1M/1M Strategy Roundtable For Entrepreneurs On Thursday, February 10

Entrepreneurs interested in discussing all aspects of a start-up venture are welcome to attend the next free online strategy roundtable on Thursday, February 10, 2011, starting at: 11 a.m. EST/8 a.m. PST/9:30 p.m. IST. You can find more details and register here.

February 3 Roundtable Poll Winner

Tuanni Price’s Zuri Wine Tasting was chosen the best business of those presented at yesterday’s roundtable through a poll on our 1M/1M Facebook page. Congratulations! In case you missed it, you can read Sramana Mitra’s roundtable recap here or listen to the recording found here.

Roundtable Recap: February 3 – Indian Entrepreneurs Are Maturing

For this week’s One Million by One Million roundtable, we partnered with the Indian Angel Network (IAN). India, as you all know, is a rising power in the entrepreneurship firmament, and the country’s entrepreneurs are making a long-awaited switch from pure outsourcing and labor arbitrage to now venturing into building Internet companies, cloud businesses, and, as you will see in today’s presenters, some cool hybrid businesses that leverage India’s cheap labor pool and combined with sophisticated technology, deliver solutions to hairy and hard-core problem domains.

It is particularly satisfying for me to work with these entrepreneurs, because I have long believed that India needs to diversify out of pure labor arbitrage. I deliberately wrote a highly controversial series of articles in 2008 [Death Of Indian Outsourcing] to provoke a debate on the topic. Other discussions on India’s need for product companies have been equally controversial. But in the end, I believe, we have arrived at a better place as an industry where Indian entrepreneurs are thinking beyond outsourcing.
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February 3 Roundtable Recording

In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here.

ViVu Offer For DimDim Customers

Readers, as you know, DimDim, our longtime partner for the 1M/1M strategy roundtables, has recently been acquired by Salesforce.com. Following the acquisition, Salesforce turned off all of the free accounts that DimDim had so generously supported.

We have since moved to the ViVu video conferencing platform, and gone from an audio/Web conferencing experience to an enhanced video/Web conferencing experience. You can check out the experience by viewing last week’s roundtable recording.

ViVu, meanwhile, is offering DimDim customers the opportunity to switch to a free ViVu account. You can get the details of their offer here. You will need to sign up by March 15, 2011, to avail the offer.

1M/1M: How We Differ From YCombinator

We are getting this question often: How does 1M/1M differ from YCombinator and other accelerators and incubators? Here is the answer: >>>

1M/1M: A Policy Suggestion To President Obama

Now that President Obama has used his State of The Union address to turn the spotlight on innovation and entrepreneurship, and his CTO, Aneesh Chopra, just wrote a post on TechCrunch with some concrete steps, I’d like to reiterate the call for a tax policy that would really help bootstrapping entrepreneurs:

As I keep on saying, 99% of the entrepreneurs who seek funding get rejected for a set of specific reasons, mostly because they are too early for even angel financing or SBA loans. They need to bootstrap. >>>

1M/1M Strategy Roundtable For Entrepreneurs On Thursday, February 3

Indian Angel Network (IAN) will be co-hosting the next free online strategy roundtable on Thursday, February 3, 2011, starting at: 11 a.m. EST/8 a.m. PST/9:30 p.m. IST. All are welcome. You can find more details and register here.