DARE - Because Entrepreneurs Do

With Startup Saturday spreading to 8 cities across the country, the newer chapters of Headstart Startup Saturday matured in Ahmedabad, Kolkata and Pune, led by enthusiastic entrepreneurs, with each one of them seeing a healthy turnout

Ahmedabad
Ashish Soparkar from Meghmani Organics Ltd spoke about his business experience and his intelligent diversification in business. He spoke about the various ways of garnering funds and gave insights on how to get support from the government and various banks.

There were some exciting partnership announcements from Headstart with NEN eWeek and the Startup Weekend scheduled to happen in Delhi and Bangalore. This was followed by Atul’s presentation on Road2Ideas. The session ended with power filled lightening pitches from Neel Shah of Spoxchange and Nikhil Talreja of KuchBhiBikega.

Zerin Rahiman of Indigo Edge at Bangalore.	Siddharth Shastri speaking at Bangalore	Ms Daksha from GINSERV

Bangalore
This one was all about Co-founders! The event was preceded by co-founders' match making on the Headstart site. Ms Daksha from GINSERV spoke about their incubation process. She also outlined details about business plans, process profiles and screening by the panel in order to incubate those ideas.

Siddharth Shastri, founder of Phi Tesla, and an MS from the USA, pursued his interest in the automotive industry and founded Phi Tesla. He spoke to the audience about the challenges the company faced and the prospects they churned out overtime. The concept of ‘Digital Speedometer’ was his brain child. He also spoke on effective outsourcing of ‘Marketing & Strategy’ to carry on various operations.

Then Zerin Rahiman, founder of Indigo Edge, took us through his journey of meeting and finding co-founders to execute his idea. He spoke about 3 main qualities of a co-founder - Health, Abilities, Trust; and about mapping opportunities and competition during a co-founder search.

‘Co-founder speed dating’ - an exciting idea where entrepreneurs get an opportunity to find a co-founder suiting their venture-profile with the skill-sets and abilities was followed. A general networking session followed it.

Abhishek Rungta at Startup Saturday, Kolkata

Kolkata
“No one is really interested in the B-Plan, but what’s the Plan-B in store, is what matters!” This perhaps is the direct message that any investor needs to send to all budding entrepreneurs, and this was discussed here.

Founder of Seeders Angel Investors, Abhishek Rungta (Indusnet Technologies), shared his insights as an angel investor. He focused on—credibility of the presenter and the Plan-B in store.

A business plan competition sponsored by Seeders in association with Startup Saturday Kolkata was announced. Next, Romit Dasgupta (Director , Globsyn Business School) shared his views of a business model, plans of improvisation of different combinations of product and market, operations, management and finance related issues.

In a discussion on “Who and specifically why investors or funding is required,” some of the attendees stressed on credit cards, and sneaking into your dad’s pocket for the initial fund to which many others agreed. Then, Hemant Chabria, Chabria Infotech spoke about his business of selling licensed and original versions of softwares in the market. The social and environment activist group—Diya, gave its presentation on conserving the nature and helping the poor, and how collaboration with startups and corporates can help. The group found some active volunteers at the venue.

A presentation on the upcoming Kolkata Bloggers Meet 2011, was given by Kamanashish Roy of Webreps,  received active participation. The event concluded with a presentation on NEN eWeek, Startup Weekend and MentorEdge.

Mumbai
The theme at SPJIMR was ‘Cloud Computing’. The event kicked off with Pravin Wicliff of icicletech.com talking about how startups can adopt cloud computing. He laid out the core features and reasons for success of Cloud computing – Scalability, Agility, etc. He further explained IaaS (Infrastructure as a service), PaaS (Platform as a service) and SaaS (Software as a service). He shared a number of online tools for both, pro cloud businesses as well as cloud-supported structures.

Lightening pitches followed with the first one by Krunal Mehta of LeadCapture.in, about his product that makes it simple for organizations to collect leads/ queries/ complains, etc. from a website. Krunal’s product integrates SMS notifications, auto forwards emails to concerned person, etc. among other features.

Simone Brunozzi, technology evangelist of Amazon Web Services, explained the concept of cloud computing and moved on to case studies of startups who have managed to scale from zero to millions of users within days, all powered by the amazing cloud architecture. He happily answered questions that ranged from technical to Amazon’s business model in the cloud.

SS Pune, Suruchi Wagh, Founder, NextLeap	Junta at Startup Saturday, Hyderabad	Super turnout of entrepreneurs in Pune

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Startup Saturday is an initiative by Headstart Network Foundation to provide entrepreneurs in each city with a monthly community driven forum that is structured in agenda but open in discussions. To attend Startup Saturday in your city visit www.headstart.in. Inputs from – Himanshu Chanda, Nagashree Iyer, Abhinaba Dey, Vinutha N & Annkur P Agarwal.

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