Roundtable Recap: April 21- Incubators Are Reaching Out To 1M/1M
After hosting three live roundtables and being on stage for six to seven hours a day, I have almost lost my voice. At this week’s roundtable, we worked with just two entrepreneurs and then spent the rest of the time on Q&A, which in itself was interesting.
Evolutech Networks
First up, Satya Choppadhandi from Bangalore, India, presented Evolutech Networks, a company that manufactures wireless energy monitoring devices for the smart home. Satya is evaluating various go-to-market models such as franchising, and I advised him to focus on direct selling to major builders and working with industry value-added resellers (VARs) that already operate in the smart home segment in India. These resellers buy devices from the U.S. and Singapore at significantly higher prices and presumably would be open to sourcing lower-cost parts.
The smart home business is still in the very early stages in India, and it will take some time before Evolutech ramps up. Meanwhile, financing the company will be quite challenging, and I advised Satya to manufacture parts based only on signed contracts and advances against orders, to avoid getting into an inventory-rich, working capital–poor situation.
GeoInvenio
Next, Douglas Villalobos from Costa Rica pitched GeoInvenio, a mobile application development platform. Douglas has identified about 50 software companies in Costa Rica that may be willing to develop apps on top of the GeoInvenio platform. I advised him to get into deeper conversations with these 50 companies and get a better feel for what applications they would build and how they want to pay for the platform: license, subscription, or transaction fee. In addition, I asked him to do a competitive analysis on the pricing models of the various mobile app platforms and come back to me with both sets of market data, namely, customer research and competitive analysis. We can derive GeoInvenio’s business model and pricing model based on that.
You can select the business you like best through a poll on the 1M/1M Facebook page.
In the Q&A, Bill Gordon introduced himself as one of the principals of the Stamford Innovation Center, an incubator being formed in Connecticut. Bill has been following the 1M/1M project and would like to connect his partners to our team. This is an interesting trend we’re seeing as we connect with incubators around the world. We are successfully establishing partnerships with various incubators whereby 1M/1M is being viewed as a supplementary resource to the efforts of these organizations. As you know, we have already announced two partnerships with MAD Incubator in Malaysia and the IAN Incubator in India, and have several other such relationships in the pilot stage.
There are 7,000 incubators in the world, and our vision is to work with as many of these incubators as possible in a supplemental mode, whereby we plug in our Silicon Valley–based methodology and network, curriculum (video lectures and case studies), business development services, and investor connections to enhance significantly the portfolio of offerings from local and regional incubators in various countries. Clearly, efforts to establish technology business incubators are in high gear around the world, and our 100% virtual offering can be a great complement to the brick-and-mortar incubators that are providing on-the-ground support for entrepreneurship development.
The recording of this roundtable can be found here. Recordings of previous online roundtables are all available here.
The next roundtable will be held April 28 and will offer priority to entrepreneurs from the Mountain States region of the U.S. You can register for 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