A couple of months’ back I got an e-mail with the subject as "Google/FluxGen company visit" from a person named Spriha, who introduced herself as an Associate Product Manager (APM) at Google, working on Search Ads. She went on to write that "The APMs at Google, along with Android/Pixel VP Brian Rakowski and other senior Product Managers, are doing a global trip[1] to learn more about start-ups, local industries and trends in cities around the world. We're visiting Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Bangalore and Paris this year". However, what I loved the most in her e-mail was this, "As part of the Bangalore leg of the trip, we’d love to visit interesting companies in the city and learn more about the tech scenes in India. After researching for the best places to visit during the trip, FluxGen specifically shone out to us -- we would all be very excited to learn about your mission, work processes and products. Would you be open for a meeting with us?" I actually had to read that part of the mail twice.
I shared the screen shot of this e-mail with my colleagues and a few well-wishers of FluxGen over WhatsApp immediately, and I could not have expected a better response. Without exception, everyone were super thrilled to hear. One of my friends responded, "When Google searches for you, you know you have arrived". Dr. Gopal, the chairperson of FluxGen [2], advised me to prepare well for this meet and focus on displaying our products (and in his typical tone, told us at least properly clean/organise the lab once before the visit). Chandru, senior director of FluxGen, who was concerned with the fact that we had never put significant efforts in raising funds, instructed me to see this as the best opportunity to learn from the west in that aspect. Venkatesh Kumaran, an advisor to FluxGen, told me to find out how we could use Google tools for FluxGen's Energy and Water manager and if we could do a pilot project for their facility. Like-wise, I got a lot of interesting advice on leveraging this visit of google product managers.
During my phone conversation with Spriha, I could figure that this visit of Google product managers was mostly going to be about mutual learning. She expressed great interest in knowing about the work we do and the impact it has on this world. She was excited to know that we were using Internet of Things concept to build products for rural electrification and water management. She was very keen on seeing our products in the field. She also mentioned the profiles of the visiting product managers, and told how FluxGen could benefit from their expertise in product development. During my phone conversations with her, I could sense that it was a great opportunity for my team to learn more about the various cloud-based tools from google - which was something we had less exposure as compared to hardware tools.
We, at FluxGen, did not want to miss this opportunity to impress Google. We made a plan to display our existing products and prototypes of our product ideas in the form of demos at our lab in BTM layout, as taking Spriha and team to the sites we had installed our systems at was not feasible because of time constraints. We had dedicated most part of June for building the demo models. In fact, I wanted to devise this visit of Google APMs to our facility as an aide to complete incomplete works. I must say the team responded to the plan with great enthusiasm and confidence. However, during the same time we got an opportunity of doing a commercial pilot for IoT based energy management of cell towers for a major mobile operator in India. With business interest as priority, I had to put experienced engineers to the project and less experienced engineers and interns to prepare the demos. Last five days before the visit, everyone worked day in day out to make the demo models work according to the plan.
The Google team visited FluxGen lab on the 27th of June at 2PM. The entire FluxGen team was out on the streets to welcome the team to our lab, which is on the first floor of my house. Since they just had lunch, we found it apt to give them water bottles as they arrived at our tiny facility. I am not sure if they had visited a garage start-up in their tour, but I am sure they could figure that FluxGen is one such start-up, operating in a residential area called BTM layout, which majorly consisted of IT professionals. We started the interaction with Zach Maier, Product Manager at Google introducing himself, and about the purpose of their visit to a start-up like FluxGen. I had a quick discussion with him and Spriha about the plan, which was followed by my team introducing themselves to the thirty-member Google team. In fact, in that 100sq meter area, we had 70 people, all pepped up for the exciting afternoon.
We had divided the two-hour meeting into four equal parts: introduction, FluxGen story in the form of a presentation, Product demo and interaction. I started the presentation by showing a screen shot of my resignation letter to my then manager in GE Aviation System [3] in July 2010 and jokingly said, "Not to motivate". I had mentioned the following in my resignation letter, "I have taken a decision to pursue entrepreneurship dreams, which requires me to leave my present occupation. I would like to channelize my passion in developing eco-friendly engineering solutions for our countrymen in a small way." I thought there was no better way than this to convey the vision with which FluxGen was started. I went on to tell how the journey started, by me relocating to a village or rather a small town called Ujire, to learn about rural electrification using solar Photovoltaics at Selco Solar [4] and then moving back to Bangalore to start FluxGen in 2011. I must thank Kaustubh (intern from KTH Sweden and former colleague) for preparing an excellent presentation [5], which displayed the projects FluxGen executed from 2011 to now in chronological order, while clearly showing how the products of FluxGen evolved, by executing projects and with customer interaction. By the end of my presentation, I invited Kit Dashwood, an intern from Queen's University, Canada, to give the pitch on the water contamination monitoring [6] - a product we are currently developing at FluxGen. Kit created a very compelling case for water quality monitoring system by mentioning how we had to give each one of them a bottled drinking water when they had arrived at FluxGen Lab.
The presentation had set a neat platform for us to demonstrate our products, as the customer profiles and persona were discussed during the presentation. We had made a jig with water pipes and electrical loads that resemble a micro-grid. We mounted our product, Energy and Water Manager [7], on it to demonstrate the product functionality. Adjacent to this jig was a semi-circular arch kind of structure, having a moving flood light (emulating the Sun) which was designed to showcase solar energy generation profile. My colleague Jagatheeswaran displayed the Solar Health Monitoring System for the Solar Plant at FluxGen lab. We explained how the solar plant installed at FluxGen is also a research and development platform[8] for us to enhance the product functionalities. My colleague Disha displayed the Branch Circuit Monitoring system installed at FluxGen lab and its application in energy conservation. Abhiroop, an intern from NITK Surathkal, demonstrated a project pertaining to home energy/water management that he was working on. Kit and Rishab presented the final demo regarding the water contamination monitoring application. The prototype was developed in two weeks, after Kit did extensive research on the product requirements to come up with the product specifications. We were quite thrilled to see the expressions of the Google team members when the web application showed the water to be undrinkable, when Rishab added a drop of contaminated water to drinking water. It was quite enthralling to see the Google team taking pictures of our demos with great enthusiasm - our night outs to make the demo models work was certainly worth it!
The last half an hour actually extended to nearly forty-five minutes, as there was so much to discuss and learn from each other. I opened up the discussion by requesting the guests to present any Google products that we could benefit from. Immediately after that, one of the APMs keenly stepped forward to share interesting information about various Google tools on IoT, cloud and machine learning (such as Container Engine, Tenserflow, AppEngine, etc.) that could provide great value additions to our products. Spriha volunteered to share her insight on the IoT operating system by Google called “AndroidThings”, which can work seamlessly on many single board computers available in the market. This way we learnt many interesting tools that Google had developed, of which we were barely aware. Among many things, one thing they were very keen on knowing from FluxGen was about the way we gather product requirements for the rural market of India, for which our explanation was that FluxGen prefers to recruit passionate engineers mainly from rural backgrounds, to understand the rural users’ needs’ straight from the horse's mouth.
We had personal interaction with the Google product manager and associate product managers in the end, which lasted for about fifteen minutes. During this interaction, we realised that the guests were very happy about their visit to FluxGen. Some of them expressed great interest in helping us grow, and a few of them at personal capacity as well, as they thought our work was very important [9]. We were thrilled and amazed to hear such kind words from them. We exchanged cards to keep in touch.
Thanks again for going through this post. I would like to end this post with a short thank you note to Google:
Dear Google,
Your product managers’ and associate product managers’ visit to FluxGen was one of the high points after its inception. This visit of yours has boosted our morale and energy levels. While you are one of the biggest and most respected corporations in the world, you were keen on learning from a small organisation like ours - that has certainly made us feel important. Thank you so much! We wish to collaborate with you in making this world a better place.
Regards,
FluxGen Engineering Technologies [10]
I shared the screen shot of this e-mail with my colleagues and a few well-wishers of FluxGen over WhatsApp immediately, and I could not have expected a better response. Without exception, everyone were super thrilled to hear. One of my friends responded, "When Google searches for you, you know you have arrived". Dr. Gopal, the chairperson of FluxGen [2], advised me to prepare well for this meet and focus on displaying our products (and in his typical tone, told us at least properly clean/organise the lab once before the visit). Chandru, senior director of FluxGen, who was concerned with the fact that we had never put significant efforts in raising funds, instructed me to see this as the best opportunity to learn from the west in that aspect. Venkatesh Kumaran, an advisor to FluxGen, told me to find out how we could use Google tools for FluxGen's Energy and Water manager and if we could do a pilot project for their facility. Like-wise, I got a lot of interesting advice on leveraging this visit of google product managers.
During my phone conversation with Spriha, I could figure that this visit of Google product managers was mostly going to be about mutual learning. She expressed great interest in knowing about the work we do and the impact it has on this world. She was excited to know that we were using Internet of Things concept to build products for rural electrification and water management. She was very keen on seeing our products in the field. She also mentioned the profiles of the visiting product managers, and told how FluxGen could benefit from their expertise in product development. During my phone conversations with her, I could sense that it was a great opportunity for my team to learn more about the various cloud-based tools from google - which was something we had less exposure as compared to hardware tools.
We, at FluxGen, did not want to miss this opportunity to impress Google. We made a plan to display our existing products and prototypes of our product ideas in the form of demos at our lab in BTM layout, as taking Spriha and team to the sites we had installed our systems at was not feasible because of time constraints. We had dedicated most part of June for building the demo models. In fact, I wanted to devise this visit of Google APMs to our facility as an aide to complete incomplete works. I must say the team responded to the plan with great enthusiasm and confidence. However, during the same time we got an opportunity of doing a commercial pilot for IoT based energy management of cell towers for a major mobile operator in India. With business interest as priority, I had to put experienced engineers to the project and less experienced engineers and interns to prepare the demos. Last five days before the visit, everyone worked day in day out to make the demo models work according to the plan.
The Google team visited FluxGen lab on the 27th of June at 2PM. The entire FluxGen team was out on the streets to welcome the team to our lab, which is on the first floor of my house. Since they just had lunch, we found it apt to give them water bottles as they arrived at our tiny facility. I am not sure if they had visited a garage start-up in their tour, but I am sure they could figure that FluxGen is one such start-up, operating in a residential area called BTM layout, which majorly consisted of IT professionals. We started the interaction with Zach Maier, Product Manager at Google introducing himself, and about the purpose of their visit to a start-up like FluxGen. I had a quick discussion with him and Spriha about the plan, which was followed by my team introducing themselves to the thirty-member Google team. In fact, in that 100sq meter area, we had 70 people, all pepped up for the exciting afternoon.
We had divided the two-hour meeting into four equal parts: introduction, FluxGen story in the form of a presentation, Product demo and interaction. I started the presentation by showing a screen shot of my resignation letter to my then manager in GE Aviation System [3] in July 2010 and jokingly said, "Not to motivate". I had mentioned the following in my resignation letter, "I have taken a decision to pursue entrepreneurship dreams, which requires me to leave my present occupation. I would like to channelize my passion in developing eco-friendly engineering solutions for our countrymen in a small way." I thought there was no better way than this to convey the vision with which FluxGen was started. I went on to tell how the journey started, by me relocating to a village or rather a small town called Ujire, to learn about rural electrification using solar Photovoltaics at Selco Solar [4] and then moving back to Bangalore to start FluxGen in 2011. I must thank Kaustubh (intern from KTH Sweden and former colleague) for preparing an excellent presentation [5], which displayed the projects FluxGen executed from 2011 to now in chronological order, while clearly showing how the products of FluxGen evolved, by executing projects and with customer interaction. By the end of my presentation, I invited Kit Dashwood, an intern from Queen's University, Canada, to give the pitch on the water contamination monitoring [6] - a product we are currently developing at FluxGen. Kit created a very compelling case for water quality monitoring system by mentioning how we had to give each one of them a bottled drinking water when they had arrived at FluxGen Lab.
The presentation had set a neat platform for us to demonstrate our products, as the customer profiles and persona were discussed during the presentation. We had made a jig with water pipes and electrical loads that resemble a micro-grid. We mounted our product, Energy and Water Manager [7], on it to demonstrate the product functionality. Adjacent to this jig was a semi-circular arch kind of structure, having a moving flood light (emulating the Sun) which was designed to showcase solar energy generation profile. My colleague Jagatheeswaran displayed the Solar Health Monitoring System for the Solar Plant at FluxGen lab. We explained how the solar plant installed at FluxGen is also a research and development platform[8] for us to enhance the product functionalities. My colleague Disha displayed the Branch Circuit Monitoring system installed at FluxGen lab and its application in energy conservation. Abhiroop, an intern from NITK Surathkal, demonstrated a project pertaining to home energy/water management that he was working on. Kit and Rishab presented the final demo regarding the water contamination monitoring application. The prototype was developed in two weeks, after Kit did extensive research on the product requirements to come up with the product specifications. We were quite thrilled to see the expressions of the Google team members when the web application showed the water to be undrinkable, when Rishab added a drop of contaminated water to drinking water. It was quite enthralling to see the Google team taking pictures of our demos with great enthusiasm - our night outs to make the demo models work was certainly worth it!
The last half an hour actually extended to nearly forty-five minutes, as there was so much to discuss and learn from each other. I opened up the discussion by requesting the guests to present any Google products that we could benefit from. Immediately after that, one of the APMs keenly stepped forward to share interesting information about various Google tools on IoT, cloud and machine learning (such as Container Engine, Tenserflow, AppEngine, etc.) that could provide great value additions to our products. Spriha volunteered to share her insight on the IoT operating system by Google called “AndroidThings”, which can work seamlessly on many single board computers available in the market. This way we learnt many interesting tools that Google had developed, of which we were barely aware. Among many things, one thing they were very keen on knowing from FluxGen was about the way we gather product requirements for the rural market of India, for which our explanation was that FluxGen prefers to recruit passionate engineers mainly from rural backgrounds, to understand the rural users’ needs’ straight from the horse's mouth.
We had personal interaction with the Google product manager and associate product managers in the end, which lasted for about fifteen minutes. During this interaction, we realised that the guests were very happy about their visit to FluxGen. Some of them expressed great interest in helping us grow, and a few of them at personal capacity as well, as they thought our work was very important [9]. We were thrilled and amazed to hear such kind words from them. We exchanged cards to keep in touch.
Thanks again for going through this post. I would like to end this post with a short thank you note to Google:
Dear Google,
Your product managers’ and associate product managers’ visit to FluxGen was one of the high points after its inception. This visit of yours has boosted our morale and energy levels. While you are one of the biggest and most respected corporations in the world, you were keen on learning from a small organisation like ours - that has certainly made us feel important. Thank you so much! We wish to collaborate with you in making this world a better place.
Regards,
FluxGen Engineering Technologies [10]
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1]About Google APM's global trip: http://www.newsweek.com/google-goes-globe-trotting-96341
[2]Blog post about my association with Dr. Gopal and Chandru, directors of FluxGen: http://isiganesh.blogspot.in/2012/12/my-ill-tempered-uncles.html
[3]Work Experience at GE: http://isiganesh.blogspot.in/2010/08/great-experience.html
[4]Leaving GE to start a career in sustainable tech: http://isiganesh.blogspot.in/2010/11/new-job.html
[5]FluxGen Story Presentation: https://goo.gl/XrzEqk
[6]Executive summary of water quality monitoring: https://goo.gl/EcUQoF
[7]Energy and Water Manager flyer: https://goo.gl/iB61HY
[8]FluxGen's scientific contribution: https://medium.com/@isiganesh/fluxgens-scientific-contribution-9704b52f68b1
[9]Zach Maier's Facebook post after visiting FluxGen Lab: https://www.facebook.com/zach.maier/posts/10104043071135001
[10] FluxGen story in yourstory: https://yourstory.com/2016/11/fluxgen-iot-ganesh-shankar/
