Shastri consulting
The transaction cost of figuring out how much to pay someone for a conversation is so high that you just "pay" ₹0. Or a coffee or a beer.
Regular readers of this blog must know that my wife and I are big fans of Ganeshana Maduve (for example). To the extent that we’ve named our son after a minor character in this movie (watch this kickass scene).
Anyway one of the pivotal characters in this movie is Shastri, played by Ramesh Bhat, who is the hero Ganesha / YG Rao’s (played by Anant Nag) roommate.
Shastri has a simple modus operandi - he provides advice to people in exchange for beer. As simple as that. When Ganesha wants to know how to get rid of Adilakshmi, who his parents want him to marry, he buys Shastri beer. When Abhilasha wants to get closer to Ganesha, and make him fall in love with her, she again gives him beer. When Adilakshmi wants to find out why her parents are behaving strangely, once again she buys Shastri beer.
Of course, Shastri nicely plays the double game, getting beer from all sides and then “lighting the candle from both ends”. I don’t want to elaborate here - please watch the movie and see for yourself (hopefully AI will get good enough in the near future to auto-subtitle the movie. This will need a Kannada transcriber and a Kannada to English translator. Maybe Sarvam will solve this).
As you can imagine, this concept of Shastri is generalisable. There is one friend who, whenever he hears about an interesting idea or funda, says “we should discuss this over beer”. Or when you ask him for a longish story he says “well, that is a three beer conversation”. My wife and I have duly nicknamed him Shastri.
And now that I’m looking to startup, I realise that “Shastri consulting” is something I plan to indulge in a fair bit. Right now my company (which might have already been incorporated, but we found that delaying by a few weeks will save us a few hundred dollars in taxes) has a capital of precisely zero rupees. Until we manage to close our first round, it will remain at that, or whatever is the initial capital we put in to register. Which pretty much means we’ll be penniless.
However, as a first time founder, I’ll need advice. And I cannot afford to pay management consultant fees for it. Actually, even if I were to raise money and afford to pay, the transaction cost of figuring out how much to pay is going to be way too much. It’s much easier to settle on a fixed price - ₹0. Or maybe one coffee / beer.
And so I’ll be indulging in a lot of “Shastri consulting” over the next few months. Where, at the cost of a coffee or a beer, I’ll be hoping to get fundaes from people. And having been on the other side (doled out copious fundaes for a coffee / beer), I know that this is a fairly legit thing to do.
For now, I’m not even “paying”. I’m in the process of talking to people to understand how companies use dashboards and make decisions using data. I want to record all these conversations, so I’m doing all of them exclusively online. So even the coffee / beer here is “virtual”!
That said - I’ve done a few of these conversations, but have a bit of a selection bias (most people I’ve spoken to work in India). If you use dashboards at work regularly, don’t work in India and are happy to spend half an hour with me in exchange for a virtual coffee / beer, please hit me up.
I promise I’ll get you that coffee / beer the next time we meet. I’m an honourable Shastri (pun fully intended; my father’s father’s father’s last name was Shastri).