The Startup Journey

Economic Times has an article on some of the lesser known funding options available for start-up ventures. Govt grants and loans The Small Industries Development Bank of India (SIDBI) has also formed the SIDBI Foundation for Risk Capital to develop and provide appropriate risk capital products for Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) in different industry segments. Some of the products introduced are equity and equity-like instruments and mezzanine instruments like optionallyconvertible debt and subordinate debt for MSMEs. With a corpus size of 2,000 crore, the fund will invest a minimum of 25 lakh and a maximum of 10 crore in the form of term loans or assistance. “Our products are easy to work around with. Risk capital has both the characteristic of equity and debt. It’s a very flexible product,” says SIDBI general manager R Dharmaji. ... Credit Guarantee Scheme It is to bypass the issue of collateral that the government has come up with the Credit Guarantee Fund Trust for...

Extracts from a Mint interview with Stuart Read, professor of entrepreneurship at Switzerland's International Institute for Management and Development, and author of Effectual Entrepreneurship: The first thing they do differently is they start with the stuff they have available. This is called starting with the means rather than the goal. An entrepreneur will, for example, set out saying he knows software and partner with someone who knows graphic design and get into making graphic skins for the iPad. But in talking to the customers, he may discover that a security service is what people really want and he will end up making this. ...The other thing they do differently is how they approach competition. In management, we teach how to look at competition using Porter’s five forces. Do you think the Freitag brothers bothered about competition? They cared more about working with partners, their bicycle messengers who would help them create a market. Looking at partnerships in the earl...

Extracted from Alok's blog at http://rodinhood.com . (Emphasis mine) I consciously notice the floors of the buildings that I visit and try to indentify the people who occupy these floors. That’s where I see interesting patterns between management styles and the floors of buildings: The Ground Floor The people on the ground floor are ‘hands on’. Mop in the hand, doing the dirty work. Sitting in an office that has no cabins. Talking to the people around them while trying to manage the crowds that come in. Quickly getting hot and tired. Blowing their fuse while trying to be civil. Just wanting to do everything themselves. The challenge being on the ground floor is that it’s easy to lose perspective. You can’t elevate yourself and peep outside – to get a chance to view what’s new & happening in the big wide world outside or spot encroachments that appear dangerously near you. Your life begins and ends on the ground floor. All the firms I work with and respect in my personal capacit...

From the Times of India profile of the company which recently raised capital from StanChart Private Equity: Two years into the business and Privi had not yet created a sufficient client base, pushing it to the verge of shutting down. In 1994, its losses eroded its equity and the company's prime creditor, State Industrial & Investment Corporation Of Maharashtra (SICOM), served a notice to take over. "We briefly thought of quitting and trying something else," Rao says. "But then we decided to fight it out rather than accept failure." Those days, the big players in aroma chemicals were Bush Boake Allen, Reckitt & Colman of India, Hindustan Lever, Hindustan Polyamides and Fibres, and Tata Oil Mills Company (Tomco). The partners did their best to turn around the business. They brought down operational costs, switched to synthetic raw materials and negotiated for cost-effective order sizes. The firm also changed its strategy. "Rather than just catering t...

Interactive lecture to feature as part of research firm Venture Intelligence’s “Entrevista” series Venture Intelligence, India’s leading research service focused on Private Equity/Venture Capital and M&A deal activity, has partnered with IIT Madras’ C-TIDES, to produce multimedia recordings of interactions with successful Indian entrepreneurs from across sectors. Branded as ‘Entrevisa’, the interactions in this series will be available for free and downloadable in audio (mp3 “podcasts”) and streaming video formats from the Entrevista website at http://www.entrevista.in. As part of the partnership, Venture Intelligence and IIT Madras propose to invite, on a regular basis, successful entrepreneurs from across the country to deliver interactive lectures at the IIT campus. Mr. R Sarabeswar, Chairman & CEO of leading construction services firm, Consolidated Construction Consortium Ltd., will deliver the first such lecture at the Department of Management Studies, IIT Madras on Frid...