ReadWriteStart

On Saturday, April 9, 2011, I arrived in Chennai at 3 a.m. after a 24-hour journey from California. At 11 a.m., a group of entrepreneurs from TiE Chennai gathered at the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras (IIT-M) Research Park campus, and we spent the next four hours discussing strategy and tactics of early-stage entrepreneurship.

TiE Chennai organized a Startup Super Day, during which I delivered the keynote address followed by a live strategy roundtable. At the roundtable, five entrepreneurs pitched their businesses to me, and I interacted with them in our usual format, with active participation from the audience.

The investment analysts at CB Insights have released their quarterly report on venture capital activity, and in terms of deal-flow and funding levels, the news is good. The first quarter of 2011 saw these return to their pre-recession levels with financing for Internet companies up 83% from the last quarter of 2010.

According to the deals tracked by CB Insights, 738 deals were funded in the first quarter, with a total of some $7.5 billion in VC investment. That increase will be used, of course, as "proof" that there's a bubble. It's a one billion dollar jump from the previous quarter, even though the number of deals has sad the same. That's just one interpretation of the statistics, of course.

In any growing business, one way to increase your market potential is by expanding to other countries; specifically, to those where you see little or no competition or which are crying out for the solutions your business is offering.

Here are a few issues that companies should understand before expanding internationally.

Most startups start small, thinking to expand after learning some valuable lessons, including making sure they're not releasing bad products that could sink the company or making bad decisions that could do the same. Toward that aim, most startups focus on building one product at a time, which may be their only product for the first several years of the business.

But there are pros and cons to selling only one product. For some startups, it may make sense to stay focused on one product, where others would be happier and more successful if they sold multiple products.

Since 2002, the law form of Fenwick & West has conducted a venture capital survey, a response to "the burst of the 'dot-come bubble' and a desire to provide the entrepreneurial community with objective information about the status of the venture environment." But recognizing that the funding landscape has changed - more angels, more Web startups - this year the firm conducted its first Angel/Seed Financing Survey.

The survey includes responses from 52 Internet, digital media, and software companies that raised money in the Silicon Valley and Seattle in 2010. For purposes of the survey, this meant those companies raising their first round, between $250,000 and $2 million, led by a professional investor.

At this week's One Million by One Million roundtable, we announced a very important partnership with MAD Incubator, Malaysia for entrepreneurship development in the region. This is our first major partnership with an incubator whereby MAD will adopt the 1M/1M methodology to foster Silicon Valley-style technopreneurship in Malaysia. Andrew Wong, CEO of MAD, has been working with us for almost a year, and we have made a mutual choice to deepen the partnership by making MAD a premiere value-added reseller partner of the 1M/1M program.

Gamification meets Daily Deals. Considering the popularity of these two trends right now, it was bound to happen, right? SCVNGR's new LevelUp platform does just that, bringing the idea of location-based gaming to the deals space. LevelUp, as the name suggests, allows users to receive better deals the more they use the system, unlocking a new "level" with a particular merchant as you go.

LevelUp launched about a month ago in Boston and Philadelphia, and today's deal is aimed squarely at the startups there. Unlike the other LevelUp deals, this package involves 3 different merchants (rather than 3 deals with a single merchant).

In my last post on ReadWriteStart, I talked about how, in many cases, it wasn't an advantage to build your start-up in stealth mode. As a continuation of that theme, I thought it would be interesting to explore five tools you can use to iterate and improve your startup idea before writing one line of code. There is nothing worse than building a tool no one is interested in, so I'd encourage you to consider these options before starting down the path of building your next startup.

Specifically, these five tools can help you do three critical activities before starting to write a line of code: create a wireframe, get feedback from the target market and test value proposition through multiple landing pages.

One of the best part of my jobs as a technology journalist is getting to hear founders' stories. I have some really great, memorable experiences of talking to entrepreneurs - not just about what they're building, but why. Sometimes these are stories that, in turn, end up in the articles I write. Sometimes they're not - off topic, off the record, and what have you. But I feel pretty lucky that, as a journalist, I get the chance to hear so many great ones.

Not everyone is in that position, of course, due to occupation, geography, or time. For his part Matthew Wise wondered what it would have been like to hear stories from founders like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates during their early years. As he told me, while Larry Page and Sergey Brin were building Google in Silicon Valley, Wise was a Marine combat medic in the Southeast Asia.

Wise has taken that interest in stories and created a new media project that will help me sure more of this founder lore is indeed documented. FounderLY launches today as an open source platform for entrepreneurs to share their stories through short form interviews.

At this week's One Million by One Million roundtable, we announced our collaboration with Microsoft around a $100,000 grant that they are offering to four Indian entrepreneurs as follows: A $40,000 grant each to two entrepreneurs, one in Mobility and one in Cloud Computing; and a $10,000 grant to two entrepreneurs, also one in each of those two categories.

1M/1M will be working with Microsoft in helping entrepreneurs prepare for these grants. I will be traveling in India in April, and doing live roundtables in three cities: Chennai (April 9), Mumbai (April 16), and Pune (April 17). Girish Joshi, from Microsoft, will be attending the roundtables, and scouting companies for the grants with me. I will be reporting back on the companies we see on this column from the road.