Entrepreneurs who are preparing to raise money from Angels can benefit immensely from a direct one-on-one interaction with attending Angels and experienced Entrepreneurs. The session will cover basic concepts that are unique to Angel investing such as ‘Convertible Debt’, common concepts such as ‘Valuation’, what preparation can help you increase your effectiveness and what to expect when you begin negotiations with an Angel.
This should be an exciting session as Angel Investing has subtle nuances as compared to other forms of institutional finance.
As an entrepreneur – will you prefer an equity round or a convertible note round – which is preferred by whom and why? What does participating preferred mean, and how does the math work in an exit scenario? What kind of anti-dilution protections are there and what are the differences? Do VC’s prefer to offer exits to early Angel Investors?
These and many other questions are encountered by investors and entrepreneurs alike every day. The session will introduce these concepts and considerations in order for you.
Presented by dynamic speakers and active angel investors, with extensive experience in venture creation, this session is a must for those focused on building or investing in new ventures.
The high level agenda will be as follows:
1600 to 1630 Introduction to attending Angels
1630 to 1715 Walk-through an actual term sheet template or memorandum of understanding
1715 to 1730 break for tea / coffee
1730 to 1830 Discussion, QnA between attending entrepreneurs and angel investors
1830 to 1930 Networking
Here are some of the high level topics we can cover:
equity types and convertible loans
how much should be raised
pre-money, post-money, price per share – valuation vs. other incentives, pre and post cap tables
liquidation preferences
anti dilution provisions
protective provisions
post funding board composition
setting up the option pool
some key tips to entrepreneurs and to investors (not necessarily the same tips!)
negotiation tips and a mock negotiation if time permits
This is a live-blog of the Pune Open Coffee Club session on use of cloud apps for your business. Since this is being typed as the session is in progress, it might be a bit incoherent and not completely well-structured, and there are no links.
Pune Open Coffee Club is an informal group for all those interested in Pune's startup ecosystem. As of this writing, it has more than 2700 members. Click on the image to get all PuneTech articles related to the Pune Open Coffee Club
This session is being run as a panel discussion. Santosh Dawara is the moderator. Panelists are:
Nitin Bhide, Co-founder of BootstarpToday, a cloud apps provider
Basant Rajan, CEO of Coriolis, which makes the Colama virtual machine management software
Anthony Hsiao, Founder of Sapna Solutions
The session started with an argument over the defintion of cloud, SaaS, etc., which I found very boring and will not capture here.
Later, Anthony gave a list of cloud apps used by Sapna Solutions:
Google apps for email, calendaring, documents
GitHub for code
Basecamp for project management
JobScore for recruitment (handles job listings on your website, and the database of applicants, etc.)
GreyTip (Indian software for HR management)
Question: Should cloud providers be in the same country? Answer: you don’t really have a choice. There are no really good cloud providers in India. So it will be outside.
Question: Are customers ready to put their sensitive data on the cloud? Audience comment: Ashish Belagali has a startup that provides recruitment software. They can provide it as installable software, and also as a hosted, could app. However, they’ve found that most customers are not interested in the cloud app. They are worried about two things: a) The software will be unavailable if internet is not available, and b) The data is outside the company premises.
Point by Nitin Bhide of BootstrapToday: Any cloud provider will take security of your data very seriously. Because, if they screw this up even once, they’ll go out of business right away. Also, as far as theft of data is concerned, it can happen even within your own premises, by your own employees.
Comment 1: Yes, the above argument makes logical sense. But most human beings are not logical, and can have an irrational fear and will defend their choice.
Comment 2: This fear is not irrational. There are valid reasons to be unhappy about having your sensitive data in the cloud.
Comment 3: Another reason why this fear is not irrational is to do with CYA: cover-your-ass. If you put data in the cloud and something goes wrong, you will be blamed. If you put the data locally and something goes wrong, you can claim that you did everything that was expected of you. As long as CYA exists (especially in enterprises), this will be a major argument against the cloud.
Question: Does anybody use accounting packages in the cloud? Answer: No. Most people prefer to stick to Tally, because of its compliance with Indian laws (or at least its compliance with Indian CAs). There doesn’t seem to be any online alternative that’s good enough.
At this point there was a longish discussion about the availability and uptime of the cloud services. Points made:
Cloud app providers have lots of redundancies and lots of backups to ensure that there is no downtime
However, there are enough instances of even world-class providers having downtime
Also, most of them claim redundancies, but give no guarnatees or SLAs, and even if they do give an SLA, you’re too small a player to enforce the SLA.
Also remember, that in the Indian context, downtime of the last mile of your internet will result in downtime of your app
Point to remember is that an app going down it not the real problem. The real problem is recovery time. How long does it take before it comes back up? Look at that before choosing upon your app.
It would be great if there was a reputation service for all cloud apps, which gives statistics on availability, downtime, performance etc. There isn’t right now, and that is a problem.
Remember, there is an economic cost of cloud apps that you will incur due to downtime, but also remember that there are definite economic savings too. For many startups the savings outweigh the potential costs. But you need to look into this for yourself.
Question: What kind of cost savings can a startup get by going to the cloud?
Nobody had concrete answers, but general points made:
Can you really afford to pay a system administrator who is competent, and who can administer a mail server, a file server, a this, and a that? There were some people who said that while admins are expensive in the US, they are not that expensive in India. However, more people felt that this would be expensive.
All significant large cloud services cost a very tiny fraction of what it would cost to do it yourself.
It is not a question of cost. As a startup, with my limited team, I wouldn’t have time to do this.
Basant Rajan points out that so far the discussion has been about either something that is in the cloud, or it is something that you do entirely yourself. These are not the only options. There is a third option – called managed services, or captive clouds. He points out that there is a Pune company called Mithi software that offers a whole bunch of useful services that they manage, on their machines, in your premises.
Question: What about compatibility between your apps? If the recruitment app needs to talk to your HR app are you in trouble?
Answer: The good ones already talk to each other. But yes, if you are not careful, you could run into trouble.
Some Pune startups who are providing cloud based apps:
Pune startup BootstrapToday provides an all-in-one solution in the cloud for development:
Source code control (using SVN). All the rest of these services are home grown.
Wiki pages
Bug tracking
Project management
Time Tracking (coming soon)
Project Tracking (coming soon)
Pune startup Acism has developed an in-house tool for collaboration and project communication which they are making available to others.
Pune startup CoLayer has been around for a long time, and has a product for better collaboration within an enterprise. It is like Google Wave, but has been around for longer, and is still around (while Wave is not).
Pune startup Colama offers private clouds based on virtualization technology. They are currently focusing on software labs in educational institutions as customers. But this technology can also be used to create grids and private clouds for development, testing and training.
Recommendations for cloud apps:
General recommendation: if you’re not using Google Apps, you must. Mail, Documents (i.e. Office equivalent functionality), Calendar.
Bug Tracking: Jira (very good app, but expensive), Pivotal Tracker (only for those familiar with agile, suggested by @dnene), Lighthouse App (suggested by: @anthonyhsiao), Mantis.
Project Management: ActiveCollab (self hostable), DeskAway, SugarCRM on Google Apps (very good CRM, very good integration with Google Apps, has a learning curve).
For hosting your own cloud (i.e. bunch of servers with load balancing etc.): Rackspace Cloud is good but expensive. Amazon Web Services is cost effective, but has a learning curve.
Unfortunately, due to time constraints, this part of the session got truncated. Hopefully we’ll have some more time in the end to pick this up again.
IndicThreads conference pass giveaway
IndicThreads will give a free pass to their Cloud Computing conference that is scheduled for 20/21 August to the best blog or tweet either about this POCC event, or about Cloud Computing in general. The pass is normally worth Rs. 8500. To enter, tweets and blogs should be brought to the attention of @indicthreads on twitter, or conf@rightrix.com. This PuneTech blog is not eligible for the free pass (because I already have a pass), so the field is still open 🙂
What: Pune OpenCoffee Club meeting on use of cloud applications in your work When: Saturday, 7th August, 4pm-7pm Where: Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research, Atur Centre, Model Colony. Map. Registration and Fees: This event is free for all to attend. Please register here
POCC is an informal group of the Pune Startup ecosystem. It contains more than 2500 people who either have their own startups, or want to start one, or provide some service (or funding) to startups. Click on the logo to find all punetech articles about the POCC. Thanks to threenovember.com for the POCC logo.
Sharing experiences with cloud apps
Do you use cloud apps in your work? Pune Open Coffee Club invites cloud app users, practitioners, enthusiasts and experts for the next POCC meetup, where we will discuss how a business can make gains by pushing processes into the cloud. This can be for both development (e.g. source code control) or support services (e.g. HR, customer support).
We will discuss apps that can be used for development, like:
Online version control
Bug tracking
Project management
File Sharing and Collaborative workspaces
and support apps like:
Hosting (eg. AWS, Google App Engine)
Payroll Management
Company Accounts
Customer Support, CRM, Ticket Management
Marketing and Conversation Monitoring
and of course, any other apps that people want to talk about.
We will invite members of the POCC community who have experience with such apps to share their experience. DOs and DONTs. Tips. Best practices. We will also invite Pune startups who have products in these spaces to give short product pitches.
If you have concerns or questions, you can expect to find answers from people who’ve been successfully using such apps for a few years if not more. If you have strong objections to using such apps, you should come to warn everybody about those. If you have a soft corner for a particular app that you just love, you should come to convert everybody.
This is your chance to meet people in the Pune tech and startup community who are using, or are interested in cloud apps. Be there.
There’s a new jobs listing forum in town, and it contains postings of jobs that you will not find anywhere else. Check out the PuneStartupJobs mailing list (which is an initiative of the Pune Open Coffee Club).
POCC is an informal group of the Pune Startup ecosystem. It contains more than 2500+ people who either have their own startups, or want to start one, or provide some service (or funding) to startups. Click on the logo to find all punetech articles about the POCC. Thanks to threenovember.com for the POCC logo.
The Pune Open Coffee Club is an informal group for all those interested in the Pune startup ecosystem, and many of the startups on that group realized that the conventional avenues for job postings were either too ineffective, or too expensive for the smaller startups. To counter this problem, the PuneStartupJobs mailing list was started. In keeping with the philosophy behind the POCC, the PuneStartupJobs mailing list is also free – any POCC member can post job postings, and anybody can subscribe to receive updates.
Features of PuneStartupJobs:
Free. No fees for posting. No fees for subscribing
Anybody can subscribe
Focused: Only Pune Startups can post. (Some other postings (e.g. Mumbai) get through once in a while, but it’s largely local.)
Moderated: All posts are moderated, so no spam.
A weekly digest of PuneStartupJobs postings is auto-posted to the main PuneStartups mailing list. This ensures wider (but delayed) circulation to a larger group. (Thanks to Pune startup Thinking Space Technologies for implementing this functionality.)
So, if you’re someone likely to be interested in getting a job with a startup in Pune, or if you might know someone who might be interested, or simply, if you’re interested in finding out what kinds of people Pune’s startups are looking to hire, you should subscribe…
What: Pune OpenCoffee Club meeting on Taking your startup to the next level, with Vilas Kelshikar. When: Saturday, June 19th, 4pm-7pm Where: TaaraGo Center, A4, Ashiayana Park, Above FabIndia, North Main Road, Koregaon Park Registration and Fees: This event is free for all to attend. No registration required.
POCC is an informal group of the Pune Startup ecosystem. It contains more than 1500 people who either have their own startups, or want to start one, or provide some service (or funding) to startups. Click on the logo to find all punetech articles about the POCC
Taking your startup to the next level
Mr. Vilas Kelshikar is an IIM-Ahmedabad Alumnus with 30+ years professional experience – wherein he held progressively responsible positions in reputed companies engaged in diverse product-lines/sectors (including Education / Training, Hospitality, Real Estate Services, Trading ) in Gulf, Africa and India.
Vilas has hands-on experience in diverse functional areas including Strategy, Joint Ventures, Sourcing, Setting-up, Turn-around, Expansion, Project Finance, Feasibility Studies, Sales & Mktg, HR, etc.
He can also talk about the possibilities of Pune companies exploring business opportunities in Gulf and African countries. If people are interested, he can talk about country profiles, business practices, currencies, establishing/doing business, SWOT analysis, etc.
Vilas is Currently based out of Muscat.
Thanks to TaaraGo for hosting the event. Please visit TaaraGo.com for event updates in Pune
There are a number of interesting tech events in Pune today and tomorrow. Here is a brief overview of each. All of these events are free, and no registration is required.
PLUG Meet – Presentation on Unicode by G Karunakar
Tomorrow, Saturday, June 5, 4pm-6pm, 7th Floor, SICSR, Model Colony,
The Pune Linux Users Group’s monthly meeting happens on the first Saturday of every month, from 4pm to 6pm at SICSR, Model Colony. This month, the agenda includes a talk by G Karunakar on Unicode. Linux CD/DVDs will also be available at the meeting for anyone looking to install linux.
This is a great place to meet open source enthusiasts in Pune
Mentoring Workshop on clean energy financing in Pune
Today, Friday, June 4, 10am-1:30pm, 1st Floor, Hotel Le Meridien
Private Financing Advisory Network (PFAN) is a multilateral, public-private partnership initiated by the Climate Technology Initiative (CTI) and funded by USAID. PFAN seeks to identify clean energy projects at an early stage and act as a project financing coaching and consultancy service to facilitate financial closure of such projects. After establishing dedicated in-country networks in China, Indonesia and Philippines, PFAN has now launched its services in India.
This workshop will introduce Indian clean energy entrepreneurs and stakeholders to the PFAN initiative and how they can leverage this platform to connect with investors and avail pro-bono mentoring services.
Agenda:
9.30 pm: Registration
10:00 am: Welcome Note, Suneel Parasnis, Team Leader – Clean Energy Finance, Contractor, USAID ECO-Asia Clean Development and Climate Program
10:10 am: Introduction to CTI-PFAN, Kavita Kaur, Country Manager – PFAN India, Contractor, USAID ECO-Asia Clean Development and Climate Program
10:30 am: MOU Signing – IT Power India and IndiaCo Ventures
11:00 am: Investor’s Expectations out of Business Plan â Rahul Patwardan, Vice Chairman and Managing Director, IndiaCo Ventures
11:30 am: Tea/Coffee Break
11:45 pm: Promoting Clean Energy – R.Chandrasekhar, CEO, IT Power
12:15 pm: Components of a Good Business Plan âSuneel Parasnis, Team Leader, ECO-Asia
1:00 pm: Panel discussion
1:30 pm: Lunch
PuneCleanTech meet: Energy Efficiency – Opportunities and Challenges
Tomorrow, Saturday, June 5, 11am, Venture Center, NCL Innovation Center, Pashan Road
The new gee-whiz technologies such as solar, wind, geothermal, biofuels et cetera take all the limelight these days. But the fact remains that they are still a miniscule part of our energy mix and will remain so for the foreseeable future. A far bigger opportunity, however, exists all around us. There is enormous potential for making the conventional energy generation, distribution, storage and utilization much more efficient than what it is.
What is this opportunity? Where is it? How does one find it? How big is it? What can be done about it? How can it be addressed? Does anyone address it today? How do they do it? What qualifications do they need to do it?
Mr. Shishir Athale, founder of Sudnya Industrial Services, an energy services company, will discuss all these questions on June 5th, 11am at the NCL Venture Center (June 5th is also the Environment Day, a fitting coincidence!).
Tomorrow, Saturday, 5 June, 4pm-7pm, 4th Floor, SICSR, Model Colony
The initial stages require only a handful of core team-members (3 to 5). These few are crucial to the success of the startup product or service. Finding these people, is one of the primary challenges facing startups today. Chetana Mehta will tackle a whole bunch of questions related to this topic. Chetana Mehta, ex-VP HR at GS Lab helped grow Persistent Systems, GS Lab when they were at a similar stage has offered to cover some aspects of nurturing and training teams.
As tech startups will identify, the initial stages require only a handful of core team-members (3 to 5). These few are crucial to the success of the startup product or service. This idea extends to startups in other domains as well.
Chetana Mehta, ex-VP HR at GS Lab helped grow Persistent Systems, GS Lab when they were at a similar stage has offered to cover some aspects of nurturing and training teams.
POCC is an informal group of the Pune Startup ecosystem. It contains more than 1500 people who either have their own startups, or want to start one, or provide some service (or funding) to startups. Click on the logo to find all punetech articles about the POCC
From my own experience, startup hires are only getting younger (freshers, 1 to 2 yrs of experience). These candidates don’t have the big-company mindset and are willing to take on a no-name startup.
I would like to explore the following challenges:
How do you nurture these few to take on ownership of diverse areas and cope with the uncertainties of a startup?
How do you set them on a path where they can take charge of their own effectiveness and learning?
How do you encourage teamwork and confidence in team members in the capabilities of others?
Another key challenge is how do you convince this core team to work for you for not just the money, but above all for a common vision or goal and the fulfillment of kick-starting a profitable venture.
Does equity even work here or is it misplaced? With students, they expect immediate returns rather than wait 8+ years for an IPO.
As the startup gains traction and moves on to the next level, the challenges are different. As Navin called out when interviewing Druva CEO:
How does a startup scale up hiring and training high-quality personnel?
How do you scale the corporate and / or engineering culture you have so carefully built?
Look forward to hearing about how you build teams and the challenges you are facing.
What is their (Druva’s) primary challenge currently?
Jaspreet says that they want to build a high-quality, world-class product, and for that he needs lots of high-quality, world-class people. While theyâve obviously managed to build a team like that which got them so far, they need many more such people in the coming days, and thatâs a significant challenge. He says that it is difficult, if not impossible to find âreadymadeâ world-class talent here (even when âworld-classâ salary and/or equity is offered!). Instead, he feels that the only approach that works is to find individuals (whether freshers or industry veterans) who have the right attitude and potential and then nurture them into the required shape.
(As an aside, wed like to point out that is a pattern. Pretty much every startup we talk to mentions hiring of high-quality people as one of their primary challenges. This is a problem that needs a solution, and I’m hoping that some entrepreneur in Pune is looking at this as an opportunity.)
About Pune OpenCoffee Club
Meet with other entrepreneurs, investors, startups, advisors, (and anyone else) from Pune, India in an informal setting.
ShopSocial.ly is a Pune-based startup that launched a couple of weeks back and immediately got coverage from both TechCrunch and GigaOm – which is a major achievement for any startup.
To give PuneTech readers some insights into what it takes to build and launch a startup like this out of Pune, we talked to a bunch of people associated with ShopSocial.ly.
ShopSocial.ly is a Pune-based social shopping startup. We talk to a number of Pune-based companies that worked on the product.
First, here is a short interview with Jai Rawat, CEO of ShopSocial.ly:
Congratulations on the launch of ShopSocial.ly and the coverage from . Can you give a brief overview of ShopSocial.ly from your point of view?
We all trust our friends advice much more than what the advertisers tell us. Yet, currently most of our shopping is influenced by the ads. ShopSocially is built on the vision that the influence needs to shift from ads to our circle of trust – i.e. friends.
ShopSocially allows you tap into the collective wisdom of friends to get trusted recommendations. Friends can not only ask questions, they can also share their purchases to get comments and feedback.
The idea of social shopping is not new. In fact, many people in the Pune startup ecosystem will be familiar with the success of Kaboodle which launched in 2005. So how is ShopSocial.ly different?
First a disclosure – Kaboodle CEO happens to be a very good friend and fellow IIT Kanpur Alumnus.
While the original premise behind Kaboodle was similar to ShopSocially, they have really focused more on shopping search rather than creating a network for friends. Recall that at the time Kaboodle started, social networking had not taken roots.
On the ShopSocial.ly about page, I notice that you appear to have used a lot of small Pune companies/freelancers in building your product. I recognize Shashank Deshpande (of Clarice Technologies) who usually does usability, Prakash Thombre (of widemediaguy) who does graphic design, Rohan Dighe (of SocialWebFactory) who does social-media/facebook apps, Mangesh Yadav (of Joomlian) who builds websites, and I’m sure there are others that I do not recognize. As someone interested in the Pune “startup ecosystem”, I’m thrilled at this level of collaboration amongst Pune’s small companies. Would you comment upon how you approached this aspect of building your product, and whether you see this as a continuing/sustainable approach in the future?
There is certainly no dearth of great talent in India – even for the cutting edge web 2.0 technologies. My previous startup, AirTight Networks is also based in Pune and was one of the first product companies born out of India. Just like AirTight, ShopSocially product development has happened completely in Pune. The team has done a phenomenal job. In fact when people visit the site, one of the first question they ask me is who built the site and where did I find these people. They are quite incredulous that we were able to find such talent in India.
So yes, I very much see this as a continuing /sustainable approach going forward.
What do you see as the primary challenge for ShopSocial.ly to tackle now?
The immediate priority is to really understand and analyze user behavior and make necessary changes. If we can delight our users, they will feel compelled to invite their friends and it will go viral.
Your previous company, Airtight Networks, was an enterprise software company, and this one is a consumer web service. Can you talk about the difference in approach required for these two different kinds of companies? What extra efforts does a Pune-based startup need to take to be able to succeed in these two markets?
Enterprise software and consumer web service are two very very different animals. Enterprise products sell on functionality. Usability is important but it is more of a race to build the most number of features. The product comes with a thick user manual and is used by a few people who get special training to use that product.
Consumer web service on the other hand needs to be very intuitive and simple. It is very tempting to add a lot of features and the hard part is to maintain the discipline of keeping it simple.
I would say that building an enterprise product is a little harder especially if your customers are abroad. Unless developers understand the customer mindset, it is hard for them to build the right product. For consumer facing products, it is a bit easier because you can think like a consumer yourself. However, at the same time, consumer facing products require a lot of iterations on the user interface which can be very frustrating.
What are the most common mistakes you see amongst the young entrepreneurs these days?
I think one of the biggest mistake I see is that often they are more focused on perfecting their VC pitch rather than their idea. Their goal is to somehow convince a VC to put some money into the company. This is exactly the wrong approach. First and foremost you need to convince yourself that it is worth spending the next few years underpaid and overworked chasing this idea. Your energy should be focused on researching and refining the idea until you can honestly sell it to yourself. Once you are fully convinced, even if you don’t get VC funding, you may still find the passion and energy to pursue it anyways.
I always tell them to ask a simple question to themselves – is the idea worth failing at? The odds are stacked up against you. 9 out of 10 companies fail. However, even if you fail, you should be able to look back and say it was still worth it.
As indicated in one of the questions to Jai, we at PuneTech absolutely loved the fact that so many different Pune companies have been used by ShopSocial.ly in building their product. We tried to talk to some of them to get a feel for the interesting aspects of working on ShopSocial.ly.
Rohan Dighe, Pune-based founder of SocialWebFactory, who did the tight integration of ShopSocial.ly with facebook, points out that this exercise had some interesting challenges:
We noticed that people end up with two different networks of friends – one on ShopSocial.ly, which is smaller and more focused, and another on Facebook, which is larger and more diffuse. The conversations + comments that happen around any post are very different in these two settings. To ensure a seamless experience, what we now do is pull the entire Facebook discussion around any ShopSocial.ly post, and display it on ShopSocial.ly along with the native comments.
Another great thing about the Facebook integration is that ShopSocial.ly does not have a user registration or user login mechanims. We fully leverage Facebook for this, and thus we are able to get a full profile of any user (from Facebook) without them having to provide any data, and without them having to remember yet another username and password.
Shashank Deshpande of Clarice Technologies who helped ShopSocial.ly on user interaction design & product branding, points out that one of the most difficult things to do in a product like this is to keep it simple:
Shopping and socializing are two activities that we all have been doing for years, and hence we know a lot about them. Due to this, the first instinct would have been to add lots of features related to shopping and lots of features related to socializing to the product. However, doing that results in a product that non-techy consumers find a little confusing and overwhelming. We had to work really hard to reduce the functionality of the product and bring it down to a very small number of actions that are intuitive, and yet powerful enough that encompass the most important aspects of the product. The “Shout” and “Share” actions that you see on ShopSocial.ly are the result of that process.
Visual designers at Clarice Technologies had a challenging task to create product brand that would appeal to the international audience. Choice of product logo, colors & overall visual treatment was critical to make the product stand out from the plethora of consumer portals.
At the end of all these conversations, doubts still remain about what potential is there in this area, and we decided to get an expert opinion.
Basically, Social shopping is not a new concept, and there have been a number of startups in this space, including successful ones. For example, was started 5 years ago, and sold to Hearst corporation in 2007. Luckily for us, one of the co-founders of Kaboodle, Chetan Pungaliya, is now based in Pune. Although Chetan is not connected to ShopSocial.ly in any way, we caught up with Chetan to get his views on this market. Specifically, if social shopping is more than 5 years old, is there still scope for new startups to do interesting things in this space? Chetan thinks there is still a lot of potential:
The existing batch of social shopping startups, of which Kaboodle is one of the most successful, happened in the pre-Facebook era. They have their own social network, and users went there specifically. However, if social shopping can happen in the context of a user’s other social activity, for example, while doing other things on facebook, that can significantly improve the reach. New social shopping sites that nail this can do well. Also, as the internet becomes more entrenched and people start buying more categories online (which were not being bought online before – for example, art), new models of social shopping will emerge. I think, this remains an exciting space to watch.
There you have it – a broad multi-person view of ShopSocial.ly. This is an experimental format for PuneTech, so please let us know what you think of the format in comparison to a more conventional overview/interview.
What: Pune OpenCoffee Club meeting on how to pitch your startup, by serial entrepreneur Samir Patel. When: Saturday, May 1, 5:30pm Where: e-Zest Office Terrace, 2nd Floor, Anand Nilay Business Center, Near Karve Statue, Karve Road, Kothrud. Map (thanks Hetal) Registration and Fees: This event is free for all to attend. No registration required.
POCC is an informal group of the Pune Startup ecosystem. It contains more than 2300 people who either have their own startups, or want to start one, or provide some service (or funding) to startups. Click on the logo to find all punetech articles about the POCC
Samir Patel is a New York based serial entrepreneur, who is visiting Pune and we have arranged a talk by him about how to pitch your startup, and why you need to fine-tune your pitch (the investor pitch, the high concept pitch, the elevator pitch). Some of you might remember Samir from a POCC presentation last November.
Samir is the Founder of Prudent.ly, a social marketplace designed for connecting customers with questions to their social network, reviewers and sellers in the context of a question. Earlier, he co-founded SearchForce that helps manage search marketing campaigns in a burgeoning $6 billion yearly market with its algorithmic trading platform. At iPIN, later acquired by Valista for $50+ million, he designed the world’s first open scalable mobile payments platform. Samir also crafted the go-to-market strategy for eBay’s apparel division, which is now a $500 million business unit and growing. He architected efficient systems for Stanford Graduate School of Business in the area of analytics, courseware management and security. Much quoted in CNN, BusinessWeek, Reuters and Mercury News, Samir has a B.S. in Computer Science and an MBA in Brand Marketing from Cornell University.
During his 2009 sabbatical, he walked solo for 1000 kilometers in the wild Himalayas and circumambulated the Narmada river just with two pairs of clothes and little money. He also serves as a volunteer at ManavSadhna and Gramshree at Gandhi Ashram and has started http://www.maareva.org for the long term sustenance of Mother Narmada.
Outline of the Talk
Investors donât invest in businesses. They invest in stories about businesses. If you want to raise money on favorable terms, you need multiple investment offers. How do you get multiple offers? Tell a good story to several investors at the same time. A good story can’t sell a pile of garbage, but it will keep a gem from going unnoticed. You can tell a story in a sentence; you can tell a story in a paragraph; and you can tell a story in a 20-minute pitch. Startups need to do all three.
Design thinking is more than just the art of designing a usable interface. Think of it as a skill that can help mold technology in to an agent of change.
To help stimulate design thinking a mix of celebrated as well as young design entrepreneurs will share their award winning designs and thinking models with POCC.
POCC is an informal group of the Pune Startup ecosystem. It contains more than 2000 people who either have their own startups, or want to start one, or provide some service (or funding) to startups. Click on the logo to find all punetech articles about the POCC
Satish Gokhale, was recently in the Times of India for designing TATA Swach, a water purifier unveiled by Ratan Tata, that costs under Rs. 1000, does not use electricity or running water often not available in rural India. Satish has designed several award wining products, and won the BusinessWorld Design Brilliance Award several years in a row. He was invited to deliver the keynote address at the International Design Forum, Singapore, and invited by HP Innovation Labs to present on “Design for The Other Six Billion”, Palo Alto, California. Satish is an entrepreneur himself, and he has accepted our invitation to speak at POCC on how he designed the Swach for extreme affordability, something that MIT Review calls “Value for Many and for Money”.
Dipendra Baoni is the Founder and Managing Director of Lemon Design, a Pune based Strategy, Branding and Multi Disciplinary Design Studio. Some of Lemon’s clients include RBI, Airtel, TVS Lucas, Hindustan Times and TCS. An Industrial Designer from NID ( National Institute of Design), Dipendra has won awards in Transportation Design ( Audi International Design Competition – 1996, Nagoya Car Design Competition – 1997) and Web Design ( Macromedia). Dipendra is interested in the convergence of Design & Technology to create/identify unique marketplace opportunities that address real world problems and create compelling value propositions for users and stakeholders. Dipendra is also a Director at Bisquare Systems, an Industrial Design, UI/UX Design, Embedded Software and Electronics Design Firm and has also recently started ECCO Electronics, a company that makes environmentally friendly, affordable consumer products. Dipendra is also involved in academics at NID, MIT and SID.
Chinmay Kulkarni is a Business Design Consultant and heads Preference Architects, a Brand Strategy Consulting Firm. He focuses on identifying and harnessing strong motivators in the value flux to achieve the maximum revenue impact. He has been a consultant to companies like Skoda, Prudential, Gera Developments etc, and is the only SE Asian Consultant to global brand IKEA of which he will be sharing a case-study with us. The IKEA case demonstrates the role of creative thinking in business with a definite focus on innovation. His next focus is to help a Tier-I ITES company to build its global consulting practice in design. He is a graduate of National Institute of Design.
After the talks, we will have an hour for general networking as we celebrate the second anniversary of POCC.
Venue: SICSR,7th floor, (Model Colony, next to OM Super market). Map. When: Saturday, April 3, 4.30pm Organized by: Anjali Gupta, Santosh Dawara Registration and Fees: This event is free for all to attend. Register here.
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