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. >>>

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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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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