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.
I met with two 20-something budding entrepreneurs this week, just by chance. I love working with and mentoring these young people. There is so much energy and hope to better themselves and make the world a better place too. And so much they need to learn. I thought I would encapsulate some of my advice that I gave them, and perhaps motivate you to reach out to someone you know who is looking to start their own business and send this post their way too.
Although cities like Chicago, Austin, and North Carolina's Research Triangle have produced a number of Web-based businesses in recent years, the New York's startup scene is growing exponentially. The amount of capital and seed funding continues to rise as well as the success of local companies like foursquare, Gilt Groupe, and Tumblr.
There's no shortage of debates in the blogosphere as to whether one coast has the advantage over the other. Regardless of what side you're on, many would agree that there's no better time to be an entrepreneur. The MBA students at UNC prepared this interesting and interactive infographic that looks at some of the more important ventures to come from either coast, and offer some commentary from the leading venture capitalists.
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.
At today's roundtable, we had a 30-minute segment on Web 3.0 and Social Dancing. We basically took the Web 3.0 framework - Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS) - and did a blue sky exercise on how to create a comprehensive user experience for social dancers. We also explored business models that not only can span advertising, subscription, and e-commerce, but also hybrid virtual-physical concepts that could even draw upon a Starbucks of Salsa, Tango or Swing!
It's a fun segment, so please take a look at the recording here. I hope some of you reading this post ARE social dancers. I am. I would love to see a much better leverage of web technologies to facilitate the formulation of dance related experiences. For more, you can also follow the discussion on my blog titled: Web 3.0 and the Argentine Tango. Complete with videos and definitive use cases, it would give an interested reader some great ideas on how to design such a Web 3.0 system.
Growing up on the coast of Maine we would do all sorts of things to pass the time. In back of our house was a small stream with steep banks surrounded by a forest that ran from the tidal sections of the Royal River to the Cousins River. We called it The Creek. By the time we were about 10 years old or so, The Creek had become an epic battle ground for the neighborhood kids, would-be commandos yielding sophisticated weapons chasing each other through the mud and sticks. It would be my introduction to the Great Nerf Wars.
I had mostly forgotten about the simple joys of Nerf guns. That was until I started covering technology and spending time at the offices of local startups. There is a theme that permeates the startup ecosystem from coast-to-coast - the Nerf gun is king. We decided to take a deep look into this phenomenon to answer the basic question: Why are startups obsessed with Nerf? So, we went to go pick a fight.
At today's roundtable, we discussed three major trends and opportunities for 2012 and also worked with an entrepreneur from Europe.
Social Contacts
Our audience of readers is full of entrepreneurs. And what do entrepreneurs do? They market and they sell. Well, at the very heart of the marketing and selling problem is the concept of lead generation. Once upon a time, it was a rather straightforward exercise of collecting names and mailing addresses, and then running direct mail campaigns. As the Internet became mainstream, this was largely replaced (at least in the universe we live in) by email marketing campaigns, so the key information was the email address of a lead.
At today's roundtable, we announced 1M/1M Premium company Freshdesk's $1M funding from Accel Partners. Freshdesk is a social customer support startup offering a SaaS solution to small businesses. The team is led by Girish Mathrubootham and Shanmugam Krishnasamy, who have their roots in Zoho, a SaaS company that has revolutionized the category by drastically undercutting the CRM price-point by leveraging India to build a $100M+ 100% bootstrapped business. Freshdesk aims to do the same in Social CRM and already has paying customers. [See: 1M/1M Incubation Radar: Freshdesk]
I then discussed some of the lessons of the Freshdesk financing. Instead of rushing to raise money, the entrepreneurs have followed a systematic methodology of validating all the assumptions and got as far as paying customers before starting the funding round. As a result, they were able to get multiple competitive term sheets and negotiate both valuation and terms to their advantage with confidence.
Yesterday, I wrote a short review of a new mobile app from Webscorer that has a curious lineage. The startup came to be from a group of several ex-Microsoft developers and is led by Vesa Suomalainen. I have known Vesa for many years, and first met him when he ran Microsoft's mainframe communications business with a product called Host Integration server. This was back in the 3270 terminal emulation days and was quite the advanced product for its time. Vesa shared with me some lessons that he has learned with several botched startups since then and what he is trying to do with his latest venture.