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BOA Clarification

I thought it might be useful to post this excerpt from a reply I sent to one person who contacted me as it may help entrepreneurs understand when it makes sense to approach the Band of Angels “Please note that I do not sign NDA’s. The Band of Angels requires executive summaries in a particular […]

Statistics India

I edited this to become a place holder for interesting data on India – Net stats is one piece. Published today in HT, New Delhi. Source Internet & Mobile Association of India. Do these seem correct ? I have converted figures to US $ at Rs 46 to the $. India uses a financial year […]

Remembering Site – Ecosystem

The ecosystem in the US encourages startup activity. Many startups fail but failing is not a stigma. I had the good fortune of attending a discussion where Bill Gates and Narayana Murthy were being interviewed. I asked Mr.Murthy what we needed to do to improve the eco system. He mentioned some excellent things, one of […]

10-10 thinking

If you have 10 million customers on whom you earn on the average $10 per year you have revenues of $100 million. ( The service could be free for the consumer and paid for by the provider/advertiser. Alternatively it could be a fee paid by the consumer or a combination ). When you think of […]

No Shanda – MMORPG

I just read this article on Shanda the leading MMORPG ( Massively multiplayer online role playing games) company in China . I have seen number of business plans in the last few months but suprisingly none on gaming. I wonder why ? Clearly online penetration and usage is currently low. Maybe thats the reason ? […]

W3C

I attended a W3C conference in Delhi about a fortnight ago. W3C works on developing standards to make the web more pervasive. They have an office at CDAC in Noida. I am pretty certain that in the next decade some of these standards will help produce elephants just as the http standard created a revolution. […]

Mapping – Ideas & Execution

A lot of us have heard the cliche ” Ideas are a dime a dozen. It is execution that counts” . My previous post on mapping has got some people thinking. Here is a reply that I sent to one of them. “The little that I know of this domain may help you. I would […]

Turning 40

I managed to find the article Jay mentioned in his post. Times of India has an e-paper. Subroto Bagchi talks of angst at 40. I can relate to that. I was 42 when I left Citibank and after trying to do a startup ended up joining the management team of PayPal. Talking of opportunity cost […]

How to bootstrap

So you have a big idea but very little money. The best way to bootstrap is to tap friends and family. There is an amazing amount of work that you can do with very little money. You can build prototypes, get angel employees, study the domain and the competition. In most cases you may be […]

Opportunity Cost

Entrepreneurship is not about taking a lot of risk. Most entrepreneurs operate on the principle of a very big upside if the venture suceeds and a small downside if it fails. If as a young person you have a big idea and you give yourselves two years to give it a shot what do you […]