 So, good afternoon ladies and gentlemen, my name is Aditya Bandi and I'm really excited to be here today at the UX India conference. So when I was asked to speak here, I thought really hard on what I should talk about. It took some time to figure out the obvious. Like, I'm a designer and an entrepreneur. So why not talk about how design helped me to be an entrepreneur. So let's begin with what I was doing when I didn't know anything about design or entrepreneurship. So most of my childhood I spent, most of my childhood and my schooling happened in a place called Rajamundri. That's a town in Andhra Pradesh, I know, and people know that, that town. Like any kid I was happy going to the school, having a good time. And one day I went to a lecture about IIT and I really liked the way it was projected and I decided I want to get an admit into IIT. I came back home and told my parents that, hey, I want to do this. And three months later, we moved to Hyderabad for my studies. Hyderabad has a better education than Rajamundri. This happened in 2000 when I was in seventh grade. Once I moved to Hyderabad, I started studying awful lot of maths, physics, chemistry, like a lot. If you're from Hyderabad, you would know the kind of, you know, things students end up doing, like waking up at five o'clock in the morning, going to tuitions, giving a lot of competitive examinations. The whole aim was to get into IIT. So that was what I was doing before I knew anything about design or entrepreneurship. So I was, one thing I was doing is that I was solving tons of problems, problems like what is the value of root of i plus root of minus i. If you ask me now and again, I was just trying to do that root 2, I guess, I might be wrong. But these were the kind of textbook problems that I was solving and I was getting really good at it. I was very hopeful about getting into IIT, but if you know IITs have a very meritocratic system of selecting students and giving them admits. Students, bottom line is students don't have a lot of freedom in terms of what courses or departments they choose. So the rank I got, I was offered a design admit in IIT Guwahati. IIT Guwahati has a department of design. And that's how I ended up, so design literally happened to me. It was not that I picked design. So how does one deal with it? All my life till this point I was studying maths, physics, chemistry, want to be an engineer, suddenly end up in a design degree. Fortunately, it was a very serendipity for me. I fell in love with it with the design program. And like all design schools, IIT Guwahati had a very unique breed of designers. The design students are, they want to be engineers, but they fell in love with design. And they are in an environment where there are other departments around them, like computer science mechanical, and the courses are very interdisciplinary. So in this sort of a scenario, in this sort of environment, I started solving other sort of problems. Till now I was solving textbook problems, and suddenly I was asked to solve problems concerning users or humans. And that's what I started doing, I started solving problems for someone, users. And this change of perspective helped me a lot in the course of becoming an entrepreneur. I fell in love with the design process in analyzing problem, getting all the information required for it to solve, and talking to the user, and finally working on the design solution. It was beautiful. And I started to realize that some of the problems I was working on, and I was interested in as a business viability. I realized if I could build a business model around this solution for the problem, I might eventually build a business. So I started to balance design and business in all the work that I was doing. And that's how I stumbled upon being an entrepreneur. And so far, the journey has been exciting for me. I graduated in 2011. I started working for companies like Cognizant, Microsoft, and Samaritany in the first two years of my career as a UI designer. But then I also wanted to start up. That's when Bookpad happened. It was way back in 2011, December, I clearly remember that I had a set of ideas that I want to work on. I started talking to a lot of people, ended up talking to 25 developers trying to figure out who can work with me. There's one guy who said, I like one of your ideas. And that was eventually, which turned out to be Bookpad. So at Bookpad, what we built was a document preview technology for the cloud. What that essentially means is that whatever we built can open, view, edit documents like Word, PowerPoint, PDF, Excel, and a lot of other formats on the cloud. So with that, we started reaching out to a lot of customers. Our customers are typically, for example, I can give an example of Dropbox. So Dropbox has a lot of files stored on it. And let's say you are a user of Dropbox, you have your Word document on it. You want to see what's inside the Word document. I'm talking like three years back. You can't do it. You have to download the document and then open it, then view it. So what we essentially did was we went to Dropbox and said, hey, why not use us, integrate into Dropbox? And your millions of users can now do much more with documents stored on Dropbox. So we essentially are an enterprise software which we license to companies. So that's what we built. It's a very tech-intensive product. And last year, September, around that time, we got acquired by Yahoo. Currently, we have integrated into Yahoo. Just two weeks back, we've launched the document preview feature, Yahoo Mail. So this is how it looks like. You click on any, so let's say you get an email with, let's say, any of the arrangement like PDF or Word. You click on that, you quickly see a preview of the document right beside your email. It's essentially very similar to Gmail experience, but what we try to do is a much faster experience and a better UI. Here you can see your document and work on your email. You can click Reply All, copy paste contents of the document into your compose message and send it. And let's say you want to expand the view, yeah, here you go. And still you're in the email, you can still get a context of your email. If you hover on the back to message, you can see what was the email that was sent. So this was launched two weeks back. So that completes our, in terms of what we started as a company, built the product, sold to Yahoo, integrated into Yahoo Mail, launched it. Very happy moment for all of us in the startup. Thank you. So that's what we do, essentially. Right now, currently, I'm working as a product manager in Yahoo, handling this very experience. So let's go back to the question, how important is design for business? The numbers say it's very important because 27 startups co-founded by designers are required by big companies in the last five years. And these companies are really big. I'm talking about Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Adobe, Yahoo. And 27 startups is a huge number. If you see all these companies put together, might acquire around 40 at the maximum if the need is really high, 40 startups every year. So that number would amount to almost like 10 to 15% of all the startups getting acquired. Actually, more than that are startups by design founders. So that's a pretty good number. And next is six venture capital firms. These are really big names, name it Axel, Sequoias. They have offered designers to join their teams as investors. This is huge. I mean, previously, like 10 years back, you would see management and MBA grad getting into venture capital firms and investing. And here, designers are asked to step into those roles. What are the other numbers? So this is very recent that the numbers show that the designer to engineer ratio in startups have significantly improved. It is one is to four or one is to five these days. Previously, it used to be one is to 30. What this number says is that designers are the first hires in startups these days. I mean, the core team, if not the co-founder of the core team, the first one, two hires that happened in a startup are designers. Whereas previously, 30 members are already there. Finally, they realize, okay, we are at a certain stage, we need a designer to fix everything. That's our designer. So there's a fundamental shift in the mindset, which is very great. And I experienced this myself. When we started up, the second hire we did was a designer. So it's great. We exactly had a one is to four ratio at Bookpad. And the other stat is that five of the top funded startups, what I'm talking about, billion dollar valuations in the last three years are startups by design co-founders. And these startups are primarily ABNB, fab.com, media-wise, Linda. So again, a very good great stat, which shows that startups by design co-founders are reaching that huge scale. So I think it's great. So these stats are nothing but they tell that designers have a good impact in terms of startups and business. So this feeds what, as I was talking about in the panel discussion, is if you are building a tech product, you as a co-founder needs to be in the sweet spot of knowing about design, knowing about technology, knowing about business. And being a designer, I genuinely feel that you guys already have two-thirds of the knowledge. If you're working somewhere, you already have the experience of working with developers, understanding the technology because you're designing, you know the limitations, you understand the technology in and out, even though you don't code. So you already have two-thirds of the knowledge. You just need to venture out and get the business knowledge out there. See what happened with me? I mean, after working for two years, I had a very good understanding of technology, how the front and back and all of those things work. I could sit with the developer and talk to him in his language. Design, I was confident I could pull it off. So I had both of these and I ventured out and I gained the business knowledge. So that sweet spot is very important. And if you see the other two, somebody's in tech, it's really hard for them to get an understanding of design or business. Somebody's in business, it's really hard for them to understand both design and tech. You guys have a very niche skill set there, so that's a sweet spot. Last bit of thoughts on for designers wanting to start up or work for it. So first and foremost thing that you need to understand is startups are very chaotic. Even though how much ever being a designer will love process and a certain methodology, startups are very chaotic in nature. So somehow you need to figure out that process that works for you. I've seen a lot of designers working for startups or who started up getting really frustrated that, hey, I spent a week working on this. You asked me to all chuck it and work on something else, that's crazy. But then that's how it is. Strategies change on as fast as a day in a day. So be ready for it. Try to align your expectations in that sense. And more important than ever, make everyone in your team understand the process that you're following and why you're doing it. What will this help is that it will kind of help grow a design culture in the startup right from an early stage. It is one of your responsibilities for sure. Otherwise later, as the team grows, it will be hard to explain why you're doing it. The reason why you're doing it is, hey, this is why it is. So if you, right from the beginning, if you instill this, you start telling why you're doing, whatever you're doing. Everybody, after a period of time, you don't even have to do it. Everybody already understands, okay, if he's saying this, okay, he must have thought about that. Makes your life really easy. Third would be to understand the business and accommodate it. So most of the times, as a designer, forget the business aspect of it, of why you're doing a product. Even if you're working in a company. And most of the programs, college programs, you really focus just on the product and not worry about the business side of it. But when you were working in a company or if you're working in a startup or you were just starting, please accommodate business in your goals, in everything that you do. Because eventually it's two sides of the same coin. And for entrepreneurs trying to work with designers, all your nominee entrepreneurs are there here who are not designers. But if you're trying to work with designers, like have confidence and let the designer help drive the product nations. I think this is very important because it'll eventually turn into a process. So you don't have to, you're not care caretically doing random stuff. Then for entrepreneurs, it's very important to work with the designer and build a process inside your company. What this means is that let's say, for bigger companies, let's say you have the product cycles are much longer. For startups, the product cycles are much shorter. So you might have to be super agile. I mean, in two days, you would get user feedback and again, I'd rate on the design on the third day. So you might have to build a custom process right inside your startup. And for entrepreneurs, again, a designer has to be a first hire. It should be a first rate citizen in the startup, not when you grow the whole company and then utilize, hey, my product works really bad. And then you hire a designer to fix things. So with that, I would want to conclude my talk. Thanks a lot for being patient. If I have time, I can take a few questions.