Gaurav Mantri's Personal Blog.

My Thoughts On Current Euphoria Over Startups In India

Nowadays everyone wants to do a startup. There is a general feeling that if they are not doing a startup, they are not doing anything . I was listening to an old song by Amitabh Bachchan and took the liberty of modifying it to reflect the current sentiment : इक रहिन ईर (Once there was Eer) इक … [Read more...]

Prarambh 2015 – A Recap

Over the weekend of Feb 20 - 22nd 2015, Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Udaipur’s Entrepreneurship Cell “Saksham” organized a 32 hour startup challenge event (Prarambh). This was the 2nd time an event like this was organized (and I'm extremely lucky to be a part of both events) and having … [Read more...]

What Startup Founders Can Learn From Ocean’s Eleven Movie

I’m a huge fan of movie Ocean’s Eleven. In fact, I watch this movie every time it comes on TV. For those who don’t know about this movie, in short it is a heist film where George Clooney along with 10 other folks rob three Las Vegas casinos in one night. If you have not seen this movie only thing I … [Read more...]

What Startups Can Learn From Aam Aadmi Party

For those who have been closely watching Indian Parliament elections concluded recently, you already know who Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) is. For those who don’t know, AAP is the youngest political party which came into existence in 2012 as a result of India Against Corruption movement. It is led by an … [Read more...]

Celebrating The Spirit Of Entrepreneurship: “Prarambh” – A 32 Hour Startup Challenge

Over this weekend (March 7th – 9th, 2014), Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Udaipur’s Entrepreneurship Cell “Saksham” organized a 32 hour startup challenge event. The event which was first of its kind in Udaipur was a huge success drawing in over 40 participants from all over the places. I had … [Read more...]

Cerebrata Story – Customer Service

In this blog post, I will share our experience regarding the most important aspect of running a company – customer service. To me, nothing is more important for a company than to providing the best possible customer service. This alone makes or breaks a company. As a side note, personally I don’t … [Read more...]

Cerebrata Story – Team Management

In this post about my journey with Cerebrata, I will talk about team management (erstwhile known as Human Resource Management or at times in India as Personnel Management). Our team management policies are built around one simple principle: Karma is a bitch! You mess with karma and in time karma … [Read more...]

Cerebrata Story – Azure Management Cmdlets

Continuing Cerebrata journey, in this blog post I will describe how we built our 3rd product – Azure Management Cmdlets. In short this product contains a number of PowerShell Cmdlets for managing Windows Azure. Why Did We Build It? Only reason I could think of regarding building this product was … [Read more...]

Cerebrata Story–Azure Diagnostics Manager

Continuing Cerebrata journey, in this blog post I will describe how we built our 2nd product – Azure Diagnostics Manager. History During the public beta phase of Cloud Storage Studio (CSS) before PDC 2009, a number of our users asked us the build the capability of visualizing their cloud … [Read more...]

Cerebrata Story – Marketing

In the previous post about Cloud Storage Studio, I walked you through our experience about building a product and making it commercially available. Now we were left with a gigantic task – How to market the product? In this post I will talk about what all things we did for marketing our products … [Read more...]