Uzanto referred to in a NYT article on micro-multinationals

Our company, Uzanto Consulting, has been referred to in an article in the New York Times on the proliferation of technology startups as micro-multinationals. The article has been authored by Hal Varian, a professor of business & economics at the Univ. of Berkeley. The thrust of the article is on how Internet technology (specially that deals with collaborative work methods) is acting to level the business playing field between large established companies (the likes of Yahoo, Google etc) and numerous small, innovation driven, initially self funded (mostly) startups. The large infrastructural costs required to collaborate between teams across the continents seem to have almost but disappeared with technologies like VOIP, IM, project mgmt software like Basecamp etc. (For a detailed understanding of these technologies, refer to my colleague, Jon’s earlier post on collaboration tools)

For the uninitiated, the word micro-multinational would almost seem paradoxical. How can multinationals be micro? For surely multinationals were supposed to be those big business goliaths that straddle the entire world. Size and scale was the first prerequisite to being a MNC.

Well, that was (and still is) true of the old economy. However in the new economy, with its emphasis on free flow of content over the boundariless world wide web, multinationals while, still sourcing from or selling in different countries, need not necessarily be huge. It is possible for small start-ups to have distributed multilocational operations across continents to leverage the availability/differential cost of business resources. In fact that’s what is referred to as the ‘50-50’ companies– companies with 50% of operations (say– sales, marketing and client servicing) in one country and the other 50% (maybe R&D, Design & Product development) in another country (or any logical combination thereof).

Uzanto can probably qualify as a micromultinational on account of the following

- our founders, Rashmi (the domain specialist) & Jonathan (the technology lead), are based out of Silicon Valley, the technology capital of the world
- our Delhi office has 5 members which includes software engineers and designers besides me as the operations in-charge
- our web service will initially be US centric, hence sales & client servicing will be in the US
- entire R&D and product design & development is based out of the Delhi office
- end user software testing is split between US & India (though more in US)
- all our web servers (4 in nos) are hosted in different parts of US
- all our web design work is being outsourced to a Spanish design studio based in the city of Punta Del Este in Uruguay, South America
- while we are targeting the US markets initially, there is no reason to believe that geographical vicinity is a service imperative – hence once we find a basic foothold in the market, clients for our web service could be located anywhere in this world