SilliconIndia startup city: mumbai edition

Image by hartboy via Flickr

Yesterday I attended another event, silliconindia startup city  similar to proto.in and this is an effort to summarize my experiences. (you can read about my proto.in experience here) 

The first keynote address (as keynote addresses go), was not really interesting or relevant to the startup space. Presented in a lackluster way about the tautology of universal internet, it set the expectations for what had to come.

The panel discussion that followed was a stark contrast. The discussion topic was building a successful starup, but the speakers all never interacted with each other or the audiences and instead narrated the story of their own journey. Not that I am complaining. While Dheeraj of Altruist had interesting anecdotes to share as to how he failed at launching altruist successfully 2 times earlier and what his learning were, the stage was bursting with pure energy as Bhuvin of DirectI took center stage and narrated the DirectI philosophy of how they viewed business as a  game that needs to be played keeping in mind some of the following principles: there are no managers, just coaches; hire a best man for a particular position, average hires do not aggregate and can replace the star performer; how its important to keep score, keep line of sight of achievements and how to celebrate success. slightly off-topic, but perhaps the best talk of the vent. The other two panelists weer also interesting - one  scratching his head repeatedly and claiming that passion and faith is all you require.

This was followed by a panel on opportunities in internet space. Following the precedent of the earlier panel, this panel too did not discuss or interact with each other or the audiences, but shared their views in a sequential order. First off, was the CEO of Mouthshut.com and his wa a really inetretsing and heartfelt talk- he couldnt help taking jibes at athe gold sponsor Rediif.com whose CEO had refused /question an audience with him, at the early stage of his start up. In retaliation, he had decided that if he ever became successful he would definitely mentor others and reply to those who call for advice. another low moment he said one must be prepared for is reporters throwing away your business card (I am exaggerating a bit here) and shrinking from you as if you have swine flu, when you mention that you are launching a dot com in the dot com burst period...which happened to him and was his lowest point of disappointment and despair. He also mentioned Salar from google as the hero of his company and himself,, as despite being a biology major, and fresh out of college he came up with the concept of adsense and adwords the business that sustains google. I mist say that I was impressed with him and perhaps he has become my hero:-)

The other panelists included the CEO of sulekha who decided to play  the devils advocate and focused instead of the dangers and risks in the Internet space rather than the opportunities.   The other panelists were howvere quite keen on the internet opportunity, especially in India.

This was followed by another keynote by much touted Suresh of Minlogicx relating his journey and though they were filled with interesting anecdotes (either as to his abdul kalam connections or narayan murthy idolism or how every Vice Chancellor this of himself as the evangelist and visionary) the take home was not much except that he was a very successful, and wealthy,  consultant prior to his entrepreneurship.   but ya, he had a very engaging style and I was reminded of the person who had taken over the last blogcamp in Pune and had everyone in fits with his anecdotes. Thankfully the talk was at least somehwt relevant to the topic on hand in this case.

The best of the event was over and from now on the experience was downhill. the ceo conclave session was as boring as it could get. I left early for lunch/ visited the booths in the interim and skipped a major part of the ceo conclave(  not that I missed much as friends told me later) .

Post lunch session was devoted to showcasing the start ups.The first 'startup' to present was a self proclaimed one man show, 100hrs before born start up ideainventory- which was basically patenting 40 of ones ideas and then either selling patents or developing solutions based on the patents. Good idea---who sways idea are worthless by themselves .Lets see how he executes this idea.First off he should have at least presented a ppt deck and not relied on an unreadable word doc to present his idea.
Next on were many different presentations- some repeating the same mistake of using too small fonts/ images...others making the mistake of reading verbatim from their decks..albeit agonizingly slowly.  PlugHR presentation stood out from the crowd and I liked the innovativenss and creativity they displayed at their booth,  brochures etc.  Other presentations were more a leraning as to how not to present. One guy even acted funny and cointinued his presentations despite many reminedrs that his time was over:-)

The startups themselves were good...crederity with verifcation services, yoknowldge and yopedia , virtual rack all interesting concepts, but if it wasn't for the panel discussions, perhaps the experience would have been forgettable.

Overall, the panel discussions in sillicon india startup city were pretty good, especially some of the speakers. I look forward to more events of this kind.