Working from 'The Center for Agile Thinking' HQ!

The new year started with a big bang at both the Last-Bench! office in Mumbai and The Center for Agile Thinking office in US. The boys in Mumbai have been on a roll and continuously producing learning content. I'd like to share my experience working out of The Center for Agile Thinking HQ in Princeton, New Jersey.

Work as usual started from the 1st day of January. That I'd like to call #LifeOfAnEntrepreneur. Prof. Anne, Charlie and I started work with getting an agenda down first of what we wanted to accomplish over the next 4 days. We came up with a list of 9 items and we achieved 8 out of them, which was very exciting!

The day started out with coffee, went into discussions, ideations and brainstorming. We also got down to some real work which included content and technology. I got to meet a very interesting management consultant while I was there with whom we validated our product, idea and value proposition.

Charlie and I got our hands wet with some server issues, discussed wireframes, design and user-interface. Prof. Anne and I reviewed content for some of our offerings. We had our first virtual team meeting with Sajid and Venkat in India and I was here in the US. It felt a bit different but the feeling was good.

Our days started at around 8am and went on until 8-10pm but it never felt tiring or stressful. Intermittently, our conversations ranged from culture to experiences, which maintained the balance and equilibrium in our minds!:-) I learned Charlie is an awesome musician who also learnt from Pt. Ravi Shankar back during his college days. He played the Piano on one of the evenings as we all were relaxing and it was perfect! The music was relaxing and it got us energized. He played Jazz to Classic Rock. I didn't know a whole lot of Jazz but he played Eric Clapton, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple and Billy Joel. What an experience to see him play the Piano!

Even on the last day, usually one would feel relaxed but we were on a roll and got a lot of work done on the final day too. With al the work, I was balancing calls and work back in India and tried in whatever little way I could to support the team in every possible manner which included communicating all our discussions here with Sajid and Venkat too.

Prof. Anne and Charlie were great hosts. For me, it felt like home and working from the office was the best start to the New Year!

Here are some pics:

Into 2014 and beyond!

2013 has been a great learning year at Last-Bench! We’ve had our shares of ups and downs, successes and failures, good days and bad days and busy days to extremely busy days but with all this we fought all odds and are now moving into our third year of existence – 2014.

From a team perspective, we’ve had many interns coming in and continuing on with their journey but towards the end our team size increased by 1. Though it’s just one but the importance of adding that ONE right person in your team is probably one of the best things that could’ve happened that will help us towards achieving our goals.

As we move into 2014, the LB team will focus on two major areas, which we do with passion, possess the right skills to execute and can make substantial progress from a business perspective.

• Educational content production
• Learning platform

Our content production projects are already rolling and we’re looking to scale it big time. We’ve already got multiple projects ranging from Kindergarten content to K-12 and corporate skill development content production in the pipeline for execution and will be scaling our team by 200% to support development activities. Overall, we’re seeing this as a big potential this year and in the future too. All I can say for now is, content production is not easy and we’ve mastered the art to bring creativity and smooth execution to the madness in this method.

On the other front, we’re very close on getting our learning platform MVP ready and are planning a soft launch sometime in Jan 2014 itself. Our JV partners and us have put a lot of thought into planning the strategy, technology, content and sales and finally in the last quarter of 2013, we began the development from all angles. We’re very excited about this learning solution and will be competing against the biggies in this space but in a very niche area. To give you’ll a gist, we’re building an expert driven skill development community for working professionals and are already seeing interest from our potential target customers.

To reach to this point today, I can proudly say that we’ve done it without external funding and are able to sustain our operations ourselves without having to put in more money after the initial capital. Like I’ve always said, it’s the team that matters and the team that can execute matters even more and at Last-Bench! we’ve got the team that can execute.

Keep a lookout on all the exciting stuff that we’re going to showcase in 2014. It’s the year where you’ll be hearing a lot about our work and us!

Lastly, would like to thank all our stakeholders for helping us to get to where we are today! We need your continued support.

Signing off from Munich! See you in 2014. Happy New Year!

-Rajeev (#LifeOfAnEntrepreneur)

Last-Bench visits Pune...

At Last-Bench, whenever we see a window of opportunity we strive to make the most of it and, more often than not, push ourselves to the limit - both, as a group and as individuals. It's probably the will to succeed or the passion we possess for our work or maybe it's just a 'startup thing'. Either ways, it ensures satisfaction and pleasure in our results and achievements :) Thus far, we've limited this drive to our 'work' mainly because we've never had the opportunity to extend it to 'play' as well! Hence, when a client meeting was scheduled in Pune we decided to capitalize on this chance and decided to make it into a company outing enthused with learning, adventure and, true to our ethos, lots of fun!

The day began rather early (even by startup terms!) at 6 am. Three quarters of the traveling troupe (Rajeev, Samir and Venkat) were being driven to Pune from Mumbai, with one member (Abhishek) already in Pune the previous day. [For all those concerned, we did not abandon Moushmi and Sajid :P They're currently taking some, much needed, time off :)]. The drive out of Mumbai and into Pune was fantastic. Such pleasure to encounter virtually no traffic as you cut through the city! Perks of early morning travel, we assume :) Then driving through the picturesque ghats on the expressway and stopping for the customary 'chai' couldn't have been a better way to start off, what would prove to be, a very important day for the company. 

The journey itself wasn't limited to refreshments and sightseeing, the objective was to use the travel time to discuss important issues like marketing strategy and plan, in the short term. This also was the cue for 'Mr. Creative' Samir to take a quick nap and dream about his next video masterpiece :D At this juncture, our focus is on social media and how we can leverage it to expand our reach, interact with potential customers, generate leads and eventually drive sales and revenue through it. We spent a good part of our journey reflecting on the learnings of our recently concluded Social Media mentoring session (look out for the blog post discussing it; coming soon!) and identifying areas of focus, goals, objectives and mediums. What remains is formulating a strategy (focused on identifying content areas, creating the content bank and defining roles & responsibilities) and, of course, actually executing the plan! 

We got into Pune around 10.30 am and straight away headed to our client's office for the meeting. After a set of preliminary talks in Mumbai, the purpose of this meeting in Pune was to finalize and, in principle, kick off the partner project. To sum up the discussion in a sentence (though we cannot to justice to the efforts put in from both sides), it was perfect! We were able to understand each others' strengths and how each one of us can contribute (and complement each other) to ensure overall success. Nothing like an association that is mutually beneficial! In retrospect, we feel that we (Last-Bench) got a little extra. We were able to observe, analyze and understand how a larger, education-focused company operates. We got good insights into their content creation and delivery standards, how they approach the entire process, where they separate their functions, where they intervene and collaborate, and how to really drive your product from being an idea to the complete, finished article. All this, while ensuring you never waver from the ultimate goal- solving the problem your customer faces and providing the best possible solution. 

It felt that we'd hit an experiential goldmine! We had come to Pune with the goal to leverage the opportunity in front of us and we did just that AND MORE. It would probably be safe to say we came, we LEARNT, we conquered! :)

Hey, but all work and no play is against the Last-Bench philosophy! So, we wrapped up our meeting and headed for a nice 'lunch + bonding session' at a popular eatery, called Tareef,  recommended to us by a local.  The food at the restaurant was absolutely wonderful and the ambience extraordinary. The calm soothing music allowed us to reflect on an excellent day and the delectable spread that was laid out provided us with the much-needed energy to discuss all things not related to work :D  The sumptuous meal and jovial conversation was followed up with a major highlight (and surprise)- a course of sweet paan [Betel leaf with coconut, fruit preserves, rose petal preserves and various spices]. Quite the perfect way to end an amazing experience in Pune.

Our journey back was more sombre and reflective. We imbibed all the learnings and thought about how we could benefit from all that we had discussed, seen and experienced. It was late evening by the time we headed back to our respective homes but all of us, individually and as a group, suddenly stood taller and more confident from the experience. And what could be better than the fact that we ourselves learned via the exact same methods we employ while teaching - Practicality and Fun! Touché!

Exclusive: Revamped website images & info

Have you seen our snazzy new website yet?

Here are some snapshots:

Visit : www.last-bench.com

Behind the scenes @ LAST-BENCH! : Website revamp

Behind the scenes is an 'inside look' into what is cooking at Last-Bench! Here you'll get to read about our current activity, future prospects, ‘under construction’ projects, brainstorming sessions, coffee breaks, 'whiteboard' drawings and lots more. Most importantly this is the perfect place to connect with our team and ask us about anything under the sun. It's almost as if you're right here with us! Feel free to comment, have a laugh and give us some useful feedback :)...

MANAGE WHAT 2.0: Evolution of our Soft Skills program

Here's a quick look into our new look MANAGE WHAT program! 
Also, a first look at our new PROMO VIDEOS!!