Web2.0 age !!!!!!!!!

About Venture Capital

Ben Holmes of Index Ventures's presentation on “Everything you need to know about Venture Capital- worth viewing.

JOB culture in India

I find an interesting comment while reading this post on Texas start-up blog.This comment not only reflect poor "job " oriented attitude of Indina graduates but also tells us how it affects entrepreneurial ecosystem of India.

Comment goes like this:


" I started a small outsourced projects development business in early 2005 but it got burst after 9 months of operation because it’s really hard to find developers who code in open source .. if you make a visit to Tata, Infosys, Wipro and others you’ll find that these giants work on Microsoft, IBM based product lines .. not open source products. Most of the developers working in these companies don’t even know what PHP is .. RubyonRails (such a hype) but if you catch someone from infosys and ask them what it is .. ummm .. “No idea”.

The basic job culture in India is just to get a job after graduation and work for some big company. Entrepreneurship doesn’t exist in IT here (I don’t deny that only people who can’t get a damn good job in IT giants OR are totally focused on their own ideas and stuff .. they start their own small business). My parents have been always bullying me to get a job .. I am 27+ and successfully provide independent consulting (one man show and earning good living) but still in my parents eyes I am not settled because I don’t work for some big IT giant.

Even if you see Silicon Valley in CA you’ll see thousands of technopreneur there (small to big) .. in India you see only big .. and these big ones have their backbone in Silicon Valley, CA. Only giants such as Infosys, Tata, Wipro others have their own standing.

Anyways, let’s come back to topic .. a lot of businesses fail in India because of

1. Power cuts (don’t even know how long electricity will be off for)

2. Lack of good locations to setup a business (the one that exist are either too expensive to rent a space OR rent a space in local market which is always noisy and doesn’t even give a feel that you work something different than the local grocers).

3. Lack of people resources (small company can’t afford to pay like giants .. thus parents don’t allow their kids to work for smaller companies).

4. There is a stupid mentality that smaller companies working on open source products are just bunch of idiots trying to run them. Even today morning I had a talk with my dad .. and he was just pushing on one point that smaller companies never tend to exist in the market.

"

Well I already discussed location issue in my previous posts.What I find most worrying is the "job attitude" of Indian graduates.Its not very difficult to understand why they make such decisions..Curriculum are outdated and discourage creativity and initiative leading to a system dependent graduate, college and faculty hardly provide career counselling and are more focus on improving " placement record" of college, risk averse parents put pressure to take a job in MNC no matter what is the quality of that job is,peers joining MNC create an very unmotivating environment for a graduate to join start-up.

But I guess they miss the bigger picture.They forget that we are living in different times compare to our parents and siblings.With world getting smaller and smaller everyday, India growing at 9 % growth rate,and reforms and opening of other sector give unique and unparalleled opportunity for this generation graduates.This is time to focus on careers rather then looking for jobs.

Bootstrap in Bangalore: A must read blog

I come across this interesting and very very practical blog today.Author of this blog Saurabh Chandra, an enterpreneur who has recently bootstrapped his company Neevtech in Bangalore.

I like every single post in this blog. I like the detail in which he explain the process of bootstraping a start-up in stepwise manner.He took great effort to explain every aspect of starting a company in India.I was looking for such eleborate understanding of starting a company in India.I am sure every aspiring enterprenuer will find somthing to learn from his blog.

Thanks to Saurabh Chandra for writing such a useful blog.

Tandem Entrepreneurs: the Indian Y-combinator?

Y Combinator’s funding methodology of investing a small amount of money across a wide array of young entrepreneurs has inspired Sunil Bhargava to start tandementrepreneurs.



Fantastic Idea.There philosophy is very simple which goes like this:

"We invest our sweat and usually less than $1MM in a startup over a period of 2 years working in tandem with the founders. We are much more like Y-combinator than Sequoia. We don’t consider ourselves a VC like Sequoia because we work so closely with founders and view more modest exits as a success. We love Y-Combinator’s approach, but they just help a company get out of the gates. We engage for a much longer period and happen to invest more time and money in each business."

Low investment,low exits model very well suits present day business model of internet start-ups.Incubation Team is small but is with good credentials.I like there site (epecially the drwaings). It is very cool,original and express the idea very well.

But either intentionally or un-intentionlly they forget to mention market they are trying to address.Right now they are california based incubators so obvious markets seems to be US's bay area.Its not clear weather they would be interested to be "INDIAN YCOMBINATOR" or not.

To me there is desperate need for such program for Indian market.Lot many indian entreprenuer seek capital,advice and connection that such program can provide.

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