Startup Saturday Kolkata is back with a bang! May 2013 Edition

By Murtuza Rohawala 

Startup Saturday Kolkata for the Month of May started back with a bang after a wait of couple of months! Unlike our past editions which were skewed towards having guest speakers and audience from IT/ITeS services this time round we had a very eclectic audience  consisting of Entrepreneurs from Construction business, Real Estate, Saree Wholesale, Energy Trading, Engineering Animation, Perfume Testing, Media, Distribution, Dance Academy, Financial Consulting, Advertising, Brand Management, Placement Consultancy etc.

The theme of our conversation was ‘Learning from Mistakes’ – a free flowing discussion moderated by Umesh Bhutoria. The participation was astounding as various participants spoke on how they bungled up while starting up. Selecting and then trusting your partner is the keysaid Dipayan Banerjee, CEO of Anthelion. He elaborated how some of his mistakes cost him dearly later on. Sumit Surekha of Crazy about Startups spoke about how his first venture crashed due to lack of  cash flow planning. The discussion wielded a lot of such insights about mistakes people make while starting up.

We also had a lightening pitch about the business model by Raunak Guha of Foundermates.com, a portal which envisages being a matchmaking site for entrepreneurs and business advisors/mentors. FounderMates aims to disrupt the current methods of seeking advisors which include social media, informal networks, attending events or cold calling to make the process easier and faster and thus help entrepreneurs when they need advisors the most. No more hassle of finding great advisors through informal means or spamming on social media channels. “It was an awesome experience presenting to some 40-off people who gave me some fantastic & honest feedback” said Raunak, an MBA from Imperial College, London.

We also had a short presentation from IIT Kharagpur’ E-Cell representative Ankur who spoke about various entrepreneurship activities and how they would like to engage with Startup Saturday members.

#SSKol in Action – May 2013

Earlier, while starting up the evening, Abhinaba Dey, City Lead of Headstart Kolkata chapter, presented to the 50 attendees on how Headstart could help budding entrepreneurs through 10000Startups initiative of NASSCOM, Tlabs and Mahindra Rise.

 “In a city which is no longer considered as enterprising as other metros, this is a welcome change. Great initiative by Startup Saturday” said Murtuza Rohawala of Edfin Consultancy speaking about the event. Shawan Sarkar of Webmoguls also agreed on how much he was surprised at the interest in starting up in Kolkata. “It’s a great platform to network and learn so much from others” said Meenakkshi Sen of Bang-in-the-middle.

Abhinaba Dey also said that, we are going to diversify and trying to reach to the industries and the entrepreneurs across the verticals for a larger entrepreneurial community in the eastern India.

Stay Tuned for all the buzz here!

1 comment

  1. Liked the review very much. We would want to be a part of Saturday meeting – kindly let me know how would i register.

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