Far Away from Silicon Valley

These days, the media is becoming better at reporting on entrepreneurship outside Silicon Valley. In Silicon Valley, however, people tend to be somewhat cocky about the region’s place in the entrepreneurship landscape. But technology entrepreneurship is happening all around the world, and we have always tried to present an international and non-parochial view of the

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1M/1M Video: Building India’s Entrepreneurship Pipeline

How does India go from 2000-3000 entrepreneurs to a pipeline of 100,000? Based on presentation at ISBA 2012.

Seed Capital: IndiaCo Investor Rahul Patwardhan

[We just received a tragic news that Rahul passed away of a cardiac arrest.] The entrepreneur ecosystem continues to grow in India. This is an exciting time for both startups and investors. As my interview with Rahul Patwardhan of IndiaCo shows, there are investors for every sector. If they do their own due diligence before

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Will SKS’s Improvements Be Enough?

SKS’s troubles do not seem to be coming to an end soon. In addition to increased microfinance sector regulations driven by Andhra Pradesh state politics, the company recently saw their founder and chairman, Vikram Akula, leave the organization. Market rumors suggest that issues with the management team led to Akula’s resignation.

Is Capitalism The Right Answer for Emerging Markets?

Given our extensive presence in emerging markets and the implosion of Western-style free market capitalism, the following question is becoming relevant and important: Is capitalism the right answer for emerging markets? I would like to open up the topic for discussion. Please use my recent piece Restructuring Capitalism as context, and share your thoughts on where

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Outsourcing: Million-Dollar Freelancer Sanjay Dange, Co-Founder and COO of Smartinfosys.net (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: In 2006, how did the order volume change? What happened in 2006? What level did it reach? Sanjay Dange: In mid 2006, we started getting 20 to 25 projects in a month. Plus, in a year and a half, we also acquired more than 50 new customers. We would get a lot of repeat

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Outsourcing: Million-Dollar Freelancer Sanjay Dange, Co-Founder and COO of Smartinfosys.net (Part 1)

We’ve featured lots of successful outsourcing companies in this series, whether they’ve been companies that successfully outsourced work to third-party vendors or accepted outsourced tasks from other businesses.  None, however, has been quite like Smartinfosys.net. A small Web design and development company founded in Gujarat, India in 1999, Smartinfosys increased its customer base by taking

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Nightmare At SKS Microfinance

Andhra Pradesh state politics in India concerning the MFI sector are continuing to hurt the performance of the sector in the country. According to Credit Suisse, India’s leading MFI, SKS Microfinance is seeing loan recoveries in the state to be as low as 12% compared with the industry’s average recovery rate of 22%. SKS’s bad

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