Tag Archives: entrepreneurs

“Building Tech Companies out of India” – with VC Naren Gupta co-founder of Nexus – 12 July

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Dr. Naren Gupta, co-founder of Nexus Venture Partners, is visiting India and will be in Pune on July 12th. An event for Pune’s entrepreneurs has been arranged where Naren will chat with Abinash Tripathy about “Building Tech Companies out of India”, and this will be followed by networking. The event will be from 2pm to 4:30pm, at the Sumant Moolgaonkar Auditorium, ICC Trade Center, SB Road, on 12th July.

About Naren Gupta

Naren is co-founder of Nexus Venture Partners.

Naren has been an entrepreneur. He co-founded Integrated Systems Inc (ISI), a leading embedded software company, where he served as the President/CEO for fifteen years. He took ISI public and subsequently merged it with Wind River Systems. Naren continued to serve on the board of Wind River till its recent acquisition by Intel. Currently, he serves on the boards of Red Hat and Tibco. He also serves on the Board of Trustees of the California institute of Technology and the Silicon Valley Community Foundation.

Naren has over 20 years of early and early-growth stage investment experience in US and India. Several of his earlier investments have had successful public exits, including Digital Link (IPO), E-Tek Dynamics (IPO), RightNow (IPO), Numerical Technologies (IPO, acquired by Synopsis) and Speedera Networks (acquired by Akamai).

Naren holds a B. Tech. degree and is a recipient of President’s Gold Medal from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi; an MS from the California Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. from Stanford University. Naren has received distinguished alumni awards from Caltech and IIT and was elected a Fellow of the IEEE. He is an active advisor to entrepreneurs worldwide.

Fees and Registration

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. Please register by sending an email to register@nexusvp.com

Event Report: TechSparks Pune 2011

Event Report, ,

(This is a live-blog of the TechSparks 2011 event in Pune. Since it is being written as the event happens, please excuse the typos, and the general low quality of the writing. Hopefully the quality of the speakers and the content will make up for that.)

Some interesting statistics. The event is at Dewang Mehta Auditorium, and it’s mostly full – which means that there are about 250 people attending. And apparently 2/3rd of them are entrepreneurs. And most of them are first-time entrepreneurs. Less than 1/3rd appear to be developers/techies.

The rest of this article is broken up into sections according to the different talks at this event.

Story of VSS Mani, JustDial

  • “I am a TamBram, so probably there has not been a entrepreneur in my family for 100 generations.”
  • He first started “AskMe” in 1989. Ran out of money in the first two years – too many meetings in 5-star hotels, and too many high-quality, high-salary employees. And since he was the sole breadwinner of his family, he had to go do something else to earn money. So, JustDial really started in 1996.
  • This incarnation of JustDial did not repeat the mistakes of AskMe – so the first office was tiny – 300 sq. ft., and did not move to a bigger place unless absolutely necessary. Rented everything possible, including chairs, tables, computers, and even LAN network cables.
  • Focused on many small customers (instead of a few large customers). And took money in advance. Helped with cash-flow (because there was little VC money in India at that time, and none at all for a new business model.)
  • When the dotcom bust of 2000 happened, most internet based companies collapsed, but JustDial was only minimally affected, because they had been conservative about betting on the internet.
  • Decided to bet big on voice enable local search and marketing around 2002.
  • Met a VC, who told them that he wasn’t interested in their existing business, but would fund them if they converted to a BPO. This convinced them to not pursue VCs any more. This remained true until 2006, at which point a VC approached them, heard their story and signed a term sheet the next day.
  • They finally launched the web-based version in 2007. Lost of internal conflicts about whether to do this – because of the fear that the internet business would cannibalize the voice based business. Interestingly, their internet business grew like a hockey stick, and at the same time the voice-based business continued to grow at the same rate as before.
  • Rode the telecom penetration and internet penetration wave on the way to fantastic growth.
  • It appears that further growth in metros is not possible because the market is already saturated. But, India is not just a metro-based market. JustDial will go to all the small cities.
  • The JustDial WAP site is growing at a tremendous pace.
  • Apps (Android/iPhone/Blackberry) are being launched next month
  • Throughout the journey, there have been naysayers. The second time he re-started JustDial, everyone told him that it was a bad idea to re-start a failed business. When they launched the web-based version, people told them that they were not a tech company, and would fail in this segment. Now the same story is repeating with their app-based business that they’re launching in the US market. (What they’re seeing that “human assisted search” is finding a lot of takers in that market – where talking to actual humans is rare.)
  • JustDial.com has the largest number of reviews and ratings in the world – 2.5 million. The secret sauce? Most people don’t actually go online and give reviews. Most online review sites have paid staff generating “reviews”. JustDial calls their voice customers back for ratings/reviews and then uploads them to their site.
  • It’s difficult to give one-line advice to entrepreneurs. But here’s an attempt: Remember, entrepreneurship is different. It’s not like a regular job. It’s a calling. So don’t do it unless you have it in you. It has to come from inside. Not because someone told you. Or copying someone else. And remember, there will be lots of failures. And learn from them. Don’t do minor, incremental things that copy someone else’s idea. Do something disruptive. Don’t do coupons.

Sanjay and Kailash Katkar, QuickHeal Technologies

  • “We are not seasoned entrepreneurs. We don’t yet feel that we have learnt everything. We are making mistakes everyday. We’ll try our best to tell you what we’ve learnt until now.”
  • Kailash Katkar’s entrepreneurial journey started in 5th standard. Over time did various minor things like screen printing, radio repairing, TV repairing. Was earning Rs. 2000 per month doing this, when he was offered a job for Rs. 400 per month – to repair calculators. He took that job because he wanted to learn the new technology. He was the only person in Pune who could repair calculators. Moved on to repairing other machines, including ledger posting machines. When his boss decided to close that business, he decided to take over that business.
  • In early 1990s he realized that computers were going to replace calculators and ledger posting machines. Decided that he needed to refocus his business on computers. Based on this, convinced his brother, Sanjay, to go for a degree in computers (BCS).
  • While doing computer repairing, he got lots of requests for fixing computers infected by viruses. Got Sanjay to write utilities for this. For example, a utility to kill the Michaleangelo virus. Started selling collection of such utilities to his customers.
  • Clubbing together all these utilities into a single product resulted in the birth of QuickHeal anti-virus software.
  • Convinced Sanjay to not take a regular job, not go to US, but instead, to join him so that they could do something different together.
  • Everybody told them that it was a bad idea to do an anti-virus product business, to go against the MNCs who had products in this space. However, the Katkars never really had that much of focus on the big picture – they only had a passion for helping their existing customers.
  • While studying for his MCS, Sanjay Katkar, in his free time, built the first version of QuickHeal, all by himself. He did not start with the intention of building an anti-virus product. He started playing with viruses and anti-virus utilities just out of interest.
  • They were late entrants in this business. In addition to the big MNCs who were selling anti-viruses in India, there were 7 or 8 Indian companies doing anti-virus products.
  • They earned money from the computer maintenance business and used it to develop the anti-virus product. And the main focus was customer satisfaction. For example, lots of organizations were using Norton Antivirus or McAfee. The software would detect files with virus, and then suggest that the infected files should be deleted. This worked in the US, because there were backups to restore the files from. In India, this never worked, because nobody bothered with backups. Hence, QuickHeal were able to actually win customers by offering versions of anti-virus which would clean existing files.
  • When the software was ready for the market, they found it very difficult to sell it. Because “buying” software was a new concept for Indians. Also, their sales partners were very comfortable selling hardware, but not with selling software. Lots and lots of effort went into educating not just customers, but also sales partners that buying anti-virus software was worth the money.
  • The Katkars were techies, not sales or business people. But their sales partners gave up on selling software, saying it couldn’t be done. So they had to do it themselves. Learn the hard way.
  • Other examples of how QuickHeal’s superior understanding of local customers helped them beat the MNCs: most Indian companies had much lower internet speeds compared to the assumptions that software from US companies made. Hence, QuickHeal, which was customized to the speeds here, was able to give a better customer experience.
  • Find good people who are committed to giving a good customer experience. Then give them a good package. And then educate them about the business. Give good after sales support (that’s how you beat the MNCs).
  • When expanding beyond Pune, they decided not to go to big cities. It is very expensive to develop the market, and you’ll probably not be in a position to make a splash. Better go to small towns where you’ll be noticed more easily. So they went to Baroda first, and then Surat, and other such places before finally going to Ahmedabad – where it was easier for them to get channel partners because they had already been noticed in the other, smaller cities in Gujarat. Today Ahmedabad is of course a bigger market than the other cities, but they couldn’t have tackled Ahmedabad without having taken the smaller cities.
  • If you are going to start a tech startup, you must have two strong pillars in your company – a very strong technology/engineering team, and a very strong marketing/business team. The other departments (finance, HR, etc) are support. But don’t start a company without having these two departments. If you’re a typical Pune entrepreneur, you’re probably a techie. Go find co-founders from the marketing/business side so that side is also strong.

There was an introductory talk about Cloud Computing at this point. Skipping it because it was too basic. Please check back around 5:30pm for the next update from the panel discussion.)

Panel Discussion – Go to Market for Startups

The panelists are:

  • Probir Roy, founder of Paymate
  • Sachin Kelkar, Head of Intel Software Partner Program
  • Shailesh Lakhani, from Sequoia Capital
  • Kris Nair, Partner, Opdrage Venture Partners
  • VSS Mani, Founder of JustDial

There where various questions and answers – I’ve tried to capture some of the more interesting quotes:

  • (Shailesh) It should not be easy to raise money. Lots of people who ask for money don’t deserve it. At early stages, people invest based on the people and not on the idea, because the idea isn’t really worth anything. And that’s the job of angel investors. Angels are slowly increasing in India.
  • (Mani) Focus on doing the best with you already have. Focus on existing customers and keep them happy. Don’t focus on what you could do if you had money. Forget the fancy stuff. Align the interests of your early employees with the interests of the company. So they should see that if the company does well, they do well.
  • (Mani) Don’t wait for a miracle to happen. Don’t wait for an angel to appear. Just focus on ensuring that your tomorrow is better than today. Focus on a small, core set of customers, and keep them happy. They will become your evangelists, they’ll get you more customers, and they’ll help you get investors.
  • (Shailesh) In deciding whether to invest in a company, we look at the size of the potential market, and a good (strong, intelligent, thoughtful) team.
  • (Probir) Entrepreneurs look for new business models. MBAs help administrate existing business models. Know the difference!
  • (Probir) Chances of you getting VC funding in India are low. So keep looking for alternative funding models.
  • (Mani) Timing is very important. We had a brilliant idea (JustDial) in 1989, and even had money. But it failed because it was way before its time. Analyze carefully whether your idea is before its time.
  • Brilliant question from audience. An entrepreneur (from SpotMyGadget) just got up and asked this question (without waiting for permission of the moderator): “How shameless should an entrepreneur be when approaching clients/etc?” Answer, from Mani was – as shameless as possible. But remember to deliver a good/relevant product in the end.

TechSparks Pune: Founders of JustDial, QuickHeal, Paymate and much more – 11 June

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http://YourStory.in is holding a half-day event for entrepreneurs, on 11 June, in Pune titled “Out of the Garage, Into the Market”. The event includes a few talks and a panel discussion, and the line-up of speakers and panelists is very impressive. VSS Mani, founder of JustDial, Kailash Katkar and Sanjay Katkar, Founder and CTO respectively of QuickHeal, Probir Roy, co-founder of Paymate, will be there. So will Shailesh Lakhani, a VC with Sequoia Capital.

This seems to be a must attend event for entrepreneurs in general, and more specifically, those interested in building a tech product/web-service in India.

Agenda

  • Keynote Addresses
    How to dial the right number – The “JustDial” Story by Founder, VSS Mani
    How to build a Global product enteprise – the “QuickHeal Technologies” Story by Founder Kailash Katkar and CTO, Sanjay Katkar
  • Cloud for Startups by Janakiram MSV, Technology Evangelist, India, Amazon Web Services
  • Go to Market for Startups – by Prashant Choksey, co-founder Mumbai Angels
  • Interact with the panelists:
    • Probir Roy, Co Founder, Paymate
    • VSS Mani, Founder, JustDial
    • Vimalraj Abrahman, IBM,Strategy and Marketing, ISV and Developers Relations, India
    • Shailesh Lakhani, Sequoia Capital
    • Kris Nair, Partner, Opdrage Venture Partners
    • Shradha Sharma, Founder, YourStory
  • Followed by Open House ( Q&A) and Networking Over Snacks

About TechSparks Regional Roundable meetings

These ‘Out of the Garage, Into the Market’ regional round tables are being held in Delhi, Pune, Chennai, Hyderabad and are a way of engaging with the entrepreneur community all over India, and also serve the purpose of generating visibility for the TechSparks 2011 Event in Bangalore in August (described later in this article).

Each Regional RoundTable is characterized by two focussed activities -a Panel Discussion featuring key stakeholders in the startup ecosystem and an Open House where entrepreneurs will be given the opportunity to ask any question to any panelist and engage in meaningful discussions and not just be a spectator.

The idea is to have an absolutely open interaction over the topic of discussion, which will be – ‘Out of the Garage, Into the Market.’ Most product technology companies face a lot of teething problems with respect to their go-to-market strategies. There are no ‘one-size-fits-all’ solutions and hence, it’s an area where entrepreneurs need all the help that they can get and much more. Through the collective might of a panel full of ‘rockstars’, the TechSparks Regional RoundTable intends to support startups by helping them kickstart their product’s journey. In short, the RoundTable intends to help startups get their products ‘out of the garage and into the market.’

What is TechSparks 2011?

TechSparks is a a pan-India hunt for Product Tech startups that have the potential to scale and grow, that may need a push, and that are holding promise. The tech startups identified in this program would be provided national recognition, genuine support and meaningful networking opportunities.

For more details, including how to apply, selection criteria, and timelines see the TechSparks webpage

Fees and Registration for TechSparks Regional Roundtable Pune

The event will be held from 2pm-7pm, at the Dewang Mehta Auditorium, Persistent, SB Road. This event is free. Please register here (click on “Register Now” button).

TiE Pune “My Story” Session with Kailash Katkar, CEO of Quickheal – 5 May

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TiE Pune presents a “My Story” session with Kailash Katkar, CEO and Founder of Quickheal, one of Pune’s major success stories in software products on 5th May, 6pm, at MCCIA, ICC Towers, SB Road.

About the speaker – Kailash Katkar

Kailash Katkar is the founder and CEO of Quickheal Technologies, India’s leading provider of Internet Security tools and is a leader in Anti-Virus Technology in India. Starting his career as a radio repair technician, Sanjay created Quickheal, a highly successful software prduct company from our very own Pune that had 09-10 revenue in excess of Rs 100 Cr.

In addition to hearing the jingles of Quickheal on FM radio, we have read about Quickheal recently when Sequoia Capital, leading VC investd Rs60 cr in Quick Heal some six months ago. Quick Heal Technologies has established Quick Heal product family as industry benchmark for computer security.

Quick Heal, an award winning security product is installed in corporate, small business and consumers’ homes protecting their computers from viruses and other malicious threats. Serving millions of users worldwide, Quick Heal Technologies employs more than 350 people in eighteen branch offices and is headquartered at Pune, India.

Quick Heal Technologies has firmly established its position in India and also operates through a network of dealers and channel partners in more than 50 countries worldwide.

About TiE Pune My Story

“My Story – Inspiring Journey of an Entrepreneur” This program is created to celebrate entrepreneurship and bring stories from successful entrepreneurs in their own words. The invited speakers will share their entrepreneurial journeys and talk about lessons learned, mistakes they wish they avoided, and key decisions that helped make their venture successful.

Fees and Registration

The event is on 5th May, from 6pm to 8pm, on the 5th Floor, MCCIA, ICC Towers, SB Road. This event is free and open for anybody to attend. Please register here

FirstCry Pune-based Online Store for Baby Products gets $4 million funding

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FirstCry, an online portal for baby products and toys, founded by Pune’s Supam Maheshwari and Amitava Saha has just raised $4 million from private equity company SAIF Partners. FirstCry works with 100+ vendors internationally to make available 4000+ items for online sales, and with free shipping. As their website says:

Over time, we hope to ‘Change’ the way, Indian parents buy, so that they can be at home to spend more quality time with their ‘Little ones’ and family.

Economic times reports:

FirstCry.com receives 10,000 daily visitors and has over 15400 fans on Facebook. It has initiated various contests for parents on Facebook. The firm, which delivers to 25,000 cities and towns in India, expects to do 1000 transactions per day in next three months.

Supam Maheshwari had earlier co-founded Brainvisa in Pune, which was sold to Indecomm Global Services in 2007. Amitava Saha was a Senior Vice President at Brainvisa and had been with the company from 2003.

ShopSocially focuses on retailers with new offering “SocialConnect”

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(Pune-based Startup ShopSocially, whose launch was covered on PuneTech last year has recently been in the news again for their launch of SocialConnect, a product for online retailers to easily add social shopping features to their existing e-commerce site. Suneetha talked to Samir Palnitkar and Sunil Arora of ShopSocially, and this article starts with an overview of ShopSocially (again), and then goes on to their latest offerings, and future plans.)

Buying a camera or a laptop and looking for some advice? Referrals seem to be taking over shopping decisions now more than ever, and the web is a key player in this activity. It’s this concept that ShopSocially has leveraged successfully by integrating the concepts of online shopping and facebook. Samir Palnitkar and Sunil Arora talk about how ShopSocially has come on the online social shopping map. Samir Palnitkar, an alumnus of IIT-Kanpur, is the President of ShopSocially and Sunil Arora, an alumnus of IIT-Kharagpur is a Founding Member who now looks after the technology aspects of the company.

Sam says it all started with a thought about harnessing social networking. Jai Rawat (CEO of ShopSocially) had spent several years in the ecommerce and online shopping space. As social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter were becoming popular, Jai realized that social recommendations via Facebook and Twitter would become a key traffic and revenue driver for e-commerce. These thoughts were the foundation behind ShopSocially. In the offline space, we tend to consult friends before making a buying decision. Why not do the same in the online space? That led to the idea behind ShopSocially set up in 2009.

You just need to register a free account with ShopSocially and shoot your shopping questions or declare your impressions on the platform. Why waste countless hours researching stuff and reading anonymous reviews? Of course, this works best when you have lots of ShopSocially Friends. Your Facebook friends automatically become your ShopSocially Friends when they join in. You can also earn badges or become ‘Shopping Gods’ depending on the intensity and frequency of your activity.

And how does it work for a retailer?

“Retailers can integrate with ShopSocially’s social commerce platform to harness the tremendous power of social recommendations. ShopSocially helps turn every purchase into a conversation and a social endorsement driving significant ‘friend referred’ traffic back to the retailer site. Retailers can get 2% to 6.5% incremental sales by integrating with the ShopSocially platform.”

ShopSocially has evolved quite a lot its model. It started off as an end-user site. Then they realized that the ShopSocially platform was highly attractive for retailers who wanted to socially enable their websites. So they launched Social Connect, to allow retailers to easily plug in to the ShopSocially platform. SocialConnect allows the retailer to add social features into the existing e-commerce platforms. Specifically, after a customer has purchased something, they are encouraged to share this purchase with their facebook friends (i.e. recommend this item to their other friends).

In addition, ShopSocially also automatically creates a new “Shoppers” tab on the company’s facebook fan page, where website where prospective customers can check whether any of their existing facebook friends have bought anything from this merchant, and if yes, what they’ve been buying, and what the reviews are.

ShopSocially started working with retailers in a fixed fee model but soon realized that it was easier for retailers to work with a performance-based or a subscription-based model; so quickly changed their pricing to meet the needs of retailers. Samir quotes an experience here. “We were thrilled when one of our retailers saw an increase of nearly $1 million in revenues per year by integrating with the ShopSocially solution.”

By now, I was getting convinced that it was all limited to the web user, but no, ShopSocially is already seeing beyond that parameter. Samir tells me that ShopSocially is as relevant for a customer outside the web precincts. “Yes. Social recommendation is how we buy most of our products, whether online or offline. In the near future, ShopSocially plans to bring product sharing to mobile devices. That will allow shoppers to share offline purchases with friends.”

So what about India specific plans? Sunil Arora says “In the next few months, we will be rolling out our solution in India. We expect retailers to embrace ShopSocially really quickly. Currently, ShopSocially is the only company in the world that offers a comprehensive social commerce suite for retailers. There are other competitors, but no company offers a suite that integrates with the most common user touch points, order confirmation page, Facebook FAN page and order confirmation email. Check this out here http://shopsocially.com/partners

Social networks such as Facebook and Twitter create a convenient way for shoppers to share their purchases with friends. Social networks have made sharing simple. While ShopSocially uses other media such as Google and Email, Facebook and Twitter play an important part in the ShopSocially strategy. Technology wise, ShopSocially has an exceptionally talented team that has built a world class platform on some of the best technologies in the world, including MongoDB, Redis, Celeryd, Python, Ajax, Javascript and others.

So what is the future map?

“ShopSocially will continue to add other social components that benefit retailers. These components will increase sharing and drive incremental traffic to retailer sites. Another dimension is integration with popular shopping carts such as Magento, Shopify and osCommerce. ShopSocially will continue to make integration simpler by offering pre-integrated plug-ins for various shopping carts. We feel that ShopSocially has the opportunity to become a global billion dollar company. We do not need a large team (maybe < 100 people), but we will continue to handpick the brightest minds to work on the exciting problems that we are solving daily.”

Startup Strategy Discussions with Sramana Mitra – 17th April

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Sramana Mitra, a serial entrepreneur with 2 successful exits, consultant with over 80 companies, and the founder of the 1M/1M is in town this weekend and, in association with Persistent Systems, will hold an event that every entrepreneur should probably visit.

The 1M/1M initiative, was started with the goal of helping one million entrepreneurs reach $1 million in revenues and beyond. The event on Sunday will have Sramana Mitra’s keynote address discussing the 1M/1M Methodology: Bootstrapping, Positioning and Lean Startups, followed by the opportunity to ask questions. Then entrepreneurs can participate in a public strategy roundtable with Sramana to receive some real time coaching and answers to questions about their startup ventures. Up to seven entrepreneurs will be able to pitch their businesses to Sramana Mitra during this session.

The schedule for this program is as follows:

  • 2:00 -2:30 pm : Dr. Anand Deshpande introduces Sramana Mitra.
  • 2:30 -3:00 pm : Keynote Address by Sramana Mitra, topics : bootstrapping, positioning, lean startups.
  • 3:00 – 3:30 pm : Q&A on the keynote address.
  • 3:30 – 4:30 pm : Live Strategy Roundtable with Pune startups.
  • 4:30 – 5:00 pm : Q&A with audience/Sramana discussing the EJ Methodology
  • 5:00 – 6:00 pm : Networking

If you’d like to pitch, send Maureen (maureen@sramanamitra.com) an email.

1M/1M will be working with Microsoft in helping entrepreneurs prepare for the Microsoft Bizspark’s India Startup Challenge. Girish Joshi from Microsoft will be attending the roundtable and scouting companies with Sramana Mitra for the challenge.You can find more about the challenge here

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. Please register here

A brief history of the Pune Open Coffee Club (Happy Birthday!)

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(This month marks the 3rd anniversary of the creation of the POCC (Pune Open Coffee Club). A few days back, POCC membership crossed 4000. We decided to mark the occasion by writing an article about the history of PuneTech, how it got started, and the various milestones along the way. If you have any good story/anecdote about your association with PuneTech, and how it affected you, we’d love to hear about it.)

The Pune Open Coffee Club is a community of all those interested in the startup ecosystem in Pune. With 4000+ members as I write this, including founders, entrepreneurs, early employees, wannabes, investors, lawyers, accountants and freelancers who work with startups, it is a huge and very active community. POCC usually meets on the 1st Saturday of every month in Shivajinagar and in Koregaon Park. Attendance is open to everyone and admission is free, and you can actually network and grow under the umbrella of experience and fellow-feeling.

The Pune Open Coffee Club was started by several individuals in their own ways. The Open Coffee Club movement had become fairly popular abroad before it reached its pioneers in Pune.

Harshal Vaidya was the first of the lot who attempted to get the OCC off the ground by organizing the first meet up in February 2008. The first meet up helped send out the first few sparks in the community.

The real start spark came a month later, in March 2008, Anjali Gupta and Santosh Dawara created http://punestartups.ning.com, an online social network for the POCC on ning.com. (This was later moved to http://punestartups.org the current home of the POCC.) On April 5th, they put together another POCC event, and they worked hard to invite all the movers and shakers of the start-up community in Pune to the BookEazy office terrace for tea, coffee and networking. The idea of the POCC was seeded in their mind by Vijay Anand.

Says Santosh:

“This time around, the conditions were right and the word about the Pune Open Coffee Club spread out quickly. Our first meeting was very well attended by over 75 individuals including some very well-known names in the Pune circle such as Anand Deshpande (Persistent Systems), Chetan Shah (Synygy), Jaspreet Singh (Druvaa) and more.

On June 7th, 2008, Nick Karnik an early member of the POCC (who has since moved out of Pune), created the Pune Startups mailing list.

Although the second meetup was a great success, there was a problem. Santosh called the next meeting in the Barista on Law College Road, expecting “maybe 15” people to attend. 40+ people showed, and there was a significant amount of chaos.

After this, Navin Kabra got in touch with Prof. Harshad Gune at SICSR, Model Colony, for permission to hold POCC meetings in one of their classsrooms. The first POCC meeting at SICSR happened on 23rd August, 2008. SICSR then became the ‘regular’ place for POCC meetings. With that the final piece of the puzzle fell into place. The next few set of events was a mix of exciting talks and discussions that resonated very well the start-up community in Pune and the movement began gathering momentum.

More recently POCC is attempting to go deeper into Pune by replicating the Open Coffee Club across Pune. This initiative is seeing a lot of initial success, with the creation of POCCs in Kothrud, PCMC, Aundh, Kalyani Nagar, Tilak Road, some of which have already announced their second meetings.

Santosh, who came up with the idea, says:

“I have my fingers crossed that these will be just as successful as the original, if not more so. They are all backed by a very impressive set of individuals who want it to succeed.”

Amruta Ranade now brings out a fortnightly newsletter to cover start-ups in detail for the benefit of the community. These are posted on the Pune Startups mailing list, and on her blog on PuneStartups.org

So is it all serious and work?

No, says Santosh,

“We also have a very “fun” side to the Open Coffee Club. In the past, we have had a group paintball competition, football games, dinners and movie nights where entrepreneurs and their families can relax, mingle and enjoy. Apart from this, we intend to meet regularly every month over the weekend.” POCC has been creating POCC subgroups in each region of Pune and Santosh says the team has high hopes about the new initiative.

“Anyone who has been an entrepreneur will tell you that entrepreneurship can be very rewarding and at the same time very unforgiving. For those who have quit their jobs to become entrepreneurs, the pressure to perform is fairly intense. Moreover, there is no going back to the same skill-based boxes as entrepreneurs are expected to excel at multiple roles.

By replicating the Open Coffee Club, we hope to encourage those who have been unable to participate actively due to distance to come forward and seed their own groups just as we have done so. In good time, we are certain that each of these groups will build their own camaraderie and dynamics locally and at the same time contribute to the overall development of start-ups in Pune.”

The Open Coffee Club was always intended to be a support group of entrepreneurs who get what each other are going through and can intervene to help each other out, share ideas and motivate each other. It looks like POCC is going in the right direction since day one.

Don’t all the books that matter to mankind advise just this?

Overview of KLISMA – Loyalty/Group buying startup incubated at Persistent

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So Customer is King; and the “loyal” King gets rewards. But how many of us really carry all the paper/plastic around or remember to redeem these? KLISMA, is a new customer loyalty program, that can be used via your mobile – which you always have with you.

KLISMA is primarily focused at providing group buying benefits to employees of corporate and institutional clusters for its services, but it also supports individual customers as well.

KLISMA offers a mobile based membership card. A corporate employee or an individual user can register (free) and get a mobile based ID across all participating retailers in the program. The user can even group family members under one ID. Once the account is setup, the user will be able to obtain digital receipts, return products, redeem m-coupons, and participate in retailers’ loyalty programs using mobile-based KLISMA ID. This service eliminates paper clutter, lost receipts for product returns, the frustration of keeping track of discount coupons and plastic loyalty cards in wallet, purse or key chain. So, you are now a “green shopper” as well.

KLISMA goes far beyond linking everything to the cards a user already carry in their wallet or purse. KLISMA constantly searches through promotions and offers to find the best deals on everything from clothing to groceries to electronics to restaurants. KLISMA’s suggestions are unique to the user, as they’re based on what you typically purchase. For example, if we like a certain store, it might offer us a m-coupon from them for “10% Off All Purchases of Rs.1000 or more”. Or, if we like a certain product, it might show us a “Buy 1, Get 1 Free” m-coupon.

Ajay Aggarwal, the Chief Customer Experience Officer at KLISMA says ‘KLISMA is a comprehensive platform for modern consumers to plan, shop and manage their entire consumption cycle and it also enables modern retailers to deliver desired shopping experience to these consumers.” To say it in a simpler way, KLISMA works more like the “armed forces canteen service” for corporate employees. In a way it engages with corporate customers to deliver its services to its employees.

I bet you are now reminded of Groupon or Snapdeal. But KLISMA begs to differ. KLISMA enables its members to buy anything ranging from a car to a cinema ticket at the time they wish to buy, the price they wish to buy and retailer they to buy from. Since KLISMA is completely member driven and not retailer driven it is truly a pull platform which is the core difference whereas all others are push models. Apart from that, it offers deals to its members. There is a unified loyalty program across all retailers, personalised promotions based on individual shopping pattern and behaviour, very wide products & services range (unlike Groupon and Snapdeal) and mixed channel experience over internet, mobile and phone support.

Ajay Aggarwal has been associated with retail industry since 1993 and post 2006 he tracked the consumer challenges in this industry when he felt the need to have a platform to push for shopping experience advocacy. “I firmly think this will be the future need of matured modern consumers”, assures Ajay.

KLISMA comes from Persistent, and Ajay Aggarwal waxes eloquent when he is asked about his experience of being incubated in Persistent.

“I started working on KLISMA in June 2009 and its basic framework comprises of Cloud, BI, Mobile and Collaboration technologies. This is where I shared the concept with Dr. Anand Deshpande in November 2010 and he invited KLISMA to be part of Persistent and committed his support to make it happen. We worked out a unique innovative model of incubating this within Persistent and it has been a great experience of working as an entrepreneur within a corporate. Very soon KLISMA shall be spun out as a separate entity, jointly owned by Persistent, founders, employees and other investors. I must say large amount of credit for the success goes to Persistent to allow us to operate independently and objectively without any bias.”

We asked Anand Deshpande, CEO of Persistent about how and why Persistent, traditionally a software product outsourcing company, is getting into incubating technology startups. Anand says:

“I am a great believer in the Indian consumer story. KLISMA is a technology based Company for the Indian consumers and we are excited to have built the platform. Persistent has funded and participated in other technology platforms another example would be Parasharplus (http://www.parasharplus.com).

“In addition to incubating products within Persistent we have also announced a partnership to connect entrepreneurs to customers. Recently, we have partnered with 1M/1M an initiative setup by Sramana Mitra who has a goal to help a million entrepreneurs reach $1 million in revenue. Persistent as a technology partner will be reselling and also be a channel for products from select 1M/1M entrepreneurs. In addition, Persistent Systems will also provide outsourced product development services to these companies. In this way, we look forward to help entrepreneurs succeed by bringing new technologies to market.”

In short, other Pune startups that are targeting Indian consumers, and would like some help in reaching the market could approach Persistent for some sort of a partnership, similar to Ajay & KLISMA’s incubation in Persistent.

Ajay is of the opinion that this is the decade of e-commerce in India. Consumer maturity, internet and mobile penetration, 3-G and maturity of supply chain infrastructure in India will give a huge push to this channel in the next 10 years. Like the traditional retail e-commerce growth will also be controlled and limited by government policies, especially FDI in retail. He has no doubt that post 2020 e-retailing space in India will not be different than anywhere else in the world. So if going green and paperless and intelligent is something you like, check out KLISMA’s website

Overview of Sokrati – Online Ads Optimization Startup

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(A few days back, Pune-based startup Sokrati announced that it has received an undisclosed amount of Series-A funding from Inventus Capital Partners, a company that has also invested in such companies as RedBus.in, TeliBrahma, and FundsIndia.

PuneTech chatted with co-founder and CEO Ashish Mehta to get more details of the Sokrati story.)

About Sokrati

Sokrati is a company that provides technology and services to merchants on the web for automated optimization of the placements of their online ads. For example, if you’re an e-commerce company, you probably spend a lot of money on buying Google AdWords, and other ads on various websites around the world. As the competition in your market heats up, it becomes more and more difficult to figure out where exactly to place ads, and what kinds of ads to get maximum conversions (in this domain, a “conversion” is when a person who sees your ad clicks on it and becomes a customer.)

On Founders and How Sokrati was Founded

Sokrati was founded by Ashish Mehta, Santosh Gannavarapu, and Anubhav Sonthalia, who were previously working for Amazon in Seattle, USA, but then quit to form Sokrati, and moved to India about 3 years ago.

The founders managed the Paid Marketing for Amazon from business & technology perspective. They saw that Paid Search Marketing (and Online Marketing in general) is very challenging for advertisers with dynamic content on their website – typically catalog based Advertisers in Shopping, Travel or Classifieds domain. And none of the established players like Marin Software, Efficient Frontier or Kenshoo provided an apt solution. They had some ideas on how to make it work for advertisers in these domains and started moon-lighting in November 2007. They signed up as one of the Amazon Affiliates, and spent weekends and after-work hours to build a proof-of-concept model. Within a year, they drove an incremental revenue of $20 million to Amazon – purely from the rudimentary PoC that they built on the side! It was easy then to quit their jobs in Dec 2008 and came to Pune to build a more production ready, more intelligent and sophisticated technology.

The idea & focus overall has still remained the same; though they are constantly taking feedback from clients and building product extensions to entail a larger piece of a more unified Digital Marketing & Analytics.

For more information about the founders see the Sokrati management team page.

Case Study to Illustrate Sokrati Offerings and Technology

To get an idea of what exactly Sokrati does, and how, consider this case study with a client who is a prominent jobs portal in India.

The client was managing Paid Search Campaigns (i.e. buying of search ads on Google and other search engines) in-house, incurring heavy spends. The key issue was – for the trailing 1 year or so, performance had started to plateau and there wasn’t much momentum in the campaigns. Scaling the campaigns with a controlled Cost-per-Action was getting very challenging & difficult for the client. And while experimenting various ways (mostly manual), the campaign structure + quality of keywords were just getting worse by the time.

Sokrati helped the advertiser ramp up their volumes by almost 2x within 8 weeks of campaign management by Sokrati.

The basic approach Sokrati took was to use Sokrati’s proprietary data mining & clustering algorithms to generate extensive set of keywords (from about 68000 to roughly 1.5 million) & very targeted ads. This allowed a lowering of CPCs (cost-per-click) & improved relevancy – eventually leading to better CPAs (cost-per-action) & higher volumes. This combined with real-time optimizations leveraging decay-rate algorithms has helped lower the overall CPA by 25% without sacrificing on any of the volumes. In other words, to get exactly the same amount of resumes, it cost the client 25% less in ad spending using Sokrati’s algorithms.

The other critical improvement provided was the ability to track beyond “binary” conversion flag. Sokrati’s proprietary tracking system is able to capture several more conversion parameters. For example, before Sokrati, the client was measuring only the number of resumes and the amount incurred to acquire them. Now, with Sokrati tracking, they are able to track the quality of the resume – whether it was an IT or Bank related; whether its a Fresher or had 5+ years experience. Not only that, the advertiser is now able to provide differential ROI targets for different “mix” of conversions; and Sokrati is able to optimize the mix in real-time.

About Their Technology Stack

Sokrati technology is built using Ruby-on-Rails for the front end and has Linux + MySQL + Java on the backend. They are using the cloud quite extensively have close to 50 servers now, all hosted on Amazon EC2 (US & Singapore). They did evaluate a few vendors in India – but didn’t find anything interesting or as reliable.

We asked Ashish whether it was difficult to hire developers with the required knowledge in Pune.

Hiring has always been a challenge & I don’t think, its a function of Pune specifically, but India overall. Though we’ve been very fortunate to get the key senior members of the team that are like-minded and truly start-up oriented, it has been lot slower than we would have liked. For example getting talent with data mining or machine learning skill-set is a struggle. We have interviewed over 100+ candidates but still haven’t been able to fulfill the positions; and have a long list of open head-counts in the company.

What is the one piece of advice you would give to founders of other technology companies in Pune – something you learnt during your journey so far and you wish you had known earlier.

Our start-up stint has just begun and there will be many things that we will learn either upfront or by failing over the next few years. But I’d like to share 2 learnings that we’ve gained from our stint so far –

1) One key learning that I’d like to share is to not procrastinate on raising funds. Once a start-up feels they are ready to raise funds or think they “need” to raise funds to grow faster (and only IF they feel so) – then the founders should not delay this process. As the funds will provide the stimulus to exponentially grow faster. I think we could have raised funds about 6 months back by being more aggressive but we let it take its own sweet time. In the internet world, where competition is so cut-throat & landscape so dynamic, even a small delay or a few missed opportunities could prove to be very fatal.

2) Customer Servicing & listening to their feedback is ultra-important. Coming from Amazon, we ingrained this idea directly & indirectly, on how to value each and every feedback from customer (big or small). But we’ve experienced that several start-ups, especially in India, are so obsessed with their product / services that they tend to overlook this aspect of the business. Its very vital to put yourselves into the customers’ shoes while building the product.