Updates on networking for startups, entrepreneurs and anybody interested in entrepreneurship:

Startup Saturday, from the HeadStart Network Foundation, is hosting its July 2010 edition on the 10th (Saturday). Those in Mumbai can register here. The theme this month is ‘workshop-wallahs’. Entrepreneurs of a different variety, from the small scale industries segment, will share their experiences and learnings in building their businesses. The accent will be on businesses that are completely offline. Information on the Bangalore, Delhi and Kolkata editions here.

The Startup Centre, a new initiative born in Chennai and announced recently, will host its first meet today at 6.30 pm. The venue is Ascendas — trust folks in Chennai are familiar with the place. The agenda is to interact with the team (Vijay Anand, Dorai Thodla, Mahesh Radha Krishnan) behind the initiative and talk about the whats and hows of making the centre work. They’re gunning for a September launch.

Some may recall that around June last year, Anand stepped back from his role as chief evangelist (he prefers the term ‘çurator’) of startup showcase forum Proto.in to work on a new project. The Startup Centre is the second initiative launched this month by a founding member of the startup unconferencing movement that kicked off in India just a few years ago. Last week we talked about the launch of HeadStart Ventures, started by HeadStart Network Foundation co-founder Kallol Borah. Proto.in and HeadStart Network Foundation are now established startup showcase forums here. Their success seems to have begun to spawn new initiatives, led (not surprisingly) by their alumni, to take the development of the startup ecosystem to the next level.

Chennai will be the venue for The Startup Centre’s launch and Anand is currently scouting a suitable venue  and sponsors in and around the information technology corridor there. The focus for now will be on technology-related startups, particularly in the mobile and Internet spaces. Future plans involve going national, starting with Pune, tentatively in the first quarter of 2011. “The centre in Chennai will give us an indication of process, costs and acceptance,” he says.

What entrepreneurs can expect from The Startup Centre:

• Young startups, with as small as one or two-member teams, can use the centre at a nominal monthly fee. There will also be a per day membership fee option.
• Facilities include conferencing and brainstorming rooms, bean bags, wifi and whiteboards — basic stuff one would need to crank out a prototype, as Anand puts it.
• The centre will also host training programmes, Barcamps, technology/design/entrepreneurship workshops and other networking events that would help entrepreneurs.
• The centre will create opportunities for entrepreneurs to interact with lawyers, accountants, venture capitalists and mentors.

There’s more. Entrepreneurs who seek support beyond the facilities offered by The Startup Centre could enter into an equity arrangement with the centre in lieu of fund-raising support or even direct investments. This will probably be on a selective basis and not too many details are available yet on how this would be structured. Equity as payment for support, specifically at the fund-raising stage, is available from several other incubators in the country and is fast catching on as a business model in itself. “Fund-raising hopefully will be the last thing we will do. It requires much closer hand-holding and involvement with the companies,” says Anand. He also says he is not looking at raising a seed fund at this stage.

Related Posts

HeadStart Ventures to plug funding gap with angel fund

Startup-picking at Proto.in

Proto.in grows up

Though it will compete with organized angel investor networks such as Mumbai Angels and Indian Angel Network, HeadStart Ventures’ functioning style will be a cross between an incubator and a venture capital firm. Individuals who want to invest in the fund will be required to make a minimum commitment of Rs 50 lakh. Each individual investor will become a limited partner in the fund. While Rs 25 crore is the target corpus for now, the founders have not set a hard cap yet on the final fund size. It will have an investment committee which will vet and close deals. This will be supported by an operations team which will be involved in activities such as workshops and managing mentors and industry partnerships. Borah and his co-founders will man the operations team and probably also be on the investment committee, though he says, “I think we will end up having a different set of people on the committee.”

The investment strategy is to park anywhere between Rs 20 lakh and Rs 2 crore per startup and for now, the focus will be on communications and technology startups. The fund will remain invested in a startup for 2-4 years. Each startup will have a mentor, who will be embedded in the startup after being identified and matched through an 8-day workshop (which begins in early August). “Apart from having relevant experience, mentors should be in a position to spend an hour per startup per day,” says Borah. This is usually the part that fails in any startup mentoring programme. Borah and his colleagues hope to address that problem by creating an incentive-linked mentoring programme. Each mentor will receive cash or stock or both in the startup that he/she mentors. However, this is not new. Bangalore-based Morpheus Venture Partners, for instance, takes a 7-10 per cent stake per company in lieu of mentoring.  It has also recently raised a seed fund to invest in startups — read a WSJ-Venture Capital Dispatch post here.

The HeadStart Ventures team has several other value-added services planned for startups. However, much of what it outlines as differentiators — results-oriented mentoring, access to markets, etc. — is already out there in various forms. For instance, there are several successful entrepreneurs who already work closely with young entrepreneurs in these areas either on their own or through organized angel investor networks. HeadStart Ventures’ real value proposition lies in being able to consistently raise seed money in the long term and stay true to its intentions. It will be a tough fight, especially in India, but a worthy one.

January is also the month when the two rival startup networking conferences — HeadStart and Proto.in — go head-to-head. Last year they had their respective events on the same days. This year better sense seems to have prevailed. Not much available yet on the agenda and speakers at Proto.in — badges for bloggers are available on the blog — but let’s hope, getting into journalists’ minds aside, the event continues with the good work of showcasing startups from diverse sectors.

Haven’t heard much on Proto, which is also currently underway. I’m waiting for the event to hold its next edition in Mumbai.

Meanwhile, friends from IIT Bombay’s E-Cell wrote in over the week with an update on the final leg of Eureka! 2007. The finalists will be awarded on February 10th at the Entrepreneuship Summit 2008. This is going to be a one-day power-packed event and the new thing this year is a VC Pitch. Investors to catch at the pitch include Mayfield Fund, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital and Trinity Ventures. Start-ups who want to be shortlisted for the pitch will have to submit their entries by Sunday (January 20th). And yes, you will actually get to raise money via these pitches.

Sateesh Andra, venture partner, Draper Fisher Jurvetson: “When it comes to monetization, you need to have a clear answer – what, when, how much. Just saying we will go for advertising or subscription alone does not help”

Venki Nishtala, CTO, Rediff.com: “Cannot go on to make yet another IM. We have plans to offer a viral type application. If it is a disruptive idea, other people should be willing to share information.”

Hrush Bhatt, head of product engineering, Cleartrip: “Don’t fall in love with tech for its own sake. Keep it as simple as possible for both back end and the front end. Never be afraid of hiring someone who is smarter than you.”

Devesh Garg, Managing Director, Bessemer Venture Partners: “Think always about the market. Technology can only take you so far. In the long run you will always need to be business minded.”

About the author: Arpit Agarwal is a compulsive BarCamper and blogger. He is also a software engineer currently based in Mumbai and was one of the key forces behind the revival of BarCamp Mumbai last year.

Alabot: The next time you are chatting with a chat-based support, you can never be sure if you are actually talking to a human sitting anywhere in the planet. Alabot has come up with a text-based intelligent system that can act as a human sitting at the other end. It can work with NLP, AI, neural networks and all the other hi-fi jargon you have heard about. Check out the demo on their website. Pretty interesting indeed.

Proficio: Proficio is a Bangalore based software company. It is a specialized web-based GIS, GIS/Mapping, spatial data integration and geo-database design company.

SneakCast: SneakCast is a video based search engine. At the core of technology is their advanced facial recognition technology. They use web 3.0 type semantic based technology to put context and key-elements together to make sense of a video in order to break it down into searchable patterns. It showed a demo on how they can search for a ‘batman flying in night’ video.

90 Degree Internet: Ninety Degree Internet Software pvt. Ltd (aka 90DI) is an Internet company that aspires to develop modern Internet products with a special emphasis on being ‘local’. It is focusing on addressing the unique needs of a local community, which are typically not addressed by providing generic solutions at a world-wide scale.

mobiSolv: mobiSolv, is mobile solutions organization with focus on solving real life problems using the mobile technology. They are currently focused on providing solutions in the mobile advertising and marketing pace. They demoed myAdz, the largest mobile ad network in India. We did get a feeling that this has surely the way to go.

As a startup, you should be looking forward to Startup Saturday coming up under the banner of Kickstart.

Right now, the inaugural keynote by Dr. C Mohan, chief scientist IBM India is going on. He is speaking on innovation and technology with IBM as a case study.

More to come on the same location. Stay tuned!

Headstart takes off on January 18-20 in Bangalore’s IISc. This is a place to showcase innovation in products and technology. The website promises networking with venture capitalists. Folks such as Ram Shriram from Sherpalo Ventures and Alok Mittal from Canaan Partners are expected to be around.

Proto.in, now the most successful start-up showcase event in the country, stages its next edition on January 18-19. This will probably be Proto.in’s last edition in Chennai for a while. It goes national from here.

BarCamp Ahmedabad comes up on January 19 on-campus at the Indian Institute of Management.

Just thinking, all these events fall on the same dates. Maybe the organizers should get together and plan their calendars to allow start-ups to attend all of them or at least more than one.