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Al Gore joins Kleiner Perkins as Partner

Very interesting. Another lever for Gore to try and influence the climate change issue. The alliance provides Mr. Gore an additional pulpit for his advocacy of environmental causes, but also gives the Nobel laureate an opportunity to nurture green businesses. Venture capitalists said the move could help companies financed by Kleiner establish ties with big […]

Bangalore in AFM

I was in Bangalore on wednesday for BangaloreIT.in event, and it took 4 hours to go and come back due to traffic and demonstrations. At the evening, it took more than an hour and a half in the security queue at the airport! See pictures below. It is amazing how the city has continuously failed […]

80s all over again?

Merrill Lynch has a fascinating analysis on the various striking similarities between this financial cycle (mostly in the US) and the one in the late 1980s. Have a look at the article – just the charts should be enough to provide a lot of food for thought. The late 1980s was a cycle characterized by […]

Miniaturization of Venture Capital

There have been a couple of discussions on venturewoods earlier regarding angel funding models, including Ycombinator. An excellent article on Read Write Web outlines the challenges the venture capital is facing. Amongst the salient ones include: Lowering cost of doing a startup and taking it to critical level Reducing role of distinctive technology in more […]

A New Kind of Incubation Model. Part II

For those who had asked about how incubation centres work, I believe the comments in the previous post would have helped. To summarize, an incubation centre supports an entrepreneur with an active advisory panel, infrastructure and with some financial assistance to help them jumpstart the process. That’s pretty much the gist of the matter. As […]

What is a startup?

Open Coffee Club’s (OCC) third meet happened successfully in Bangalore yesterday. OCC has been getting good amount of traction in Bangalore since the day it kick off. However, my key aim of writing this post is not to publicize OCC, rather, to ask a straight and simple question. ( This question was asked by one […]

The Need for a New Kind of Incubation Model

It seems that at the rise of every economic cycle, old structures of the past do pop-up again. Incubators are a good example of that. They were around during the dotcom bubble and they are back now. I am not talking about India, where incubators are meant to be the last refuge for most entrepreneurs […]

Norwest Venture Partners opens India office in Mumbai

from ET: Norwest Venture Partners (NVP), a leading Silicon Valley venture capital firm, has opened office in India. The firm, led by Promod Haque, is best known for its technology investments. Its portfolio has 60 companies including 20 that are based in the US but have an Indian presence. Five of its investee companies are […]

Band of Angels’ 1st Mumbai meeting

Band of Angels, now rechristened Indian Angel Network(IAN) held it’s 1st meeting in Mumbai today afternoon, where 6 businesses presented for raising early stage capital. IAN has now assigned a member to work with each of the businesses to help develop their plan and undertake diligence. Upon completion of these steps, which usually takes a […]

Back to the Basics: Bootstrapping, by Definition.

“Hi, I am Bob, and I am bootstrapping a startup.” “Oh, great!. What do you do?” “Well, we are building this service which does that in a different way” “oh” (with a little disappointment) “So bob, how can I help?” “I would like to run my business plan with you. Is that okay?” “Sure, go […]

Google joins band of angels

This news appeared in toda’s Business Standard. May be of interest to people here. Google joins hands with Band of Angels Raghuvir Badrinath / Bangalore July 25, 2007 Google Inc, the $-10 billion Internet major, is set to lead the angel investing scenario in India. The company, which has been acquiring mature companies across the […]