ReadWriteStart

For any entrepreneur, finding the perfect investor is like a match made in Heaven. But as in any marriage, things don't always go smoothly. And if things get ugly, you can end up in court instead of living happily ever after.

To make sure that doesn't happen - and help startups avoid costly lawsuits (another instance where the only people who get rich are the lawyers) I asked Anton Rosandic, a California-based attorney and an entrepreneur himself, for some free advice. The solution isn't all that complicated, Rosandic says, "A successful investor/business owner relationship is all about managing expectations" and making sure all the terms are clear to everyone involved.

The art of entrepreneurship and the science of customer development is not just getting out of the building and listening to prospective customers. It's understanding who to listen to and why.

I got a call from Satish, one of my ex-students last week. He got my attention when he said, "following your customer development stuff is making my company fail." The rest of the conversation sounded too confusing for me to figure out over the phone, so I invited him out to the ranch to chat.

Today's roundtable had a couple of interesting businesses, but before I get to them, I want to underscore that entrepreneurs MUST gauge fundability before assuming that they can build their businesses by raising money.

TravelTriangle.com

First, Sanchit Gurg from Noida, India, pitched TravelTriangle.com, a marketplace for travel agencies offering personalized tour packages for travelers seeking such help. The company already has engaged about 75 travel agencies and some 900 customers. They have started transacting, generating multiple bids for each RFP and taking a commission off closed deals. Reviews, ratings and other core marketplace functions are part of the offering. Sanchit and his team of six have validated the concept already.

Today's roundtable, as usual, was an international affair, with entrepreneurs presenting from different parts of the US, India, Israel, and many other geographies. Before I share what we heard from them today, I want to highlight an important aspect of 1M/1M that is repeatedly underscored in these roundtables: the international, inclusive, democratic nature of the initiative.

In fact, one of the best ways we can delineate this phenomenon is by contrasting 1M/1M with YCombinator. (Video after the jump.)

In my recent piece Reengineering Capitalism I highlighted a phenomenon that the global entrepreneurship ecosystem is paying very little attention to: Over 99% of entrepreneurs who seek funding get rejected. Yet, the entire world is focused on the 1% that is "fundable."

The media, when pitched a startup story, is interested in who funded the venture. They seldom ask how much revenue the company has or if it is profitable.

Today's roundtable was co-hosted with the Jacksonville Startup Weekend. For the uninitiated, Startup Weekends are 54-hour events where entrepreneurs come together to pitch ideas, form teams, and learn best practices.

This past weekend, the Jacksonville entrepreneurship community hosted their own version of this exciting program. 150 people came together, and 17 businesses were formed. An additional 50 were on the wait-list, an evidence of the energy and enthusiasm that is bubbling in Florida right now. MJ Charmani, founder of iStart Jax, a business accelerator, and one of the key organizers of the event, introduced today's session with additional reports on last weekend's event.

Today's roundtable brought some core issues up for debate regarding media startups that are focusing largely on Content and Community features and expecting to get funded. So, I would like to take some time to offer a broad overview on the topic and some pointers to entrepreneurs who are making the assumption that you can raise $500,000 for such a venture. Be careful!

Empower Lounge

Misty Gibbs from Austin, Texas, presented Empower Lounge, a concept for a website that focuses on offering inspirational content along four major vectors: work, health, play and giving. In addition, the site will offer some level of professional networking. Misty is folding in a national site, Inspiration Lounge, and a local site, AustinWomen, to bring together her current 10,000-strong subscriber base under the Empower Lounge umbrella.

Today's roundtable was jointly organized by the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur (IIT KGP) and the 1M/1M program as part of the former's Global Entrepreneurship Summit organized by the student-run e-cell. For the uninitiated, IIT KGP is considered one of the top technology schools in India, and it is located in the Eastern part of the country, not far from the city of Kolkata.

I have visited IIT KGP many times over the years, and each time I see a marked improvement in the energy and momentum at the campus on entrepreneurship. My 1997 recruitment visit met with tepid response, with the student body largely interested in multinational placements at the time. But a subsequent visit in January 2009 saw a massive change: the students were excited about entrepreneurship.

At today's roundtable, we had an unusual amount of discussion on ERP startups. Given that ERP is such a mature market, the fact that all this startup activity is going on in ERP is a bit puzzling to me.

Rural ERP

Surjith Singh from Chennai, India, pitched Rural ERP, a business that intends to focus on supplying rural Indian small and micro businesses with local language ERP systems. While there are 30 million small and micro businesses in rural India, according to Surjith, and only 5% of those know English, there are substantial barriers to selling technology to these companies, including the fact that computer knowledge and Internet connections are both quite low in this segment. Hence, building a local language (Tamil, Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi, Marathi, Gujrati) ERP SaaS business will be an uphill task.

At today's roundtable, the last for 2011, we had four different countries represented and an intense set of discussions on five very interesting businesses - a fabulous event to end the year with.

BootstrapToday

Anand Agarwal from Pune, India, pitched BootStrapToday, an Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) SaaS solution from his company Sensible Softwares. Anand already has 100 beta customers and fifteen of them are paying Rs. 1000-2000 (~$20-$40) per month to access advanced workflow logistics and intelligence in the area of software testing and productivity improvement.