NASSCOM Product Conclave – Event Report
I had an opportunity to go to the NASSCOM Product Conclave held at Lalit Ashok, Bangalore on October 27, 28th as a representative of the Headstart.
Art of the Start
The star speaker and the crowd-puller was definitely Guy Kawasaki – The author of “Art of the Start” and “Reality Check”. He kept the audience engaged throughout the talk. I am not sure how much of the advice that he gave can be used for startups other than web/cloud startups. The slides of his talk are embedded below.
Krishna – Arjuna session
This session was moderated by Sanjay Anandram. This session explored the relationship between Krishna (The Advisor) and Arjuna (The Entrepreneur) fighting together to build and sell a product in the market (Kurukshetra). The discussion ranged from how to choose a mentor, to compensation issues (longer term equity or transactional) to having star advisor to advisors who give meaningful advice. It was a good interactive session and it was nice to hear both sides of the story as there were advisors as well as entrepreneurs present in the session.
Writing a business plan
I could not attend writing a business plan by Naeem Zafar but I heard it was good from other people. I have embedded the slides of the talk below:
Building global consumer businesses out of India
This was one of the best sessions in NASSCOM PC. Pallav Nandhani, CTO of Infosoft Global (which sells Fusion Charts). He started the business from his home on Kolkata and was initially the sole developer. He uses the FOSS model and licenses the penultimate version of his software under MIT and GPLv3 licenses. He used this to build credibility about his product as the market for charting software is highly fragmented. Also making the software fended off competition from the lower end of the market while at the same time reducing the cost of acquisition and trail to near zero. Pallav started the business when he was 17 ! A very inspiring story and he build his business while breaking several rules of conventional wisdom for startups. K Ganesh of Tutorvista spoke next and his business model was unusual as well. Tutorvista provides online tutoring to students across 28 countries. All the teachers that tutor students are located across India. How serial entrepreneur K Ganesh overcame challenges of infrastructure (power, computers and internet access) was fascinating. Also all the marketing was done online by deploying over 100,000 keywords using google adwords. They are one of the largest online ad spenders in India. The next speaker was Amit Ranjan of Slideshare. He spoke how he started and grew the company. An inspiration for Slideshare was youtube as it made embedding and sharing really easy and he had designed slideshare from ground up based on this thought process.
Technology opportunities for serving millions of Indians
This session was moderated by Ramesh Ramanathan of Janaagraha. He spoke about the lessons learned from his microfinance firm Janalakshmi. Sean Blagsvedt of Babajobs also shared some insight on the challenges he faced when building the business. Babajobs use technology to help people at the bottom of the pyramid find jobs. Their target market contains people such as drivers, maids, security personnel and cooks. Babajobs found that on average by harnessing technology to provide better matching these people were able to earn more while commuting less. This leads to getting more money into the hands of these people which means more buying power in the longer run. Sudhakar V -of Co-options works with farmers at an aggregate level (via co-operatives) providing them loans at better rates. V Rajashekar also talked about the e-choupal initiative which is very successful and how it is helping rural development. The e-choupal platform can be used to provide various services to farmers thus tapping the rural potential which so far has been untapped.
Startup ecosystem enablers
This discussion brought all of the ecosystem enabler together and brought forth some of the typical problems that entrepreneurs face and how to solve them. The topics that were most interesting is how to help the entrepreneur to take an idea and commercialize it and what are the gaps in the current ecosystem that are stopping it. Students today are aware of entrepreneurship as a career avenue unlike earlier but challenges remain such as peer pressure and the Indian social system that dissuades people from taking risk at a point when the can do it most easily (as you have very less to lose). Another fact was that unlike the silicon valley (which serves as a model for tech startups in India for better or worse), professors are not educated about possibilities for commercializing research unlike Stanford and other universities in the valley. Rosen Sharma of Mentor Partners gave the example of how John Hennessy encouraged students to start companies. Yahoo, Google and Granite systems were some of the companies that were founded when Rosen was studying in Stanford. This perhaps harks back to the deeply entrenched caste system in India where learning as a means (Brahmins) has higher social value than business (Vaishyas).
Overall it was a great conference as I got to meet several people who I knew only through mailing lists and other social media. I also felt that it was more of a startup conference rather than a product conference but that bias could be because I was selecting sessions based on speakers (mostly from startups) that I wanted to listen and interact with. Another probable reason is all the big mature IT companies in India are pursuing the services path and only now are people looking at starting product companies.