Signing off 2010 in Style at Startup Saturday Bangalore

The month of December brings both endings and beginnings to the forefront, and what a great way to culminate a year of amazing work by HeadStart, with yet another spectacular Startup Saturday in IIM-Bangalore. The event was based on the theme “Scaling a Services Startup”. This was a particularly engaging and active event, with good turn-out in terms of participants, and some fascinating talks and lightning pitches.

Ajay Shankar Sharma, the CEO of Srishti Software (Started in 1997), was the first speaker. Starting with his background and a nice personal account of his experiences, Ajay shared some insights with the crowd on taking the plunge at the right time and anticipating road-blocks in terms of support and finances. He also stressed on the need to be able to scale-back when required to avoid a bubble-burst situation during continuous scaling up. With vivid examples of hibernation or lying low when required, a template explaining how the market operates and an animated discussion on market analysis to determine the right time for scale-up, Ajay’s talk was filled with important take-away points for any services organization. He also spent some time in depicting the importance of analyzing demand and supply, and how the supply side of things is something an entrepreneur must analyze. His points led to interesting questions based on downsizing business and increasing the probability of success. It was extremely interesting to learn about SuperSeva and Srishti’s current product offerings in the healthcare and media space as well.

The next talk was by Madhav Raju, the COO of IIHT (Indian Institute of Hardware and Technology). Most of us have seen IIHT advertisements at some point and it was quite exciting to see the man behind it all share his story. Madhav talked about recognizing his key differentiator in hardware training, something absent at the time, and related it to Ajay’s concept of differentiating yourself as a Startup. He talked about developing the course curriculum, the idea of franchising as an effect of people’s queries, and hiring extremely talented people by compensating them extremely well, as it is the people who run an organization. He also shared some interesting anecdotes regarding legal issues and equity and talked about the importance of being the best at whatever kind of business you do. Madhav talked passionately about everyone aligning with the goals and vision of the organization, investing in marketing and people, handling competition and being in a niche business. His pointers on working with integrity, guaranteeing a certain quality and right pricing were truly inspirational.

December saw some spectacular lightning pitches that piqued everyone’s interest. Praveen and Avinash pitched 99tests.com, their crowd-sourcing platform that is a testing solution for projects. They talked about rewarding top testing talent and hence sourcing an on-demand QA team that provides instant quality results, and they aim to become a learning community as well. Arjun spoke about Taazza, a new location-based discovery and delivery service for India that brings local news and deals to you. TaazzaGo is their mobile offering that covers real time news and deals from over 40 cities and 100,000 localities in India. Sharath from Ferdinand Wealth Management talked about the importance of cash flow and how he could help understand the difference between managing money and controlling money. Ferdinand Wealth Management primarily gets people in control of their finances. The event ended with a quick presentation on L-pad, a virtual start-up incubator based in Chandigarh, that comprises of a group of entrepreneurs, investors and mentors. Check out Lpad.in to know more.

Friends, don’t miss the Startup Saturday Bangalore on 8^th January 2011. This long- awaited event will be aired by ET Now on its show Starting Up. Click here to register for this action-packed event.

Here’s wishing all the readers, entrepreneurs and volunteers a Merry Christmas and a fantastic New Year ahead.

Contributed by Ramya Rajan