Ajay Garg wants more IIM alumni to turn entrepreneurs

Indian Angel Network (IAN), earlier known as Band of Angels, announced an undisclosed investment in online library services startup Kwench last week, taking its portfolio tally to 14. Under the IAN investing model, a group of individuals, between three and ten, who are members of the network pool their resources and invest in a startup. Kwench’s founders are IIM Ahmedabad…

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ChrysCapital ushers in the next decade

It was a rare evening at the Four Seasons hotel in Mumbai on April 16. ChrysCapital, India’s largest independent homegrown private equity firm completed ten years. It was a happy coincidence that the firm decided to host the first of its two anniversary bashes in Mumbai, the city of its birth and somewhat troubled past. The second one comes up…

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Infosys founder Murthy turns venture capitalist

(India) VC Investments Shrink to $49 Million, Down 58% (Livemint) Five Rules For Getting Your Ideas Off the Ground (VentureBeat) Murthy to Turn Venture Capitalist (The Economic Times) Facebook Rejects Funding at $4 billion valuation (VentureBeat) Are PIPEs the Next Frontier for VCs? (Venture Capital Dispatch) Indian Angel Network Invests in Online Library and CRO (VC Circle)

US VC investments down 61.5% in Q1

Update: The NVCA has just put out the Q1 venture capital investment numbers — $3 billion across 549 deals. This represents a 47% decline from the $5.7 billion invested in Q4 2008 across 866 deals. The decline this quarter is even more worrying when compared to Q1 2008 when venture capitalists invested $7.8 billion – which is a drop of…

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iAccelerator 2009: Meet the EIRs

IIM Ahmedabad’s startup assistance programme, iAccelerator 2009, has added one more new dimension this season — a Entrepreneur-in-Residence (EIR) initiative. The school’s Center for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE), under whose aegis the programme is being conducted, has picked four EIRs to help it identify and then work with the six startup teams that will be shortlisted by mid-April for…

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StartupCentral-Medianama Round Table: Before & After (Starting Up) – Part 2

Continuing with our round table series, read what our five panelists — Saurabh Khullar, Ideacts; Jiby Thomas, Quikr; Hrush Bhatt, Cleartrip; Saurabh Gupta, Phonethics; Naveen Tewari, mKhoj — had to say about their experiences in drawing up their business plans. Drawing Board – The Business Plan Nikhil Pahwa: Hrush (Bhatt), how did you go about crafting the business plan? Bhatt:…

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Nasscom Friday’s 2.0: Product marketing

Now is probably not the best of times to go looking for venture capital, but it is definitely the right time to network at every possible forum. And if you are a product company and in New Delhi, the latest Nasscom Friday’s 2.0 workshop on ‘From Product Creation to Marketplace Creation – How Indian Product Companies Can Create‘  coming up…

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