Roundtable Recap: April 9 – 1M/1M Announces Partnership With TiE Chennai

On Saturday, April 9, 2011, I arrived in Chennai at 3:00 a.m. after a 24-hour journey from California. At 11:00 a.m., a group of entrepreneurs from TiE Chennai gathered at the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras (IIT-M) Research Park campus, and we spent the next four hours discussing strategy and tactics of early-stage entrepreneurship.

TiE Chennai organized a Startup Super Day, during which I delivered the keynote address followed by a live strategy roundtable. At the roundtable, five entrepreneurs pitched their businesses to me, and I interacted with them in our usual format, with active participation from the audience.

Freshdesk
First up, Girish Mathrubootham from Chennai, India, presented Freshdesk, a SaaS solution for multi-channel customer support including knowledge base and social CRM support. Girish and his team are former Zoho employees and bring to their entrepreneurial efforts the perspective and learnings of Zoho, which has been successful in drastically undercutting high-end competitors in a major market, namely CRM, the office suite, and so on.

I liked this venture very much and see the basic framework of using the Indian cost structure to provide SaaS products that are competitive in terms of performance and functionality at drastically lower prices as a massive opportunity for Indian entrepreneurs to go after. Almost a thousand SaaS/cloud startups have been launched over the past decade, and in each niche there are opportunities for concept arbitrage using this basic formula. I am very glad to see Girish and his team going after one such opportunity. Girish already has a number of clients and is well on his way to building the business. The go-to-market strategy has to be fine-tuned to make it more precise, but the basic premise of the business is validated.

Interviewstreet.com
Next, also from Chennai, India, Vivek Ravisankar pitched Interviewstreet.com, a nifty concept for testing programmers’ skill levels in various key languages to bypass the lengthy interviewing that goes into screening candidates in a hiring process. Vivek already has Amazon, Google, and a few other companies using the product and needs to put together a scalable telesales process to be able to sell it to a larger number of customers. The value proposition is well articulated, validated, and very clean.

Quantum Arc
Then, Satish from Chennai, India, discussed Quantum Arc, a solution for predictive analysis and forecasting of fire breakout hazards by monitoring electrical/power infrastructures in major facilities. The concept, if technically as compelling as it sounds, could become a standard in building safety all over the world. The majority of the discussion was about go-to-market strategy, channels and regulatory issues. It’s a very impressive concept, to say the least!

Invention Labs
We also had Ajit Narayanan present AVAZ, designed by Invention Labs, a neat learning and communication product that helps people with disabilities such as cerebral palsy, autism, mental retardation, and speech disorders to communicate. The product has won a national award from the president of India for its empowerment of people with disabilities. However, in my assessment, the bigger opportunity for this business is to go to market as a mobile app.

ET Interactive
Finally, Robin Mathew presented ET Interactive Design, a retail concept to address the disconnect between rural artisans and the merchandise they produce, and customers and what they want to buy. While the basic premise is compelling, and I am very interested in entrepreneurship opportunities in this area, the business model is flawed. I advised Robin to review rural and slum development, as well as lifestyle brand projects in Vision India 2020 and decide which one captures his fancy, then come and work with me on executing on it.

Some of these businesses should definitely apply for the Microsoft BizSpark India Startup Challenge grants. I look forward to working with all of them further in 1M/1M.

You can select the business you like best of those described above through a poll on the 1M/1M Facebook page.

Also, on the evening of April 9, I met with a large group of TiE Chennai charter members to brainstorm about Capitalism 2.0 and entrepreneurship development, which also yielded a very animated discussion.

At the end of the day, we sealed a partnership between 1M/1M and TiE Chennai whereby TiE Chennai members can receive a discount of 25% off the annual membership fee for the 1M/1M premium program until June 16, 2011, and a 15% discount thereafter. The 1M/1M premium program offers entrepreneurs access to on-demand educational, business development and incubation resources and strategy discussions with me for $1,000 per year.

I am traveling in India over the next several days and will be holding more live roundtables in Mumbai (April 16) and Pune (April 17).

Our usual online roundtable schedule will resume April 21 and focus on the northeastern part of the United States. Recordings of previous online roundtables are all available here. You can register for the upcoming roundtables here.

This segment is a part in the series : Roundtable Recap
. March 25 – A Mixed Bag Of Advice . April 1 – Bootstrapping Tips . April 8 – A Focus On E-Commerce . April 15 – Small Is OK; The Goal Is Profitability . April 22 – The Original Runners . April 29 – Finding The Right Direction . May 6 – Defining Value Proposition . May 20 – Validation, Validation, Validation . May 27 – Is The Venture Worth Your Time? . June 3 – Defining Market Segments . June 10 – Efficient Targeting . June 17 – Online Education Startups . June 24 – Three Startups That Can Hit One Million Dollars . July 1 - Get Your Pricing Model Validated . July 8 - The EJ Methodology . July 15 - A Market Of Late Adopters . July 22 - Bootstrap Using Services . July 29 - Startups In Malaysia . August 5 - Paying Customers =>Validation =>Valuation . August 19 - Niche E-Commerce Is Great For Bootstrapping . August 26 - 85%-90% Of Search Traffic Comes From Organic Search . September 2 - Find High Velocity Channels . September 9 - Open Opportunities In Cloud Computing And Rural BPO . September 16 – 5 Cloud Computing Opportunities for Entrepreneurs . September 23 - Do Not Spray And Pray . September 30 - Investors Don't Fund Broad Ideas . October 7 - Try To Get At Least $2M Pre-Money In Seed Round Valuation . October 14 - Professional Investors Do Not Invest In $20 Million Markets . October 21 - Bootstrapping Comes In Many Flavors . October 28 – Convert Potential Competitors To Partners . November 4 - Premium Lounge Sneak Preview . November 11 - African Tech Entrepreneurs Emerging . November 18 - Not Coming To The Rescue Of Victory . December 2 - Niche Marketplace Businesses Can Be Interesting . December 9 - Where Should You Raise Money? . December 16 - Top 10 Tech Trends To Watch . January 6 - Top 10 Vertical and Social Web Trends For The Decade . January 13 - Top 10 Online Advertising Trends For The Decade . January 20 - Personalization Remains An Open Problem . January 27 - Non-Dilutive Financing Through Revenue Sharing . February 3 - Indian Entrepreneurs Are Maturing . February 10 - When Keywords Are Competitive . February 17 - Indian Company Plugs Gap In Google’s Enterprise Solution . February 24 - VCs, Angels, Incubators, Accelerators – What Are You Doing With Your Rejects? . March 3 - Spotlight On The Northwest . March 10 - Spotlight On India . March 17 - Spotlight On Latin And Central America . March 24 - 75th Session Spotlights The Midwest . March 31 - Microsoft’s $100,000 India Startup Challenge Grant . April 6 - 1M/1M Announces Important Partnership With MAD Incubator, Malaysia . April 9 - 1M/1M Announces Partnership With TiE Chennai . April 16 - 1M/1M Partners With Indian Angel Network Incubator . April 17 - High-Octane Energy In Pune . April 21- Incubators Are Reaching Out To 1M/1M . April 28 - Guerrilla P.R. & SEO Most Profitable Customer Acquisition Strategies . May 5 - Ownership Matters . May 12 - Two Really Cool Companies . May 19, Making Money From Blogs . May 26 - Twitter, LinkedIn - Why Not Affiliates? . June 2 - 1M/1M And Incubators - What We Have Learned . June 9 - Silicon Valley . June 16 - Exciting Companies Lined Up For Microsoft Startup Grant Finals . June 23 - New Assessment Tool For Entrepreneurs . June 30 - Continued International Participation . July 21 - Crowd Sourced Funding Exchanges - An Emerging Trend . July 28 - Investors And Incubators Need To Look At Pre-Incubation . August 4 - How Do You Bootstrap Freemium Ventures? . August 11 - Menlo Park And The Silicon Valley Renaissance . August 25 - How To Use Twitter For Lead Generation . September 1 - Fall Call To Action . September 8 - A View Into Israeli Start-ups . September 15 - Do Your Homework First . September 22 - How Do You Catalyze A Region’s Entrepreneurship? . September 29 - From Poland To Argentina . October 6 - Dedicated To Steve Jobs, Reinforcing Mission To Restructure Capitalism . October 13 - FREE Is Not A Business Model . October 20 - Non-profits And For-profits . October 27 - Check Out Stanzr . November 3 - VCs Are Not Always Right . November 17 - Business Schools And Early Stage Entrepreneurship . December 1 - 1M/1M Premium Company Freshdesk Wins Funding From Accel Partners . December 8 - Three Open Opportunities For 2012 . December 15 - Web 3.0 And Social Dancing; Romania Emerging . December 22 - Free Apps, Ad-Supported Business Models => Dangerous! . January 5 - ERP Galore . January 12-13 - Spotlight On IIT Kharagpur, India . January 19 - Are Media Sites Fundable? . January 26th - Spotlight On Jacksonville, Florida . February 2 - YCombinator vs. 1M/1M . February 9 - Are You Fundable? . February 16 - What’s Happening In Turkey? . February 23 - Microsoft Israel To Offer 1M/1M Scholarships . March 1 - Strategy Gaps Need To Be Plugged . March 12 - Winners Of Microsoft Israel Scholarships . March 15 - Spotlight On 3 Day Startup Tel-Aviv . April 3 - Rendezvous In Bangalore . April 12 - More From Indian Entrepreneurs . April 19 - Tyranny Of The TAM . April 26 - A Rare Women-Only Session . May 3 - Some Wonderful Opportunities With Corporate Partners . May 10 - BlueSnap-Elance Contest Applications Deadline This Weekend . May 22 - Winners Of TechHub-A&N Media Battle Of The Startups Contest In London Win 1M/1M Scholarships