Life as a series of bets

Brick by brick, we're bootstrapping our way towards an Information Products R&D Lab. Every year we make one big bet on a new approach or a problem. If the bet works, we hive it off and then restart. Often we make the bet with a larger partner that has funds, domain knowledge and access to market.

While India has many creative UI-heavy design studios, there are not enough who are attempting to mix analytics and design. Hence, the first bet was — can we bootstrap an Information Design Studio from India?

Next, we wanted to reduce cost yet increase reliability. Hence, the next bet was — can we invest in break information design into building blocks (like Lego)? During this period, we built PykQuery.js, PykCharts.js and Rumi Data Engine (GitHub for Data).

Investments made in this period helped us execute these projects

Bet 3: Can visual analytics on TimesSeries data be brought to business managers at 1/10th the cost? (for FusionCharts.com)

Bet 4: Can visual analytics be brought to SMEs at 1/10th the cost?

Bet 5: Can visual analytics be brought to Doctors for every day decisions (with Pulse Infoframe)?

Bet 6: Can newsrooms launch single topic sites in a sustainable way (with ICFJ.org)?

Outcome

[Update: September 2018] In March 2017, we started a 16 month long engagement with Washington DC based International Center for Journalists. After completion of this engagement, ICFJ Knight Fellow Nasr ul Hadi and our co-founder Ritvvij Parrikh co-founded PROTO. With this formation, we relocated to New Delhi and majority of our team moved to PROTO. Now, pykih restarts for the 5th time.