Venture Hacks is a new site for entrepreneurs.

David Beisel writes:

In the early days of a startup, it’s always all hands on deck. There are a set of founders or founder(s) with an early team, and the roles of who does what and when is often decided by whoever has free bandwidth to address it. These individuals apply their skillsets to whatever needs to be taken care of today with little (if any) thought to process. Results are paramount. Accordingly, people’s roles become fluid and partially interchangeable. They get things done in small ad hoc groups or “tribes” that form and dissolve in lock step with the necessary tasks at hand. And that’s a good thing – in those very early days, it’s imperative that the organization is nimble and flexible to react to the marketplace as it commences in building both a product and a corresponding business model.

At some point, however, a startup team needs to evolve from building a small-team endeavor into building a company with a strong organizational structure. A number of events could serve as a catalyst for this transition: a round of institutional investment, the introduction of a new senior person on the team, or significant growth in the number of people within the company. But maturing from a tribal mode into a healthy functioning organization is often a very challenging process.

Atanu Dey has put up his presentation on RISC made recently at ISB. It is good supplemental reading to the ongoing Tech Talk series.

Krisse (AllAboutSymbian) asks: "An increasing number of basic but widely-used applications, including email clients, word processors and calendars are becoming available on PCs as web-based applications. If this trend spreads to smartphones, will a smartphone need any on-board apps except the browser?"

Wap Review compares the two.

By Atanu Dey

The year is 2020. For nearly 12 years, India has seen an average annual GDP growth rate of over 12 percent more than quadrupling the per capita GDP from US$500 in 2008 to $2000, placing India in the league of middle-income economies. Stark poverty is a thing of the past. In much less than a generation, the population transitioned from being 70 percent rural to being less than 20 percent rural. Agricultural labor is only 15 percent of total labor participation, down from 60 percent in 2008. Farm incomes are six times what they used to be. The $3 trillion economy shows no signs of slowing down.

So how did this seemingly impossible transformation happen, I asked the man on the street.

“The cities. I am hazy about the details but it appears that there was a change of tack. Somehow they figured that they had to think different, think big. They had been stuck in a rut created by a poverty of imagination. The problem was that there was no compelling vision to light a fire in the bellies of the hundreds of millions of people. Then somehow inexplicably they got out of the rut.”

Can you be a bit more specific? What was the turning point? What did they specifically do? What made the difference? Who was responsible?

“I was coming to that. Like I said it was the cities. But that was just the instrument, just the visible part of the transformation. The creation of the cities was the equivalent of the challenge to land a man on the moon. Remember all that talk about an Indian manned mission to the moon? Well, how lunatic was that? Nothing new in attempting to do in 2012 what the Americans had done over 40 years ago. Not just that, with all their trillions of dollars, the Americans themselves thought it was a pointless waste of money to keep doing manned missions to the moon. And yet, impoverished India was willing to spend a few billion dollars repeating that. I ask you, how retarded is that?”

Why drag in all this talk about missions to the moon?

“Actually, think about it for a second. The challenge that JFK presented to the nation was the important bit. Recall his words. Quote: We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too. Unquote. You must read that speech to get a sense of what the articulation of a real vision is all about. http://www1.jsc.nasa.gov/er/seh/ricetalk.htm

“The bit about doing something not because it is easy but because it is hard is important. And the bit about choosing. The operative word is “choosing” – you choose to do this as opposed to that. The Indians finally woke and decided to choose. It was a choice. They thought through what the options were and then made a choice to do what made the most sense. And the choice they made best organized their resources and their skills.”

But tell me, how did it all begin.

Tomorrow: Flashback (continued)