Thought Clouds

Where was I this weekend? I was on an awesome ride with Srini (my friend from Trilogy) enjoying the early morning weather of Chennai and riding at 90kmph :). But it got really humid and hot over the day even in this winter. Thankfully I was more absorbed in some live action of some new emerging products /services coming out of Indian startups. I was at Proto.in
umang was supposed to accompany me and dropped off due to inevitable reasons (hehe). Oh my! what was I to do alone there. Should I go ? I did and I was lucky to meet Yashwant and Srikanth TS from my college, who were a great company. More, Pravin, a colleague and ex-Trilogian was also there with his IIT gang. I also met swaroop, the python guy from college :) and his friends. So I definitely had a crowd as against my fear of being left alone :)



About the event:
Proto.in is a great start in India. There were 250-300 people present there yesterday. The arrangements were good and presentations were quite organised too. It was many others opinion too that they could have done better with lot more publicity and getting more people to participate.

The event as such was focused more on providing a forum for the companies, VCs and others to peep into the innovations and trigger interest. There were around 30 companies that presented their product yesterday out of only 115 registrations that had happened. There were a few VCs and a couple of angel investors too.

Each team got 8 minutes to present, No Q&A session following that (sigh!) and frequent breaks to network. Areas were: Telecom, Infrastructure & Development Platforms, Internet & Web 2.0, Consumer Electronics, Business & Productivity & Mobile.

More Details
There were few ideas or pilots that interest me.
- DesiCrew [New]: Rural BPO - a distributed model of outsourcing operations in Rural India (I think this is great and I believe there is lot of locked potential in Rural India. It is definitely tough to execute and maintain)
- NetPC[Relatively New]: A low cost connectivity solution. live and running for quite some time. Internet to the masses is their pitch. I believe this can act as a solution for the basic problem of reaching more people in India and for many ideas revolving around online <anything>
- ValueFirst [Old]: quickly pluggable mobile enabled services. They are old and have a huge user base already. They can grow big with more features and add ons with the setup and user base they already have.
- SpotEasy [New]: product search and recommendation engine (lacked business focus or ideas of expansion but might be a good technology acquisition if they are really good at search and recommendation as a service) [cannot find their website and I doubt if they own spoteasy.com. I have requested for a private alpha invite]
- StoreGrid [Relative New]: A higly configurable and convenient data backup manager, easily affordable and good features and service.
- Picsquare [Relative New]: Targeted at NRIs wanting to share photographs with folks back home. They have a model where you can upload photographs, share and also order to deliver paper prints, cds, calendars, greeting cards to a postal address. They are already operational and I believe are running profitably. However, Yash told me that Indian Postal Service already has a similar service and definitely has low costs on operation with its wide base. They are probably lacking marketting.

The list of VC's who were present :Mr. Vardha representing iLabs, Canon partners and couple of angel investors Asif & Arif from Vakil group, NS Raghavan of Nathur holdings. I believe there were at least 15 of them in all (but no big names I think) . Only a few were available on sunday and we ofcourse could interact with a much lesser portion of the ones available.

DISCLAIMER: There were more companies and would post more in detail in a followup entry.

<Update> If you are looking for more details -
A very crisp and comprehensive coverage by Swaroop
An exhaustive Live blogging by Gokul
</Update>

Opinions: [A little long, did not spend time to condense, so read on if you can bear with it :) ]

Not representative: I personally felt that there are a lot many companies based in India (targetting Indian market too) doing lot more interesting stuff and with strong bases which were not present at proto.in yesterday. I definitely had expected to see a lot more @ proto.in with all the buzz we hear.

India is not there yet : From above proto did not represent the action in India. Even otherwise I have started to think may be India really lacks enough action or business focus at this point. There probably could have been lot ideas in domains like travel & transport, telecommunication, finance & insurance, network & connectivity which already have a base infrastructure, need and reach.
Do you also think that India is low on action, planning, execution and just about the real action beneath the buzz around startups ?

Orientation: Most companies focused on their demo and I can hardly remember any team that covered the market state, competition, positioning, revenue model or barrier to entry as they see. Few lacked to bring out their key distinguishing features too. A lot of them are in private alpha or earlier stages and hence cannot really play around with their products. I could still meet some of the people working on them and dig deeper during the break hours. But astonishingly found that very few break their heads thinking whether the idea will survive, sustain, and make money!!

Where is it happening: Was chennai the wrong place for proto.in ? Most of the companies who came there were based out chennai. But we all know there are so many more startups blooming one every week almost in Bangalore. I personally think that Bangalore and even Gurgaon is much happening place and many would have restrained due to the time and place factors. If the reach (I mean people) doesn't improve I don;t think I will travel all the way to chennai for proto.in next year.

Commitment or so they see: People do expect you to put in full time to buy your idea or believe it. You have to even believe in what you are doing :( so much that you give it full time taking all risks or uncertainties. Quit your job seems the motto for young entrepreneurs. Even if you think or say you are competent of doing 2 things (say regular job and a not-a-hobby project) at the same time the impressions vary with a person putting fulltime and balancing two things.

Will you rise funding: There is huge inclination for funding and support for startups in India. VC's all over the world are looking to invest in India. So this I see contracdicts my view on Indian startups today. Anyway, do you have an idea ? You need to know your business and If you need funding pitch it with confidence and ofcourse as said below: Quit your job before that and focus ;) .With a very high probability you will rise sufficient funds.

The big event: Thanks to the proto team for giving a peek into the whole stuff. I spoke to one of the key organisers: Vijay Anand. They have definitely put a lof of effort in making it happen. I am sure they will be doing a great job in the following years. However I think proto has to focus on two things:
First, Defining what they want proto to represent. From what Vijay explained about the selection process and what they wanted teams to present at the event: This years focus was more on the providing a forum for companies from dedicated teams (refer full-time commitment above) which have not any significant funding. Making it representative of the happenings around would be lot more interesting and valuable for varied groups of people. It is also good to position each product/service and evaluate relatively.
Second, Proto needs a lot of Publicity and Marketing (nothing wrong). The publicity and targetted pitches would automatically attract more companies, more VC's and angel investors, more attendee registrations which would make it more popular and hence more valuable. Its a cycle.

Should I stop :) :
There are lot more things that ran through my mind sitting in ICSR auditorium yesterday, I have jotted down few things and more observations post that. Were you also there at proto.in ? If yes, why don't you tell me about your thoughts on the event and things to follow. If No, tell me if you like to hear about any specific company, product or anything more about proto.in.

By the way I am thinking about DesiCrew pretty seriously. It has a lot of potential. But any distributed model is tough to collabrate and make it a success.