It was middle of the night, 01:05 AM Feb 06th and came on hangouts my AppyFest co-founder's message
> "fb/events/232534833748096"
It happens a lot of times and is always annoying. Ashish is so found of one word-messages which he will send out of the blue. And this was one of the tough cases, as he pinged this and disappeared.
Oh what is it. Let me check.
Some fb event...Okay its a startup meet.
< "Yes, Ashish you should definitely go "
< "for this funding event you guys can go as audience and lets try to learn what is the process"
< "its 500 per head for going as audience"
But there was no one on the other end. And I realized that it was another of those tough cases.
Anyways this was something new. Startup events. Nice. I explored a bit more and found another one. This one by IndianStartups. Oh! it was in Bangalore. Nice. When? Okay Feb 6th. Oh! its today at 03:00PM. Seems doable although its 03:11 AM already
I booked a premier ticket which gave guaranteed seating. Did an Internet recharge. Woke a few hours later. And took a bus for the spot-
Green Bubbles, L165, 1st Floor, Sri Gayathri Complex, HSR layout, Sector 6, Bangalore
Although it was just 16 km but I left 4 hours ahead of time fearing the Bangalore traffic. Google Maps made for me a bus plan. But after halfway, the next bus it was suggesting is, as per the people around, not plying any longer. Man. Confusion. Why am I taking these stupid buses? and not just a plain ola. I knew the answer and just retold myself- cabs are costly. One should adapt to his current monthly income. So I chose an alternate bus. Some different route.
It was 03:10 and I was still in the bus remembering my friend- Sumit who discouraged me leaving 4 hours ahead of time. This stupid bus dropped me where it was still hundreds of metre away.
Running through the streets and societies as guided by google maps, I finally reached around 03:40, panting. A nice girl at the desk welcomed me warmly. Even more warmly after knowing my name as it was in her list of guaranteed-seating.
"Am I late?"
"No; You are exactly on time. "
A guy assisted me to my reserved seat in the second row. I was happy that all rows were occupied and there were people standing at the back.
It was as soon as I sat and opened my complementary water-bottle that the proceedings started.
In the panel were:
Anupam Mishra the Rajasthan boy, with 20+ years of managing experience in automobile industry working with leading firms like Tata Motors. An year ago he started Autotygr- an aggregator for vehicle servicing. Strangely enough, this is what I was brainstorming at and convincing my friends about in my final year of B. Tech. The idea was promising but 2 reasons that stopped me were lack of automobile experience and finance. And clearly these restrictions aren't applicable to Anupam.
Lightning struck the same spot twice when he, as part of an answer, suggested the audience in general to look beyond apps. He said, "Just look around. In Rajasthan there is so much of art. You can start selling the artworks online." Man. Either my ideas are too obvious or Mishra breathes what I exhale. Since selling Odisha artworks on amazon.com was what I brainstormed 6 months back. But I don't care much about uniqueness of ideas these days as I have seen enough examples of firms with overlapping/coincidental ideas to co-exist and thrive in the same market. It is important to "do". To do any of the decent ideas you have instead of wasting life in hunt of the perfect "new" idea.
Senthil Kumar M, had 1.5 years experience as senior SDE in Samsung and 3 year at Qualcomm. He is running a group- Mentoo Mentors which is giving technological mentorship to young students in India's tier2 and tier3 cities. In his hometown Madurai, Senthil is mentoring around 200 girls on weekends. 
The moderator was Nelson Vasanth, founder of Honey Technologies- which as far as I understand is a company providing support-services to other companies. This was a young and dynamic guy with a year experience at Yahoo and another year at Microsoft. He has done just recently things which I am thinking to do. Seemed somewhat like a-few-years-later version of mine. When still in Microsoft, he could create a group of 75 people working with him on Honey Technologies.
Some take-aways I got from him are:
- Investors don't like to fund startups which are a one-man show. You may be proud of yourself working 16 hours a day and managing your job as well as startup simultaneously but that smells of an unstable equilibrium and this smell itself is enough to ward-off investors.
- Building good relations with people is important. He said his team of 75 is working on Honey Technologies, for a few months now each working without expectation of salaries.
It was a good day for networking as I met a number of founders and came to know about their 'creations' (or should it be 'findings'!).
Val from Animaker- DIY animated video creator, Chandrasekhar from Scientiamobile- a library for mobile apps which does some ls on the device and help collects some statistics. These two were sponsoring the event.
I met Krishna an aged fellow who started his conversation with me by guessing (and guessing rightly) my home state. He said he studied some linguistics and can tell by how I speak English. He was running a financial evaluations firm. Wow, I never knew such things exist. He could value anything from buildings to websites. His son started a custom tshirt printing company- Teecultr which Krishna was here to promote. At the end of the event, he was so kind to drop me in his car. He was knowledgeable and was willing to converse on any and every topic. I tried varying the topic of discussion from Google Maps to American lifestyle to Baba Ramdev and Rajiv Dixit's death. And he always had something to say.
Another useful info I got was that Green Bubbles is something which provides office space solutions for startups.
Also it was nice to meet Arjun, the guy from IndianStartups. They projected IndianStartups as a non-profit volunteering thing, but I will like to double check as I came paying for my reserved seat !
Another interesting person to meet was Krish. It was Shwetha Krish. A lady who after being an HR with TCS for 3 years, is now a freelancing social media content writer. She came with Nelson, her client, who found her on LinkedIn. I will definitely need such expertise for AppyFest.
The day was productive in the sense that I got to know these many diverse people and collected a few visiting cards and made a few LinkedIn connections.
Other then networking the key content that came out was about Modi's Startup India Initiative.
- There is some gov app in which one may register his company
- Paperwork is expected to get simplified starting April
- Registered company need to get along with some incubator
- Usually you get 3 lakhs + 3 months to make an MVP
- And 60 lakh seed funding is normal to expect
This is NOT about what government is giving as part of Startup India Initiative.
The primary support from govt is that they won't complicate the processes or hamper the development (and even that is a great support infact). Govt. gives none of the fundings and its just that you register there and get to recognize yourself as a startup which can facilitate in you getting an incubator/accelerator and rest all is per the forces of market.
And the day was done.
Not exactly, as I realized, seeing the map that this HSR layout is pretty close to Baby Mona School. Its where my friend Mohit Jindal lives (who when I wrote about last was with Grab House but is now at 25LPA in Microsoft). Courtesy Krishna that he drove me towards Mona.
It is so nice to stop by at an old friend. So easing it is to repeat the same old talks in the same old style. The same old jokes and the same old arguments. He gave me a nice dinner and a super nice frozen-yogurt treat.
At around 11:00PM I took the bus back to home. I dropped off half-kilometer away from my hostel (intentionally this time) and started slowly waking my way to PD while revisiting the day in thoughts.
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