The Startup Journey

Writing in Founding Fuel , Baba Prasad, CEO of Vivekin Group who teaches entrepreneurship in B-Schools, bemoans the fact that a lot of the students would like to emulate the founders of companies like Facebook and Amazon and do not even bring up names like Narayana Murthy of Infosys or Azim Premji of Wipro, leave alone like Laxmanrao Kirloskar or Jamsetji Tata. "So, if business models for Indian entrepreneurs are fashioned in the West, and business heroes are not Indian, the question comes up: What is Indian about the Indian entrepreneur?," he asks. According to the article, the crux of an Indian Entrepreneur is: 1. Balancing profit-making with the burdens it is imposing on society and the benefits it can deliver to society 2.  The entrepreneur is solving problems, that are not uniquely Indian, but the scale is Indian.   Contrasting the Western/Capitalist model and a not-too-practical Gandhian/Socialist model, the author provides Aravind Eye Hospital as a bala...

In a Medium blog , Mitchel Harper  shares his thoughts on what makes great products. 1. BFBC - Build For your Best Customers They bring you most revenue and are willing to pay for upgrades and newer products. Give a higher weight age for their feedback. 2. Solve Tier I Problems Tier I - One of top 3 problems of potential customers . If  you are solving a Tier I problem you will have the Customers' attention and budget spend. The rest are Vitamins - "nice to have fixed" problems. 3. Build 'simple to understand' products Design is your most important feature. Every time the user experience is great, a startup's revenue grow like weed. 4. Make a cupcake Most startups try to build the wedding cake (the big final product) on their first iteration instead of starting small with a cupcake, then turning it into a cake (based on customer feedback) and then finally into a wedding cake (again, based on customer feedback). 4. Prioritize Customer Feedba...

Mukund Mohan of Microsoft Ventures has a wow blog post on why illustrated with a couple of examples of startups from the firm's accelerator: For every two of these entrepreneurs, there are 100′s I know whose story did not end up with funding. It ended with a company that closed, or a marriage that fell apart and a kid that had to go to a tier 2 college, because they had spent a lot of their life’s savings in their startup. To them as well, I say “you tried, and did not succeed, but you did not fail”. Those who “failed” are the ones who did not try at all. The ones who failed are the ones in a safe job, 9-5 assignments who keep telling me “they want to start a company some day”. I think we should have entrepreneurs that succeeded and those that did not succeed. I liken it to giving the gold for the successful ones and silver to the unsuccessful ones. The ones watching on the sidelines and commenting are the ones that “failed”. Arun Natarajan is the Founder & CEO of Ve...

Entrepreneurs like Sanjiv Bikhchandani of Naukri, Murugavel Janakiraman of Matrimony, the Bansals of Flipkart;  VSS Mani  of Justdial, etc. deserve massive admiration. What they have achieved is more like conquering Everest. Good to know that once they have climbed the peak, thee environment also helps protect "their" turf. From a blog post by Dev Khare of Lightspeed Ventures (emphasis mine): Many of India's successful startups have navigated a maze of challenges, creating leading brands and sustaining for long periods of time.   Correspondingly, it is much harder in India, relative to the US/Europe, for competition to unseat leading brands . ... Startups need large markets (Rs 2500cr+ or $500 million+) to get large and succeed.  This is hard to find in India, perhaps due to early consumer demand, unorganized markets, regional differences or foreign substitutes.  For example, digital advertising is a roughly $400 million annual business here, ...

From an ad by financial services firm Shriram City Union (in Businessworld issue dated 9 September 2013) Hello, Boss Here's to those who never needed to have someone down the corridor telling them what to do. Here's to those who never delegated upwards. Here's to those who only served one boss: Their Passion. Here's to those who never found themselves a job, because in a job they would have never found themselves. Click Here to download and view the original advertisement (scanned pdf ).  Arun Natarajan is the Founder & CEO of Venture Intelligence, the leading provider of data and analysis on private company transactions, valuations and financials in India. Click Here to learn about Venture Intelligence products that help entrepreneurs Reach Out to Investors, Research Competition, Learn from Experienced Entrepreneurs and Interact with Peers. Includes the Free Deal Digest Weekly Newsletter: India's First & Most Exhaustive Transactions Newsletter....

Cross posted from the Entrevista blog at http://www.entrevista.in Interview with Ratish Nair, Founding-CEO of Interactive Avenues (IA), the Mumbai-headquartered, Sequoia Capital India-backed digital marketing agency which was acquired in March 2013 by US- and Europe-based ad agency Interpublic. Interview focuses on the company's founding (5 co-founders who earlier worked at another digital agency Mediaturf); Angel Funding (from Anupam Mittal of Shaadi.com); VC Funding and relationship with Sequoia Capital; and, of course, the Exit (how IA ran the process, the role of the VC, the role of the intermediary, internal dynamics, etc.). The interviewer is fellow entrepreneur Chandu Nair . (Chandu earlier founded, successfully raised venture capital for and exited from Scope eKnowledge, one of the earliest KPO firms in India.) The Audio (podcast) version can be downloaded from here   Other Highlights Synergistic Co-founding team How, having worked together in the past (a...

To start with Mumbai- & Pune-based entrepreneurs An entrepreneur’s journey is always an exciting one. But it can often be along a testing and lonely path. Harsh Mariwala has steered Marico to grow in sales from Rs. 40 lac in 1971 to Rs. 4,000 crore today. He understands the challenges one faces while growing an enterprise. And that is why he has launched a new idea- ASCENT - A ccelerating the SC aling up of ENT erprises . Ascent seeks to identify entrepreneurs with potential and enable them in their growth journey. Ascent is a non-profit entity expression of Harsh Mariwala's personal social responsibility towards entrepreneurs. Harsh Mariwala bears all expenses for ASCENT personally. ASCENT offers a unique and powerful ‘self-help” platform through the formation of TRUST GROUPS of 10 Entrepreneurs each. Each Trust Group will comprise non-competitive, diverse groups of entrepreneurs. We aim to start with 10 TRUST groups in Mumbai and Pune, and over the next few ...

From the Inc.com article titled "How Great Entrepreneurs Think" based on a in-depth survey of 45 US-based conducted by Saras Sarasvathy, a professor at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business. The article also contrasts the entrepreneur way of thinking versus the corporate executive way of thinking. Doing & Course Correcting Brilliant improvisers, the entrepreneurs don't start out with concrete goals. Instead, they constantly assess how to use their personal strengths and whatever resources they have at hand to develop goals on the fly, while creatively reacting to contingencies....That is not to say entrepreneurs don't have goals, only that those goals are broad and—like luggage—may shift during flight. Rather than meticulously segment customers according to potential return, they itch to get to market as quickly and cheaply as possible, a principle Sarasvathy calls affordable loss. Repeatedly, the entrepreneurs in her study expressed impatien...

The meeting ended with a list of “to-dos” for each of the startup team members. Everyone appeared charged and excited. Yet one of the members appeared less enthusiastic. Upon having a discussion with him, he said that he had the longest list of to-dos, with almost 15 specific items! More importantly, he felt that most of them would be a waste of his time as he was sure that executing them wouldn’t really benefit the company. A few weeks later at a follow-up meeting where the status of these to-dos were being reviewed, it transpired that only 2 of the 15 items on this individual’s list had been done and that too only in part. He explained that he hadn’t followed through on the execution of the 13 items as “given my earlier experience (in another company), I was sure they wouldn’t work”; But what of the part execution of the 2? Ah, the completion of those items required inputs from others and since those inputs weren’t forthcoming, the work couldn’t be completed in full. When the individ...

Vishwas Patel of Avenues India, the company best known for its online payment gateway service CcAvenue, has related his entrepreneurial journey in The Rodinhoods . Learnings from IT: 1) An average Indian businessman doesn't understand technology; he wants technology to understand his business and do wonders. The businessman just wants a simple, idiot proof solution that saves him time, effort and money. 2) Business is like an inverted triangle. You start from a small dot at the bottom and as you grow your business upwards, the opportunities keep on increasing. This is because you get experience, knowledge, access to funds etc., thats why you find the Ambanis, Tatas, Birlas, Mahindras. etc dabbling in all kinds of diverse businesses (Oil, telecoms, Insurance etc.) and are mostly successful in all their ventures. They build huge capital intensive scalable businesses that it becomes difficult to beat them on price and the way they scale their businesses in double quick time. Now if y...

An irate customer sends an email to a startup company “….am disgusted with the quality of your service. I was referred to your company by my friend and I’ve just had the most unhappy time ……” The customer support department does not forward the mail (& others like it) to the executive leadership. Response to the board of directors from a CEO of a VC backed startup “…we’re doing fine. I’m confident we’ll hit and perhaps even exceed this month’s targets…..” Of course, the board didn’t know that the two top customers of the startup were pulling out of contracts with the startup. The CEO knew but was scared to tell the board. Board member writes a letter to the CEO of the company “….you seem to be stressed out lately. Why don’t you get more senior executive help around you to help reduce the pressure?” The CEO replies “…Thanks for your concern. Am doing fine actually. Am wondering if you had any other objective in suggesting that I surround myself with senior executive help?” The CEO w...

Social anthropologists have determined that the impact of a dominant culture on a constrained (either self-imposed or externally imposed or a combination) culture is such that over time the dominant culture so subsumes the other culture leaving it as a poor carbon copy version of itself. Indian culture too has been constrained and inhibited for several generations for reasons of history and bad policy. In the India of the 21st century, there’s rapidly growing self-esteem and great opportunity ahead- critical ingredients for original thinking and innovation. One of the most critical attributes of an entrepreneur’s personality is self-esteem. The desire to achieve, the ambition, confidence, and drive all flow from this core personality trait. People with a manic desire to prove to themselves and to the world that they “can do it” are the ones who can weather storms, deal with crises and plug away at making their aspirations come alive. All great entrepreneurs are people with high self-e...

A friend narrated this to me this morning. He was on a business trip to Taiwan and bumped into a colleague from a much larger division of the same company at Taipei airport. After exchanging some chit-chat, the colleague told my friend that he was likely to be now based out of Taipei as it was an important part of the division’s “China strategy”. On further enquiry it transpired that instead of long distance phone calls and faxes and emails to Taiwanese vendors and partners from Bangalore, he would now be able to visit them and make local phone calls and send local faxes and email! Ostensibly, this would result in enhanced relationships leading to furtherance of the division’s “China strategy”. One of the banes of our times has been the gross trivialization of word meanings. Words like “innovation” and “strategy” have been almost trivialized into banality - almost every trivial act of improvement or approach is either an innovation or a strategy. There’s this almost manic desire to bei...

Last week I had two very different experiences while visiting two well known global companies. Experiences that made an impact on me and experiences that every startup company can learn from. I arrived at the fist company a little before my 10am appointment and walked into the reception area. There was pandemonium there with a large number of visitors huddled around the reception desk. The long desk in turn was “manned” by about 6 or 7 smartly dressed men and women and had 3-4 computers on it. I mentioned the name of the person I’d come to visit to one of these persons and I received a blank stare. I repeated the name and was asked if I had the extension number of the person. I did not. I repeated the name again as well as the designation of the person. Finally, the name and a mobile number was located. The mobile number turned out to be an old one. The staff were running around without any clue as to who my host was. The cell phone number I had for the person didn’t work either. I was...

It is often said that in India, as in some other Asian countries, entrepreneurs tend to be extremely control oriented, tend to be very focused on retaining generational ownership of the company, and view investors as necessary evils and not as partners in creating value. Investors usually tend to be viewed as lenders or project financiers and generally receive the same callous treatment as did banks of yore. However, as more and more private equity capital (including venture capital) flows into companies to satisfy the entrepreneurial aspirations of globalization, scale, and market value, the realization that good governance, transparency, investing in business growth and professional management lead to value creation has gained strong currency. For startups therefore it is important to appreciate the role of investors as stakeholders and partners in the creation of a successful and valuable business. And part of the appreciation should manifest itself in the realization that investo...

The 23rd July edition of Business World has a piece by Rashmi Bansal that showcases the various startups that MBAs of top B-schools of India are promoting. A few excerpts: ....Prakash Mundhra is enjoying giving them a high. His company, Sacred Moments, makes ‘puja kits’ for Diwali, an idea he conceived as a student at Symbiosis Centre for Management and Human Resource Development (SCMHRD) in Pune. “My marketing professor, Shivram Apte, rejected the idea totally,” says Mundhra. “We had long arguments — he didn’t think there was a market for it.” Prof. Apte was wrong. In its first Diwali season — October 2006 — Sacred Moments sold more than 10,000 puja kits and achieved a turnover of Rs 35 lakh. “I took a risk,” grins Prakash. “But it has worked out.” ....... Yet, he was in a dilemma. He went through the placement process and accepted an offer from ICICI Prudential. “In the meantime, I entered six business plan contests and won five,” he says. “I became more and more convinced about my i...

Early last year, I met a startup team that was building the next great mobile application. They had built a system that could offer mobile social networking to end consumers. The team had great technologists including a few successful entrepreneurs among them. They were convinced that their system would be the next great thing for consumers; they were supremely confident (bordering on overconfidence) about the uniqueness of their offering. This company was trying to build a company focused on the end-consumer as their customer. This meant that they had to build a brand, build a system that would be ridiculously easy for consumers to use, have a mechanism that would keep attracting people back to them, and figure out a way to make money. Of course, companies like Google and MySpace were their role models. The team had enormous expertise in building and running systems for businesses, selling and marketing to businesses and supporting business customers. They however had no experience in...

Southern Compass of The Economic Times(19th July '07) carried the profile of Navas Meeran who took over at the helm of Eastern Condiments and Spices from his father. A second generation entrepreneur, he saw how his father built the business to become a prominent distributor of leading brands in Central Kerala besides building the Eastern Curry Powder Brand. When after his studies, Mr. Navas Meeran joined the business in 1994, the turnover of the company was in the range of Rs. 10 crore. It did not take long for Navas Meeran to rework the business model and prepare for long-term growth. And, at heart of his business model, was the core competency they had built up - an efficient distribution system. Eastern Curry Powder did not remain in the league of the 'small player' for long. The company touched a turnover of Rs. 208 crore by 2006-07, and his dream is to touch a turnover of Rs. 2500 crores for the Eastern group, which also is into readymade garments, tread rubber and pac...

All too often hopeful entrepreneurs approach venture capitalists (VCs) and then keep approaching them with the same set of slides. After a while, disappointment sets in. ‘VCs in India are risk averse’, ‘They do not understand my business plan’, ‘None of them have operating backgrounds so they cannot appreciate the position’ are some of the common refrains. It is, therefore, worth understanding the language used by VCs during the meetings. “Interesting but…..” The word ‘interesting’ has many meanings but almost certainly never means that the VC is excited. The meaning of the word varies from ‘OK, nice’ to ‘intriguing’. It is also used as a place-holder or a punctuation mark. The ‘but’ that follows is dangerous. Means the VC is not positively inclined. “Who else have you talked to?” This is not a general innocent question. This is a way for the VC to know who else is looking at the deal and therefore, how he or she should pace the decision-making process. If a lot of VCs have been approa...