Entrepreneurship in Bengal: A Blueprint for India’s Next Stage of Development

You have heard much about Jyoti Basu’s Bengal, Mamata Banerjee’s Kolkata, and various other dysfunctional views of the erstwhile capital of British India. Today, I am going to introduce you to Abhishek Rungta’s Kolkata, Pallav Nadhani’s Kolkata, Bimal Patwari’s Bengal, Srish Agarwal’s Bengal, and Arijit Bhattacharyya’s Bengal.

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Bootstrapping to $14M, Solving Serious Pain in IT Lead Generation: DiscoverOrg CoFounder Henry Schuck (Part 5)

Sramana: How do customers use your product? Henry Schuck: The product is geared for technology vendors who sell into large, midsized and small businesses. Our service puts all of the IT decision makers on an organizational chart along with their direct dial phone number, email address, job description and exact title in front of you.

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Catching Up On Readings: A New Branch on the Family Tree?

This week, we come back from the barren surface of the moon to visit another harsh land, Siberia. In 2010, scientists discovered in a cave a fragment of finger bone that was found to be different from a theretofore unknown group of humans. A new study to be published in Science will discuss the important

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Outsourcing: Arijit Bhattacharyya, CEO of VirtualInfoCom.com (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How many people are you training in this mode per year? Arijit Bhattacharyya: Per year, per institute, it depends. But in Kolkata, we have 160 people; in Jodhpur, we have nearly 210. Pune is a new institute, so it has no more than five people. SM: You don’t have that many people in

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Bootstrapping to $14M, Solving Serious Pain in IT Lead Generation: DiscoverOrg Cofounder Henry Schuck (Part 4)

Sramana: What was happening on the business side during 2008? Henry Schuck: We were marketing and doing sales. We were basically just splitting our time. We spent half of our time doing data integrity and the other half doing sales and marketing. We did calls to decision makers and sent samples to potential clients. We

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Outsourcing: Arijit Bhattacharyya, CEO of VirtualInfoCom.com (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: This was a game that you designed? Arijit Bhattacharyya: Right. SM: And you sold it in the Kolkata market? AB: Kolkata and outside Kolkata.

Bootstrapping to $14M, Solving Serious Pain in IT Lead Generation: DiscoverOrg Cofounder Henry Schuck (Part 3)

Sramana: Did you focus only on IT, or did you focus on IT only to validate your concept and use the IT list as a minimal viable product? Henry Schuck: We stayed very focused. People would ask us to create our service for finance, engineering, and marketing. The company was bootstrapped with our savings money

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Outsourcing: Arijit Bhattacharyya, CEO of VirtualInfoCom.com (Part 3)

SM: Got it. What software were you using, and how were you able to afford it? AB: We didn’t use any kind of software. I had to write software to create animation. We didn’t have any kind of software for that. SM: Interesting. You’re quite savvy technically.