's a 13-year-old firm, and we have around 60 plus developers now. So I was going to ask these questions 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 going to ask if there are solopreneurs or freelance programmers here, or if people belong to companies with kind of two to five developers, or are their product people here? So I would have kind of changed the direction of my talk accordingly. Okay, so in my talk, 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 path we have, and why it exists. So those two things would kind of set the context for the third part is 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 yeah, 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 placements in India. And I got selected in a huge Indian outsourcing firm with maybe 15,000 developers. I was chosen to work on a Y2K project, which is like year 2000 problem, where you go into this millions of lines of cobalt code. You go and find where year is represented as YY and you replace it by YY, YY, YY, and you're done. So that was so intellectually stimulating and satisfying. So I quit that job and I started learning Java. James Costling 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 an internet startup there, which was in the 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 the two of us were working in this team in Tokyo, while we had a six people 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 offshore development team, so 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 just called my guru. He was like, Vatan O'San was sitting like this. And I was like, what happened? He said, Manik Sahn, 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 this is totally non-modular. This is the perfect example of what we can call spaghetti code. So I realized, okay. 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 very entrepreneurial, but maybe somewhere that incident 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 were mainly working on Java, Korba, 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 of it we were doing with Pearl and some 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 fiance 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 is 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 very easy actually to start a company if you have a paying client already existing, so that was good for us, very fortunate for us. We're still working on Java, Korba, Oracle, whatever little open source interaction I had had was with these Ruby scripts which we did. But then due to financial reasons, we decided to move from Oracle to Postgres. That was really when I saw we've been spending millions of yen on 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 was my first major interaction with open source software. So we continued to work out of the basement of our house for a couple more years. We were just kind of 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'll get more Java projects, but the irony was that there are no Java projects for two people team. Java needs at least 10, 20, 30 people. You can't do anything meaningful, not a project like you can be a consultant, but to do a full project, you need 10 people maybe minimum. So that kind of forced us into the direction of moving towards PHP, which was like on a swing Facebook was launched and kind of picking up, 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 with open source because we built some custom Drupal modules and extensions, WordPress modules, WordPress extensions, and we were one of the first companies at that time to launch what was a Ajax-based module for Drupal, which is 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 Rails in a couple of hours than what I could take days to do in PHP or Java, and that was like really when I got hooked on to Rails and then the tipping point was this 2006 bar camp. How many of you know about what bar camps 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 this context, they are not just names, but they are acronyms, so foo was a, foo camp was a conference organized by O'Reilly, it was called French of O'Reilly, F-O-O, so they called it the foo camp and it was like the elitist group of people who'd come together 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 is again an acronym. It stood for Bay Area Rejects. So everybody who was rejected and not a part of foo camp was now invited or like it was an 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 first one of these in Delhi in 2006. Jonathan Boutel who is the founder of SlideShare was there. Their company also used to do a little bit of 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 a Delhi office and Jonathan was in Delhi at that point of time. So we organized this bar camp 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, there was a time when everybody who did an introduction to Ruby on Rails presentation, the title used to be build your blog in 15 minutes. So I did the same thing. It took me 30 however. So I built that blog, did a live demo and it was organized at Adobe. So they gave us their auditorium and we could use it about 100 people attended and the presentation went viral, which 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 37 signals was doing, saw base camp and they were like, okay, 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 site so that I could afford to go to the Rails Conf in Europe in 2006. So that's me, DHH and Marcel Molina Jr. Who used to I think work for 37 signals, but one of the original guys who worked with DHH and released Rails. Now I think he works for Twitter. So I mean the biggest thing there wasn't like I had my interactions with open source software. I had my interactions with contributing open source software, not just consuming it, not just using it by those small word press plugins and Drupal modules. I had done all of that, but what really was huge when I was there at the conference was the community. I got to rub shoulders with DHH, Marcel Molina, James Buck, Jimi Rich, Dave Thomas, David Black, all these guys were there and I was like, wow, this is so cool. And it was like 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 what again set me thinking was how can I take some of this back home and apply it? We had just kind of with that bar camp 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 led to was like, I released my first Ruby gem. I remember we called it V PayPal, V was for Winsor. So it was called V PayPal. 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 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 on number one is Surmax, he is a developer who used to work for us. And if you look at two and three, they are at some point of time, they were Rails core contributors. And this guy submitted 2,162 patches which were accepted into Rails core in a month. That means 70 patches a day on average. So, and he won the, this hackfest was organized by a site called workingwithrails.com, which was like very popular at some point of time. So that's something like being there with the community and then contributing and encouraging 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, but this was, if you look at this, this is from Obi Fanandis, the founder of Hashrocket. He gave a presentation at Ruby Fringe 2008, where this was a slide which showed the competitive landscape in Rails development firms today. And we were so happy to see, you know, when saw 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, Pivotal Labs. These were like companies we used to look up to. Can we be like them someday? But here like a guy picks us, and not any ordinary guy. He's the founder of Hashrocket who feels like Vinsol is a competitor to them. We were like, yeah, we are doing something. We were happy. But doing all this, like we had not spent a single dollar on marketing. We, the only way we had done all this was blogging, open source contribution, and regularly attending the Rails Conf. So just doing all these, we came from like kind of nobody dabbling with Java, PHP from a basement to having a proper office, 12 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 US. Hashrocket is headquartered in Florida. So a company in Florida thinks of us as their competition, which is good, okay, we've done something. It feel good. So today we are 60 people in three offices in Delhi, but we still continue to kind of try and build that culture and sustain that company culture that we had set up. So we built our own training tool called VT App, 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 anybody who joins Winsol has to go through this, do a six month training on the job paid training, and finish all these before he can be ready for an internal project. After successfully doing that, he's ready for a client project. So we just didn't want to be like that, that experience which I had, which I earlier mentioned, being in that office with this great Japanese developer, Watanosan, and he's sitting like this, really kind of had that impact on me that I thought like we have to create something that is very different, not this huge 20,000 people working in an office, nine to five developers, not really happy about what they're 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 led to where we are today. Even like this is a guy who's just joined our company and we kind of encourage them to still continue to contribute to Rails code. This is as recent as three days ago, the last commit. Even if it's a typo, even it's a documentation thing, we encourage people go and after you finish 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 send a pull request. So we have these very new, just have started developing kind of guys who are making these commits. This is today morning and it's just a fix in the comment. Like the comment shouldn't be this, it should be something else. So we kind of have made it mandatory. The good thing is that out of those 60 people that I mentioned, around 30 are Rails code contributors. Whatever be the patch, but they've taken the pains to go through the Rails internals and submit something. Whatever it might be, it doesn't really matter. Okay, so that was a little bit about the history, about my background. So I'll quickly talk about some of the clients and verticals we work in, one of the verticals which we do a lot of work is in e-commerce. Maybe because I released that, V, PayPal, 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 Ideally, which is a flash sale site, headquartered in New York. This was recently acquired by Groupon. So 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 Ideally 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. Deal there, this is very interesting. This site was started as a Groupon clone but really did well. It is now funded by Kinevich Ventures of Sweden and the guy who started this is the Forbes magazine recently wrote an article on the 10 most 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 Deal Day. He was mentioned in Forbes and then he has another venture which even did better than like doing Deal Day. He saw that there is 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.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'm proud of is like we built this in two months. We took Spree 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 could 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.com slash extensions you can find all these extensions by Vinsol which are listed here. So we did Spree wallet, Spree bank transfer so that people could do a transfer to Konga and get their orders fulfilled. Favorite products, admin roles and access, loyalty points, unified GTP and Paga are three gateways very popular in Nigeria. And then point of sale. There's a type of their point of sale. So these like we built and I'm really proud of like we not only launched the site in two months we were even able to 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've worked on. And not only did we release it we actually 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 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 okay it's open source go figure it out and fix it for yourself. But no these guys like have so much ownership of that open source code that they release that they said no we'll fix it for you. It took five days maybe but they did it. So the point is that that culture that we were trying to build and you know imbibe that in every person I feel we've been fairly successful in doing that. And Spree Commerce was watching all the time what we were doing and we became the second firm to be labeled as Spree Commerce Premium Partners. There's Rails Dog which is based in Washington. They were the first firm because that was the firm founded by Sean Schofield who is actually the creator of Spree. Before creating Spree he had this consultancy and so he moved over to Spree and Rails Dog became the first partner and we were the second partner. Now they have like I think 19 partners. Another site we helped build is V-Work. Have you guys heard of V-Work which is a co-working space in like 10 cities in the US, 10 plus cities. I think they're even opening an office here in the West Loop in Chicago. It's a co-working space where you can go there and work, pay by the day, half day, or get a monthly office. So flexible working space and we work headquartered out of New York. So we built their entire property management system and 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 his specialization is. So they could use this tool to kind of get to know each other virtually and then find somebody 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 your tech team, who's doing all the work because we like your product so much that we want to get it done by the same team. We want to kind of get rid of our existing website and we want a CMS, I built that blog. So it took me 30 however. So I did the same thing, very different. It wasn't like you couldn't just take any out-of-box CMS solution and implement it. So we built the customs, the presentation was like Ruby on Rails first, which was good for our review. It's an exam preparation site based out of Detroit, Michigan. It started by a physician so that helps others prepare for emergency medicine examination. So its original name was EMQB, Emergency Medicine Question Bank where you can go and prepare. This is interesting because it's bootstrapped and profitable from SOAR Basecamp and they were like, seven signals was doing DHH, SOAR was 30 about Ruby on Rails, read about this presentation like many. And over the years, we've done some work for OpenTable, Disney, Logitech, Best Buy. The reason I am showing all this is that which leads us into the third part of this presentation is like minimum 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 firms here which has allowed us to work with clients like these, otherwise like a team which a company which doesn't even have a marketing office in the US, they can't land clients like this. Okay, so I'll quickly talk about Vinsol partnership program. That's the last part of the presentation. So who is it for? It's for Rails developer having more work and less time. So if they need help, or if it's for smaller consulting shops planning to scale their operations, 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, we can contact us. There are kind of variations of this model which I'll skip for now. And 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've partnered with these design agencies, brand agencies, advertising agencies 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 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 V1 there and then come back. It gives you two advantages. One is that the MVP gets done much faster if you're there and second, you know the team, like anything, you know each person, 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 capital, we don't mind doing equity deals, though we want to start with a pure consultative model and then maybe if we feel that things might work out, we've also done equity deals. So this would help you kind of build scale, get scale, or get your product build and it would really help me as well because I don't 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 pulls and pressures of running a business, but I can go back to what I love doing, which is coding. Thank you.