Smart Techie Startup City

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Published
May 25, 2008

Yesterday, I attended The Smart Techie Startup

City event. It was

intended as a showcase of startups as well as for

learning/sharing/mentoring.

I had taken some notes during the day. As I was expanding it into

a blog post, I realized I was just adding filler words which was

a waste of bits, so here it is as-is:

  • Ashish Gupta, Helion VC on “Concept to Success : Milestones forstartups”
    • India is a startup (positive way of looking at things)
      • High energy
      • Lots of growth
      • Small absolute number (relatively)
      • Little infrastructure or process
      • Lack of talent
      • Lots of optimism
      • Need to innovate to survive
      • ⇒ Once in a lifetime opportunity
    • Significant change in dynamics (negative way of looking at it)
      • Whatever can be made efficient will be done so.
        • We can in turn get bangalored and some other country willbenefit.
      • Creative folks will thrive.
      • ⇒ We have no choice.
    • Hardest evolutionary steps
      • Those that requires behavior change
        • For example, starting to think “Become cash flow positive”
        • Next level CEO, process, tech, business model, etc.
    • Put in place metrics to measure everything – will help identifywhether one has already hit an inflection point.
    • Rules of thumb
      1. Focus on customer/issue
      2. Focus on continuous improvement
      3. Intellectual honesty
      4. Results matter – only for MEASURING (measure progress ona larger scale)
      5. ⇒ Same rules for person, family, company
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  • Application Marketing panel discussion
    • Dr. Y L R Moorthi – IIMB professor of marketing (the moderator)
      • ‘Technology has the shelf life of a banana’
      • Wacky ideas (product) + Marketing (messaging) – the2 challenges
    • Paul Murphy, Director of Innovation, Microsoft India
      • Taking ideas to market is key
      • Time vs Cost in marketing
      • Leverage as many platforms as possible
    • Bharath Chinamanthur,Director – Retail Systems, Amazon IndiaDevelopment Center
      • Great customer experience, wide merchandise, low cost – simplebasics that Amazon has adhered to
      • Free shipping in lieu of marketing program
      • Affiliate program
      • ‘Zara’ – a Spanish retailer, No. 64 in the Inter-Brand survey→ fast moving (short availability) high-fashion availablein regular malls. Their innovation is the supply-chain and themarketing since the fashion is designed by others.
    • Suresh Vedula, Head – Business Mobility, Nokia India
      • Having a good product, be honest about your product’scapabilities, build a customer base.
      • All these are required for startups as well. Brand will bebuilt over time via word of mouth, etc. If you have a productthat’s a dud, things like marketing and brand don’t matter.
      • Nokia Basics
        1. Product innovation
        2. Reach, especially in a country like India
        3. Supply chain management
      • When everything fails, common sense succeeds
    • Y L R Moorthi
      • Marketing tactic – from 9 am to 1 pm say ‘cello’ instead of‘hello’ and if you’re the one they call up, you get a gift→ costs nothing but overnight they built brandrecognition in Tamil Nadu
      • Its essential to think such wacky ideas, only startups can dothat.
    • Paul Murphy
      • Partner ecosystem important
      • 1) Crawl 2) Walk 3) Run
      • Success is a terrible teacher. Failure is a better one.
    • Summary by Y R L Moorthi
      • Start with the market, not the product
      • “I’m expensive now because I learned so much” – a guy who hashad 3 failures who was a hot hire
      • Wacky ideas
        • Anantra, no office, save lot of money
      • How to get Reach is important, various strategies being used
        • “Oh My News” Korean newspaper/blog
        • CambrianHouse.com – crowdsourcing ideas
      • Basically, ideate and monetize.
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  • Startup stalls
    • The ones I was most impressed with was Mobisy – they have alreadydone a Adobe AIR for Mobile! You can write applications inHTML/JavaScript and deploy as an app on a number of platformslike Symbian, etc. provides native facilities like SMS, phonebook, location.
    • MyDuniya – just SMS for sharing Files, messaging Groups, etc.
    • There were more startups in mobile payment (ngpay, obopay,mchek), services such as payroll outsourcing and companyincorporation help, big companies like Akamai and Amazon thatprovide technology services for startups, etc.
    • The group stalls for Bangalore OCC and KickStart.in were packed.
    • Satishfound QuillPad very good: “It needsguts/passion to say a ‘NO’ when approached by google to acquire!”
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  • There was also a ‘Meet the VCs’sessiongoing on in parallel.
  • R K Misra, Change India movement
    • Talking about his story – 3 ventures, all successful, lived inUSA and Japan but had the desire to retire at 40 and havea public life. Working with the government in a private-publicpartnership to improve things in India
    • Rural is poor because only 18% GDP comes from agriculture and hasto support 600 million people compared to 60% of Indian GDP in1950 which supported 200 million people
    • Subsidies are not the route but he was glad the loan waiver wasdone even though economists disagree
    • Why should everyone in rural areas become a farmer? They cannotcome to urban areas because they can’t afford housing and therewill be more Dharavis.
      • Some initiative here. Visit his website for details.
    • Average income in village family is 2000 rupees per month!
    • The initiatives will benefit even the politician because they canhoardings of their names. Everybody wins!
      • In all this, he is the catalyst.
    • Change India movement
    • What age should I start? Sunday comes in every age.
    • Nobody voted. We think we are too sophisticated for politics.
    • 25% of the population i.e. the middle class doesn’t vote. That’swhy the politicians don’t care about them!
    • 1) Individual 2) Social 3) National responsibilities.Entrepreneurship is about the first two, what about the third?
    • Not rocket science, it is doable
    • Help politicians in their ambitions and help them do good worksuch as in Orissa, etc.
    • Someone blamed PMs from North India for backwardness, R K Misrasaid we should not make such statements unless we have proof andalso he wants one India and does not want to debate suchstatements. “So what are you going to do?” is his question. Youshould engage North Indians and help them to improve.
    • You cannot take wheat/potato from Karnataka to Andhra Pradesh!Because of APMC act.
    • Food scarcity is the best thing to happen in India because nobodywants to get into agriculture and this will help improve things
    • Costco and Walmart are already doing rationing of wheat in USA!
    • rk@changeindia.in
    • Corruption
      • Electoral reforms is important such as corporate donations topolitical parties should be public. But everybody benefits byit not being stringent – the middlemen ‘moneybags’, thepoliticians, the corporates, except the common man.
      • This country is like Europe – local aspirations (regionalparties) and national pride (national parties).
      • It is very complex, we cannot have a 2-party system eventhough it’s nice to talk about such things.
    • Water, food, national pride – are the critical issues goingforward.
    • Nobody asked about entrepreneurship, this shows that politics ismore important than entrepreneurship but please first make yourmoney in entrepreneurship!
    • Impressive speaker, especially his clarity in thought
    • Further reading
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  • CEO Conclave
    • Panel
      1. Kris Gopalakrishnan, CEO, Infosys
      2. Dr. Vivek Mansingh, Country Manager, Dell India R&D
      3. Praveen Vishakantaiah, President, Intel India
      4. Sharad Sharma, CEO, Yahoo! India
    • They should have also invited actual entrepreneurs who are recentsuccesses, not only people from big companies, where is SridharVembu from Zoho?
    • “Co-creation”, “innovation”, “disruption”, “inflection point”,too many buzzwords
    • “Know your customer” – well, call him, I’ll talk to him/her rightnow! I’m skeptical on this piece of advice, there is nowell-defined customer, just people who might benefit from yourproduct and they can be anybody anywhere
    • 400 Tier-1 and 2 cities in India vs just 180 in China
    • Praveen says funding not as difficult, if you stand out, it willhappen
    • I wish I could beam the IBM “Stop Talking. Start Doing.” ads withmy cellphone to the roof:
    • Why take on cliched stories like Google, why not someone likeMobissimo?
    • Sharad Sharma is doing a good job of being the moderator
    • Discussion on adoption of IT by SMB across industries
      • I personally think this is a chicken-and-egg problem, withoutkiller applications, why would they adopt?
    • Everybody talks about mobile. Where are the killer applications?I see JiGrahak, ngpay, obopay, mchek all solving paymentproblems, but is that the only thing? What else? If there’snothing else, why are all the VCs proclaiming 250 million dollarseach for only mobile ventures?
    • CEO is the chief change officer and should be focused on thecompany’s differentiation
    • Payment methods like prepaid cards for mobile will fuel the SaaSstrategy to penetrate SMBs that have not adopted IT yet
    • Leaders who can take the company to the next level is important
    • Imagination is what is required. Innovation is cheap, talentis scattered.
    • Radical change is tough to handle
    • Leadership takes over when logic stops.
    • Vivek spoke well, lot of common sense, trying to instill thecan-do attitude in the audience
    • I think the reason that Silicon Valley is Silicon Valley isbecause of the culture of experimentation and the culture that“failure is okay”. That’s what needs to be developed in India.
    • The first half of this session was boring, but the latter halfturned out to be good.
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  • My personal takeaway : Reinforcement of basics
    • Ideas
    • User experience
    • Team – matching frequency and passion
    • Execution
    • Risk-taking
    • Business models
    • Time to market
    • Distribution, partners, tie-ups, leveraging platforms
    • Networking
    • Mentorship
    • Branding
    • Willingness to do whatever it takes to succeed i.e. wear manyhats
    • Emotional strength to bide over the highs and lows
    • Know your role and shut your hole (‘Monster House’ advice)
    • Ability to recognize good contacts and hire good people
    • Be happy with small successes but get fired up for big ones
    • Learn to read the data
    • Make customer lock-in but always respect your customer

Overall, I think it was a good event, at least it was better than my

expectations. There were some things they could’ve done better as I’ve

already mentioned, especially bringing in people who are out there

doing it today and succeeding instead of big company people. I wished

to see people with their scars, not only people who are old and

seasoned!

At the end of the day, I felt a little jaded. I guess what we need are

more success stories and discussion on their stories. Yes, there are

startups which are doing great such as Sloka Telecom, they are the

kind of

people

who should be highlighted, rather than regurgitating buzzwords and

spiel.

With all these events like Startup City, Startup

Disco

and even an entire Indian magazine dedicated

to entrepreneurship happening, I wonder if entrepreneurship is

overhyped in

India?

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