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Event Review: Startup Saturday Mumbai & Some StartUp Concerns
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I was present at the recently organized startup saturday event in Mumbai S.P.Jain auditorium. Attended both the sessions out of which the first one was given by Vishal Gupta of Seclore on How to use the competition as your weapon - Importance, processes and methodologies for mapping competition and the second session was on Microfinance in India by Ramakrishna of Rang De.
This was my second startup saturday that I attended in Mumbai. The feeling was very entrepreneurial with atleast an audience of 40 people and the speakers very eager to answer all questions. Here is a review of what was spoken at the event.
How to use the competition as your weapon - Importance, processes and methodologies for mapping competition
Though I was a little late for this session Vishal was basically driving down the point of how knowing your competition helps not only from a competitive intelligence point of view but from also a venture capital point of view.
He said if you do your research well and present it to a VC you inturn reduce the efforts required by him to do reserach on your competitors and their USP and compare it against yours.
There was also a debate on whether competitors can collaborate together? But Vishal disagreed and pointed out that he has rarely seen any collaboration between a startup and a big company who are competitors or two startups who are competitors. He felt only startups catering to two different geographical location mght collaborate even if they were competitors.
Microfinance in India
Ramkrishna’s presentation on Rangde blew me away as it was great to see so much of passion in the social entrepreneurship field. The whole objective of Rangde is to bring down the cost of microfinance in India. So instead of the regular 24% that most other microfinance institutions charge these guys charge 8.5%. They are a not for profit organization which is driven primarily through the web medium. Rangde feels it real revenue would come in through the advertising on the website.
Discussion During Networking
The discussion I had with a few people revolved around what was lacking in the startup ecosystem in India currently.. And like me most people felt that there were enough founders and there were enough employees as well but what the space lacked was the Intrapreneurs i.e. the management team or the second line in a startup.
Most people agreed that building that management team with the intrapreneurial ability was the most difficult task! The reason for the same were pointed out as Lack of value for equity, lack of role clarification and Peer pressure for fat salary.
What do you guys feel? Anyone disagrees?
PS: Next startup saturday is on 11th October at SPJain
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