Seed Investors In India: Why So Few?

As I have written in previous columns, the seed capital ecosystem in India is a real bottleneck right now. There are no more than a couple of hundred seed investments that are happening a year. Even if the number doubles this year, it is still a terribly inadequate number to build a real pipeline of

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Building a VC-Funded Tech Company from Upstate New York: Sinclair Schuller, CEO of Apprenda (Part 2)

Sramana: What did you do after you left Morgan Stanley? Sinclair Schuller: I went to work for a startup in upstate New York that focused on help desk software. I worked as a Java developer inside of a really small company. At Morgan Stanley I experienced software development in large enterprises, so it was a

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1Mby1M Incubation Radar 2013: Invention Labs, Chennai, India

Invention Labs develops augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) solutions like Avaz that help children with speech disabilities develop communication and language skills. Avaz represents ideas visually, as picture symbols that can then be sequenced together to create sentences that are spoken out. Unlike its competitors, Avaz is not English-specific and not only helps in communication

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Thursday, October 24 – 193rd 1M/1M Mentoring Roundtable For Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurs are invited to the 193rd FREE online 1M/1M roundtable mentoring session on Thursday, October 24, 2013, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/8:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious entrepreneur, register to “pitch” and sell your business idea to Sramana Mitra. You’ll gain straightforward feedback, advice on next steps, and she’ll answer any

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How To Navigate the Seed Capital Gap in India

Even though interest in entrepreneurship is at its highest in India, the country has a nominal seed capital infrastructure. As you know, I concern myself with issues of scalability and pipeline building. The question that I have been pondering for the last ten years is: how do you develop a sustainable pipeline of entrepreneurs? Of

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Building a VC-Funded Tech Company from Upstate New York: Sinclair Schuller, CEO of Apprenda (Part 1)

Sinclair Schuller is the CEO of Apprenda. With his two co-founders, Schuller has secured $16 million in VC funding to date. Investors include NEA, Ignition Partners, and High Peak Ventures.  Apprenda delivers private and public PaaS to enterprise developers. Sinclair serves on multiple venture networks and speaks nationally on the topics of enterprise IT efficiency,

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India’s Earliest Product Entrepreneur: FACT CEO Arvind Agarwalla (Part 7)

Sramana: You own the company 100%. How do you incentivize your employees aside from salary? Do you have a private stock option plan? Arvind Agarwalla: We do not have a stock option plan, and that would not make sense because I really have no intention of exiting the company. Our sales team operates with an

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India’s Earliest Product Entrepreneur: FACT CEO Arvind Agarwalla (Part 6)

Sramana: Have you lost clients to the companies that offer an SaaS model? Arvind Agarwalla: We have not lost any clients to the public cloud. We offer our clients a private cloud option. We allow our clients to determine what kind of security they want. They allow what branches they want to connect to the

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