Institute For The Future

Personal risk management, Mumbai, India, Gondal, 19/12/2008

Vishal Gondal facebooks from his phone at the Sahara Hotel

Family context

Vishal is a 29-year old entrepreneur in the online gaming space.  He’s married with two kids, and spends a lot of time on the road. Formerly, he was a sales manager with a lot of international clients; now his business takes him all over the world. In a short time, he’s managed to build his service (indiagames.com) into a highly successful company. Currently he’s the CEO of indiagames and has started to angel-fund a couple of Indian tech startups. We interviewed him at the Sahara Star close to the Mumbai airport – he’d just gotten off one flight and was going to catch another early next morning.  

Domain context

Vishal has a big online property to maintain, and is also personally involved with his brand to a very large extent. Indiagames’ core business is an on-demand games distribution business. He runs a network of young “game ambassadors” and calls himself GoD –in-chief (games-on-demand). He’s passionate about food and travel, and has a blog called godinchief.com. He extensively brands himself along with the company – his backpack has a “I am GoD” logo, his Fujitsu UMPC also bears a company logo. He interacts with both friends and business contacts through a network of 1000 facebook friends – he thinks that the “line between personal and business is getting blurred”. His phone serves for 90% of his media needs – he frequently updates his status on the road, asks for restaurant recommendations, announces travel, etc.

Notwithstanding the value he obtains from his online business, company brand, and personal online identity, his approach to risk management is somewhat unexpected. As a young , successful CEO, he believes in focusing on his business rather than worrying about potential competitors. He thinks that the global media space is getting flattened, and that millions more users are becoming content creators through avenues such as microblogging. He also runs a social network for indiagames called tadkalive.com.

Indiagames employs 300-odd people and works kind of like Valve’s steam – about 250 games can be distributed through broadband connections and the rental is paid through the broadband billing itself. This has been a very successful business model.

General insights

“Anyone can write anything about you, new media has changed everything”. While earlier there used to be a closed group of investors and a PR agency, new media brings the company and the people close together. All his employees are active on social network sites much like him. However, user-generated content and feedback  do not present risks to him or his company. He believes it is generally difficult to strategically manage an online identity (“people can see through pretense”) and he “doesn’t care if people see what I did yesterday”. Thus, Vishal believes in presenting himself in raw, unedited form to both friends and business contacts online, with little regard for “risk” in the sense of protecting privacy or personal brand online.

The same frame of mind is also reflected in the way he uses online storage. His company has recently moved to cloud computing, and he thinks of external data centers as being more secure than anything he could cook up. “I’m not trading in nuclear secrets”, he says.  

Vishal’s Nokia phone, combined with internet access to facebook, serves as the hub of socialization and business. Being the road warrior that he is, he has learnt to quickly adapt to local conditions. He bought a 3g card on a recent trip to Israel to get faster surfing on the phone; he uses an application called JokuSpot on the phone to convert his phone into a wifi hub. In general, he’s a super-early adopter of technologies and a huge facebook fan. His 1,000 facebook connections are a great source of information (he can ask questions of this community just by updating his status and get dozens of responses). [In that he is similar to the twitter super-users who derive benefits from having a ton of followers].

In line with his assertions about “personal and business lines blurring”, he finds it easier to do business with someone he knows through facebook because there is more information at hand.

Other technology uses: a fujitsu UMPC (mainly used for powerpoint presentations, which he can’t do on the phone), and a big setup with windows media center pc and two Xboxes in his home that he uses to stream media around his house.

There is a sense that social networks afford a level of control over communication not previously seen. Vishal finds IM and blackberry push mail intrusive, so doesn’t use it much; but his favorite activity seems to be checking the responses to his status updates on the phone. [Other interviewees also mention this “control” that new media channels offer them].  He also doesn’t publish personal contact info on his facebook, and from personal experience he often doesn’t pick up calls from numbers he doesn’t recognize.

With regard to risk, there is a clear strategy of “cross that bridge when it comes”. In both business and personal management of online assets, Vishal has not had any experiences which would necessitate taking up some sort of “risk management” strategy. In fact, he is averse to the very term “risk management” and talks about building his brand and online assets rather than “protecting” them.

There is no strategy of separating business and personal communication contexts. Vishal has “integrated all my networks in facebook”.

Trends

Massive media consumption shift towards UGC  - news from web, blogs, twitter, facebook “news is coming to me”.

Fewer SMSes  and emails– facebook messages are the replacement.

Personalization of corporate communication and individual responsibility – the press release is dead, every CEO blogs, but they are individually accountable for what they put on their blogs.

Orkut is downmarket. Everyone he knows, except some relatives, are on facebook.

Business gets more personal as social networks become more extensive.