We started this week’s roundtable with a discussion of the top 10 tech trends to watch for the upcoming decade. The trends include Cloud Computing, Outsourcing, Social Web, Vertical and Local Web, Smartphones and Tablets, Online Advertising, Online Video, Online Gaming, eBooks, and Bootstrapped Entrepreneurship. You can find details in the blog post on http://www.sramanamitra.com.  […]

During this week’s roundtable we had a group of entrepreneurs from the Pune Open Coffee Club gather at the offices of Persistent Systems to participate in the roundtable together. It is a very good format for entrepreneur groups around the world to get together and network around the roundtable programming which happens every week, religiously.  […]

During this week’s roundtable, one of the questions that I answered was about the One Million by One Million program’s plans around supporting social enterprises. Well, 1M/1M is focused on helping businesses generate $1M in annual revenue, whatever be the nature of the business. We see a lot of businesses that can be characterized as […]

During this week’s roundtable I addressed a commonly held critique of the 1M/1M program: that we’re focusing on the basics and stating the obvious. I have seen this criticism at various places where this recap is syndicated on a weekly basis, as well as in certain random forums on the internet.  Well, I have coached […]

I liked all of the companies that were presented at this week’s roundtable. And it was really cool to see a company from Tanzania. I LOVE the international nature of the 1M/1M initiative.  First up today was Joshua Schwadron presenting Betterfly, a startup he founded earlier this year that aims to offer an easier way […]

At today’s roundtable I offered a sneak preview into the One Million by One Million Premium Lounge we have just unveiled to a small group of core users. To get started, I suggest you take a look at three videos messages: To Entrepreneurs, To Investors, and To The Media.   The premium lounge includes an […]

At today’s roundtable we saw three very nice businesses, each with pilot customers, and each working on real problems. At the end of the session, each left with specific action items.  First up today was Antonio Lucena de Faria with ActionFlow from Portugal. Antonio has a portfolio of web based business process management applications for […]

At today’s roundtable, we had some very interesting discussions on creative bootstrapping. I am always fascinated by how innovative entrepreneurs get when faced with resource crunches.   First up today was Justin Beck with PerBlue, a mobile and social gaming company that makes the iPhone and Android game Parallel Kingdom that has been in the market […]

At today’s roundtable we had some intensive discussions around market sizing and its impact on financing. You have heard, I am sure, that venture capitalists only invest in very large market opportunities – $500 million to a billion. But you have, perhaps, heard less specific discussions on what angel investors are looking for.   Well, some […]

At today’s roundtable we had some interesting companies and a lot of fund-raising discussions, and I will review them shortly. Before I do, however, I want to talk about a thumb rule that I’d like to propose to entrepreneurs about raising money.  Bottom line, early stage equity is very, very expensive. So at any point, […]

At today’s roundtable I had a disturbing experience.   One of the entrepreneurs presented a business idea that sounded like a business-to-consumer concept, but as I peeled the onion, it turned out that the business was really a business-to-business concept. I asked why the pitch was so confusing and all over the place, to which […]