Live from POCC at SICSR. Bootstrapping vs. VC’s.

Session 1 (Panel Discussion):

speakers:

• social web factory: anand somi

• gs labs: shridhar

• mithi: tarun malaviya

bad news for all of us. we wont be funded. look for some other source of funding. maybe your first customer. not only you get your company funded but also validates as he knows that your doing something (he is anyways going to make sure he gets a good product out of you once he is on board).

lifestyle vs non-lifestyle business.

external funders r not interested in lifestyle biz as the stake holders are believed not to be interrested in growing someone else’s money as long as their network is growing. don’t care about what you’re called as long as you know that you are providing value. people don’t realise that eve thought they are not succesful they are still sitting in the business

vc’s want to move out asap. you should never put yourself in a timeline trap. steve jobs wasnt able to perform repeatable successes until he was 40 something. millions of dollars were lossed for his education between his first n second success.

mithi: we took vc funding becoz of building a corporate structure.

many of us want to start on products and not on services. why? because of exponentiality. you encapsulate a service in a product. try going the other way around and start a service, find gaps and productize it.

target one thing- product or service. otherwise the business tends to move towards both and at a point realise dependecies as crutches. a shared resource will be stretched like a rubber band. keep that in mind. don’t keep shared resources. let the 2 things move independently.

use the experience from your services to develop your product further. get feedback from customer.

each vc you get is a good vc because he is parting with money. you should know why you want the money. get as much cash you can. many companies spend their funding in 6 months and start looking for funding once again. let the vc know what help you want from him. be direct. period.

your advisory board is more important than your vc or anything.

Session 2 (Startup Spotlight):

ThinkingSpace Technologies.

product profile: activeciti, event-a-zoo

product engg projects: rsvpindia, imin-tv

Already through IP issues, sued someone, mentally tortured by running behind the pune police to get a fir registered, and then done a software for the pune police (i believe that’s what he mentioned).

is POCC going to help in setting up a advisory board for startups? will it be succesful? and should the advisory board be offered equity stake? will it prove more fruitful than a voluntary advisory board?