Published by Vinayak Hegde on 14th March 2010
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
Published by Vinayak Hegde on 8th November 2009
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.
Published by Vinayak Hegde on 30th October 2009
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.
Published by Vinayak Hegde on 13th March 2009
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
Published by Vinayak Hegde on 22nd January 2009
Headstart 2009 went off really well. I could not attend many of the talks as I was making sure the startups were not having problems in the demo-pit and scheduling VC-startup meetings. Some very good products startups demoed at Headstart 2009 including Indusgeeks, CashNXT, Verismo, TringMe, WisdomTap, Jobeehive, Meshlabs and Artin dynamics. The startups that demoed at Headstart were of the highest quality and won many awards at the International level as well.
- Verismo won the best of the Best award at CES 209 in the Media technology category.
- NetPrice Services- ( AdoRoi ), is among World’s 100 most innovative, disruptive and high growth companies, driving the future of technology. They made the “Red Herring 100″
- Tringme was featured on Gigaom and CNN Money.
- CashNXT was featured on ReadWriteWeb
The entreprenuer’s roundtable (especially Sujai Karampuri’s talk) and Ashish Gupta’s Keynote on second day generated a lot of buzz. Luckily I was able to attend Ashish Gupta’s keynote. It was excellent. For those who missed it the videos whould be up sometime next week. (If you want to be notified of that please follow @headstartdotin on twitter or join the friends-of-kickstart mailing list).
The photos are also up at Flickr.
| Satish Mugulavalli – Founder of Verismo Networks demoing Vunow |
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| Aditya Mishra (Director, Headstart) and Anant Krishnan (CTO of TCS) after announcing the Co-innovation program in collaboration with Headstart. |
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| Kallol Borah (Director, Headstart) inaugurating Headstart and Compute 2009 |
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| Prasad Ram, CTO, Google India talking at the Cloud Computing Tutorial |
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| Rameena Rabeedin of CashNXT demoing their product in the Consumer Products Section |
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| Anthony Hsaio of Entrip demoing their Webapp in Consumer Products Section |
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| Sujai Karampuri delivering his hard hitting talk on VCs in the Entrepreneur Panel |
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| Venki Nishtala, CTO, Rediff talk at the Cloud Computing Tutorial |
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| Dr Chandrakant Patel keynoting at Headstart / Compute 2009 |
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| Press conference during Headstart / Compute 2009 |
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| Apul Nahata demoing VoicePHP product lauched by Tringme |
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The ragtag bunch of volunteers that made Headstart / Compute 2009 happen  |
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We were also able to use the social media effectively. Quite a few Many people wre talking about Headstart and it trended on Twitter. Here is a screen shot of the same
The best part was the startups enjoyed it and were able to talk to investors. More than 15 VCs / Angels / Early stage investors attended the event. There were more than 150+ one-on-one meetings with startups with 27+ startups that I know of. I am counting only the formal ones as the VCs got a chance to talk to individuals startups at the demo-pit. Al in all it was great success as we got all the stake holders in the system together.
The Colocated technology conference ACM Compute 2009 also went off well with the ‘Cloud Computing’ and the Search and Social Platforms’ attracting the most crowds. More tech deep-dive tutorials are planned in the coming months. Also Srinivas annonced the launch of Distinguished Speakers Program at Compute 2009. Details about that soon. Join the ACM Bangalore mailing list for updates.
Press coverage was good with Times of India and Deccan Herald covering us among others.
Links to online press coverage:
