I must say, your presentation was brilliant.

Cheers…

Two quick points

1. Please don’t form an opinion based on what you read in the media. The VCCircle story was based on a phone interview, and i’m sure you understand that some of these quotes look very different when taken out of context. It’s not the reporters fault – you shorten a story, and some of it is unlinked.

2. When i said “Unless it’s a must have…”, what I meant to say was – one needs to figure out the value delivered to the member (user), and do it quickly. If the value delivered isn’t high enough, it won’t work in the Indian market. That’s a must have. A nice to have is something which the user may like once or twice, but when life gets busy, won’t use. Those plays won’t work in India. In India, we have plenty of social life with family and friends. The bar to get someone to use a service is high – service needs to deliver value. Unfortunately, as it is with most media interviews, they use soundbites .

And I don’t mean “value delivered” to be a tangible thing or monetary/business value. A bollywood portal like Chakpak can be of high value – like the Delhi Times paper I read every other day . It’s entertainment. Alok Kejriwals’ Games2Win delivers high value to people who just love the brainless games.

In the context of techTribe, it was a nice to have to a certain extent. Users liked the site, but didn’t get addicted to it.

Hope that clears up some of the confusion.

I also liked how you both responded to audience questions and suggestions.

Wishing you all the best.

I have tremendous respect for you and have been following your venture very keenly. In fact, we celebrated in our office when techtribe featured in “Young Turks” program.

If u remember, we also had a small e-mail conversation on 9/10/07 for a possible alliance.

But, I am extremely sorry to say that some of your statements really taken us back. Like “Unless it’s a service that is a must have, it doesn’t work in Indian web” — Source: VC Circle.

As, many budding entrepreneurs like me are looking up to you, please think through properly before making such general statements. These statements can create a lot of confusion in our minds. And I am sure, thats not great for our eco-system.

Anyways, I heard that you are already starting with your new venture. Wish you all the best for that and for all your future endeavors.

This is Rohit. I agree. I would never recommend that one look for reasons for failure and decide to close. It’s difficult to describe details in a generic talk where not everyone is familiar with referral recruiting models. I did clearly mention that it was a very difficult decision, made after looking at all external and internal factors. Persistence is extremely important, but not in a vacuum. When companies like Infy and Naukri were being persistent, the outsourcing and job markets were in their infancy. In mature markets, when the hypothesis doesn’t get validated, and when you realize that even if the market did accept it 3 years later, larger players would have a distinct advantage – persistence may not be the best option.

Yes, it’s more difficult when you’ve taken outside money, but a lot lot more when you have matched it with your own life savings in it. And it gets a LOT more difficult if one were to take even more outside money – wouldn’t you say? Rest assured that these aren’t easy decisions – too much at stake to simply decide. My point wasn’t to suggest to anyone to not be persistent, but to not latch on to something just to save face – we tend to do a lot of that in India.

“Rohit felt that the earlier you spot failure the better it is” — How do u spot a failure? What due diligence we need to do before we say that its a failure?

Not all companies can be successful in the early years even if the idea is right. There can be many reasons for that like immature market, technical limitations, government regulations an so on. But, if the entrepreneur believes in his idea, he need to be persisted with it(especially when u have taken money from others). Infosys is just nothing until it got its first real client reebok almost after a decade. Naukri took 6 years to realize its potential. So, persistence, confidence an vision are very important. Please don’t start, if u don’t have any of these qualities.

The case with Rajeev is different.He started of jobs4freshers.com at a very young age with a very little investment (the site might have cost 400 USD). I believe, he learned a lot with that venture an realized his true dream an started off this WAT. I would like to request Rajeev not to shut this off, if it doesn’t give some returns in next couple of quarters..!!

However, I don’t say that u should fall in blind love with your venture an ignore reality. Do proper research before u start off. Once, u start off put all your efforts to make it a success. Please don’t try an stop failure early. I believe, there is nothing called a bad business idea on this planet. Its just execution that makes even an average idea look great.