India Needs More Incubator Funds

Yesterday, I spent an hour chatting with Subrata Mitra, one of the Partners at Indian seed fund Erasmic, which has been in the news recently for attracting Google as a Limited Partner. I have been writing often about the Indian seed investment situation: Concept Arbitrage, Venture Capital in India, Too Much Money, Too Few Deals

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We Would Be Scary With Some Capital!

By Calvin McElroy, Guest Author Entrepreneurship in Canada is hard. I have spent over a decade leveraging skills, knowledge and relationships developed from a successful corporate career – while trying to master the art of starting and developing early stage companies. Although the job is challenging and gratifying, it seems a day doesn’t go by

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Serial Entrepreneur: HP Michelet (Part 11)

In this final segment of our interview, we discuss some of the current business initiatives, as well as potential exit strategies. My thanks to HP for providing us with his insight to allow us all to benefit from his experience. I also sincerely hope that all the cleantech entrepreneurs and VCs out there would pay

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Serial Entrepreneur: HP Michelet (Part 10)

I continue my discussion with HP regarding management teams, and then begin to explore other challenges like incredibly long sales cycles of ERI’s business, which makes forecasting and cashflow management very complex. In fact, with 18-36 month sales cycles, it makes me wonder to what extent our VCs who are rushing to Cleantech would have

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Serial Entrepreneur: HP Michelet (Part 9)

Finding the right team to lead a company is very important, and perhaps an area where many entrepreneurs struggle as they cannot attract the right people, or delineate responsibilities clearly or effectively. HP has had the foresight to make difficult management changes as necessary to ensure the success of ERI.

Serial Entrepreneur: HP Michelet (Part 8)

Coming from a strong finance background, here we see how HP and his partners make decisions from both the perspective of the investor and the entrepreneur. This makes for a very interesting study.

Serial Entrepreneur: HP Michelet (Part 6)

Over the last five parts, I interviewed HP to extract the full significance of his innovation. After all, Reverse Osmosis and Osmotic Power are not exactly my own core competency areas, so I needed him to walk us through the market landscape, the ROI factors, and the general business eco-system dynamics. As I did that,

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Serial Entrepreneur: HP Michelet (Part 5)

In this next segment I asked HP a couple of questions on what types of applications and markets he is planning for the future. As we have seen in the previous segments, HP has a firm grasp of ERI’s immediate core competency and it’s business environment. Here HP demonstrates another characteristic we often find in

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