Mr. Ajit Balakrishnan, Founder and CEO, Rediff.com, was another interesting speaker at the event. Balakrishnan was happy about the facilities that institutes like the IITs and IIMs provide for the budding entrepreneurs plus the e-summit-like networking events. However, he pointed out, the amount of seed-level funding available to the Indian entrepreneurs, is virtually non-existent. This, he said, was “not working” for India and this was necessary if we want to build a healthy entrepreneurial ecosystem in India.

A remark by him – “Bombay now has more VCs than there are entrepreneurs”, raised quite a laughs from the audience. The statement was aimed at pointing out that a lot of VCs have taken up to the Indian market and a lot of funds are flowing in for anyone who is interested in starting up. But one should be careful enough while choosing a venture capitalist.

Balakrishnan further noted how VCs are “clustering” their investments together. So, at one point in time, you have an idea of a travel site, and you don’t get any VC for it. After a while, however, there are as many as six different VC-funded portals on travel industry. And after one of them succeeds and the rest fail in oblivion, there is again no money bet on this idea anymore. This, he said, was not such a healthy practice, and the VCs should look further towards the greener turfs. Domains which are fresh and untapped.

His advice to the budding entrepreneurs – focus on some technological innovation. Take the Google example. The search process, prior to Google was a largely manual job. So there was Yahoo, paying hundreds of librarians to find the right kind of webpages. And then came Google, with its Pagerank algorithm and found a way to derive the relevancy of a webpage to the search query by taking into account the links linking back to the original webpage. And this, added a lot of value to the end user, and therefore helped Google monetize this service.

So, he tells the wannabes to focus more on technological innovation and then leverage it for business purpose. Pure execution – without any technological innovation- won’t cut it, he said.

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