God in Chief

India has traditionally been a society where we have heard stories of the King and his Subjects, Gods and Mortals, the British Raj, and somewhere in our minds we have the concept of being submissive or being a follower to someone of higher power. And it did not help to have a Licence Raj. I grew up hearing stories of how these men of power could turn anyone into winners and anyone into losers.

Every new day brings new experiences and in my case new surprises. In my role as a mentor and investor I meet many entrepreneurs each of them with a story, unique business, passion and blind belief in their business. Many of these entrepreneurs have good backgrounds and generally well prepared for the meeting. They are able to share a crisp presentation on the plan and in my case within 5 mins of the presentation they start getting a volley of questions and we discuss, debate, agree, disagree and generally it ends up to be a 1 to 2 hour meet. While few of these meeting convert into a funding event in most cases I love to keep in touch with the entrepreneurs and keep advising them if they come to me with any query.

The brains of the VC’s are wired differently and startups should know how to deal with them.

A venture capitalist is a person who invests in a business , providing capital either for start-up or growth. Venture capitalists aim for a higher rate of return than would be given by more traditional investments. My years of interactions with VC’s have made me come to a conclusion that their brains are certainly wired differently. Just like entrepreneurs demonstrate certain common traits across the world VCs have certain traits. And when it comes to India I think the breed goes through another generation of transformation. To help entrepreneurs and startups better understand how to deal with the complex brains of the Indian VCs, I have put together my version of their brain map. Of course this is generic and there are many exceptions to the rule.

NASSCOM the premier software body of India is once again organizing the NASSCOM India Leadership Forum 2010. Overall a great conference, mostly attended by senior level executives of most top software companies of India, global Industry leaders,CEOs, Entrepreneurs etc.

Outlined are few of my observations related to how Indian IT Leaders are adapting to social media and traditional email :-

India has witnessed a tremendous growth in its media and entertainment business. In the past decade, we have seen the growth of billion dollar home grown media conglomerates like Network 18, Zee, UTV, Reliance ADA, Yash Raj, NDTV, Bennet & Colmen, and Hindustan Times to name a few. At the same time the foreign players too have done extremely well either directly like Star TV or via investments and partnerships with local players. Today Disney, Viacom, Turner, Sony, you name it and they have a large presence in the Media and entertainment business. When it comes to Television, Newspapers, Magazine, Sports, Movies, Theaters, DTH and entertaining over 700 million people in India, these companies rock.

Mumbai Terror Attacks on 26/11 has impacted thousands of people directly, millions of people across the globe who saw the event unfold on television, internet, twitter & facebook were also deeply impacted. For the next couple of months there were public demonstrations, media reports, blogs CEOs, Politicians, Teachers, street vendors, taxi drivers housewife almost everyone had a viewpoint. We got mad at the media, abused the government and politicians, blamed corruption, lack of planning, bad equipment, no coordination between agencies, Pakistan, Raj Thackeray, Shiv Sena, America, George Bush and everything under the sun for the Mumbai Terror Attacks

I must admit I too was suffering from the soda bottle effect, where initially it was all the bubble fizz of agitation but slowly things started to settle down and life got back to normal and 26/11 became a phrase Indian’s started to use with a bit of ‘pride’ it was India’s 9/11 and became a much popular topic of discussion whenever I met friends and business associations abroad.

For the past 10 years i have attended over 100 conferences in India and abroad. In most cases while others paid hundreds of dollars to attend. I used Juggad and almost always got in for free mostly being a speaker. The format for attending such conferences became quiet standard. Before the conference you setup number of meetings with people you know. Attend the keynote speech where you meet many random but sometimes important people. Setup more meetings with them.

Its almost like a jungle where different animals are looking for different prey. Startups looking for investors, established companies looking for business, many looking for jobs, everyone seems to be having a different agenda and the conference is just an excuse for everyone to get together under one roof.

I made the 3000 mile journey to TED from LA with not much expectations. Having attended a number of events and shows in India, I was expecting this event to be much like others, long lines, few good speakers who would mostly fly in for a few hours to speak, networking dinner which suited booted corporate types mostly mid and some senior management, mostly tech related over some bad food. Imagine there are 900 odd delegates and a big number of management and support staff.

Hear are the 10 things you should know:-

1. Hotel Infosys: Infosys Resort (Campus) is huge and has over 15000 employees. About 7000 on projects and 8000 always under training. All the delegates are housed in rooms which are originally designed to house the trainees. However, if Infosys starts a hotel chain, I bet it can beat Taj, Hyatt or Marriot. The arrangements are top class, the staff is very polite, rooms are good feels like a professionally managed hotel.

2. Big Jumbo Badges: Normally, conference badges are in small print and boring. It’s difficult to read them while you are attempting to have a conversation with a random guy. But TED has though it well and their badges are 3x the normal size with information on your topics of interest. A great way to break the ice and super effective. The conference is well designed to facilitate networking.

Last week I was at an interesting round-table organized by Welingkar’s Education on “Seeding Entrepreneurial Startups & Social Businesses in B School Campuses”. They had put together an interesting group together there were VCs, University Professors, Consultants, Entrepreneurs, Startups, representatives from IITs, IIMs, representatives from TiE & students pretty much the entire eco system was present in one room. The discussion and part interesting, part practical and part academic which was kind of expected given the room was full of people trying to figure out how we can teach MBA students to become entrepreneurs and now to ignite the passion etc. etc. Facebook, Google, Yahoo and a lot of other major companies came about as campus startups.

Folks from IIT and IIM very cheering up the fact they they now have 4-5 startups coming up every year to which i brought my point. Do you really think we should be happy with 4-5 startups coming from the Dozen IIT and IIMs and the thousands of MBA schools in the country ? NO WAY

According to me if we really have to be serious about startup space in India we need to have at-least a 1000 startups over the next 5 years. Here is the math if we have to aim for 200 startups a year for the next 5 years and these 200 startups are coming say from the
5 Metros Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai @ 30 per year
5 Cities Kolkatta, Chandigarh, Indore-Bhopal, Jaipur, Ahmedabad doing 10 each year.
Other cities too can contribute say total 5-10 per year

Now based on established startup funding models it is clear that most western startups operate at a $25k to $50k seed funding level and therefore it is fair to assume that a typical seed round in India can easily be in the 10 Lakhs $20k range. Which make a total funding requirement over 5 years of 1000×10 Lakhs = 100 Crs. approx $20 million.

That’s not such a big sum in the funding world however the challenge is how to actively manage, guide and mentor these 1000 startups and what kind of an organization is actually equipped to do so. My answer is simple what about the local entrepreneurs. If corporate funding is able to combine with local ‘Angels’/ Entrepreneurs say 50:50 where 5 lakhs comes from central fund and 5 lakhs comes from a local angel who is the lead on the startup and takes active personal interest in developing the idea and mentor the startups. The startup get the advantage of personalized mentoring as well as access to the larger network of contacts and knowledge which can help take them to the next level

At the same time I may be totally wrong too maybe India just needs a 100 high quality startups ?? which much higher funding ?

While I am still working to develop this idea further taking inputs from friends, incubators and investors across the globe would be happy to get your ideas and how we can get to 1000 startups in India ?

In these days of marketing clutter its raining laptops literally. Limca a popular soft drink from the Coca Cola company if offering you free Laptops. Shahrukh Khan is trying to sell you Laptops, Hritik Roshan is dancing to Laptops, Saif Ali Khan is smoking laptops. Sony Vaio has launched girly laptops which are pink in color, there is also a laptop which will not crash even if your wife throws it out of the window.

As usual most of the laptops claim that they are the most powerful, most sexy looking and most affordable... so how does one break from this clutter and target a segment which has the money, the need and is currently undeserved.