DARE - Because Entrepreneurs Do

Bengaluru
Startup Saturday Bangalore celebrated its second anniversary with much fanfare. Instead of a regular panel discussion and startup product demos, this edition invited the city’s local entrepreneurs to come and share their stories. It was not just the highs, but also the lows; not just the blind beliefs, but also the fears. The speakers, who were handpicked from the earlier editions of SS Bangalore, shared their experiences candidly and offered pearls of wisdom to the audience. The fact that they touched a chord with the audience was evident with several questions being asked and answered in a rapid fire.

The speakers included, Srinivasan KA of Amagi, Shreyans Chopra of Suksh, Sumeet Anand of Kreeo, Aashish Solanki of NetBramha, Jyoti Ramnath of CraftMyGift, and Navin Kumar of eLagaan. More info at http://startupsaturday.headstart.in/event.php?eid=21

Mumbai
Following the tradition of motivating entrepreneurial zeal across this nation, the monthly Startup Saturday was hosted on 13th Feb. The event was attended by over 70 people who came from various domains, regions and backgrounds to brain storm in yet another superb confluence.

The event started with a lecture delivered by Mahesh Shetty the owner of MT Educare. He shared his insights about entrepreneurship and the specific opportunities available in the education sector in India. Mahesh also shared some special nuggets that answered entrepreneurial doubts about self, industry and competitors. He said the most important aspect to win in education or any other any sector is the way you approach the problem. When Mr. Mahesh started Mahesh Tutorials and decided to increase his team, he was called upon by his mentor. He advised Mahesh that he is simply making a mistake by compiling a team of faculties, who will later become his competitors by opening their own classes once they know the business. To this Mahesh replied that he is not creating competitors, rather by empowering his team what he sees is three new branches of Mahesh Tutorials in near future, which will be executed by these three team mates. What happened next is history. Even today the same principles guide his organization of empowered employees called MT Educare!

In the lightening pitches segment there was a good amount of diversity—Akshay from Ads4Good who presented a medium where website owners and bloggers can help uplift the society by providing an ad space on their websites, Anubhuti from DewInk.com, a startup which helps develop a child’s brain with stories that they connect with, Simi and her team from Meter Down the country’s first auto rickshaw magazine, a team from Deltecs who showcased their product Drona which is a mobile application authoring tool, friends from i-become.org who discussed how they are trying to bridge the gap between companies and students from various education institutes.

Finally an interesting part of the meet was the Open House. The theme was HR and personnel issues that the startups have to face; where can they get good team members, how can they manage them and experiences by different startups were discussed. If you weren’t there, you seriously missed great insights! More info on http://startupsaturday.headstart.in/event.php?eid=19

Kolkata
The Kolkata SS started with a talk by Salaree.com founder, Aditya Sanghi, who answered questions about his business.
Salaree.com is a promising modular SaaS-based payroll management system, which is totally web-based. This was followed by an interesting session by Aditya on “is your data ‘earning’ the interest?”
Aditya, a proponent of SaaS took a shot at pitching to businesses and individuals to go the SaaS way. This was followed by the lightning pitches session. More info on http://startupsaturday.headstart.in/event.php?eid=18

Delhi
The theme for SS Delhi was Corporate Social Responsibility—How startups can add value in this segment. Some interesting insights were shared by Nakul Kumar from ReGlobe. The company specializes in providing E-waste management solutions to its clients. They are currently managing the mobile recycling program
for Nokia.

Pankaj Sharma from Center for Transforming India. This very young NGO-startup is trying to create social harmony and help further the growth of our country.

Anand Mahesh from Mavcomm Consulting spoke on “How should startups use PR effectively.” His company’s portfolio includes DLF, Reebok, NEC, Symantec etc.

Hyderabad
SS Hyderabad was held in the premier B-school, ISB, with a sales theme, which included questions like how do you get that first sale, the first paying customer, startups struggle to get leads into corporates and to customers, how do you get those leads and how do you close the sale. Some prominent speakers included Sundar Subramaniam, Co-founder of DimDim, a premier web conference tool, Anil Kumat Katakam, VP, Sales, Innominds, a global software

Pune
SS Pune focused on ventures which normally miss the eye from our heavily digital-media centric lives. These are cool businesses which give better returns to their investors. Brigadier Jayant Mankikar from Checkmate Security Services, Rajiv Kumar from Laundry Consultants Group, and Suketu Talekar from Doolally held the sessions. This was followed by a tea and networking session and a discussion on the Pune Angel Network.

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