1. Skills & Hiring
Vishnu Gopal

2. CTO, MobME.

3. Technology Mentor at Startup Village.

4. About me
Technology guy.
Initial engineer who worked on SlideShare.
HCI from UCL, UK.

5. Let’s jump in.

6. Skills & Hiring

7. Skills
noun. the ability to do something well. expertise.

8. Skills
Different from acquired knowledge. Also not purely
“experience”.

9. Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies. Gartner 2013.

10. Skills
Expertise in “in memory analytics” is different from a
degree in Computer Science.

11. Skills
Skill development is also hard because of the increasing
scale of technology inventions.

13. Computer
Programming
DevOps
TDD
Agile
Design Patterns
Functional
Languages
Premature
optimisation
Literate
Programming

14. Skills
Several of the programming skills were only refined in
the last 10 years. How do you build expertise in it?

15. Skills
What we need is a new framework to think about skills

16. Perpetual
Beta
Skills should be developed
throughout one’s life.
!
Not to be acquired once but
constantly developed.

17. Skills
A professional should think of himself as a startup.
Constantly reinventing himself. Always learning.

18. Which of these should you learn?

19. Skills
This is the same answer I give to startups. Pick something
you are interested in. Pick something that has potential.

20. Skills
But in life, things don’t go always as planned. So if that
happens to you, pivot.

21. Btech
HCI
Tech Guy
UX Guy
(Persevere)
(Pivot)

22. Btech
HCI
Tech Guy
UX Guy
(Persevere)
(Pivot)
Pivot
happened
here

23. Skills
As a professional, think of lifelong learning through multiple
changing careers. Pivot & persevere based on learning.

24. Skills
<small break for questions>

25. Hiring
MobME made 20Cr in top-line revenue last year. We
started in 2005. We’re a 100+ person company.

26. Almost all great hires are
through referrals.
!
We’ve had some success in
campus hiring, but it’s too
much of cost.
Direct
Interviews
Referrals
Campus Hiring
Remote
Consultants
Hiring Events

27. Direct
Interviews
Referrals
Campus Hiring
Remote
Consultants
Hiring Events
50+
30+
<5
<5
<5
Getting great referrals is the
secret sauce for us.
!
To do that, we needed to
build a great “company
culture”
!
MobME as a “cool place to
work”.

28. Hiring
It is very difficult to find skilled talent. Very difficult for
people outside Kerala to adjust to life here.

29. Hiring
Much, much better if we had local talent. People who
could learn new skills well. But not there yet.

30. Hiring
So with Startup Village, we’re doing something to make a
difference.

31. College
Bootcamps Grade Zero
Entrepreneurs Funding &
$$$
Startup Village has always been laser-focused on
entrepreneurs.

32. College
Bootcamps Grade Zero
Entrepreneurs Funding &
$$$
We’re investing 21Cr into building this ecosystem in
2015-16.
Fab lab
In cooperation with MIT
Bits & Atoms Centre, a
world-class Fab lab in SV.

33. College
Bootcamps Grade Zero
Entrepreneurs Funding &
$$$
But we want to cater to people who miss this funnel too. Turn them
into skilled professionals. Because the ecosystem will demand it.

34. Hiring
We’re thinking of build a skill development product for
students & professionals. Still in early alpha stage.

35. Hiring
So do come talk to me about it :)

36. Skills & Hiring
Finis. Questions?