Gain Knowledge Company Interview
Gain
Knowledge is a startup firm located in NYC which uses creative
problem solving to help solve challenging problems. It was
started in 2009 by Ravi Kashyap, a NYU MBA student.
More
can be read on their website at http://www.gainknowledgegroup.com
Can you tell us a little bit about Gain Knowledge and what problem it
attempts to solve?
Gain Knowledge seeks to solve business problems that
organizations face. This represents a wide array of problems and our
claim is that we can solve most business problems without having too
many specialized practitioners working to solve these problems. So from
a business or organization perspective, we will attempt to solve
any and every problem out there. The only problems we will not try to
solve are those that require the use of complicated machinery. We define
complicated machinery as the ones that require more than say a day of
training to use them. Like operating an X-ray machine or a crane or
things of that sort. But there is indeed a basic problem which we are
trying to solve, it is about taking previous experience too seriously, I
have elaborated more on that in the next question.
How did you realize there was this problem?
Currently, when organizations realize they are facing some issues. They
look for people either internally or externally who can solve
it. A lot of times, the main issue about the issue is that it is not
clearly what the real issue is. The reason for this is very simple,
when an issue is identified, it is either done by someone who does not
have the time to solve it or does not know how to solve it or
simply does not want to deal with it themselves. This could very well be
due to the many valid constraints they face in their current
organization. So they make their best effort to isolate the
issue. What is usually done then is the issue is bucketed into a
few standard categories. Then an expert in that category is brought in
to take care of it. The expert here is someone who has dealt with
similar issues many times before and has experience dealing with
such problems for a number of years. So at this point, we are not sure
what the issue is and we have an expert on this issue looking at it. You
see where I am going with this right ...
When we talk about experience over a number of years, it does lead to
specialization. This means when a specialist is looking at it a problem
he is looking at it in one way, identical to an approach he might have
used before and proving a solution quite similar to previous situations
that might have some common elements to the current problems. This
happens way too many times. The specialist has the advantage of sounding
very knowledgeable very early on in the initial diagnosis phase and
hence someone who is not a specialist does not seem to add much
value in the initial phase and few such non-experts get involved in
this initial phase.
I am sure we have seen this play out many times before in almost any
organization we worked. The good part is the solution we provide -
Our approach to problem solving, which is outlined in one of the later
questions ...
You are currently in school getting your MBA - how do you manage to find
the time to start a company and deal with class work?
As I mentioned earlier, the company is still in its infancy. The real
work will start in a few months. My class load happens to be very
manageable this semester and sometimes it is about following the most
important B-School rule of being very content with B grades.
Are you working with partners? How did you go about choosing them
or how are you going about looking for them?
There are a few legal and structural aspects that still need to be
taken care of here. I speak to my cousins, friends from
b-school and even my undergraduate days a lot about Gain Knowledge. The
plan is to get to about 6-7 partners initially and we will see what
happens later on from there. Choosing the partners will be mainly
from the list of people that have expressed an interest and seem to
think that the fundamental philosophy makes sense. A few
interested people might come back and join as partners later.
Of course, a lot of interested people when they finish
school have huge loans to pay off. So it is about finding partners that
are free to get involved in something they believe in right now and not
have to worry about financial aspects too much.
You're a new company, how do you plan to get the word out about your
services?
Word of mouth mainly. There is a website and in a few months it will
be maintained by an outside company and constantly updated to
reflect the work we will be doing. But referrals from people that know
one of the partners will be the starting point. This is a great question
because conventional advertising does not really work here. We need
referrals from people who know us and have worked with us. Once we get
the initial momentum going, it should be smooth sailing after that or
rather lots of intense problem solving after that.
What's your ideal client?
Someone who does not have too many pre-conceived ideas about the kind
of problems they are facing and are very willing to work with us as one
team. We are outsiders and we need to retain that perspective, but being
treated as insiders would make things easier for us. This is very
crucial to success, We and the clients operating as one team.
One of your selling points is that you deal with problems differently,
can you expand on that?
If you got this message by looking at our website, I am very glad
that we are starting to do the right things and getting the right
message out in the right way.
Dealing with problems differently is an attitude. I mean no
disrespect to any experts who have spent many years working in a
field. I definitely rule out R&D here as well, which is definitely
specialized work in a field. We clearly need both.
We can have a bright high school student talk as intelligently about
the stock markets as a hedge fund manager who has been managing his fund
for two decades. Same goes with say, an expert in marketing. There
is also an element here about how luck is important etc and this can be
a long discussion and we will leave it out for now.
The takeaway from this is that people overestimate the amount of additional
knowledge that experts posses and they ignore the bias that forms
naturally when experience is used to solve problems. Having
said that, when we look at a problem we not just encourage, we
require our problem solvers to not muddy the issue too much with their
previous experience. This does not mean we leave out experts from our
team. We certainly draw lessons from previous situations. But in the
initial phase, we try to get as many contrasting opinions out on the
table as possible. We also try to find common elements between this
problem and say some other problems the company might be facing in other
related divisions or groups. Easy as this might sound, to fully get a
team working like this takes training and a great deal of modesty from
the members of the team. This again relates to the kind of people that
would be a good fit for roles within our organization. I hope that has
answered your question. There is more about this on our website under
the Our Philosophy section.
Who have you turned to in order to get this company started? Friends,
school resources?
Friends and some school resources. Will definitely tap into more of that
later on.
What is your growth pattern?
Slow and Steady. This will depend mainly on finding people that would
fit well with the organization and those that can drop their experience
at the door step before looking at any situation. The people that are
interested so far, are the ones I have known for sometime. So to find
new ones and be sure it is a right mutual fit will take time.
You actually bring up a great problem we have. 'What kind of pipeline
do we need to maintain to cultivate the next generation of problem
solvers?' We need to think this out over time and see what makes the
most sense.
Do you have a business plan?
We have some guidelines, But honestly, to make a concrete plan would
be hard and a highly error prone task. So we think it is better not to
make plans, but rather it is always better to have guide lines.
Where do you plan to market your services?
The website will be the main place where people can find information
about us. Other than that we plan to work mainly through referrals and
word of mouth.
Describe a day in the life of Ravi Kashyap
A lot of time spent on the NYU campus, some of it in the Coles
Swimming pool. The rest of the time is spent problem solving. ( Both
school and some for a couple of clients.)
If you could start a non-profit business and you didn't have to worry
about money, what would it be?
We plan to work with non profits also and in fact a big part of our
push will be to help non-profits. So if we were a non-profit. We would
simple be called the Pro Bono Problem Solvers.
You have one question to ask me - what is it?
The question I would ask you is what we ask most people. Can
we help you with your Problems?
Jokes Apart, Do you think we are doing the right things in terms of
promoting our service .. What does your work in dealing with start-ups
tell you about any mistakes we might be doing ?
DMB Enterprise Consulting's Answer
Personally, I would flip your answer to the 'Where do
you plan to market your services' question. It's a common mistake
to assume that because you are on the web, people will find you.
There's so much material, good and bad on the web, it's next to
impossible to find a new company without much press. People would
have to specifically type in your domain name.
I believe a much better choice for you is to work your
network and to directly contact who you think your target client is and
sell yourself to them. After a while, once you have a track record
you will get a lot of word of mouth referrals and hopefully some
press. It might also be in your interest to partner with someone
whose been in industry for a while and can bring their network to your
firm. You'll have to give some equity, but your chances of
survival are much better.
If you do chose a web-based approach, your
best bet is to figure out the keyword/phrases people would type
in when looking for a service such as yours and use Google
Adwords. You might also try some banner ads at forums
where people post questions, but give you are a local service it
might be difficult to find a locally based website to advertise.
I would also suggest getting a webmaster to redo your website to
give it a more modern look and feel.
I would also respectively disagree on your comment
about business plans. While a concrete 40 page operation business
plan is overkill, it is still important to write out your business plan
as more of a thinking exercise than a bible. The act of writing
out your thoughts in detail, and making them cohesive is very valuable
when starting a business. In other words, you probably want to
have a marketing plan, a tentative financial plan and an operational
plan of how the business will actually work. You'll likely be
asked for a business plan if you start hiring C-level talent or are
asking a significant amount of money from friends. It's not so
much the destination with business plans, it's more of the journey and
the thinking which goes along with it.
As for my problems, right now my biggest
problem is breaking my diet soda addiction. Any
suggestions?
Ravi Kashyap resides in New Jersey while
he attends the MBA program at NYU. He has a background in
technology, and Quantitative modeling for derivatives working
at such firms as Citigroup and Merrill Lynch. When not
studying or working on Gain Knowledge, he likes to play
volleyball, ski, read and travel.
Dave Blake, the interviewer, is a serial
entrepreneur with a long history of helping consult small
companies.
He's had a thriving photography studio for the last several
years called www.daveblakephotography.com
and also started a failed dot com called PhotoPlayoff. He
currently is working on several new ideas while actively
consulting several startup companies. Dave has a passion
helping business owners realizing their dream of creating their
life's dream. You can read more about his services at http://www.dmbenterpriseconsulting.com
