Vinayak Hegde

Headstart has been growing fast since a bunch of us started off in 2007. Initially it was just Startup Saturday in Bangalore and then Arpit and Aditya started the Startup Saturday in Mumbai. Now we have grown to 6 cities – Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Kolkata and Pune – where Startup Saturday is held every 2nd Saturday of the month. Startup Saturday are a great way to have face-to-face interactions with other entrepreneurs, founders, investors, service providers and consultants. We have hardly spent any money on publicity but the richness of interactions and the value that Startup Saturdays created help create word-of-mouth publicity. In fact Vivek Wadhwa recently attended Startup Saturday Delhi. He has mentioned Startup Saturdays in his series on Techcrunch.

While Startup Saturday has been great for interacting with local entrepreneurs, the Headstart Network mailing list provides another great platform to interact with other entrepreneurs all across India. We have been deliberately loose with the moderation and have seen several great conversations happen over the mailing list but slowly but surely the mailing list itself is becoming a victim of it’s own success. Earlier we had just 2 moderators but now the count of moderators has grown to 5. The list itself has grown from few hundred members to more than 2500+ members across India. We have had to introduce some guidelines to improve the signal-to-noise ratio of the list and also to make the archives easily searchable since there is a wealth of information there. These are guidelines and not rules as strict enforcement of rules sometimes stifle conversation that we all value so much.

Headstart Mailing List Rules:

Headstart Mailing list has grown to more than 2500+ members consisting of Entrepreneurs, Investors, aspiring entrepreneurs, consultants and service providers from all over India.

The traffic on the mailing list has also grown to more than 400 messages per month. To maintain the quality of messages, the moderators of the mailing list who are volunteers of the Headstart Network Foundation have decided to enforce some rules to maintain the signal-to-noise ratio. This mailing list is primarily for
entrepreneurs and startups so it will help if the posters ask themselves these questions before posting the mailing list (to make the life of moderators easier – BTW these are the questions moderators ask themselves before allowing posting):

1. Has this question been asked before ? – Suggest searching the archives before asking questions on the mailing list. Many questions such as which hosting provider to use have been answered many times
before.

2. How is this information _specifically_ useful for other entrepreneurs or other startups ? – Especially for those posters who post information regarding other conferences / seminars / tutorials / workshops ?

3. Is this a personal reply to the poster ? If then I would request posters to directly answer to the poster and not the mailing list.

4. Is this message relevant to the objectives of the mailing lists (helping startups and entrepreneurs) and does it follow the guidelines of the mailing list ? Please refer the guidelines below before posting.

Guidelines:

1. Please prefix informative links and posts with [Link] in the subject of the messages.

2. Please prefix queries with the [Query] in the subject of messages.

3. Please prefix queries regarding events such as conferences / seminars / worskhops with [Event] in the subject of messages. Also putting the deadline (if any) in the subject is useful.

4. Please prefix messages for office space / space sharing with [Office Space] in the subject. Putting the locations of the area & city (such as Indiranagar, Bangalore) in the subject header should it make it easy to search.

5. Please prefix offers for Funding / Investing startups with [Fund]

6. Please prefix hiring / jobs descriptions with [Jobs]. Also describe what your startup does (with founders background) and if you offer options/other facilities. If the jobs are not for startups these posts will be rejected.

Last but not the least Please read “How to ask Questions the smart way ?”. This is directed mainly towards technical folks but is still useful for other people. This will increase the probability of finding the answers to your questions quickly.

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We recently had our flagship event Headstart 2010, Hyderabad . This was the fourth edition of Headstart and the first one in Hyderabad. The previous editions were held in Bangalore and Mumbai. The event was co-located with ITsAP (HYSEA) at the HICC Hotel in Hi-Tech City. We had a good response from the startups.

This time we had a similar format as the previous Headstart. The on-stage demo and demo-pit were provided free of cost to the startups (We only charged for registration of the startups). The startups made good use of the demo-pit space. A few startups generated quite a bit of buzz including Notion-ink (makers of the Adam Tablet PC), Robosoft Systems (Makers of duct cleaning robot), Sysblitz (on-demand Business applications), Youpid (Tapping into the marriage market using social networks), Go-live gaming (Educational products using gaming) and Innoz (A student startup from Kerala that makes mobile applications for filesharing).

The complete list of selected startups

Two of the panels “Unconventional Sources of funding” and “Business Plan mistakes” were well received by packed halls. The questions posed to the panelists and the conversations with the attendees during the conference pointed to the fact that the startup scene in Hyderabad is still nascent and needs to mature as compared to Mumbai and Bangalore. We were happy to help connect many people in Hyderabad through the Headstart event and our regular Startup Saturdays there.

More coverage

• On Twitter
• On Swaroop’s Blog – one of the panelists on “Unconventional sources of funding”
• On the Youpid Blog – one of the startups in the demo-pit

Alexis Ohanian ( kn0thing on twitter) – the co-founder of reddit (and the creator of the beloved Reddit Alien) was in Mysore for the TED conference. He took a break from the TED conference to meetup with a bunch of redditers. For those who don’t know he is also the publisher of XKCD books and all the proceeds from the book go to building a school in Laos. It was interesting talking to him about startups, startup school, Paul Graham, ycombinator, traveling in India, the startup scene in India, Social media [link to TED Presentation] and of course reddit.

We gave him a sampling of Indian food (Coconut Groove) and sweets (K C Das). Thanks to @dhempe and @pswam for organising this tweetup.

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.

The Clouds Above at Pangong Tso, Ladakh More photos here

The first CloudCamp in India is happening on Sunday, March 29th in Bangalore, India. ACM Bangalore is supporting this CloudCamp.

CloudCamp is an unconference where early adopters of Cloud Computing technologies exchange ideas. With the rapid change occurring in the industry, we need a place we can meet to share our experiences, challenges and solutions. At CloudCamp, you are encouraged you to share your thoughts in several open discussions, as we strive for the advancement of Cloud Computing. End users, IT professionals and vendors are all encouraged to participate.

One track will feature invited speakers from early adopter startups, CloudComputing Vendors and Developers. Register below.

If you are interested in sponsoring or submitting a proposal for a talk, send an email to vinayakh AT gmail DOT com.

Some of the proposed sessions are “A introduction to Cloud Computing” by Dave Nielsen, “How to build a Search Engine using AWS” by Chirayu Patel and “How to use Cloud computing to build a MMORPG” by Arjun Gupte.

Tentative Agenda:

Doors open at 10:00am
10:00am: Talks (2 startups on their experience of using clouds)
11:00am: Expert Talk (a survey of cloud platform products – Amazon, Sun, Google, etc)
11:30am: Expert talk (case studies of app architectures that use clouds)
12:15pm: Break for unconference
12:30pm: Unconference session 1
1:30pm: Lunch
2:30pm: Unconference session 2
3:30pm: Unconference session 3
4:30pm: Quick snacks
5:00pm – 6:00pm: Panel discussion and close