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:
- If you are a startup going after the local Indian market, your best option might be to raise capital from India
- On the other hand, if you are startup going after the global market, you might want to talk to investors from India as well as outside.
- We also discussed nuances of fundraising outside India and then trying to raise capital in India (and vice versa).
- And a shameless plug, there are funds such as our own (Accel.com) that has global presence and so you have flexibility to raise capital and get help from our team in India as well as across the globe (US, Europe and China).
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.