About the Speaker:
Naren is an accomplished executive in building organizations and has extensively conducted business in the US and India. Most recently, he co-founded ScanCafe Inc; headquartered in the San Francisco bay area. Naren built ScanCafe from his garage with the objective of enabling people to relive their photographic and video based memories (past and present) by providing products and services that are powered by a creative workforce that serve as the customer's personal digital studio. ScanCafe won the CNN Money 2007 award for best quality and price in the US market and has been featured in the Oprah magazine and The Wall Street Journal. The company is well-funded and backed by venture capital from Sigma Partners in the silicon valley. ScanCafe has a 700 person creative fulfillment center in Whitefield, Bangalore.
Prior to founding ScanCafe, Naren spent a decade in various management roles in the microchip and solar panel industries. During his tenure in microelectronics, he worked at industry leaders like Applied Materials in Silicon Valley and at Moser Baer in New Delhi. Raised in Goa, India, Naren holds a B.E. from BITS, Pilani-Rajasthan, an MBA from the Wharton School of Business and a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, where he completed his dissertation in bio-artificial tissues and image processing of biopolymers using confocal laser scanning microscopy. He has been awarded patents in the areas of remote plasma generation and the magnetic shielding of plasmas. When he is not patenting things, Naren likes to paint mostly oil on canvas.
Description of the Talk:
He charted out the growth of ScanCafe right from its birth, exposing all the opportunities and challenges they encountered.
He spoke on customer needs and how ScanCafe met them. He was quite frank in admitting that his company could not meet certain needs, like fast delivery of scanned photos.
He then explained to the audience how he used optimization to pinpoint the ideal price for the services being offered by ScanCafe. Low Prices are the biggest USP of ScanCafe now as it offers its services at prices which are a fourth of the prices being charged by its competitors.
He revealed that the biggest risk had to take was outsourcing to India. Even though surveys indicated that customers were not ready to have their photographs shipped all the way to India to have them scanned, the founders of ScanCafe decided to go ahead with India, due to the superior quality of manpower and lower wages. The gamble paid off and ScanCafe is growing at a very rapid pace now, all set to break even in a few months.
Speaking on another interesting problems he had to overcome, he said that ScanCafe initially had to Airlift photos in big cartons, which were mostly empty, just to ensure that not even one photograph is lost. "The devil is in the details." "You have to be paranoid about all the small details."
He concluded by advising the students that the best sources of market information are surveys conducted among friends and family. Inexpensive and modestly accurate.
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