TechTree: By George!

That's me in the TechTree office in Nariman Point, back in 2002. ITNation was a great place to work at and while I was there for less than a year, that time was quite memorable

In an earlier post, I wrote about having submitted my resignation at Indian Auto. With nothing to do, zero earnings and meagre savings, while still paying rent for my apartment (along with other regular monthly expenses), I wasn’t exactly in a very comfortable position. Had been writing to and calling up some people whom I knew, but nothing came of it. After a few weeks, I started getting a bit worried – if I did not get work, I might even have to leave Bombay and go back to Lucknow, and I really, really did not want things to come to that. But then I got a phone call, which helped put thing back on track. The story continues here.

One Sunday morning, about six weeks after I had left Indian Auto, I got a call from GV Sreekumar, a good friend and a professor at IDC, IIT Bombay. GV and I had earlier worked together at CHIP, where he headed the design team. After moving on from CHIP, I had gone to CNET India, while GV went to IDC, a prestigious design college which is a part of IIT Bombay. With a deep interest in typography and great love for high-end Apple computers, GV is a genial, soft-spoken gentleman and we got along very well when we were at CHIP. Both of us lived in New Bombay back then, and we sometimes used to meet up at a bar in Nerul for our favourite Old Monk rum with Coke and lots of ice.

That Sunday morning, GV called to ask what I was doing and whether I’d be interested in taking up a short, three-month project where I’d be working for HP Labs, which had tied up with the IDC for some design and content work for their website. The pay would be good, he promised, and I agreed immediately since I was desperate for work at that point. The next day, I went to the IDC campus in Powai, where GV introduced me to the small team of writers and designers with whom I’d be working, along with Warren from HP – whom GV referred to as Warren bhai – who was in charge of the entire project. HP Labs offered to match whatever I was being paid at Indian Auto and I was happy with this arrangement – while this was only a three-month project, it would at least allow me to stay afloat for the time being, while I looked for a more permanent job. The writing work was fairly simple and they gave me the flexibility to work from home – I was required to go to the IDC campus only once or twice a week, and sometimes not even that.

About a month before the HP Labs project was due to be completed, I got a call from George, another friend of mine from my CHIP days. A particularly affable man with whom I got along extremely well, George had been the managing editor at Computer Reseller News (CRN), a B2B trade magazine published by Jasubhai Digital Media (JDM) and the first of its kind in India. In the JDM office in Taj Building, on DN Road, our cubicles were right next to each other, and while George was senior to me in the organization, he was friendly with me, and we used to like talking to each other. He had a solid background in tech journalism and before coming to work for CRN, he had worked with Express Computer, which was published by The Indian Express newspaper group, and had later also set up his own computer magazine called Living Computers, which I used to read occasionally when I was in Lucknow. When I was leaving CHIP, it was George who had helped me get a job with CNET India.

At the time when I was working on the short-term HP Labs project, George had also left CRN and had joined ITNation, which was based in Nariman Point. Led by a dynamic duo – Pawan Sood and Rizwan Thakur – ITNation was a young startup that was into Web-based B2B tech publications. With George on board, they were now looking to start a consumer-focused technology website and were looking to hire an editor who could lead this new property. On that day, when George called me up, he asked whether I’d like to come to his office and meet him, so he could discuss things with me. I went to ITNation’s office in Nariman Point and received a warm welcome from George, who explained the company’s plans to launch this new tech website and asked me if I’d be interested in being the editor of this new website. It would require building up an editorial team and setting up a hardware and software test centre from scratch, which sounded quite exciting. I said I’d definitely be interested and asked if ITNation would match the salary that I was getting at Indian Auto. George said he’d get back to me on that in 2-3 days, and I left his office in high spirits.

Later that week, George called back to let me know that it would not be possible for ITNation to match my earlier pay and quoted their best offer, which was about 20% less than what I had been getting at Indian Auto. Still, the prospect of doing this new tech website seemed quite interesting. If I took the editor’s position, George would be my immediate boss, which was also great since he and I anyway got along very well. Plus, I had no other options at that time and accepting George’s offer seemed to be the best thing to do. And so, I said yes and was told to start at the beginning of the next week. I still had about three weeks to go before I’d be wrapping my work for HP Labs, but George very kindly allowed me to continue that work from the ITNation office itself, as long as I did not let that interfere with my work for ITNation. It was an arrangement that worked for all of us.

I was still living in the same rented apartment in CBD Belapur, New Bombay, which I’d moved into after joining CNET. This was about 45km from ITNation’s office in Nariman Point, so I used to take the 7.30 a.m. dheemi local from Belapur and reach VT in an hour, after which I used to walk to Nariman Point, which took another 20-25 minutes. The HR head at ITNation, who was, incidentally, an excellent guitarist, insisted that everybody must be in office by 9.00 a.m. sharp and we did our best to comply with that. If you were late for more than three days in a month, that would mean the deduction of half a day’s salary, so people did whatever they could to be on time.

Pavan and Rizwan, who had set up ITNation and ran the company, were tall, suave and very stylish. Pavan, whose father owned a shipping company, was very South Bombay, with a posh accent, perfectly tailored clothes and movie star demeanour. Rizwan was a bit more earthy, though equally stylish. I reported to George and worked closely with him, but Pavan and Rizwan did meet me briefly after I joined, and seemed to be reasonably satisfied with having hired me. With Pavan’s and Rizwan’s inputs, George and I quickly got down to detailed discussions regarding every aspect of the new website. The first thing, of course, was naming it, and after much deliberation we settled on ‘TechTree.’ (Note: TechTree still exists but is now owned and operated by someone else. ITNation no longer exists.) But naming the website was the easy part. Next up was finding a team of features writers and people who could conduct hardware and software tests, and write about it in a convincing manner, in a language that would be accessible and easy to understand for our particular audience.

Once again, a former colleague from CHIP entered the scene. Varun, from Chandigarh, was an exceptional talent – at a very young age, he had developed a vast understanding of both hardware and software, and also had very good writing skills – a hard combination to find. He had written to me when I was with CHIP saying that he wanted to join the editorial team, and Gourav had hired him for the CHIP test centre, where he did a great job. Varun had, since then, moved on from CHIP and was looking for work when I joined ITNation. I asked him to speak to George, which he did. After some salary negotiations, ITNation eventually hired Varun and we asked him to set up a test centre for hardware and software, much like the one where he had worked at CHIP. Varun was able to set up a test centre and was able to put in place all the systems and processes that go with it. Not just that, he was also able to help us hire more editorial team members for the test centre – young computer enthusiasts with the right mix of skills, namely, a strong understanding of computer hardware and/or software, along with good writing skills. In the meanwhile, I also found and hired some team members who would write features and news-based stories for the website.

Within a few weeks, we had a team of around 7-8 people, some of whom were in the test centre and the others in the writers’ team. The team comprised an eclectic mix of characters, some of whom I quite enjoyed interacting with. Particularly Jaison, for his enthusiasm for both tech as well as good food. Shravan, for his unflagging optimism and perpetual good cheer. The design person, Andre – a shared resource among various ITN teams – was fun to talk to, and a brilliant illustrator. Neha, Sonal, Hazel, Hussain, Carol, Vitthal, Shreos… the list of people at ITN whom I got along with was practically endless. It was a good workplace, with a mostly young team of people, most of whom were quite passionate about their work and gave it their best. We worked hard and after work, partied hard – the team would often go out together for lunch (there were many good places in Nariman Point that were in close proximity to the ITN office), and on Friday evenings we’d often go for a movie, usually to one of the theatres in nearby Colaba. I still wasn’t earning as much as I was at Indian Auto and that sometimes rankled, but there was enough money to get by, and I was anyway having such a good time working with TechTree that I wasn’t complaining.

Of course, TechTree and ITN weren’t just about having a good time. We had work to do. The objective was to build up TechTree as India’s premier ‘personal technology’ destination on the Web. We were not covering enterprise computing, but wanted to cater to readers who wanted news and reviews of hardware and software that they used in their actual day to day lives. And that meant reviews of things like desktop PCs, laptops, graphics cards, sound cards, motherboards, portable hard drives, keyboards and miscellaneous other bits of hardware. And, of course, software reviews – software for accounting, design, illustration, word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, animation, image and video editing, and so on. We were setting up TechTree back in 2002, and phones weren’t really that big a thing back then. Most people just used regular feature phones with a physical keypad. Those who were really rich and very tech-savvy had, at best, a Nokia 9210 Communicator, which seemed as exotic as an alien from outer space to the rest of us. In fact, as far as I can remember, we never reviewed a single phone during my time with TechTree and it never occurred to any of us that someday, tech websites would be all about phones (well, smartphones) and other mobile devices. Oh, and reviews were all about text and photos – there was no video. YouTube hadn’t been invented at the time (it came in 2005) and people still actually read stuff, instead of just watching videos all day on YouTube.

TechTree was about more than just content. For Pavan, Rizwan and George, the big thing they wanted to get into, with TechTree, was ecommerce – which is why the primary focus was hardware reviews, comparison tests and other computer hardware-related stories. Their vision was to eventually tie up with computer manufacturers, retailers and resellers and to have a ‘Buy Now’ button at the end of every hardware review that TechTree did. They envisioned a complex system whereby all clicks to retailers/resellers would be tracked and logged, and every purchase that happened on a third-party website via TechTree would be recorded, after which a certain percentage of the transaction would be paid to ITN by its retail partner(s). Today, these kind of ecommerce setups are the norm on almost all content-driven websites, but back in 2002, the idea found few takers and did not really take off. It was just too early – people weren’t comfortable with the idea of buying stuff online, everybody wanted to first ‘touch and feel’ whatever they were buying, and those who did have credit cards did not want to give out their credit card information online. So, while TechTree did get some basic display advertising, where the advertiser paid to have their clickable banner ads displayed on the website, the real big thing – ecommerce, which is where the big money supposedly was – did not happen.

Given that we hadn’t really been able to make TechTree’s ecommerce aspect work, Rizwan and Pavan weren’t entirely happy. To his credit, Pavan always kept his cool and never showed even a hint of anger or irritation. Rizwan also tried to keep a lid on his temper most of the time, but occasionally he did let loose let everyone know that he was not satisfied with the way things were going. The existing ad sales team did their best but all they could get were a few banner ads, which meant TechTree was not really earning anything much. It was a difficult situation for the company but we soldiered on.

In all of this, George hired a new business manager for TechTree – Deepa – whom he knew from his JDM days. Deepa had earlier worked for ZDNet, which had been brought to India by JDM, the group which also published CHIP, CRN and Network Computing. Deepa joined TechTree as head of marketing and was introduced to the team. She was sharp and had a no-nonsense demeanour. While I personally did not have much to do with what Deepa did – my domain was editorial and hers was marketing – we did get along just fine, and coordinating with her as and when required wasn’t a problem. This was a big plus because in many (most?) publications – both print and online – editorial and marketing heads are often at loggerheads, with each person trying to get the upper hand and trying to prove that it is he, or she, who runs the place. While Deepa was firm in her convictions, she wasn’t overly aggressive and never tried to push the editorial team around. She and I were on friendly terms – we protected our turf but also respected our boundaries, and it worked just fine.

To be continued…