Making sure that we don’t fail to learn from failure- Startup Saturday Bangalore April 2011

There’s a saying that goes “Smile and the world smiles with you, cry and you cry alone”. Many people extend this saying to success and failure, downplaying the valuable and irreplaceable learning that comes from Startup Failures. Startup Saturday, Bangalore on 9^th April focused on the lessons learnt from Startup Failures, a topic that always generates a lot of keen interest. The event saw around 90 attendees enjoying the enriching, humorous and straight-from-the-heart talks that day.

The event started out with Lightning Pitches. Avin Jain and Vaibhav Gupta from ADIS Health Tech spoke first, about changing India and changing India’s health lifestyle through a new health management system. They are India’s first online medical record management system and offer some core services related to health ID number, online accounts, mobile applications and emergency helpline services. They also showed their impressive gallery of achievements to the audience.

Ravi Gururaj from Citrix spoke next. He introduced the Startup Accelerator program, which works with around 12 startups a year for 16 months. After initially investing around 100 to 400 thousand dollars, the Startup Accelerator works with each startup on capital, coaching, customers and connections, being involved from the beginning.  He can be reached at ravi.gururaj@citrix.com.

Sunil Patro introduced Easy Sign Mobile. Signing and filling documents constantly ends up being considerably inconvenient for Individuals, Small business owners and Mobile workers. Easy Sign Mobile is an iPhone app that allows people to digitally sign their documents on touch phones without any paper or hassle. He talked about it being Super Easy, Convenient and cheap.

The main talk based on lessons learnt from Startup Failures came next, delivered in a witty, humorous and unabashedly honest manner from the Founder and CEO of Pepper Square, Muki.  In his refreshingly quick presentation style, Muki joked about the prerequisites for success and spoke about his previous seven failures. There were several takeaways from his talk- the need to be willing to experience life, internalizing, failing fast so that success comes quicker, getting addicted to challenging the known for the known. A remarkable point was that the idea that you have for a startup shouldn’t be something you came up with last night, it should be something long term, an idea that you’d die for.

Muki also talked about the need to simplify, understand internal navigation to deal with crisis and the need to stop looking only at financial stability. He urged entrepreneurs to never become more than their job, to learn with minimal resources, show leadership with family friends and society, define their own style and carry everyone forward. With amazing personal anecdotes, he delved into a little bit of philosophy, talking about competing with your inner conscience for success, making a choice to be happy and being persistent with action. Just like a dog wags its tail everyday no matter what and move on, so should we all, he said. He ended by talking about truly living the one life we have to the fullest, and everyone in the room was undoubtedly inspired.

The lightning pitches continued with an outstanding presentation by Cohan from Aiaioo labs, a consulting company. His amazing demo of Vaklipi, a programming system that understands human language and that too, in several languages like tamil, kannada, hindi and Chinese was garnered a lot of attention and is sure to do so in the future. He can be reached  at cohan@aiaioo.com.

Padma Latha spoke next, on her interesting  initiative with a partner, the <Just Femme> Media Initiative. Just Femme is a spunky and unabashedly female news magazine that covers sensible women-related stories and information much unlike the magazines women currently find today. It is a magazine that truly attempts to make a difference.

Kartik, a Volunteer at HeadStart  spoke about his idea, Mango Melons in order to solicit valuable feedback.  Mango Melons is a smartphone service that brings many needs, brands and services to one accessible spot on your phone, including public services like railway bookings, matrimony search, job search, appointments, etc. It is a web and mobile portal that offers various services under one application, allowing all of them to compete on the same platform equally.

The action packed event ended with a networking session, and I’m sure the attendees would all agree that this was truly an insightful and innovative Startup Saturday. We’re all waiting for the next one!

Startup Saturdays are monthly networking meets for entrepreneurs, organized by HeadStart Network Foundation. These events happen across 8 Indian cities on the Second Saturday of every month. For more details, visit www.startupsaturday.in

– Contributed by Ramya Rajan