The Accelerator Conundrum: Navigating Your Path to Startup Success

Alright, let’s cut through the noise and get to the brutal truth of the startup accelerator world. Many entrepreneurs, starry-eyed and naive, leap headfirst into 3-month accelerator programs without truly understanding the long-term implications. It’s time for an incisive commentary, a necessary dissection.

1Mby1M Udemy Courses with Sramana Mitra: Financing

Raising money to build a startup is a huge challenge. To be able to raise any money at all, you must first understand how investors think. We have developed the following courses catering to entrepreneurs in different stages of their entrepreneurial journey.

New Book – Seed India: How To Navigate The Seed Capital Gap In India

While tremendous interest in entrepreneurship in India continues to surge, there is a troubling and corresponding shortage of seed capital to help get these entrepreneurs’ ventures off the ground.

Sramana Mitra, one of the most highly regarded writers on the Indian startup scene, analyzes the current state of the startup eco-system in India in the latest addition to her acclaimed Entrepreneur Journeys book series, Seed India: How To Navigate The Seed Capital Gap In India (December 2013; Amazon Kindle). Mitra proposes ways of navigating the rest of the decade, such that a robust pipeline of entrepreneurs can survive the current malaise, and thrive, while the eco-system develops and matures in parallel.
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Featured Videos

Seed Capital: Inventus Capital Partners

1M/1M ambassador Irina Patterson talks with Parag Dhol of Inventus Capital Partners.

Irina Patterson: Please tell us briefly about your personal background and about your fund.

Parag Dhol: Inventus Capital Partners is a U.S.–India venture firm managed by successful entrepreneurs and industry operating veterans who have backed over 100 entrepreneurs with operations in India and/or Silicon Valley. Inventus backs entrepreneurs first and foremost. The companies financed by Inventus include redBus (acquired by MIH/Naspers and our biggest success), Vizury, Credit Sesame, Savaari, PoshMark, Power2sme, Policybazaar and eDreams, among others. Inventus started investing out of Fund-II earlier this year. >>>

How to Navigate India’s Seed Capital Gap

India has a minuscule seed capital ecosystem. Entrepreneurs thus have to be really creative to survive.

My new piece How To Navigate The Seed Capital Gap in India offers a synthesis of how entrepreneurs are getting around. Two companion pieces offer perspective on why the ecosystem is developing so slowly: Seed Investors in India: Why So Few? and Venture Capital in India: Age of Reckoning. >>>

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 hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs that can meaningfully impact the country.

How can we change this?

To answer that question, we need to first understand why there is such a shortage of seed money in the Indian IT entrepreneurship ecosystem.

You see, Silicon Valley’s angel investors were all either entrepreneurs themselves, or part of an entrepreneurial venture that succeeded sufficiently for its early employees to make significant money. Most of them went through the experience of building a technology product, taking it to market, watching it take off in the market, and then reaping the benefits of that success.
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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 course, this discussion pertains to my field: IT and IT-enabled services. India has numerous small retailers, service providers, etc. who are shining examples of scrappy entrepreneurship at its best.

But how do we take advantage of the increasing penetration of information technology into the consumer and business populations in India? And how, through technology, do we empower Indian entrepreneurs to build global businesses?
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Is Too Much Liquidity In The Angel Capital Market Good or Bad?

Too much dumb money rushing into the angel investment game is inevitable with crowdsourcing, AngelList and other innovations. Innovation is welcome. Liquidity for startups is welcome. How much is too much?

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The Indian Startup Eco-System Wants Acqui-hiring!

I spent large chunks of time in the last two days with my friend Sharad Sharma, one of the true deep thinkers of the Indian startup eco-system. I first met Sharad when he invited me to co-chair the Nasscom Product Conclave in Bangalore with him in 2010. I really enjoyed working with him, and over the years, have come to appreciate what he is trying to do for the Indian eco-system.

Sharad, by the way, is one of the 20 odd effective angel investors who invest in the technology sector in India. While the total number of angel investors is much larger, many of them come from outside the sector, and hence are not capable of leading deals. If you look at Indian Angel Network or Mumbai Angels, for instance, a vast majority of the angels made their money elsewhere (like real estate), and often find it difficult to fully grasp what’s happening in the software, mobile or Internet businesses, let alone networking or semiconductor. Thus, these lead angels are critical for the eco-system to mature.

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How To Start An Incubator

This is REALLY exciting!

As you know, we’ve been working with many partners around the world over the last year.

This has helped us develop an informed perspective on the need for a scalable incubation system that our partners can use easily, affordably, seamlessly to launch their own incubators, with our help, anywhere in the world, but with deep ties into Silicon Valley.

And now, we present the 1M/1M Incubator-in-a-Box, a new program to support partners in how to start a business incubator.

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The Million Dollar Club: Quantifying The 1Mby1M Value Equation

At 1Mby1M, our agenda is to help you figure out how to put one foot before the other and build a sustainable business, irrespective of financing. If you use the program the way it is designed to be used, you would be able to derive value from it on multiple vectors. Let me quantify that equation for you. >>>

The Million Dollar Club: Conclusion

I know many of you are struggling to figure out how to put one foot before the other in your quest for a successful entrepreneurial journey. I also know that many of you are continuously chasing investors over customers.

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The Million Dollar Club: Freshdesk

Completing our list is Billion Dollar Unicorn club contender Freshdesk. The company was founded in 2010 by CEO Girish Mathrubootham and CTO Shan Krishnasamy. After a series of successful products in his work as a technical architect, Girish was inspired to start Freshdesk by a posting in Y Combinator’s Hacker News. Learning that a major company in the customer support software industry, Zendesk, had raised its prices, Girish and Shan set out to create an affordable alternative. [Note: Zendesk has since had a successful IPO and is valued at ~$2 Billion (May 2015).]

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The Million Dollar Club: InSync

Atul Gupta first began his entrepreneurial ventures in 2003 with an IT provider based in Bhutan, India. His drive to provide software solutions to local small businesses resulted in a move to Kolkata in 2006, where he founded InSync. Over the next three years the company conducted extensive research through their more than 500 domestic customers. Atul noted that once a business reached a certain volume, customers could no longer manage an e-commerce business without an integrated ERP system.

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The Million Dollar Club: Happy Grasshopper

In October 2010, multiple-time Inc. 500|5000 honoree Dan Stewart began a side venture based on a clear need for effective e-mail marketing campaigns. The project was originally inspired by an earlier venture, a customer relationship management (CRM) company Dan founded in 2007. One of his customers, a marketing-focused teacher to real estate agents and brokers, advised his students to stop sending e-mails that were “boring” in nature. He instead recommended that e-mail messages be “fun, relationship-building, [and] conversation starting,” giving Dan his evidence that creative message content was a challenge facing the market at large.

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The Million Dollar Club: Indus Net

Abhishek Rungta has bootstrapped Indus Net Technologies to a $5 million, 500-person Web design and digital marketing services company from Kolkata, India. Indus Net focuses specifically on application development for Web and mobile, integrated digital marketing, and Web design, with specific work in SEO and SEM.

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The Million Dollar Club: Mansa Systems

San Francisco-based Mansa Systems, led by founder Siva Devaki, is one of them. Mansa provides cloud, mobile, and social enterprise solutions, including cloud storage, secure document sharing, cloud telephony and more. In order to differentiate the firm from its competitors, Siva initially focused on Salesforce CRM, partnering with the company to build apps for Salesforce customers and publish them via AppExchange. Today, the company provides both products and services that extend the Salesforce CRM capabilities.

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