Tag Archives: startups

How can a Pune startup sell in the US? POCC event – Nov 7

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This Saturday, 7th November, the Pune Open Coffee Club will meet to discuss an important issue facing many of Pune’s small startups. How can a small startup with limited funds sell effectively in the US market? First we’ll start with a couple of early achievers – Pune startups that launched on the world stage, with the entire world watching them: Dubzer, which launched at DEMOFall’09, and Onion.tv which launched at TechCrunch50. We will follow that up with a panel discussion on the details and mechanics and logistics and the strategy and the tactics of enterprise sales in the US – with panelists who have lots of experience in this area. Read on for details. This event is free for all to attend, and there is not registration required. So if you know someone who would benefit by this, please forward this article to them.

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4pm-4:30pm: Dubzer’s experience with DEMOFall’09 AlphaPitch – Santosh Dawara

Dubzer, a SaaS offering that allows publishers to quickly and easily create translated versions of their websites without requiring any technology development or software changes, debuted at the AlphaPitch event at DEMOFall ’09. We have covered details of this here. Santosh will talk about the whole experience, how they got in, how they prepared, the expenses, and the benefits.

4:30pm-5pm: Onion.tv’s experience with TechCrunch50 – Nilesh Diane

Onion.tv, another SaaS offering that allows publishers of video content to add tags, notes, tables-of-content, and other rich meta-data to their videos, was selected for the TechCrunch50 DemoPit. We covered the details of that here. Nilesh Diane will talk about their experience, and other Pune startups can get a feel for what they need to do to be in the same situation.

5pm-6:15pm: How to bootstrap enterprise sales in the US Panel Discussion

We have three panelists – Abhijit Athavale, Devendra Deshmukh, and Amit Paranjape  – each of whom have over 10 years of experience doing enterprise sales in the US. Each panelist will speak for about 15 minutes about specific topics related to the theme (as given below), and answer questions from the audience. After that we’ll have about 30 minutes of a general Q&A where startups can ask any questions to the panelists.

Details:

  • Devendra Deshmukh, will talk about “How to set up a sales channel; How to increase your reach; and also talk about his early experiences in this area while setting up eZest.” Devendra is a founder and executive director of e-Zest Solutions Ltd., e-Zest Inc. & e-Zest (UK) Ltd. He is also a co-founder of Webizus Technologies, the IT (Information Technology) consulting company. He has experience of working with Indian software companies in both the operational and business development functions. For more, see his linked-in profile.
  • Abhijit Athavale will cover: “How to hire a Sales Rep; Why and how much time to spend in the field; The difference in sales and distribution and why it matters.” Abhijit is President and CEO of Markonix, and a high-tech marketing consultant. He has 16+ years of high-technology industry experience. Prior to Markonix, Abhijit spent over 11 years at Xilinx, Inc. in various engineering, applications and marketing roles. In his role as a marketing consultant, he has held executive management positions at Taray, Inc and Sanved DA. He has a masters degree in electrical engineering from Texas A&M University and a bachelors degree in electrical engineering from University of Pune. He is an accomplished speaker and author of several publications including a book. For more, see his linked-in profile.
  • Amit Paranjape will talk about: “The dynamics of enterprise sales (understanding your customer, his ecosystem, his business) and the kinds of problems you run into if you don’t understand all of this.” Amit has been in senior positions with enterprise product companies for over 12 years, most of it with i2 in Dallas, USA. He has extensive leadership experience across Product Management/Marketing, Strategy, Business Development, Solutions Development, Consulting and Outsourcing. For more, see his linked-in profile.

The panel discussion will be moderated by me (Navin Kabra). If you have any specific questions or areas that that you’d like the panelists to cover, please send them to navin @ punetech, or leave a comment below.

6:15-7pm: General Networking

Practise your startup pitch, bring your business cards, mingle, portray the confidence that you don’t always feel, ask the seniors for free advice, convince the juniors that working nights and evenings for your startup will be the most fun thing they’ve ever done, and feel out your peers for potential co-founders. Ask the panelists questions that you were too shy to ask in public, practise your startup pitch, set-up follow-up meetings with potential advisors, mentors, CAs, HR outsourcers, php coders, facebook app developers, potential angel investors, and people who will help you get in touch with potential angel investors. Or just talk about beer, or Pune’s new microbrewery, or ask around for new and interesting restaurants in town,  practise your pitch, and find new and interesting people to be friends with. And, did I mention, practise your pitch? All of this…possible only at a Pune Open Coffee Club meeting. Be there.

Logistics:

What: Pune OpenCoffee Club meeting on How Pune’s startups can sell in the US enterprise market. Featuring presentations by Dubzer & Onion.tv’s recent success at DEMOFall’09 and TechCrunch50, and a panel discussion with Abhijit Athavale, Devendra Deshmukh, and Amit Paranjape
When: Saturday, Nov 7th, 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. No registration required.


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The Venture Center Library for Entrepreneurs and Innovators in Pune

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Pune’s resource for startups, the Venture Center has yet another service that could be valuable for Pune’s startups. The Venture Center Library has been created specifically to support and enhance the entrepreneurial ecosystem in and around Pune. They are targeting entrepreneurs, scientific researchers, technology innovators, IP & technology commercialization professionals and venture investors to take advantage of their collection of books, periodicals, reports and research services.

Click on the Venture Center Logo to see all PuneTech articles about Venture Center
Click on the Venture Center Logo to see all PuneTech articles about Venture Center

Here are key features of the Venture Center Library:

  • ~ 1000 books – with an emphasis on technology innovation, commercialization & entrepreneurship
  • Many *good* magazines (MIT Tech Review, SciAm, etc.)
  • Book collection listed online & searchable: http://www.vcenterlibrary.org/book.php
  • Increasing data base on electronic articles and e-books
  • Open Mon-Sat, ample parking
  • Internet access, scanning, etc. available
  • Events featuring books, videos, etc. http://www.vcenterlibrary.org/events.php

If you just want to browse/read books at the library itself, it is free until the end of 2009, and after that it will cost Rs. 400 per year. If you want to check out books, there’s a Rs. 2000 refundable deposit and a Rs. 400 yearly fee – which allows you to check out 2 books for up to 14 days each. Look here for details of membership and fees.

About Venture Center

Venture center is an incubator mainly targeted towards startups in biotech, chemical and material sciences. It has been set up using government funds, and is housed in NCL‘s premises, but is planned as an independent entity that needs to become self-sustaining in a few years (based on taking equity/fees from the startups it helps). Check out the venturecenter tag on PuneTech for all PuneTech articles about Venture Center.

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Allow your marketing department to produce translated versions of your website with Dubzer

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Do in half an hour what would normally take weeks!

dubzer-logoNormally, making a website available in multiple languages is the last thing on the minds of a web developer. It costs time and money, is boring work, is error prone, and in the mind of a developer, it does not add any new features, or sexiness to the website. So, the developer drags his or her feet over this.

Of course, marketing does not see things the same way. Large chunks of the market are excluded when a website talks just in English. And trying to get engineering to produce the other language versions is a struggle.

Like they say, the best person to do something is the person who is most passionate about it. Which means that it would be great if the marketing department could translate the website without having to involve the developers.

That is the promise of Dubzer, which launched at Demo Fall 09’s Alpha Pitch today, and become the latest Pune startup to hit the world stage (after onion.tv that debuted at TechCrunch50’s demopit) from Santosh Dawara and Anjali Gupta, who previously brought us Lipikaar (the software for typing in Indian languages, which my mom loves), and Bookeazy (the much loved, but now dead, movie ticket booking service).

Dubzer will allow non-technical people to create translated versions of a website, or parts of a website, without requiring any significant changes to the backend of the website. It appears that this will be a hosted service, where you provide Dubzer with the URL of your website, they crawl it and then provide you with an online platform where you can start translating and publishing portions of your website (start with the most popular, or most important pages first). There are a whole bunch of features indicating that enterprise users are also being targeted – specifically, ability to translate intranets, fine-grained access control (i.e. who has permission to translate which portions of the site). Another interesting feature is that they allow you to implement different mechanisms of translation – i.e. free & paid translation methods, such as machine based (e.g. google translate), volunteer driven (e.g. what facebook is doing), crowd-sourced (as in wikipedia), or professional translation (sometimes, you get what you pay for).

Unlike Bookeazy and Lipikaar, Dubzer is actually incubated by Persistent Systems, which means that the team sits in Persistent Systems’ premises (except Anjali who has left Pune, traitorously defected to Bangalore). Their board of advisors includes Anand Deshpande, Founder and MD of Persistent, Abhijit Athavale, President of Markonix, and creator of PuneChips, and Jugal Gupta, CEO of Databyte.

One interesting point to note: Last year the Lipikaar founders ran into the problem of translating their website into all the various Indian languages (they are after all trying to sell software for writing in 18 different languages, so they better have their own website in those languages). When they did not find a decent solution, they decided to build it themselves and Dubzer was born. Similarly, Arun Prabhudesai was looking for a way to monetize his blog, trak.in with in-text ads, and did not find any appropriate solution. So, he decided to build it himself and hover.in was born.

There-in lies a lesson for us all…

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38 organizations where a tech startup can apply for funds

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The Venture Center is a not-for-profit technology startup incubator hosted in the National Chemical Laboratory (NCL), Pune. One of the services they provide their incubatee startups is a guide to the various government funds and schemes that a technology startup can avail of at different stages of their development, depending upon meeting certain criteria.

This is information that most entrepreneurs are not aware of. With this in mind, Venture Center has put out this guide to the Financing Landscape in India for Technology Ventures. This guide is a must read for all startups interested in funding.

You can simply browse this information, and read the rules and regulations of each of these 38 funds/organizations. Or, if you want to be handheld your way through the maze, you can avail of Venture Center’s advisory services.

For more information about Venture Center, you can see PuneTech’s interview of Kaushik Gala, the business development manager for Venture Center.

Copyrights and Patents for Startups – POCC event Sept 19th

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What: Pune OpenCoffee Club meeting on copyrights and patent issues that startups should be aware of.
When: Saturday, Sept 19th, 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. No registration required.

Talk 1: Understanding Copyrights, by Navin Kabra

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Many startup founders are unclear on the details of what exactly copyright law entails. I’ve seen a few Pune startups get into significant trouble due to their ignorance. And I’ve seen a lot of them inadvertently indulge in very risky behavior.

In this talk I’ll cover the following points:

  • Basic introduction to copyrights
  • How copyrights are different from patents and trade secrets
  • Fair Use: What is and what isn’t a copyright violation
  • Understanding open source licenses: GPL, Apache, Affero GPL (for cloud computing), Creative Commons, etc

About the speaker: Navin Kabra

Navin is a co-founder and CTO at BharatHealth.com, a startup focused on creating online software products in the healthcare industry. He is also the creator of PuneTech.com, a portal for the tech community in Pune, India. In the past he has worked for large companies, and small; he has seen a successful exit, and he has seen a dotcom failure; he has done product development, and he has done research; he has written consumer software, and he has written enterprise software; and he has been a developer, he has been an architect, and he has been a manager (but hated it). He has a PhD in Computer Sciences from the University of Wisconsin in 1999, and a B.Tech. in Computer Sciences from IIT-Bombay before that.

Talk 2: Become Patent-Smart Entrepreneur – by Hemant Chaskar

In this talk audience will receive practical knowledge on patents. Basics of patents will be covered, followed by guidelines on pursuing effective patent strategy for startups and early stage ventures.

About the speaker: Hemant Chaskar

Hemant has been in the computer and networking industry for more than a decade. His experience spans research, product design and engineering, intellectual property management, technical marketing, and standardization. He is currently Director of Technology at AirTight Networks. Hemant holds PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from UIUC and is also a patent agent registered with the US Patent Office.

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“Don’t develop any software until you have a customer” – Interview of serial entrepreneur Anand Soman

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As a part of the new, experimental PuneTech video series, we interviewed Anand Soman, CEO of Pune-based startup Infinishare, and serial entrepreneur. Infinishare provides software for a host of internet enabled devices, including digital photoframe devices, digital displays, home internet devices. They provide a full software stack for such devices, but their core IP is in device-to-cloud, and device-to-device communications.

Before Infinishare, Anand has had two successful exits as an entrepreneur – one for a bootstrapped startup, and one for a VC funded startup. See the PuneTech report of last year’s POCC meeting “How (and Why) to bootstrap your own startup,” for some of Anand’s thoughts on this topics.

In today’s video we asked him about his company, and more importantly about what advice he has for young entrepreneurs. (We are still experimenting with our video creation process, so the sound is still bad. We will had a fix for this soon, but in the meantime, please max the volume when you view this video):

Some interesting excerpts from this interview:

  • Don’t develop any software until you have a customer (so you’re sure there’s a market)
  • Focus on paying customers from the beginning
  • It is very difficult to get the freemium model to work
  • If you have users for your product who are not paying, don’t call them customers! Get real paying customers

See the video for these and other insights.

About Anand Soman

Anand is co-founder of Infinishare technologies.

Before Infinishare, Anand founded Intigma Inc, where they wrote AI-based engines for automated classification and extraction of content. Intigma was acquired by Emptoris Inc., after which Anand headed their India centre. Before Intigma, Anand founded Testchip Technologies, developing tools and cell libraries for Testchip design. Testchip was acquired by HPL Technologies Inc.

Anand received his B.Tech from IIT Bombay, and was the recipient of the Institute Medal for Electrical Engg. He received his M.S.E.E. and Ph.D degrees from California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, USA, specializing in DSP & Communications. He worked at AT&T, Murray Hill, before founding Testchip. He has published numerous research papers in International Journals & Conferences and has several years of project execution & management experience.

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Everything you wanted to know about shares and equity in your Startup – POCC meeting – 8th Aug

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What: Pune OpenCoffee Club meeting focused around equity and related financial issues for startups, by Jayesh Baheti, CA, and other experts in company finance
When: Saturday, August 8th, 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. Register here.

Details:

How should startup co-founders divide up equity amongst themselves? How much equity to give advisors, mentors, and key initial employees? What are the rules governing equity that will affect me? What are the important issues in equity management that are typically ignored by young startups? Can a small startup give stock options to employees, and what are the gotchas in doing this?

If you’ve had any of these questions, then this meeting is for you. And if you are a startup founder and you are not facing any of these questions, then you are in deeper trouble than you thought! You definitely need to attend.

If you have similar/related questions, you can ask them on the POCC mailing list, and Jayesh will try to cover those points too in his presentation.

Jahesh Baheti’s previous POCC talk “What should I create: sole proprietorship, partnership, Pvt. Ltd., or LLP” has been one of the most attended events of POCC.  Slides of Jayesh’s talk are up on slideshare.

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Actionable Insights into the World of Indian Startups – Abinash Tripathy’s blog

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Abinash Tripathy is credited with building the best web-2.0 team in India (for Zimbra which sold to Yahoo! for US$350million.)
Abinash Tripathy is credited with building the best web-2.0 team in India (for Zimbra which sold to Yahoo! for US$350million.)

Abinash Tripathy’s blog, “Insights into the World of Indian Startups,” is a must read for all Pune Technology professionals.

Abinash is a serial entrepreneur who is now on the loose in Pune. Most recently, he spent a few years building Zimbra from scratch in India, created one of the best web-2.0 teams in India, a team that build a product that was acquired by Yahoo! for US$350 million.  Abinash quit Yahoo! in February 2009, and is going down the path of entrepreneurship once again. He is an advisor for Enterux, the company whose English Seekho product was one of the highlights of proto.in Pune.

In his own words, Abinash represents:

the new generation of Global Indians who spent 10 years in the US in the High Tech Industry and decided to return to India to be close to family and to be a change agent who will help young Indians understand the power of Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Having decided to spend the rest of my life in India, it is also in my interest to be a change agent (not just a voice) in the new, modern, developed India.

For the last few months, he has been writing a blog focused on the startup ecosystem in India. On the blog, he promises to be “highly opinionated (fair warning)  and a straight shooter who likes to base his theories on personal real world experience,” which should be very welcome insights for any entrepreneur.

Here are a few excerpts from his posts on the blog.

In “Building a Kickass Team Part II“, he writes:

4. Reward Performance  –  Anyone that has worked in tech and has a thorough understanding of this business knows that the output of one great engineer adds more value to the company than the output of one hundred average engineers.   Unlike the services industry which prides itself with the numbers of warm bodies it has on its rolls, the best tech startups pride themselves for being able to create huge value with the least number of people.   We all live in a capitalist society and the laws of capitalism are designed to reward the best.

In “What Ails the Startup Ecosystem in India,” among a host of other insightful things, he says:

If you are not a hacker, start today.   Stop wasting time on Drupal or other CMS platforms and start real programming.   ASP and .NET don’t count either. Learn real programming languages like Java, C, C++, PHP, Python, Ruby.   Start by contributing to open source projects to measure yourself against the best in the world.  We need lots of this breed for the startup ecosystem to grow and thrive.   We absolutely cannot rely on the government or our esteemed institutions like the IIT to produce hackers.   Hackers are mostly self taught creative geniuses who code for pleasure.

Tech startup founders need to be people with very deep technology backgrounds as well.  There is a reason our industry is called Hi-Tech.   If founders lack this key ingredient, then they are going to hire duds who cannot deliver.

Read the whole post, it is quite interesting.

You should subscribe to the blog, and also follow Abinash on twitter (and unless you’ve been living in a cave, you should know why you should be on twitter.)

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Attend proto.in from home – follow the live online coverage

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Click on the logo to see all PuneTech articles about proto.in
Click on the logo to see all PuneTech articles about proto.in

Proto.in is in Pune today, and one of the ideas they are pushing this year, is live online coverage of the event. The idea is that while only 400 people can attend the event in person, many more should be able to follow the details online. With this in mind, this proto promises to the the most connected proto so far.

Here are the different ways in which you can follow proto online:

  • http://proto.in/live: is proto’s live portal where you can follow all the proto activity. It aggregates all the live tweets about #protodotin. Bloggers can also submit their live-blogs and selected ones will be put up on this page. You can download information about the companies that are presenting, and you can leave feedback for the companies.
  • @PuneTechLive will be live-tweeting the event. Unfortunately, twitter search does not pick up punetechlive’s tweets, so the proto.in/live page and the twitter search pages will not show you these tweets. So you have to follow punetechlive in twitter (or go to http://twitter.com/punetechlive and refresh periodically).
  • The hashtag for proto.in is “#protodotin”, so searching for that on twitter, or on technorati should give you the latest on what is going on.
  • On an experimental basis, PuneTech will be trying to videoblog. We will have short (1 or 2 minute) interviews with various interesting people throughout the data. Check PuneTech’s youtube page and refresh periodically.

Keep checking this page also, we’ll try to keep it updated with …umm… updates throughout the day.

PuneTech is also trying out live-video updates of proto.in. Check out this video:

Highlights of Proto.in Presentations

Here is what we feel were the best parts of proto so far:

  • Vardenchi motorcycles on stage. Awesome audience impact!
  • HyCa presenting a product based on very complicated chemical process in words that we understood.
  • EnglishSeekho demo – The product speaks for itself. No explanation needed
  • EnglishSeekho founder asking: we could be providing pesticide info to farmers, we could be providing information about contraception to rural girls, in a convenient and confidential setting, we could be providing life-changing, life-saving information at the right time, at the right price (maybe Rs. 5). Isn’t that better than spending time building websites that sell movie or airline tickets or books online?
  • TouchMagix demo of Magix 3D Sense. Someone on twitter pointed out – proto.in felt like TED for a moment!

Demo Tips for Startups

Based on what we saw at proto.in presentations, here are some tips for those who presenting their startup:

  • Read Jason Calcanis‘ “How to demo your startup”. It’s a must read
  • Dress conservatively! You don’t want to draw attention to your dress. Definitely do NOT dress in a white suite and white-and-brown shoes.
  • If you have 30 minutes, then spending time on the educational and professional background of the team makes sense. If you have just 6 minutes, skip it. Go straight to your product.
  • You shouldn’t need to spend half your time motivating your product. Just show your product, and the audience should be able to see the motivation. Otherwise your product is not compelling enough (or you are pitching to the wrong audience)

Audience Reactions

These are reactions of Pune tech community regulars to the proto.in presentations:

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Pre-Proto Startup Networking event – July 24

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Proto.in, the premier startup event in the country, is happening in Pune this Saturday, so the who’s who of the startup world will descend upon Pune. This is a chance for Pune’s entrepreneurs and wannapreneurs to meet interesting people. Unfortunately, proto.in had limited seats and they are all gone, so, on popular demand, proto. in has created a pre-proto networking event for all those who will not be at proto.in – to give them a chance to network with the visitors who are coming in to town for proto.in.

The event will be on Friday, 24 July, from 5pm to 7pm at Hall No. 5, MCCIA Trade Tower, ICC Complex, S.B. Road. A fee of Rs. 100 will be collected at the door. If you want to attend, send an email to Maya at maya.m@mentorsquare.com.

What to expect at the event? There will be some sort of a panel discussion on “Transforming Business Environments.” I have no idea what that means, and the topic is so generic that I’m sure the discussion will also be generic. But don’t let the prescribed agenda fool you. The agenda and panel discussion is only there to get all the people in one room. The real benefit of going to such events is the networking that happens before and after (and some of it during) the event. You meet people who can help you find customers, people who can provide some useful service to your startup, people who just generally give you some insightful piece of advice that can change the course of your startup, people who over time become advisors for your startup (we met the most important advisor of our startup at one such event).

3 hours and Rs. 100 is a low price to pay for all these opportunities.