Here are my 15 reasons why every person who wants to be an entrepreneur has to attend startup weekend especially if they are planning to startup in the technology space.
Get to evaluate and try out your
product idea in a risk free manner. If you have an idea and don't know if it will work you can come to the event and pitch it - if you get enough votes probably there is some credibility to your idea.
Connect and network with
developers and marketing and business professionals who can possibly work with
you in the future. You can evaluate their skills over 54 hours in the toughest circumstances and find the
right person who you can work with.
Get to meet mentors and spend 1 on
1 quality time with them when in real life trying to get even a few minutes of
their time is very hard. They will help you fine tune your idea even further.
Ability to brainstorm with experienced professionals and fine
tune your idea to something that can be taken to market.
Learn how to pitch and sell your
idea in 1 minute. This will force you to practice your pitch.
Ability to present in front of
Angels, VCs and Incubators. If you are able to impress them then the world is yours to conquer.
Learn through practice. Try out things and find out things that work.
Learn about different tools and
techniques people use and see the effectiveness of those techniques that
different teams adopted.
Understand the process of going
about in starting up a technology product startup that takes you through the
phases of ideation, team formation, market evaluation, product development and
roll out all in 54 hours.
Teaches you to never give up. There are times it looks so daunting what needs to be done but with perseverance it is amazing what can be achieved in 54 hours.
Be a part of a global community of startup weekenders who number in the 10s of thousands.
Learn to have fun and achieve great things that you feel very passionate about.
Give you a preview of what the 18 hour days would be like when you are actually doing your startup.
Forces you to learn to make quick decisions.
Finally the awesome food - 7 meals
to keep your batteries running.
I went for a very interesting event today and its called Startup Funerals. I was surprised at the size of the audience that made it to the event and that stayed all through the event. The event had a very simple format of networking and a few speakers talking about their experiences. The event focused on startups that did not succeed, in other words they failed or they gave up. The idea of the event was to share the learning from these startups with the rest of the community.
The speakers were a couple of Hyderabad Angels who shared their experiences with the audience but the stand out speaker was K.Ramakrishna who gave a chronological history about his experiences through his entrepreneurial journey and he very openly explained about the reasons why the startups he tried out did not work out. There are not many who are very open like this about their failures. So its wonderful to see people starting to open up and explain what went wrong so that no one else makes the same mistakes.
We all go through ups and downs in startups and its about how you steel your way through these situations and over come them. Its great to see events like this where people come out and explain about these challenges and how they over came them or learnt from them to make bigger and better startups. Unless you try it you will not make a mistake and unless you make a mistake you are not going to learn. We have all made mistakes from when we were toddlers and that is how we have learn.
One question that keeps haunting me is "Why is it that we did not fear to fall down when we tried to first walk as a toddler but fear to try things out as an adult?" Is it because we are more knowledgeable of the risks involved in failing that it restricts us from trying things out?
The last one year has been a very exciting year for me in terms of learning and growing. In September 2011 I signed up as a participant for Startup Weekend the first time it was conducted in Hyderabad and since then I have volunteered at Startup Weekend events in Mumbai, Bangalore and Delhi and have become an organizer at Startup Weekend Hyderabad and we are about to conduct the third event in the city which is going to be part of the Global Startup Battle.
What is it about Startup Weekend? It all starts off with the event itself - the event is in a format that facilitates one to learn in multiple levels. One learns from the speakers, getting inspired by them from what they have achieved and then from the mentors who guide and advice the participants until their ideas start to make good business sense and finally the participants who come from very diverse backgrounds with whom relationships form that carry on well past the event.
The event itself is very unstructured with a greater focus on execution than on theory. Its all about taking an idea that starts off just as a thought and converting it into something real that can be shown to end customer at the end of 54 hours. The beauty of the event is that one can try out their plans and thoughts with no fear of failure. You get the practice and the confidence to be able to pitch your idea in less than a minute in a manner that is able to grab the attention of the audience. There is a great focus on idea validation, execution and presentation.
As a volunteer and an organizer I want to give this experience to as many participants as I can since this is a wonderful way to learn and explore about entrepreneurship in a risk free manner. In order to become an entrepreneur there are a few fundamental activities such as how to validate the idea, build the business model, ability to market convincingly and clearly, working with a team and presenting the idea in a compelling manner to investors and customers. All of these activities can be done on the weekend.
From winner at the last Startup Weekend at Hyderabad, to volunteer at Startup Weekend at Mumbai to Organizer at Startup Weekend at Hyderabad in the second edition - I have in the sense been through the process of moving from the front to the back of Startup Weekend over the last 1 year and what an amazing journey it has been. The experience as a participant is of complete focus on achieving the goal of building something over the weekend, molded into shape by talking to the mentors and having it validated through market surveys and interviews. As a volunteer there is so much to learn in organizing an event and understanding all the nuts and bolts that go into putting together this weekend of learning an fun.
Being an organizer makes it all so worthwhile to have so many different individuals come together over a weekend and build bonds that last a lifetime and probably even create products that may go on to become the next big company. The quality of the learning through action over a weekend is unsurpassed so far for me.
Startup Weekend is such a melting pot of talent enriched with a lot of mentorship and guidance which never fails to bring out the best in people to create an amazing amount of productivity over 54 hours. The energy is focused, the goals are set and everyone is at their imaginative best all through the weekend.
This video very beautifully illustrates the awesomeness of the weekend at Hyderabad
Thank you judges, mentors, speakers, volunteers, participants and finally my fellow organizers for the awesome event and can't wait for the next Startup Weekend Hyderabad event. Stay tuned we will be coming out with the dates soon and I hope to see you all there building a startup over a weekend.
Startup Weekend Hyderabad is back - bigger and better this time at the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad from the 13-15 of July. For those that are not familiar with Startup Weekend - read my post when I attended the last event as a participant.
Watch this video preview of what happened in the last event
Why attend Startup Weekend?
Startup Weekend is an event where ideas that have been nagging you for a long long time can be tried out and evaluated. Come to the event pitch your idea, if you get enough votes for it - the idea is immediately validated. For people who have a clear idea on what they want to do but dont have the team to execute it - Startup Weekend is the perfect place to seed this team. You get to work with your team for a full 54 hours in a very exciting and focused manner - giving you a great insight into your future team. The event is the perfect place to help fine tune the idea with many experts who have started and exited many startups successfully. And finally if your team is able to impress the judging panel you might be considered for incubation or event funding - which will truly set you on your way to Starting Up.
Whats different this year ?
There are more number of participants from very diverse fields which means there will be more excitement and more number of people to network with. Secondly we have a great speaker list, mentor list and judging panel that have agreed to spend time at the event to coach, mentor and evaluate all the ideas that will be showcased at the event.
Book your tickets to Startup Weekend Hyderabad by visiting http://hyderabad.startupweekend.org. You can get more information by calling our IVR system at 040-30512888.
It all started on Thursday when I saw a post on one of the blogs announcing that there was going to be a Startup Weekend being hosted at ISB in Hyderabad. Something in that article triggered my imagination that it would be a fun event to attend to understand and feel the start-up ecosystem. With a lot of encouragement from the home front I was all game to go. I went ahead and bought 5 tickets to the event and then started to ask all my friends and colleagues asking them who would like to come for the event and the 5 tickets disappeared fairly quickly.
To tell you a bit about Startup Weekend, I copied a paragraph from Annkur's post, one of the organizers about startup weekend
"Startup Weekend is this 54
hours madness that brings together business folks, developers, designers
and jack of all trades like me to build a startup over a weekend. Ones
with an idea pitch it, voting follows and teams are formed organically.
These teams have to come back with a product / prototype / demo /
whatever by Sunday evening and present to the judging panel. In march,
Startup Weekend, which has as of today done over 100 cities and 250
action packed weekends, came to India."
Day 1: The first 14 hours - Product Concept, Team Formation, Branding and Technology Identification
On Friday afternoon about 2 hours before we were to leave we had no idea what we were going to pitch. So we called everyone we knew into a room to help us brainstorm and come up with ideas to pitch at the event. After about an hour we settled on 5 ideas and then used the next hour to narrow down the ideas to 3. We all then jumped into the car and started our 30 min drive to ISB. It was here that we finally gave shape to our ideas and wrote a pitch for each one of them.
On completion of our registration we had pizzas and a lot of coke to set the right mood and then it was onto the pitches. While having our pizzas we got talking to other participants there and this kind of got us in touch with other participants that can become team members. It is important to take this networking session very seriously and meet as many participants as you can. It is during this period that you can introduce your self to everyone present there and
also get to know about them as this can influence
the team formation as there is not much time later on if your idea is shortlisted.
We all stood in a line and started to make our pitches one after another in fairly quick succession and it was down to the voting. The results were announced and since there were some ties we had 15 ideas that were selected and out of the 3 ideas that we pitched 2 got selected, Park-e-mon and Feriwala. We quickly formed into our teams and the Park-e-mon team consisted of 4 members Krishnamraju (Developer), Jeevan (Developer), Shahnawaz (Sales and Marketing) and Sudeep (Team Lead).
Soon after forming the team it was all work from then on. We had to decide on the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) i.e. the least amount of functionality that can be coded on a weekend and that will show the functionality of the application being built. At the same time we had to fill up a brief description of the product and also submit other paper work like the team details and stuff. We closed the day at about 2:00 AM with a clear idea of what was our product and the division of tasks for the next day. We had a mobile component and also a web component so each developer took one, the other two of us came up with a product validation strategy and branding which we had to complete before 11:00 AM the next morning, this included coming up with a survey, presentation demonstrating our product, name of the product, logo and buying of the website URLs and shortlisting one or two potential clients to meet and check the viability of the product in the market.
Day 2: Hours 15 to 40 - Market survey and Development
The next morning while the developers were hard at coding the product, we spoke to a couple of mentors that gave us very valuable feedback about the product. There were altogether 5 mentors that were present the whole day but we had time to talk to only 2 of them. After this the business development team went out to meet some potential customers. We met the owner of a construction company that builds commercial spaces, an architect and the parking administrator of a large mall. After having met them the idea fine tuned itself into a truly promising product that can be taken into the market. The business development team touch based with the developers who promised to have the product completed which finally happened at about 5:00 AM in the morning.
Day 3: The final 14 hours - Presentation, Fine Tuning and Pitches
After a few hours of sleep it was the start of Day 3. We all headed back to ISB, while the development team was fixing all the final issues in the product the business team worked on the presentation and the video that was going to demonstrate the usage of the product. We were done by about 4:00 PM and the pitches were to start at 5:00 PM. A few practice runs and it was time to make our pitch which went well. The pitches were all well managed. You were given 2 min to setup while the previous team was answering questions and then your 5 minutes started as soon as the previous team was done. On completion of the 5 minutes, there is 2 minutes of questions where the judges and audience were free to ask any thing. How to ensure that you make the best of the pitches
Ensure you are ready for any eventuality, during our pitch the internet was very slow and so we could not show a live demo but our video bailed us out. So have a back up plan to show the demo.
Practice your pitch and ensure that it does not cross 4:30 min. It will finally end up being 5:00 min.
Check out all the connections before hand and do not let the members of the team doing the pitch operate the laptop, unless there is no other option.
Once all the pitches were completed it was time to announce the results and our team the Park-e-mon team came first. It was a nice surprise as there were some very nice product ideas that were very well presented. On the whole the learning experience was amazing and also the opportunity to interact with so many different people in an environment where you are all thrown together and forced to work on an idea and this brings out the best in everyone.
Sandeep was Co-Founder and CEO of Medusind Solutions, one of the leading healthcare outsourcing companies in India. Sandeep is also the co-founder and Managing Director of eVentures, a leading Venture Capital firm focused on early stage investments in India since 1999. Sandeep has held senior roles at McKinsey and Company, Digital Equipment and EDA Systems. Click here to read more about Sandeep.
Sandeep spoke about developing differentiation
Important to make your product/Service unique
- This allows you to price better.
- It is easier to sell.
- It allows you to figure out where to focus.
- Helps in prioritizing your resources.
Sources of differentiation
- Technology or patents
- Processes
- Business model
- Marketing
How to differentiate?
- Build the right team.
- Surround yourself with people brighter than you that will question you.
- Develop a deep understanding of the target market.
- Choose the sources of differentiation.
- Execute flawlessly.
Samir has been an early stage venture investor in India for the past six years. Prior to co-founding Inventus, Samir built and led the India venture team for Acer Technology Ventures - a $260 million cross-border venture fund investing in early-stage technology and services companies across India, the U.S. and the Asia Pacific. Samir was an early member of two startups in India, and was part of the early team at Wipro. He helped Wipro grow revenues from ~$4M in 1989 to over $200 million in 1998. Click here to read more about Samir.
Samir spoke about Marketing Strategies for a startup.
Think big and execute in small steps
It is important to have a good team. Very few VCs will invest in a single individual.
Product Most important thing the entrepreneur needs to focus on.
It needs to be thought through very carefully and diligently.
Think from outside in. Look at it from the view of a customer.
Important to include customers when conceptualizing the product.
Understand the competition that has similar products.
Price
Many startups are afraid to price the product right.
Do not price the product too low.
Price higher but give sweet heart deals initially.
Placement How will the customer buy and pay for the product needs to be thought out?
Identify your partners and your competitors. Sometimes there is a fine line between them. It may be beneficial at times to partner with a possible competitor in order to penetrate the market.
Promotion It is not always necessary to spend a great deal of money on media. Many popular brands such as orkut, facebook, gmail have done it without big advertising budgets.
Positioning Understand how the product will be positioned in the customers mind.
Shantanu Surpure is Managing Attorney at Sand Hill Counsel, a law firm with offices in Mumbai and Silicon Valley. He focuses on venture capital and private equity transactions. Shantanu holds a BA from Brown University/London School of Economics, an MA Juris from Oxford University and a Juris Doctor from Columbia Law School and is admitted to practice law in India, California, New York and England and Wales.
Shantanu spoke about Negotiating with VCs.
Be organized and document everything properly.
Hire a lawyer when negotiating with a VC because they will have one of their own.
VC's will do a valuation and will ask for anything between 25% to 40% of the company in the form of preference shares.
When the VCs have an interest in investing they will give you something called a term sheet which will have all the terms and conditions.
VCs usually look at a 3-5 year investment horizon.
In the term sheet there will be anti dilution terms which means that if the valuation of the company falls they might want more stock.
VC's will want one or more people on the company's board and this has to be negotiated.
They will want to have rights to veto certain decisions made by the company.
They will have clauses on any mergers and acquisitions that the company may plan to make in the future and also the hiring and firing of the CEO.
There will be terms on drag along and tag along which is related to what will happen if either the VC or the entrepreneur quits the organization.
There can be no shop clauses which means that you cannot talk to other VCs.
DD Ganguly is co-founder and CEO of Dimdim, Inc. Previously, as Vice President of Product Development at CA (NYSE:CA; $ 3.5B) he built and led an organization of 1000+ members. He joined CA in 2001 upon its acquisition of Boston based AIM, Inc. where he was founder and CEO. Click here to read more about him.
DD Ganguly spoke about his Fund Raising Experience for DimDim which is a free web conferencing service where you can share your desktop, show slides, collaborate, chat, talk and broadcast via webcam with absolutely no download required for attendees. Funding
When looking for funding look for people that like you and what you are doing. Angel investors invest in your business because the align with how you think and what you do.
Try and get journalists and bloggers to write about your product/service. This will help in popularizing and showcasing your product to potential VC's.
You need to click with the VC for them to invest.
Choosing a name
The .com webaddress should be available
There should be a repetition in the name
Easy to spell from the sound and the sound should be easily derived from the spelling.
Globally recognized as DimDim was going to be a global brand.
Professor K Ramachandran is the Associate Dean of Academic Programmes at the Indian School of Business. He has been a professor of entrepreneurship, family business, and strategy at the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad since its inception in 2001. He is also the Thomas Schmidheiny Fellow of Family Business and Wealth Management at the ISB.
Professor Ramachandran spoke about Entrepreneurial opportunities and Organization Building - A Road Map. He spoke about identifying the type of opportunity, the graph of time against turnover for a startup and elements of a business plan.
Opportunities are identified through a pent up need or customer dissatisfaction in the existing offerings. By mapping the pent up need (Discontentment) on one axis and Criticality (dissatisfaction) on the other different kinds of opportunites can be identified.
Any organization needs to balance Financial Needs, Technology Needs, Marketing Needs and Entrepreneurial Capability. If an entrepreneur can manage the four of these then his organization will be a shining diamond.
By mapping the turnover of the organization over time one can get the graph as shown below
The key to being successful is to reduce the time from the organization is started till it starts to show a profit and many successful organizations reduce this time to be very short. This curve is never smooth and there are bumps as the organization grows especially when work is delegated and decisions are decentralized.
Business plans force dicipline and it is always good to write a business plan oneself and this task should not be delegated. One needs to keep revisiting and updating their business plan. Need to make a 3-5 year business plan. Don't underestimate working capital and it is important to keep working capital low.
Elements of a Business Plan
Executive Summary - Clean, Completing and Concise
Product or Service Description - Explain how it will continously provide value
Management Team - Capability and Company Description. It is important to have a good advisory team. A good board of advisors help in attracting customers and investment.
Market and Competition - Clear understanding of customer needs should be showcased. Good to talk about future competition too.
Sateesh Andra is a Venture Partner with DFJ India. Sateesh started his Silicon Valley career in the early nineties and has extensive background in general management, marketing, product strategy, and technology development.
Prior to DFJ, Sateesh was the fo founder and CEO of Euclid Software, a leader in the IT Governance space. He has also served in product marketing and engineering leadership roles at Tsqware (Conexant), LSI Logic, VLSI Technology (Philips), and Wipro. You can read more about Sateesh here.
Sateesh spoke about the Spirit of Entrepreneurship - My Journey. Here are my notes from that session.
Have passion in your idea for a period of time.
Dream big.
Study your idea.
Understand the stated value proposition vs the implemented value proposition of your idea.
Is your idea a pain killer or a vitamin. In times of hardship people stop using vitamins but the do not stop using pain killers
Raise money from the right people. Do not just take money from any source that offers it to you.
Perform market research
Start local and analyse the market before going into other geographic regions
It is not a bad idea to bootstrap an idea initially. It helps one get clarity and will be in a better position to negotiate with VCs later.
Look at different ways of doing sales such as direct sales, partner sales and tele sales.
If a fast growing market place you will need money to grow fast. For example the current online travel market.
Look for strategic partners and customers who will fund the business initially.
When rolling out the product or service one needs to understand the customer requirement and how the customer is approached.
Ensuring that internal capabilities can meet customer requirements when performing rollouts is important.
It is good to have beta customers as it helps to be in touch with the customer when developing the product/service.
Reason for investing in mginger was the team behind the idea, the market opportunity that exists in that space and the number of customers that they had already. Their cost of acquiring every new customer was very low.
VC's look for documentation and precesses before investing in a company.
Sashi Reddi is the CEO of Applabs which he founded in the year 1998 and today Applabs is the world's largest independent software testing company. Click here to read more about Sashi Reddi.
Sashi Reddi spoke about the Spirit of Entrepreneurship - My Journey. Here are my notes from that session.
Being a part time entrepreneur does not work. If you want to be an entrepreneur then you must be full time into it.
There is no right time to start. The right time is when you are passionate about your idea.
Jump in and then refine your plan. Jump in and sort the problems. There is no perfect business plan and if you wait for the perfect business plan then your venture will never get off the ground.
Be an entrepreneur to make money. Do not start a venture where it is not clear how you will make money.
Take a shot in a fast growing big market. The reason is because it is easier to capture the market when there are more customers.
When starting think small on how to make money with few customers and then think big with Venture Capital funding.
Be rich, have rich friends or marry someone rich. It is very hard to raise money initially when you are starting off as an entrepreneur. The first funds are very difficult since professional investors won’t look at you.
Meeting and making your first customer happy is important.
Entrepreneur is not a team effort, at the end, the entrepreneur is to make it happen. He should provide the vision and direction.
As the CEO of a startup be ready to be the sales guy.
Don’t get caught up into what is sexy. Look at what will make money. Do not do something that sounds exciting or wonderful to do but has no way of making money. He gave the example of Applabs which was not into software development but was into testing which is the least sexiest thing to do in software services but someone had to do it and there was a lot of money out there to be made.
I am going for the TiE-ISB Connect conference to be held here in Hyderabad from the 5th to the 7th of this month.
Quoting from the website this is what it is all about
"India’s most exciting annual networking event for entrepreneurs and investors, the TiE-ISB Connect '08 will be held on November 5th, 6th and 7th, 2008 at the ISB campus in Hyderabad. Organized by the TiE, Hyderabad Chapter and the Wadhwani Centre for Entrepreneurship Development (WCED), ISB, TiE-ISB Connect enables interaction of aspiring entrepreneurs, early-stage ventures, and growth-stage ventures with potential investors, successful entrepreneurs and mentors. "
The conference is of two parts - one is the Jumpstart event that is a day long learning event. It is a day meant for young entrepreneurs to get a head start. The day is broken up into several workshop type sessions with each topic focussing on a specific area of entrepreneurial learning. From this session I am hoping to learn how to convert some of my ideas detailed on this page Coceptualize, Build, Market, Sell and also a few others that I am currently working on into something that will actually make some money.
The remaining two days do not sound very exciting in terms of content that is related to my line of work but I am hoping to make some contacts and also to try and understand what are the needs of the industry. I will try and give a daily synopsis about my experiences and my thoughts so keep checking back for details or subscribe to my RSS feed.
The Indiblogger meet sure seemed to have upped my popularity. It all started with a phone call from Ishita from Deccan Chronicle about my views on blogging and why I blog and after a 5 minute conversation with Mona and myself she seemed satisfied with the information that she had and before we could ask her anything more she hung up. On opening today mornings paper I was surprised to find this
Then there are blogs that will guide you about the basic things like how to apply for a passport, create a website, good places to hang out in a city, as CTO of Infornia.com, Sudeep D’Souza does. Sudeep’s wife, Mona, is also a serious blogger. “I have a baby product company and though we don’t use my blog to promote the company as yet, we give reviews on different baby products available in the market. We make independent comments and also invite parents to give their feedback.”
On closer examination they got my organization wrong - it should have been inforica.com and I have been told that it would be corrected.
