Entrepreneurship gains ground as a career choice on campuses

Campus incubation centers are filling a vital gap but must offer the right mix of seed money and mentorship.

Click here to view full story

Powered by ScribeFire.

Paul Graham at Startup School '08

Paul Graham, founder of YCombinator, speaks at Startup School 08 about how to create a successful startup.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Clean Tech - SSB Aug 09

­­­­­­

My post on the Headstart Network Blog

The August edition of Startup Saturday showcased two of the finest efforts in the domain of clean tech. While the term clean tech is in a lot of discussion, these days, there are a number of concepts that need clarifications, and when it comes to start-ups in clean tech, SSB is always at the forefront with its showcase! In fact, we had rush not just in nominations, but also amongst speakers and the demos in Lightning Pitches - we had more than we could accomodate and till the last minute, this kept us on our toes! So finally, NextGen PMS and AutoBoxx Automation were the ones that comprised the main demos and we had a number of speakers that made us decide about having a panel discussion. The concept of a panel discussion during an SS event was one of the two 'firsts' that we had  - the second one being mentioned next.

One of the newest feather in our cap was the concept of live streaming of the event, thanks to mobisy.com. The idea sprung up from the fact that we needed online videos of the event for archiving and streaming over the Net. In fact, our media partners have always been interested in having a copy of the part they have sponsored and live streaming really served this purpose.

Since this was an experimental effort this time, we have further efforts to improve the quality, lighting, timing and other related aspects of the video. View videos

­The way the volunteers have been supported by the people who attend SSB events was so clear when we faced a hitch in the mobile camera used for live streaming (it's battery went off!) and immediately, one of the members of the audience offered his phone's battery to continue the recording. Thanks to this spirit that SSB events have been so successful in Bangalore.

         

View more pics 

­ NextGen PMS are involved in the entire green chain, and are involved in estimating carbon waste footprints, and providing energy and emission efficiency measures and implementation plan. It was really a crisp presentation and Abhishek, who is the co-founder of the startup, interacted very well with the audience. He seemed to present a number of complicated topics in a very simplified manner to the group.

Think about managing energy in offices and houses and you got to talk to Ramandeep from Autoboxx Automation. They are not just into this but also in monitoring and tracking of company personnel, outsourced vendors as wel as customers. Their clientele includes banks retailers and telecom companies.

InOutAds was the first one to come up for the Lightning Pitches and went to showcase their approach towards connecting the folks who have places to advertise with the folks who have things to advertise. This was followed by Narahari from Presiding Tech India (They are primarily into Carbon credit and related activities), and Freeman who talked about the iAccelerator program at IIMA. Alleway Info talked about grooming the students entering the job market, and how they are not a placement agency but a source of well qualified and more than normal freshers in to the industry. Daniel from Daniel Power Systems was on stage with his wife and 3 month old kid and showcased his efforts at minimizing power thefts from the supply lines (not from homes) and at optimizing smart grids (without the hassles of having expensive smart switches at home/grids). MASH from IIMB presented the Marketing club efforts by the students and how they are coming up with innovative methods to reach more relevant people. They also mentioned briefly about the upcoming events at IIMB during the networking sessions.

The panel discussion was a very warm one with biggies like Vasudev Avdhani from the Tata Group,  Karthee Madaswamy from Qualcomm Ventures, Elmar Stroomer and Pradeep from Enviu, and Shashidhara K from Blueray Solar joining together with the audience to understand deeper aspects of opportunities in Clean Tech in India, and part of the discussion involved topics such as solar power, rechargeable dance floor, and hybrid autorickshaw project in India.

        ­ 

View more pics 

­ We had a new concept of categorized business card collection and folks dropped their cards in to boxes with different labels such as web services, product based startups and so on. We also had a graffitti board up during the networking session for people to put in their thoughts about Startup Saturday events! Bangalore Mirror and StartupNews.in were present amongst the audience and did an excellent job of interacting with the audience. The audience enthu was brimming, and was visible during the networking session!

View more pics 

Powered by ScribeFire.

Dearth of Product Companies in India - repeat call!?

One of my articles published on the NSRCEL Blog

We were lucky as well as unlucky to have missed the industrial revolution during its birth pangs - we got the stuff once it was already in a shape in the west. If it was the first car that was made or the first record player that played music, the entirety of products came up in some form in the west. This had a dual effect of having some form of product on the one hand (acceleration of technology use in the society) and forgetting to develop newer products in the country. We always had a thought that the product gets developed in the west and then it is migrated in an appropriate form to countries like India. (In fact, if a Indian product really comes up, it is not looked at with the same respect as the one born outside the country!) And now with folks like Friedmann singing about the services industry, the media and the public in general are in a euphoria of being the services capital of the globe, forgetting and unfortunately, ignoring the importance of product development in India. The number of original products developed in India has been very less, in comparison to the other aspects of industry. Well, we need to look at the long term effects of this assumed 'high'!

Whether it be post-independence economic policies, or a rush to get richer quicker by providing services (rather than wait for the full development cycle of a product), there are numerous reasons to look at. But the time has come when indegenous products from India have to be honored, with services being looked as the cream on the milk.

How do you think most developed countries have been able to remain competitive? According to NSF (National Science Foundation, USA), “High-technology industries are driving economic growth around the world”.

Although a lot has started happening in encouraging products as the main motive for development, we have to push the pedal harder. “Even during the recent, slow-growth, ‘post-bubble’ period (2000–03), high-technology industry continued to lead global growth at about four times the rate of all other manufacturing industries.”

Is this article dated by a few years - because it seems, that with people like Mahindra, Tata and Bharat Forge, we do have a product oriented approach!? Well, this article, is not really dated - it is just a reminder for the intense focus that we need to have when we go ahead with products. The definition of product from being a physical entity has been shattered. We need to have the central idea that can materialize into a definite form, and that can by itself sustain the services industry that we are proud of.

To quote a random internet user (login Dharma - no link):

Its hard to build product companies when the markets for these products are elsewhere. Now, with India emerging as a major market for high-tech products/services, its only a matter of time before we have some product-based entrepreneurial success stories coming out of India. I personally know several different entrepreneurs in B’lore working on ambitious product ventures. What is needed now is a combination of (1) govt regulation, (2) infrastructure development, and (3) seed/early-stage support from “mentor” funds/VCs to nurture this budding ecosystem. The service companies have done a great job building up Brand India, and the folks who have made lots of money in the process have an unique opportunity to give back to Indian IT by helping with (3) above.

We do not want to undermine the software services companies - they have contributed brilliantly to the economy - we just should not over-enthusiastic with this and tend to lose a product oriented approach.

Again, quoting Sramana Mitra, in an address to IITians:

In the last decade, IT has sucked all other engineering disciplines dry of their best minds. Even the IIT Civil Engineers and Mechanical Engineers are writing low-level software for Oracle or IBM. If you continue at this rate, none of the other major disciplines will get their rightful share of leadership that is your responsibility to provide.

This may look like a repeat call for a product based economy - but in today's world, it does have its significance.

Any thoughts!?

All rights reserved for site content.
Visit Jeev's Homepage

Alternative Startup Financing Schemes - Freeman Murray

I’ve seen a number of posts lately discussing the ‘changing face of venture capital’. Paul Graham talks about the change in dynamics caused by the low capital requirements of technology startups. Fred Wilson discusses the need for a market for privately held common stock. There seems to be a general consensus about the growing role angels play in the startup ecosystem, and sadly there also seems to be a general consensus indicating that angels should basically write off their investments the moment they make them.

This last point rings true for me. Before coming to India I made a number of investments in tech companies. During my chapter... [Read full article]

Powered by ScribeFire.

Of foster parenting and technology marketing

One of my  articles published on the NSRCEL Blog

The state of technology marketing in India (and else where) is something that is of prime concern for the introduction of new products and the so-called buzz being created to focus on innovative products in SW. We have mostly been a service based economy as far as IT is concerned and there is a sentiment of venture gurus to focus more on innovation, so as to sustain and lead in this arena. Many folks blame the marketing fellows to have failed in sustaining innovation, even if technical folks are busy creating newer ideas. A number of product companies funded by well-known money mines are being shelved, and the blame goes to the entrepreneurs behind these ideas. Are they really failing? Many of them get swallowed by the biggies such as MS and Google (the founders consider it success for them if they have been bought over by a bigger player!).

        

I believe there is an amazing mismatch between marketing fellows and the techies, and this is the primary reason that they fail. People at the top are unable to comprehend, where buckets-full of money is vanishing in the name of branding a product. For every failure in the market, there are many success stories - sometimes the smaller fish is bought over by a giant or simply shelved into file-13.

I was interacting with the marketing fellow of a techie product - we did not know that he was not a PhD and not a techie fellow, until his boss revealed. The depth of understanding he had about 'how his product is going to help the customer' was superb. Another example, I would suggest a fellow from Mathworks Inc, who was completely from the sales and marketing side - the clarity he had about the usability of the product was the inspiration to even think of an alternative solution to the tool we were using at hand. You have to keep in mind, just two things - make the customer understand the technology involved in a very simple manner, and secondly, you have got to get the right price. Many marketing fellows avoid the most important questions, saying that they'll get back to the tech team. And some others, over-promise the merits of the product without even taking the tech team into confidence.

It is very difficult (particularly for the bigger companies, who are the guys with the money), to shift from a software tool to a newer one. They keep working with the older tool because their client overseas has not yet upgraded to the latest version or the newer tool in discussion.

Pouring money to marketing of technology is never going to work in the long run and we keep lamenting the disappearance of innovative SW. It has to (blame it to Darwin or to anyone) vanish unless sustained in a motherly way (marketing folks always have a mix of fear for tech and over-commitment, making them almost step-parental). In the same lines, we need more and more tech fellow develop the ability to market for themselves or assist the marketing fellow (instead of looking at the marketing fellow as a money-minded jerk who gets paid for 'just babbling'). In many successful companies, the pitching team always comprises of a combination of a tech person and a non-tech person.

We got to evolve. SW ideas evolve faster than they get accepted in the market. Secondly, SW ideas come to shape faster than bigger project's life cycle. Example, an Airbus 380 project had loss in billions of USD just because the SW they used underwent a major version upgrade. For this reason, the bigger projects prefer to freeze the SW till the project is delivered and the support for the project continues with the same tool. Its like, you have ten soaps on the shelf to take bath with, you'd generally choose one for the whole period of the bath (the project). Can you say that another soap which was bought while you were busy bathing has failed, for you!? Every innovation is important - to make it viable  in the business sense needs planned effort.

It is high time that VCs and the folks whose money is involved, get deeper into the idea behind an idea, than just playing with spreadsheets. It has become like the discussion between a foster parent with her teenage daughter - the adult is not interested in going into details of what the teenager wants to prove, and the teenager does not want to or is incapable of explaining the real meaning of her intentions. The money-folks keep looking at the halo over the head of the inventor, and the inventor may lack the basics of explaining the money aspects of the innovation. Unfortunately, the idea gets shelved!

Money (funnily, many folks really understand it as muscle power - its true!) plus better marketing/entreprenuers can make more number of SW innovations see the light of the day - and we need not lament dying innovations (due to Darwin stuff about evolution and the survival of the fittest) - if people can do without them, they will.

Incubators such as NSRCEL are a great source of a collection of mentors who bridge this gap to a large extent. You will find people who are interested in both technology and money, (in an equally ignorant way!), so as to look at the better aspects of both. When you look at an idea from a non-rejection perspective, and with all the patience that it deserves, it will evolve faster and healthier. "Generally at the NSRCEL no Idea is rejected." And if you observe, the gap between the marketing and the techies are being filled by appropriate support from NSRCEL. To have the right kind of folks do the job they are best at is the focus. This will help the techies focus on innovation and would make sense when the need of the hour is to focus on innovative products.

Powered by ScribeFire.

List of Business Incubators in India

List of a few Business Incubators in India

Name	Contact Person	Address	Contact Information
Centre for Innovation, Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE)	Mr. Kunal Upadhyay - CEO	Indian Institute of Management, Vastrapur, Ahmedabad- 380015	91-79-26324203 / 079 - 26308357 kunal@iimahd.ernet.in www.iimahd.ernet.in/ciie
Society for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SINE)	Prof. N.L. Sarda- Professor in Charge	IIT Bombay, Powai, Mumbai - 400076	91- 22- 25767072 Direct: 25767710 nls@csc.iitb.ac.in www.sineiitb.org
TBI ON EMBEDDED SYSTEMS AND VLSI DESIGN	Prof.S, Gurunarayanan Co-ordinator, TBI	Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani - 333031 Rajasthan.	91-1596-245073 Extn: 252 sguru@bits-pilani.ac.in www.bits-pilani.ac.in
TBI for Composites	Dr.R. Gopalan, Executive Director	Composites Technology Park, 205, Bande Mutt, Kengeri Satellite Township Bangalore-560060	91-80-56997605, 56681005 drgopal@blr.vsnl.net.in
Centre for Biotechnology	Dr. S. Meenakshisundaram- Business Manager	Centre for Biotechnology, Anna University Chennai - 600025	91-44-22350772, 9840348173 meenakshi@annauniv.edu www.annauniv.edu/biotech
MITCON Biotechnology Centre	Mr. Kulkarni - Chief Executive	MITCON Biotechnology Centre, BAIF Campus Mr. Manibhai Desai Nagar Pune - 411052	91-20-66289451 kulkarni@mitconbt.com www.mitconindia.com
National Design Business Incubator	Mr. Mahesh. K Rovvidi - Chief Operating Officer	National Institute of Design (NID), Paldi, Ahmedabad - 380007	91-79-2662 3692 Extn 5001 ndbi@nid.edu www.ndbiindia.org
Vellore Institute of Technology	Mr. A. Balachandran, Manager- TBI	VITTBI, Vellore Institute of Technology, Vellore-632014	91-416-2243097 - Direct vittbi@vit.ac.in www.vittbi.com
National Institute of Technology, Calicut	Mr. A.V. Francis, Officer on Special Duty, TBI	National Institute of Technology, Calicut - 673601 kerala	91-0495-2286162,Direct - 2286604 avf@nitc.ac.in
J.S.S. Mahavidyapeetha	Prof. R. Raghunanadan - Chief Executive	J.S.S. Academy of Technical Education, C-20/1, Sector -62 Noida 201301	91-120-2401442 ce@jssstepnoida.org www.jssstepnoida.org
ICRISAT	Mr. S. Karuppanchetty - Deputy COO, Mr. Abdul Rahman Ilyas - COO	ICRISAT, 303 Bldg, Patancheru 5023224	91-040-30713222 karuppanchetty@cgiar.org
Kongu Engineering College	Prof. S. Balamurugan- Executive Director - TBI	Kongu Engineering College, Perundurai -638052, Erode, Tamil Nadu.	91- 4294 220562, 220171, Direct 226650 balamurugan@kongu.ac.in
Advance Materials Technology Incubator	Mr. Sanjay Bharadwaj - Co-ordinator	International Advance Research Centre for Powder Metallurgy & New Materials RCI Road, Opp. Ballapur Village, Hyderabad - 500005	91-40-24457104-7
Center for Entrepreneurship - SPJIMR	Prof. M. Suresh Rao - Program Co-ordinator	S.P. Jain Institute of Management & Research, Munshi Nagar, Dadabhai Road, Andheri (West), Mumbai - 400 058.	+91-22-2623 7454 / 0396 / 2401 Ext: 211 msrao@spjimr.org www.spjimr.org/cen tre_entrepreneurship/hom e.asp