Almost slipped on the cross-posting promise! Here's a post I did yesterday for TechCrunch. At least I think it was yesterday....days are blurring together in India. I was really happy with how this story turned out, but it was a challenge to write. Why? Because Deep Kalra is just really, really likable. I don't just mean that he's a nice guy-- he's a great entrepreneur, took risk where a lot of Indians have not, has built a great business and takes his team on rafting trips!

He studies entrepreneurs not just in the US but around the world, and not in a sycophantic name-dropping way. He wants to learn how to be better. He's one of the most impressive guys I've met in India, in short. And that sucks, because it's hard to capture "endearing" and easy to capture "weird" or "mean" or "quirky."

Paul Carr has become my de facto second set of eyes on TC posts when I'm exhausted and traveling. (What can I say? I like editors. You can take the girl out of old media....) At any rate, his comment was "I really care about this guy and want him to do well!" And anyone who knows (or reads) Paul knows he's kind of a jerk. So perhaps I captured "endearing" after all? I hope so. Enjoy.

GURGAON, INDIA– Back in 1995, Deep Kalra knew that India had burgeoning consumer promise. So he took a risk, quit his safe-but-boring banking job and joined AMF Bowling—an American company that was aiming to bring bowling alleys and billiard halls to India for the first time.

So after four years, he headed back into the safe world of banking. And then, in 2000, with some money saved up, he decided to leave again and do things his way. Enamored by the Internet and frustrated by how hard it was to travel in India he opened MakeMyTrip.com. The site—as you might guess from the name—was like any of the online travel brokers started during the dot com bubble, only it was in India.

Of course, that was a pretty crucial difference. That venture too was ahead of its time, but it was his and Kalra stuck it out. After the market crash and September 11, Kalra’s foreign investors reneged on $1 million in funding commitments. Then there was the triple whammy of SARS, which made everyone want to travel in Asia less. He was 31-years-old with a wife and a baby at a time when starting a dot com was insane and in a place where it was downright suicidal. Indeed, many VCs will tell you today that India—where only 50 million people are online and just two million have broadband connections— is still not ready for the consumer Web.

But Kalra and two senior managers bought back their equity in the business and agreed to go without salaries for 18 months. He called a meeting and asked the staff to take 40% paycuts. Twenty-five of them stayed and 17 balked and quit. Kalra decided to focus on selling travel to returning Indian expats rather than locals, but he kept an eye on that sleeping giant of a domestic market.

A year later, MakeMyTrip broke even, in 2003 he reluctantly decided to trust VCs again and in 2004– when Internet adoption in India had finally started to grow and much of the Indians who had the money to travel had credit cards, bank cards or access to money transfers—Kalra came back to his original vision of building the Expedia of India. “There’s a fine line between resilient and stubborn,” he says, sitting in his office in Gurgoan surrounded by globes, maps and maps with mashed-up pictures of many of those employees who stayed. “It worked out, so we can say we were resilient. But at the time I worried I was just being stubborn. But I figured you regret the things you don’t do in life, not the things you do.” When I met him the day before, Kalra easily rattled off details of a bowling supercenter that opened up down the road after his AMF days. You can tell it stings a bit, but if we were sitting here having the same conversation about an online travel company that took off after he gave up, it’d be devastating.

What Kalra didn’t know back in those dark days was that he was about to benefit from a global Internet truism: Online travel is the ecommerce gateway drug. It makes up some 70% of global ecommerce, it was one of the first categories to take off in the United States and one of the only markets big enough to sustain a host of publicly traded Internet competitors. Similarly, Ctrip was one of the first big Internet hits in China.

India—a country with few Internet homeruns—took longer. But Kalra’s company is now making $5 million in US  dollars of profit this year and doing more than $500 million in gross bookings. Revenues are up 88% during the recession and one-out-of-every-twelve domestic flights in India is booked via MakeMyTrip.com. After airline tickets, the second biggest category is railway tickets—the site sells 2,500 of them every day. Kalra is busy interviewing a lot of US-trained management types to augment the team. Don’t look now, but MakeMyTrip could be India’s next dot com IPO. (Like most well-behaved CEOs, Kalra wouldn’t comment on any immediate IPO plans.)

Why does travel take off so fast? For starters, it’s one of the only categories where you buy something that’s delivered over email. Forget costs—in emerging markets shipping to far-flung areas doesn’t always exist. Kalra says etickets may have saved the company. For most, booking online doesn’t require a huge change in the way they buy travel. In pre-Internet days in India and the US most people booked travel through a travel agent who’d pull up inventory in a computer. The Web just cut out the middleman. (And his fees.)

Travel won’t be the ecommerce exception forever. India’s rush of a middle class with disposable income is evolving fast. When Kalra was growing up no one went on Honeymoons abroad and now most of the kids in his office do. And hotels were verboten—you visited family and stayed with family. Kalra has a hunch the next local ecommerce hit could be FlipKart, an online book retailer with a whopping 5 million monthly uniques, profitability and a new round of cash from Accel in the bank.

And there’s the so-called “last mile” problem. Kalra doesn’t plan on addressing it by opening more stores. Instead, he’s playing with the idea of a business-to-business product, where existing local travel agents would use a slow-connection optimized version of MakeMyTrip to access more inventory than they can now and sell through the site’s existing back-end system. He doesn’t want to cram an efficient online option down the throat of a population that knows its local travel agent and likes to go in and chat with them, have a cup of tea and discuss cricket scores. And clearly one deal with a travel agent is a far more efficient way to reach a whole village.

Kalra is smart. He studies every competitor out there. He’s ripped ideas off lesser-known companies like FareCast.com, corrected me on the pronunciation of China’s up-and-comer Qunar.com (so much for my Mandarin lessons), and can quote Expedia’s customer conversion rates. (They’re 6%, by the way. His are 7%. It’s the most important metric he watches.)

Ahead of his time or no, Kalra is glad he took the risk when he did. He’s not sure he would today even with more money in his savings. He’s also glad he didn’t give up on India’s domestic market, “If I’d been in Silicon Valley I’m convinced we might have reached scale in half the time, but we also probably would have been obliterated by the competition.”

That’s the benefit of slowly emerging markets that’ll eventually have a big payoff—you get time to make mistakes.

It's my sister's 40th birthday today. (Hopefully that wasn't supposed to be a secret, because it's kinda too late.) So far it's been quite the social media event for me. Geni reminded me (Thanks, Sacks.) and I've enlisted an army of Twitter friends to wish her happy bday. (Please add your wishes!)

I am the youngest of five kids and Mary is my only sister. You can only imagine how annoying I was as a younger sister. No, actually, you can't. I thought everything she did (and wore) was cool (even the Hammer pants). I always "borrowed" stuff without asking in our cramped house and somehow she resisted the urge to kill me. 

Here are ten other reasons she's awesome:

1. She is the rock of our family. She does so much to take care of everyone, while I just selfishly move to California then flit all over the world.

2. She married very well. Mary married her childhood sweetheart Robert, who she started dating when I was in 7th grade. He was probably closer to me growing up than my two oldest brothers who were out of the house by then. Robert is an amazing cook, hilarious, drinks as much wine at family functions as I do, and is a perfect in-law companion to Mr. Lacy. He's also done a lot for my family. It's rare when you can't think of a better person for your sibling to be married to.

3. She has great kids. Ramie and Bob are just awesome. I took care of Ramie two days a week for about six months when she was young, I was in college, my sister was getting her Master's Degree and none of us had any money. I still cherish that time and wish I'd had more of it with Bob. I've always said if we could get it in writing that we'd have kids that awesome, we'd do it tomorrow. (Or when I stop traveling all over the world.)

4. She doesn't take any shit. I mean-- she's more outspoken than I am. Can you imagine? Yeah, don't mess with her.

5. So, my mom taught at the beloved girls school I went to from k-12. We carpooled there everyday for 13 years. It's some of my best memories growing up and cemented an amazing relationship with my mother. Now my sister (who only went there for high school because she liked boys too much) teaches at the same school and my niece goes there. Isn't that awesome?

6. She drove an old blue-and-white Dodge Dart in high school that used to belong to my grandmother. She named it "Velma" after my grandmother. I shared a Toyota hatchback. I was grateful, but it's comparatively lame. :(

7. Mary and Robert make me grilled cheese sandwiches and rotel dip when I visit. Any time day or night!

8. She gives the most thoughtful gifts and is the one sibling who *always* remembers my birthday. I just write lame blog posts from India for her...

9. She was a far bigger romantic than I was growing up, but still, she spent a lot of time mopping up my tears over boys. We even went on a double date with my first boyfriend when I was in 8th grade. How cool is that for a high school sister? (Awkwardly enough, my boyfriend was also in high school. . .so really I guess I was the one out of place.)

10. She's my sister. There is just something about having a sister. Surrounded by two older brothers, she refused to admit my brother two years older than me, Peter, was a boy for a while and insisted on putting barrettes in his hair. She was elated when I was born a girl. She insisted on calling me "Suzy" for a while, which some brain-dead PR people still call me. We do have to stick together, even when one steals the other's Hammer pants.

I always like getting spa treatments in other countries because you never exactly know what they are going to do to you. Extra anxiety points if you don't speak the language because you don't know how to politely tell them to stop.

I went for a facial in India before leaving Delhi to get rid of some of this caked in smog and pollution. Three weeks in China followed by three weeks in India and I'm amazed my skin has held up as well as it has. (I know everyone talks about smog in China, but in my experience pollution is worse in Delhi than Beijing.)

It was going ok. I was in a small room covered by yellow-and-white striped towels that I think my family used to unearth for beach trips. I was ordered to keep my eyes closed as my face was rubbed over and over rhythmically with some kind of mask. It was mostly relaxing. Then the woman got a load of my horribly ungroomed eyebrows.

"You're eyebrows are too long!" she exclaimed.

"Um, yeah I know, I've been traveling," I said. (I also haven't had a haircut in months. Thank God it was in a shower cap.)

"I need to take care of these!" she said.

"Um...ok."

"What do you do?? Tweeze them?"

"No I get them waxed, I've just been gone." (I'm getting more nervous here.)

"Oh, that's a horrible method."

"Well it usually works for--"

"Hold this skin tight!"

"Oh, ok."

Now remember, my eyes are still closed. She proceeds to start doing what feels like hacking away at my face with a straight edge razor. Tears are streaming out of my eyes and my grip keeps loosening on the skin around my eyebrow making it sting more. I was thinking, "How long do I have to endure this and what the hell could she be doing??"

Finally I said, "That really hurts!"

"It's better," she said. She finished with the left brow and I opened my eyes and said "How are you doing that? It's horrible!" I was half expecting to see a chainsaw in her hand. Instead she had a piece of string wrapped around two fingers, and held in her teeth. She smiled. "Indian method. Rips out the whole root."

"Is that razor wire?" I asked. She grabbed my hand and showed me on my arm hair. I'm still not sure how she did it-- but it was like one of those rope tricks kids do. She pulled the string from different angles causing it to wrap around the hair and then -- rip. I was so amazed at the ingenuity I let her do the other brow. They do look pretty good. (Even if they're still sore.) I didn't know anything could be more painful than waxing. American women really shouldn't complain!

When you wake up this exhausted-- it's a problem. I am absolutely beat after five days traveling around Northern India, jolting along Indian roads, riding smelly animals, meeting nearly 100 local entrepreneurs and experiencing some of the best hospitality I've had during the whole book project.

I have a lot in my head I want to write, both for TechCrunch at the book, but there are too many things and they're all yelling. So I'm going to give them another day to settle down. I'd love to give them that day sitting on a massage table somewhere or doing some Yoga. Unfortunately, I've got a pile of meetings today too. Tomorrow, I head to Bangalore.

Here are some pictures from our weekend in Jaipur:

Yes, Vivek Wadhwa finally found me an elephant to ride. It wasn't as scary as I thought I'd be. Kind of like an amusement park ride that spits all over you. Pictures follow.

India's omnipresent "bling" as applied to an elephant:

"You're not going to trample me right, Mr. Elephant?"

Leaving the station...

...and Twittering about it

Vivek Wadhwa actually said that as we were riding camels today. Yes, the trend of amazing cell coverage in emerging markets while I can't get a signal in my living room continues. I am far too tired to write a more salient post than that. So here are some pictures of me and a camel named Raju.

Raju: "Sigh. Another American wants a ride."

 Note: I'm a little trepidatious about this whole camel thing at first...

Boarding all rows...

Raju takes a break. Exhausted from carrying me around.

Back on the camel.

And, you're done Raju. Drink up, pal. You've earned it.

Being on the camel wasn't really scary at all-- it was relaxing. We're supposed to be riding elephants today after a meet up with the Jaipur Chapter of TiE, an amazing group for connecting and supporting Indian entrepreneurs around the world.

I think the elephant will be scary.

There's one place in the world where I seem to break promises and that's on this site. Not only did I stop crossposting stuff from TechCrunch and promoting my BusinessWeek columns (something you know I'm remedying if you've been reading lately), but I also promised an international travel tip for each trip. And then I forgot. I suppose the China one could be "Don't split a bottle of Baijiu, or if you do, don't take valuable possessions out with you that night."

My India one is more cynical: Don't be nice to people on airplanes.

Last night, I was boarding the second leg of my flight to India-- a brutal 15 hour one. In coach. In what was supposed to be an exit row, but wasn't. In what was supposed to be an aisle seat, but wasn't. Behind two crying children. I saw the seat, and immediately made sure I'd packed either an Ambien or a suicide pill.

But it wasn't all bad. I wasn't dead-center of the row, had a tiny polite Indian man sitting next to me, and an empty seat on the other side. I can make that work.

Just then a guy came up and begged me to switch with him because he had an elderly grandfather he needed to sit next to. Everyone else in my section looked down at a magazine, hoping they wouldn't get asked in case I said no. I politely agreed to move, provided that he could find a place for my suitcase. Overhead space was at a huge premium on this flight and, as readers know, I NEVER check a bag. He said he'd just swap it with his bag. I didn't actually see this happen, he just came and told me he did and I took his word for it.

Oh, and I got to the seat-- dead center, next to a young child, in a seat that didn't recline. You've got to be kidding me.

The flight wasn't so bad, thanks to the Ambien and eight months of international travel that has trained me to go into a zen-like state even in the worst coach situation. I slept about 10 hours of it, and wasn't even that annoyed that the kid next to me pretty much slept half in my seat most of the time. Then we went to de-plane and wouldn't you know it? My bag is NOWHERE IN SIGHT. As you can see from the picture on the link above, it's a bright green bag and hard to miss. I had to wait for the entire plane to deplane, then I, the guy who I was doing "a huge favor for" and about three flight attendants searched every single bin on the plane. No bag.

They told me to leave the plane and go with an agent to arrivals where we'd try to find whoever took it. Oh lovely. In the tunnel from the plane to the gate, I looked at the guy and just said "Unbelievable." And he brushed it off saying, "Hey, it's not my fault. I put it in the bin." At which point-- after some 24 hours of travel and the prospect of nearly a month in India with no clothes-- I snapped a bit. "As far as I'm concerned this is exactly your fault. I did you a favor; I didn't see you move the bag; you were the last one to touch it and now it's mysteriously gone. That's certainly not my fault."

A flight attendant immediately snapped at me and told me I needed to take a deep breath and apologize to him. Um.....does anyone else think I was out of line? Under the circumstances, I think I'd been quite calm until this point.

Before I could cause a bigger scene, the suitcase was produced as if from nowhere by a flight attendant. "See it's not his fault!" she said.

"Where was it?" I demanded.

"In the bin where he said he'd put it," she said.

Hmm...that's interesting considering all five of us looked in that bin-- and every other bin on the plane-- and didn't see it. Reminded me of my favorite children's book "Morris's Disappearing Bag." American Airlines must have disappearing bins just to create such dramatic situations. I literally can not think of another answer. It's too bad they told me to leave the plane just minutes before it was reproduced, because I would have love to have seen that magic trick.

Anyway, I stomped off, went through customs and got in a car to the hotel. But I'm still annoyed that I gave myself a far-worse seat on a 15-hour plane ride, was essentially detained a good thirty minutes, and then got treated like the bad guy by everyone. That will teach me to be nice. 

Of course, the really sad thing is I'm such a push-over I'd do it again if someone with an elderly grandparent asked. I'd just move the damn bag myself. 

I have to add as a post-script: I hope this losing or almost-losing of bags on every trip isn't a new trend for me. I'm already on a backup backpack, borrowed camera, and spare laptop after the China-Baijiu debacle. It's particularly fitting given the working title of the book in progress is "Nothing to Lose." Pretty soon I'm going to embody it! And that's ironic because with my last book, "Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good," plenty of reviewers mused that I may have just been lucky with the first book. I think I'm naming my third book: "I Just Won a Million Dollars" just in case there's something to the trend.

If you're only going to do one magazine cover then jump to new media, why not make it a memorable one?

I saw this today on Twitter and it made me so happy. This is some guy dressed as Kevin Rose specifically from my BusinessWeek cover back in 2006-- one of the first national stories on a lot of Web 2.0 companies we now obsess about daily.

When the cover came out, we got a lot of semi-legit criticism over the cover language (which - love it or hate it- did its job and moved 50% more copies than any other issue that year) and a lot of dumb criticism for "inflating another bubble" by saying -- gasp!-- YouTube could be worth $500 million. (Never mind, it was purchased for more than three times that a month later.) We were also told loudly by haters that all these companies would be out of business in a year. Guess what? They're not, I got a book deal from that story that changed my life and now my the whole thing lives on in Halloween costume form. So there.

(From Sean Percival's Flickr stream)

I've only got a little more than a week in between my China and India trips. Amid some TechCrunch posts, a BusinessWeek column and romantic weekend away with Mr. Lacy, I managed to squeeze in a Press:Here shoot. It was a fun one. Our guest was Dan Rosensweig, Guitar Hero CEO, and Heidi Flato, of Verizon, who was showing off the new Droid.

There were a few interesting moments. One of my favorites was when Flato politely answered the question of why people would buy the Droid instead of the iPhone by saying, essentially: Well, AT&T's service is HORRIBLE FOR STARTERS. Indeed, one thing I don't miss while traveling is the constant dropped calls from all my friends with iPhones.

But first, we talked to Rosensweig about whether the Guitar Hero fad was over and about the new product, DJ Hero. I would have assumed the benefit was reaching more hip-hop obsessed youth. But Rosensweig noted it would also appeal to the house-music-obsessed Europeans, who haven't yet grabbed onto the trend-- not even when Rock Band put out its Beatles version. Another surprise: Only 20% of consoles have a music-playing game. I would have assumed it was at least 40%. I mean, that's the only reason we bought our Xbox.

Clip below, and the full show is here.

Ok, I promised myself I was going to crosspost my stuff from TechCrunch from now on. This post is a tough call. I actually think it's a great business story and the entrepreneur in question is fascinating. But it's definitely, ahem, not my usual beat and may offend some people. Especially ones who gave birth to me or my husband. So let me be clear-- if you are likely to be shocked, don't read the following.

I’ve met a lot of expats in my time in China. Some decided to move during an Asian studies class in college. Others decided to move when they saw Mandarin-speaking colleagues getting a promotion over them at work. Still others may have promised a Chinese parent on his or her deathbed to return to the homeland.

For Chicago-native Brian Sloan, it was about the time he was being questioned by police for trafficking and dismembering human skulls.

Sloan seems normal. Even boring. I met him with some other Beijing entrepreneurs last week over hot pot and he refused to eat anything out of the spicy side of the pot. He has a slight build, non-descript features, and mousey brown hair. He even has a law degree from Penn State. But his life took a more interesting turn in 2004 or so when he started to scour antique shows and auctions for things he could sell for more money on eBay. What motivated him? “Making money,” he says. Not so much for the cash itself, but the chase, the deal and the challenge. Buying something undervalued—even weird— and figuring out who would highly value it.

Long story short: He starting to realize China was a treasure trove of things to buy low and sell high—among them, human skulls that he imported in a box marked “TOYS” and then boiled, cleaned, broken apart and screwed back together and detailed for medical students. A good skull would cost about $100 each and he could sell it for as high as $800. (What makes “a good skull”? Turns out it’s the number of teeth.)

It all went well until the day an eccentric Chicago puppeteer named JoJo Baby came by the house to buy some mannequins and saw some skulls boiling on the stove. He naturally assumed Sloan was a serial killer and called the cops. This YouTube video (also embedded below) pretty much says the rest. It bears noting, Sloan was never actually arrested or charged, although he still complains that he never got his “inventory” back from the mustachioed, gum-smacking Chicago brass who spent days trying to work him over Law-and-Order-style while TV satellite trucks camped out in front of his apartment.

Sloan moved to China soon after. It was considerably closer access to the things he was selling and, let’s just say after the skull incident, filled with more open-minded people. “In China, people respect what I do as a business,” he says. Which would be a boon in his next career move… making latex fetish-wear. (Link very NSFW.) And that’s where the Chinese supply chain magic came in. He was able to tailor nearly any outfit in any size and ship it at a healthy mark-up. Some outfits go as high as $800.

But even that pales next to his new business. How should I put this and still be a lady? The product is called “AutoBlow” and it has nothing to do with cars. Here’s the site. Warning: It’s very, very Not Safe For Work. (Yes, I’m spelling the letters out this time, just in case.)

Like a lot of entrepreneurs in China, Sloan is cagey about what I can and can’t say about how the operation works. That’s not because it’s illicit—it’s because it’s so incredibly lean, flexible and outsourced that he doesn’t benefit if competitors realize exactly what he’s pulled off business-wise. But suffice to say with a small army of employees peppered around the globe, Sloan—aka the “Kinky King of Beijing”—is looking at an incredibly profitable business that’s already generating more than $1 million in revenue and growing quickly. He’s exploited what each region does best: Romanians are his programmers and SEO, Indians and Brazilians do his Web design, and China does the manufacturing and fulfillment. He hired his whole staff without leaving his living room. His next act? Finding new products and following the same playbook.

My point here isn’t to write a salacious post about skulls and sex toys—as much as I enjoy watching Michael Arrington squirm. My point is that for all the talk about how much harder it is for a Westerner to do business in China, in a lot of industries there are far fewer barriers to entry than anywhere else I’ve seen in the world. And – huge 1.3 billion person domestic market aside—that’s what is making China such a Mecca for scrappy, pioneering entrepreneurs right now. You may find Sloan’s ventures distasteful, indeed he says his mother still changes the subject when friends ask what her son does for a living. But change the nature of what he’s selling and Sloan thinks just like any good entrepreneur pushing the boundaries in any pioneering market.

We like to think that outsourcing manufacturing to China or call centers to India revolutionized American business. But America hasn’t seen anything like the truly flattened, profitable, deconstructed and then ingeniously reconstructed businesses I’ve seen in China in the last few weeks.

People who say China is all about outsourcing the supply chain and not innovation have it backwards—the deconstructed supply chain is precisely what’s opened China up to a world of innovation. Imagine the way the Web democratized media and content and now apply the same ability to break a staid practice into Lego-like pieces to any physical hard goods industry whether its sex toys or iPods or pharmaceuticals.

We’ve only seen the first few innings of what this means for global business and smart entrepreneurs in China – whether expats or locals—have the advantage.