Life of the Indian Entrepreneur sucks, We gotta take charge!

As a KickStart.in initiative, I wrote this relatively long mail to get people to work towards empowering the entrepreneurship ecosystem of our cities. It really inspired a few people and we are making significant progress. We really need to network. The same mistakes are being repeated over and over again. I gotta work on completing my “Startup Pains” research soon to learn more on the mindset of the Indian Entrepreneur. We can’t keep waiting for things to happen. We gotta make things happen. Stuff like StartupSaturday.in and Headstart.in are small things that we are doing to make things happen.

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Dear All,

Thanks for your support and encouragement.

This mail is to invite you to a breakfast meeting this Sunday, to discuss how we can transform the startup ecosystem of Bangalore.

We all have one thing in common.
Each one of us has a flare for entrepreneurship and has something to contribute to the Startup Ecosystem of our country.

Right now the life of the Indian Entrepreneur is not easy. There are several hurdles that he/she faces. More than 40% of the startups don’t survive the first year. Over 80% of them get bankrupt before their 5th B’day.

You know, things don’t have to be this way. We have innovation, drive, ambition, persistence and all the qualities necessary to succeed.

But still a majority of us fail.

Why?

Because most of us repeat the same fatal mistakes made by other entrepreneurs before us. And we don’t get to learn from their experience because we never really knew they existed.

Whats missing in our ecosystem is – Networking. We can all learn from each other and support each other in our tough times. We float our ideas to a few friends and if we get a good response, we start building our product. We build it up and look forward to conquering the market. But then people don’t seem to be so excited about our offering. Then we wonder what went wrong! If we knew 5 friends who were entrepreneurs and would have floated the idea to them, they would have definitely asked us to do some market research before building the full blown prototype in the first place. An environment like this is missing, we don’t know the right people to discuss our ideas with.

Startups are looked down upon as “small companies, where you work only because you didn’t get a job anywhere else” etc etc. It is partially true but far from the reality of what startups actually represent. Startups stand for ‘freedom’, for ‘creativity’, for ‘determination’, for ‘dreams’ for ‘belief’. You know, its awesome cool to start your own company. But, very few of the bright people realize it.

Whats missing in our ecosystem is Awareness. The media doesn’t like to talk about startups. Even people who have already taken the entrepreneurial plunge don’t know how to register their startups as private ltd companies.

To whom should the Indian Entrepreneur go if he/she needs legal advice? Google (Search), thats all that the Indian Entrepreneur is left with.

To whom should he/she consult to undertake un-inspiring but essential tasks like Policy Making, Organizing Processes, Financial Planning, Containing Attrition?

To whom should an entrepreneur go to get seed funding? There just aren’t enough angels in our ecosystem. Of course the scene is improving in this direction. But a lot is left to be desired.

Things are different in the Silicon Valley. There startups are regarded as “COOL”. Every smart college student wants to start his/her own company. They have mentors who support them technically and in other areas. People there are not security centric they are freedom-centric.

Infrastructure is so cheap in India that its India that should be the Innovation hot-bed of the world. KickStart was founded with the vision of making this happen. Its a long journey and we have made significant progress. Thanks to the efforts of NEN, TiE, OCC, TKF, Proto.in, Bootstrappers’ Network and other organizations, entrepreneurship is getting a major boost in India.

We are all primarily from Bangalore, and there is a lot that we can do to foster entrepreneurship in our city itself. I have had the pleasure of speaking to many of you personally and you had expressed your interest in contributing to the cause in a multitude of ways. Lets meet up and discuss, what each of us are inspired to follow in this direction. And what structures can we put in place to ensure that this activity lasts and doesn’t fizzle out.

Venue: Indian Coffee House – MG Road
Date: June 1st (Sunday)
Time: 9 AM

And we will be meeting every Sunday at 9AM from now on at the same place, to discuss how things are shaping up.

Among all of us we have a lot of entrepreneurs, aspiring entrepreneurs, bloggers, journalists, hi-tech specialists, HR professionals, senior executives and other ecosystem enablers. There is a lot that we all can do together. Lets join hands and make Bangalore a heaven for startups. By working towards this cause, you will learn a lot about entrepreneurship. You will meet a lot of people and expand your network of contacts. Some day when you startup, you will have a lot of entrepreneur friends who can guide you in your startup. And more than everything else, you’d have a satisfaction of being someone who is making a difference to the society.

All these meetings are a lot of fun once we start gelling. I am looking forward to meeting you all.

Please spread the word and get anybody who feels inspired by the cause and is willing to work, to come along.

Thanks and Regards,
–
Amit Singh
98863 14456
www.kickstart.in

Some new things that I have been upto!

Well I wrote a bit about my adventures giving a session on algorithms a week back. The basic things with 98% of the engineering colleges in India is that people study to pass. And the teachers teach in a way that is to make the majority of students pass. This is something I am concerned a lot about and I will surely do my bit to make things better for students in colleges someday. In fact a part of my responsibilities at Kickstart is to introduce Entrepreneurship to students. NEN is already doing a good deal in that direction, so I’ll only take on connecting colleges to NEN. I wrote a couple of mails to Laura, the NEN students’ wing cheif. Ashish and I both are passionate about making a difference in this one area and I am sure we shall do something substantial about it in 2008.

1 small thing that I have already started is writing a daily blog that gives one programming problem a day. I post the solution after a 12 hour gap and explain small points that you could keep in mind while coding. The idea is to provide budding programmers a place where problems are explained at their level and where they can come and incrementally grow. I already have a couple of juniors reading it daily. The blog is called IWannaCode and is a blogspot blog! Right now I am experimenting and very ambitiously spoke a bit about STL (The STandard Template Library of C++) in the 3rd post. But I am getting active feedback and hopefully it will be a place where students come daily, see the problem in the morning, code it on their own and come back in the evening to check the solution and how others have solved them.

Another thing thats happening at my end is that I am thinking of getting into sales. Its not coding and I love selling. That could qualify for my ‘living a life I love’ funda! Kesava has offered a few ideas. (He is always brimming with ideas!)

If you are a programmer or a friend, I would appreciate your feedback to my coding blog.

Barcamp Bangalore 6 – My Best BarCamp Ever!

I wasn’t around when the BCB6 planning started. I was enjoying my vacation in Bhopal. I came back to Bangalore a week or so before BCB6 and found little work to do in the organizing front. There was an amazing response in the call for volunteers and 56 people volunteered. This was a major breakthrough compared to previous Barcamps.

I initiated a couple of sessions in BCB6. The first one was on Startup Pains. It was inspired primarily to identify authentic issues that I could take up as a KickStart.in initiative and do my bit towards making Bangalore a heaven for startups. It was led primarily by Prof Suresh. He brought in some presentations and put in a lot of facts in the picture. We got some 5 pain points. 4 of which we had compiled before. The solutions too were something in lines of what we had thought of earlier.

Chetna forced me to sit down with her for her session on Star Signs, astrology, palmistry etc. She chipped in my name and handwriting analysis as well. The session on Star Signs was informative, I figured out that a Star Sign is different from Sun Sign. And as expected there was a lot of debate. I asked if Rajiv, (the guy who was an armature palmist and who seemed to know the most about the topic) if he could tell 1 major incident from my past. If he could accurately say that, I would be a convert. He couldn’t but he did say a thing about creativity which I agree with.

Astrology got even more heated arguments.

Now my turn came to speak about Handwriting Analysis and I was already thinking like “what am I doing here?”. Anyways, I chose not to talk much. I offered to do a 2 line analysis of 10 people who volunteered. I’ll tell 2 things about each of them. If all of them found those two things to be their typical qualities then people could take Handwriting Analysis to be a Science and if it did not match, they could brand it a pseudo science or whatever. And there was only 1 line to read from. It was a gamble, the data was insufficient. But I thought it would be fun and took it on. Result: Out of the 20 or so handwritings that I analyzed, all agreed and only 1 disagreed with a thing I spoke on optimism. I don’t know what the others thought of HandwritingAnalysis though.

Shourya was at his cynical and logical best though! When I looked at a sample’s T bar and spoke a thing about enthusiasm, he commented immediately about the 2 exclamation marks that the sentence carried (something I hadn’t even noticed!!!).

But thats not what made it my best barcamp ever. I just loved the participation. For the first time, I didn’t go to the gates to tie the banners. And when Aditya and I went to the L Cluster after the feedback session to clean the place up, we were surprised to find that everything was spic and span!!! This kind of things happen when people take the event as their own. I guess in BCB6, the majority did take it that way!

I met a lot of amazing people as usual. It was just too good an experience to describe in words.