Was browsing a few youtube videos today and came across a couple of good ones that I thought had a bunch of good advice for early stage entrepreneurs.
Mark Zuckerberg at Startup School 2013 – good conversation with Paul Graham
Guy Kawasaki – The Top 10 Mistakes of Entrepreneurs @ the Berkeley-Haas school
It is more than a year since we took a close look at the education investment landscape in India. In this blog post and a couple of subsequent ones, I would like to cover the following:
India investment landscape for Education
If we look across all VC and PE investments in India it has held more or less steady in the last few years with about 20 investments and about $200M being invested annually (data below courtesy Venture Intelligence)
If you leave out Private Equity investments (growth stage) and look at only Venture Capital and Angel investments the number for 2012 was about 15 investments (and $55M total invested).
Now, lets dive deeper into what’s happening across the various sub-sectors of Education. For the purpose of this discussion, let’s look at the following sub-sectors: Test Preparation, K12, Higher Education & corporate training and Skills/Certification training
In this blog, let’s take a closer look at Test Preparation and in subsequent blogs we can dive deeper into other sub-sectors.
Test Preparation
Test Preparation companies focus on helping students prepare for various entrance exams for engineering, medical, management and other professional streams. This is probably one of the largest organized sub-sectors within education and has emerged strongly over the past decade. To set the context, there are about 1.2M students who take the engineering entrance exam and about 350K who take the medical entrance exam alone in India. The total addressable market for this sector is safely north of Rs 3500 Cr in revenue potential. Here is a good blog by education entrepreneur Jayadev Gopalakrishnan pegging the market conservatively at about Rs 4000 Cr. There are two public companies in this space – Career Point and MT Educare and at least 5 other with revenue >Rs100Cr.
In the blog above, Jayadev points out three major trends – exams going online, exams consolidating (JEE Main as an example where there were multiple entrance exams earlier) and renewed importance of Board exams.
We believe that all three are important and hence companies that embrace technologies such as tablet and online practice systems and offer integrated test preparation have an edge. Integrated test prep refers to programs such as FITJEE and ACE-Deeksha that provide integrated board and entrance test preparation thereby using the students time more efficiently without having to shuttle between school and tuitions (for test prep) and using the extra time to effectively practice online or with tablets (full disclosure: ACE is an Accel Partner India’s portfolio company)
One of the pleasures of being an investor in education is that I get to meet entrepreneurs trying to disrupt test preparation using technology. A few companies that are doing outstanding work in this regard are Edutor (tablet learning), Vedantu (online and tablet), Embibe and Toppr (both provide online/tablet based test prep). These are just a few off the top of my head – I have met at least a dozen other interesting startups in the space.
Challenges: A few challenges that startups that are taking the technology route need to think through:
Through the Edustars program (applications open through end of November), we hope to discover that next great disruption in the Test Prep market using technology. The above questions are meant for you to think through the basics of building that business so that we can quickly get past these questions and onto building a company that touches millions of students over the coming decade. Would love to hear your questions and get your feedback on the Test Prep topic.
Will touch upon the other three topics in the next blog post: K12, Higher Education & corporate training, Skills/Certification training
Posted in Education, Indian Startups
Wanted to briefly recap a couple of events in which Shekhar Kiran and I had the pleasure of participating at the recently concluded Nasscom Product Conclave 2013. Overall, we really enjoyed being at the event (this is my third year attending the event). Just like previous years, the 2013 event managed to get a great set of entrepreneurs to attend and really enjoyed interacting with them. Now to the recap.
Building fundable startups
Shekhar Kirani (my colleague at Accel) and Vijay Anand (from TheStartupCenter in Chennai) brought out the essence of how to build fundable startups in this 45 min panel. Topics where covered in a top-down fashion where they set the context that for Indian VC’s a good exit to shoot for is $200M+. And to achieve that the two essential components are – market and team. They went into great detail on how to pick the right markets and what are the essential components of building a team. If you are a first-time entrepreneur, would encourage you to spend 45 mins reviewing the following video.
Desi vs Pardesi Capital
I had the pleasure of moderating a short 30 min panel on raising capital from Indian investors vs. from investors outside India. More details about the context for the panel is here in this blog post. A quick summary of what we discussed:
We are sure there are many questions we did not manage to cover in our short sessions. Please feel free to share those via our Accel India Facebook page.
Posted in General, Indian Startups
I get this question from time to time from people who are looking to move to India from the US and other parts of the globe. These are very qualified people but the fact of the matter is. for more mature startups, most of these senior roles are already filled. As someone who moved back to India after more than a decade outside, I always try to encourage people on making this move and have blogged about things to ponder while planning a “Career Move to India”. For senior technologists and product folks who are looking to move back, I want to add a few more points here:
One other point to note about the Indian startup ecosystem is that, over the past year or so, I have seen a few VC backed early stage startups not doing great (shutting down or being merged into other companies), but the good news is that talented senior people from these teams (particularly technologists) are being aggressively hired by other startups. This is good for a culture that is known not to tolerate failure in the past – we are learning that the startup game is bound to have failures but not all failures can be attributed to people. And that good people, irrespective of the startups outcome, deserve and will get good jobs.
Look forward to hearing from people planning to make such moves or looking to join startups. I know many startups in our portfolio and outside that are looking for good senior technology and product folks across multiple sectors. Feel free to ping me at in.linkedin.com/in/ananddaniel/ if I can be helpful.
Posted in Indian Startups, Move To India
Tagged Indian startup jobs, Move to India, Startup Jobs
The Economist recently ran a special report on India which was highly informative. I particularly found “A Billion Brains” to be a great summary of the education scene in India. One aspect called out in the article was the humongous skill gap that we have in India.
Here is the gist of it. The current annual demand for skilled labor in India can employ 100% of the population entering employable age. But only 4 MM people (2.8 MM through higher education and 1.2 MM through vocational training) are getting any sort of formal training while 17 MM trained labor is required every year. Majority of graduates study humanities (2.5 MM) and hence have to be trained on the job. The following slides share more details on the demand for labor across sectors and the supply side issues.
Given the above context, the efforts of the National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC) to upskill 150 MM people by 2022, is quite commendable. Here are some highlights from my conversation with NSDC on this topic.
The table below summarizes the list of projects they have listed on the website. As you can see, these listed projects aim to upskill about 70 MM people over 10 years and on an average each project upskills about 1.4 MM people at a cost of Rs 36 Crores over 10 years.
I personally think it is worth a shot for an entrepreneur to try reaching a potential venture capital (VC) or angel investor via LinkedIn. Particularly if you can find a mutual contact to provide an introduction. The main benefits of this approach, over just cold calling or dropping a note on the investing firms website, are the following:
But, here are a few suggestions while trying this approach:
While on the topic of reaching out via a social network, I would highly recommend reading the following article by Ried Hoofman on “The real way to build a social network“, if you haven’t already read it.
Note: Pluggd.in published this blog here.
Posted in General, Indian Startups
Tagged entrepreneurship, indianstartups, venturecapital
Education continues to be an exciting sector for entrepreneurial ventures in India. The following chart shows the extent and frequency of the investments that were made in this sector by Private Equity investors (including Venture Capitalists) over the past few years.
Source: Venture Intelligence, Jan 2012 A recent poll conducted among various investors showed that education is one of the most favored sectors for investing. Source: Venture Intelligence, Jan 2012 What makes education an exciting sector? Anything new? In his comparison of India and China, Professor Yasheng Huang of MIT – an expert economist on India and China – calls out education (and thereby Human Capital) as one the top reasons why China is ahead. Here is a link to Prof Huang’s recent presentation at TED. (Forward to 10:30 if you are pressed for time) This presents a great opportunity for Indian entrepreneurs to have an impact on the Indian education ecosystem – be it K-12, Higher Education or Skills Development. The growing penetration of technology (mobile/tablet devices, internet, etc.) provides greater opportunity to reach out to millions of people and provide more personalized learning options (Khan Academy is pursuing a similar strategy in the US today). There are several opportunities to make the learning process an enjoyable experience. For example, social media tools can be leveraged to improve user interaction and promote group learning. Why Edustars? As of right now, in India there is no convenient platform for information sharing among the Education entrepreneurial community. Edustars has been created to fill that particular need. At a high level, Edustars aims to: We welcome suggestions from education startups regarding any other venues wherein Edustars can add value and contribute towards your overall su
ccess.
