NEN Program for Women Entrepreneurs

Published by Mukul on September 3, 2010 in General.
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Here is an announcement from National Entrepreneurship Network. Please feel free to write to the below mentioned email

Are you a woman entrepreneur who dreams big or do you know of one?

If so, this is for you!

It is a known fact that most young companies die in the first 4-5 years of their life. This is also the time when startups begin to explore the opportunities for growth. The transition from startup to growth is a tough one and this is when most entrepreneurs have said they could use some focused help.

So here is an excellent opportunity for you to nominate yourself or a friend, relative or colleague to the NEN “Tools for Growth” program developed in partnership with London Business School, under the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women Program. Eligibility criteria includes a current turnover of between 5 and 50 lakhs per annum.

This Workshop will help women entrepreneurs address key issues around growing their business. The entrepreneurs will be exposed to different tools and frameworks through case study discussions of real companies. Additionally, they will work with teams of 4 entrepreneurship faculty members from India’s top institutions to evaluate their company’s readiness and action plan for growth
For more information on the following, please visit NEN Resourcesand get in touch with richa@nenglobal.org

Navigating through M&A

Published by Alok Mittal on August 30, 2010 in General.
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Interesting account of how Backblaze navigated through an M&A discussion, and what to watch out for,

read here.

Early stage entrepreneurs will see huge opportunities

Published by Alok Mittal on August 27, 2010 in Interviews.
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Peerzada has done a great job of reflecting our thoughts on early stage entrepreneurship, and what excites us about the Indian market.

Its interesting that while we pride ourselves in being able to leverage our operating experience and help build companies, the best entrepreneurs know enough to run their businesses, and tend to involve us in very specific issues where we can add perspective.

Mobile services for agriculture

Published by Alok Mittal on August 25, 2010 in Ideas & Companies.
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Seems like there is growing interest in mobile information services for farmers. TCS has mKrishi, Intuit had another application to get mandi prices etc, and IFFCO Kisan Sanchar Ltd has a mobile information business with Airtel… Looks like a great application area given the number of farmers out there. The notion also extends to other large occupational communities like dairy farming and so on.

Canaan invests in Equitas and Naaptol

Published by Alok Mittal on August 19, 2010 in News/ Events.
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Pleased to announce our investment in Equitas, the fastest growing top-10 micro finance company in India; and Naaptol, a leading home shopping business. We are very excited to participate in high-growth consumer services opportunities, with high-caliber entrepreneurial teams.

Journalistic over reach - why are we surprised?

Published by Alok Mittal on August 19, 2010 in Musings.
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Finally we were able to come out and share our perspectives on our investment in Naaptol. Over past few weeks, as the news leaked first in ET, then picked by various blogs; and then a second round in VCCircle, we received several enquiries on the same. I would like to thank media persons who resorted to responsible journalistic practices, and allowed us an opportunity to express our views on the same.

Some of the earlier misreports, perhaps especially the one at pluggd.in drew stark reactions from people questioning whether this was responsible journalism. Honestly, I do not feel anger that “our news had been leaked” - media in general has leaned in favor of sensationalism over past many years, and there is no reason to expect that online blogging will be any different. There will be certain sources that will lose credibility over time, and there will be others which will be relied upon for authenticity - that strategy choice belongs to owners of those sources. As an audience, the choice that belongs to us is who we go to and for what. In the print and television media, business success has not necessarily been maximized by credibility, but by “breaking news”, and I consider it a valid incentive in the startup space as well. The mistake that we have made and feel undone for, is to consider startup bloggers as “friends of startups” - that mistake is entirely ours. These businesses have no obligation to care about interests of entrepreneurs, which can be severely damaged if deals “reported” in media do not go through. These are businesses like any other, and are free to set their ethical standards where they would like to - if we dont like that as customers of these businesses, we should defect.

There is one primary reason for me to write this post though. At pluggd.in, there were several revisions of the story, and I think most of them misquoted me, including the last one of my having denied the investment altogether. I consider this as deliberate falsification of information on part of the author - my credibility is important for me, and I am reproducing my response to Ashish in toto - as the readers will notice, I had refrained from denying or confirming specifically the news of an investment being made. There was also no express refutation of the numbers reported by ET - I can now confirm that the numbers reported by ET were wrong.

Nothing to share right now Ashish. The ET report is factually incorrect – journalistic over reach!

Will definitely share anything that we have to share with you :)

Alok Mittal

which got reported as “[Alok] mentioned that the numbers aren’t correct at all”, and the followup

As I said, no issues from my end, cheers

Its not just the data, the news itself might be incorrect

which got reported as a denial of the investment - “It seems the news itself isnt correct, as per my conversation with Alok”.

I am perfectly fine with any journalist reporting standards. One thing that does apply even to that world - Please do not misquote.

A Billion Dollar Indian Internet Company

Published by Mukul on August 19, 2010 in Ecosystem and General.
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I have always (after coming into the VC industry) heard the concept of $1 bn company while evaluating early stage businesses. “Can it become a $ 1 bn company?” has been a perpetual question. I always doubted on the concept of $ 1 bn market cap internet company out of India. However; last week our portfolio company, MakeMyTrip IPO made me a big believer of early stage investing.

Early last week, the IPO was oversubscribed by a big margin. My team at SAIF Partners in India was happy that the company will get listed at higher price range of the band giving us a 10x return. It was a joyous moment specially because MakeMyTrip is one of our very early stage investment. Thursday turned out to be a different day for us. All of us checked MMYT (MakeMyTrip NASDAQ ticker) multiple times at night. The stock went through a crazy day and finally closed 89% up on the debut day itself. By this time MMYT was already a $800 MN Market Cap company

MMT

It zoomed again yesterday and according to Nikhil (MediaNama) “the first instance of an Indian Internet company crossing the $1 billion Market Cap”

Though I have joined SAIF very recently but I feel privileged to be a part of the joyous moment. I strongly believe MakeMyTrip IPO will go a long way in contributing to the Indian Internet and start up ecosystem.

1.) It will reinforce investors’ confidence in Internet in India. Couple of days back, Alok bounced if more money will flow to Indian early stage businesses. I didn’t have an answer that time. However; now I believe that it will. I am already seeing lot more deals cooking with various VCs

2.) Hiring senior level talent would be easy in growing Indian Internet/Mobile companies. After Naukri, MakeMyTrip would become another example of wealth creation through ESOP. I am seeing great interest in senior level hiring in our other portfolio companies like HomeShop18 and One97. I think ESOP story will become more credible to sell

Personally, it has created lot of energy and motivation in the team and we will see many more SAIF investments in early stage companies in India. One97 would be another early stage investment of ours going to hit markets soon.

Launching GrexIt - Your shared email memory

Published by Niraj on August 17, 2010 in General.
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I have been working for the last couple of months building this tool: www.grexit.com. If you use Google Apps for your email, you’ll most likely find it useful. A small description of where we are trying to get at with GrexIt follows (It uses a browser plugin that we currently build only for FF 3.x):

This is what you can do with GrexIt:

  • When you have an email thread in your inbox that you think can be of importance/relevance to other people you work with, now or sometime in the future, you can add the email thread to GrexIt by pressing the “Send to GrexIt” button on your email interface.
  • This also triggers an email to all participants of the email discussion. You can continue your discussion on email by responding to this automatically triggered mail, and the complete discussion keeps getting saved in GrexIt.
  • You can search the content on GrexIt by typing in the box that is rendered just above your chat box in Gmail/GoogleApps mail.
  • You can also login to GrexIt at http://grexit.com and access the content that your group has added.

How to use GrexIt: http://blog.grexit.com/using-grexit

The kind of content for which GrexIt is relevant (some generic points):

  • Technical set-up/configuration information that might be needed later by anyone in the team
  • Announcements that might be of relevance to people who join the team later
  • Discussions where someone asked a question and the problem got resolved on email
  • Links to articles etc. on the internet which might be useful later - example: all the gang discussions that we have
  • As a thumb-rule, anything in your inbox that you think might be needed by others now/later, belongs in GrexIt

Currently, the plugin works only on FF 3.x and is for Google Apps users. Also, you might see some problems with the attachment support as of now. We’re working to fix it.

Would look forward to knowing from the community here what they think about the tool. A lot of features, including gmail like labels, but shared within the group, are coming soon.

Join us to learn about the opportunities and success stories of Indian Digital Economy

Published by Avinash on July 30, 2010 in News/ Events.
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More than 300 executives from start-ups, emerging companies and especially those developing mobile, internet applications will converge on New Delhi on the 25th of August for what is the definitive event for an IT start-up in India – the EMERGEOUT Conclave to understand “What it takes to build a successful mobile, internet company from India?”.

Learn from the industry thought leaders on new opportunities and interact with people who built and are building successful mobile, internet companies from India. Also many emerging company executives who attend to brainstorm their ideas, free wheeling discussions and networking all of which are especially pertinent for small to mid size companies trying to become game changers.

Technology, often disruptive in nature is at the heart of a start-up’s differentiators to make them game changers. No surprise then that EMERGEOUT has in the past been themed around Cloud Computing, and that the current theme is “The Mobile Internet & AppStore”.  This makes the event a must attend for the technology and business strategists.

Over the past four editions, the EMERGEOUT Conclave has become ‘the’ event on the calendar of a start-up CXO. Given the number of senior executives and CXOs the event attracts, in their wake come the Research Analysts, Bloggers and Media, who track and report on the sector.

Attending the Conclave gives a visitor a clear sense of where the action is in the emerging companies space and hear their stories, learn from companies building successful business cases. And in keeping with the ‘catch them young’ strategy, the Conclave brings in Investors looking for the next big idea and the next little company that will implement that game changing idea. Register now!

For Sponsors, its hard to find a more focused target audience. Nor a more responsive one…..the level of debate, interaction and buzz is not seen at too many other conferences!

EMERGEOUT has something for everyone — Now, you cant find an excuse for not attending. Join Us!

the First Startup Camp @HeadStart Ventures

Published by Kallol on July 24, 2010 in Ecosystem and News/ Events.
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I am happy to announce the first set of startup workshops from August 20th till the 29th in Bangalore. The agenda is here. The objective is to find startups the HeadStart Ventures team can work with from now on. These will also form the pool of companies the fund that we are setting up can potentially invest in. We will also actively promote qualified startups to our industry partners - eight of them will present opportunities, ideas and interest areas on the 20th and 21st.

All startups are welcome to apply but we will select 15-20 startups to attend the camp. Domains our team is strong in are - telecoms/mobility, semiconductors, consumer media, financial services, and healthcare. HeadStart Ventures is not a pure play mentoring organisation and neither it is a venture capital fund. It is a small group of people who will work hands on with startups and will seed invest in selected qualified startups. So, whoever submits proposals to work with us should be open to working with a bigger team of experienced people, be willing to start out small in terms of money and expectations but should not be limited by vision and ambition.

If you have any questions, do send an email to interest@headstart.org.in