enspace vol ix issue i

Vol IX Issue I2 enspace Vol IX Issue I 3enspaceecell.in/blog ecell.in/blog

The hub of technology in the United States, or the Silicon Valley, as it is popularly known as, has long attracted talented researchers, enthusiastic entrepre-

neurs and hopeful investors to that particular belt in Cali-fornia. Various cities in other countries, such as Tel Aviv in Israel and Berlin in Germany, as also areas such as the Silicon Roundabout in London, UK, have tried to emulate the success of the Valley. Since the last couple of decades, Bangalore has established itself as the tech capital of our country. However, the tech scene in Bangalore is largely lim-ited to IT and is dominated by companies such as Infosys and Wipro and hence, there’s less of a general start-up cul-ture than we would have liked. Enter Powai, an area which is quickly gaining reputation for being a haven that every entrepreneur was waiting for. With its proximity to IIT Bombay, its youthful exuberance and accessibility to young entrepreneurs, it is at Powai where phenomenal growth sto-ries in the form of Housing.com and Ola Cabs took birth. In this edition of Enspace, we try to understand how Silicon Valley grew over the years and where it stands today, as also take a look into what is now being commonly referred to as the ‘Powai Valley’.

Few people have the heart to leave their cushy jobs and start-up their own ventures. In this issue, we also talk to the founders of Shopsense and MadRat Games, IIT-B alumni who’ve dared to dream! The slow yet steady rise of E-commerce has managed to catch everyone’s attention around the country. For those of you wondering about how it all happened, read on to find out the analysis that we give you.

Freshmen entering IIT Bombay face a unique set of dilemmas and one such girl writes about her uncertainty surrounding entrepreneurship. On the other hand, those graduating out of college often wonder if working in a start-up might be as rewarding as it sounds. We analyze last year’s placement season and find a rapid change in the trends and notice that start-ups are not only recruiting in numbers but also offering more than competitive pay packages.

We hope you enjoy reading the first issue of this year as much as we did writing it!

Best,Sagar.Chief Editor

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Advent of ShopsenseI’d always wanted to start my own company. Even when I was the E-Cell Overall Coordinator in my final year, I had my own company which I was run-ning from my hostel room. That com-pany was VC-funded and we had cli-ents all around the world. It was called Nova Global and we were a very private social network, a by-invite only social network. It was based out of the USA and I was managing the Asia part of it. When I was graduating, I was expected to work from home and I didn’t want to start my career that way so that’s why I joined Opera. And in hindsight it was a good decision for me because there are certain things that a job teaches you which you don’t get to learn when you start out initially. That includes basic hygienic things like learning best prac-tices and tools and just observing how processes are run in a big company. In a couple of years, your learning pretty much stops unless you’re in a research oriented job. I met Farooq at Opera who was an IITB alumnus as well, and he too had his own startup back in campus called Mumbai Unmute. Initially when we met, we used to just discuss ideas and we hit it off really well and the idea for Shopsense just clicked and it sort of worked out for the two of us.

Leaving his jobNo one needs to start up after leaving one’s job. You can still very much start up while at the job. Like I said, after 2 years into the job, you pretty much

Takeaways from IITBWhat IITB allows you to see is the whole spectrum of people in this coun-try. When you come from a particular back ground you are always exposed to people from that background, but when you come to IIT, you very quickly lose your individuality and are overwhelmed by the people from across the country who are coming in from various back-grounds. And that surely made me more receptive, more accommodative and made me a better thinker as to how people perceive ideas, products and how people from different backgrounds read different situations.

EngineeringI wish I had paid more attention in Meta (Metallurgical Engg & Materials Science). If you are looking to become the founder of a technological company but don’t have good engineering funda-mentals then you’re never going to be able to build that company. So I would say that I wish had paid more attention in class because that would have defi-nitely made me a better entrepreneur.

3 suggestionsfor budding EntrepreneursBe better engineers. No matter what educational background you have, if you want to build a service or a product, you have to think in the way an engi-neer solves problems. If you are from an engineering college, consider yourself fortunate and try to become a better engineer.Hire a good team. It is very easy to start up with friends or relatives or acquaint-ances but it may not always be the best thing to start up with friends or relatives or acquaintances. Be very choosy and picky about the people you start your organization with, especially with the early employees because that is going

Harsh Shah, a former E-Cell Overall Co-ordinator, walks us through his life from being an

IITB student to a consultant at Opera Solutions and now, an entrepreneur. He shares with us the story of his current obsession, Shopsense, and also gives some very practical fundaes to budding entrepreneurs.

savings from Opera which allowed us to start something initially. We also had the help of friends and seniors from IIT who allowed us to use their offices while we were still setting up and hence we never felt a need to go to an incubator. We only needed funding to grow the team and to build a final complete prod-uct, once we had readied our pilot proof of concept. And for raising that capital we went to institutional investors such as Kae Capital and Powai Lake Ventures which we knew from our days at IIT.

E-Cell journeyE-Cell helped me gain exposure into the

world of entrepreneurship and when I look back I think that I was very naive, even as an OC for assuming certain stuff and getting second hand knowl-edge on entrepreneurship. Definitely, being a part of Corporate Relations and Marketing helped me get introduced to VCs and people in the corporate world which made my fundraising easier, made my contacts easier and gave me the confidence to approach people. And definitely being the OC and lead-ing a team allowed me to make mistakes back then. And a lot of things I did back then made me understand how a team should not be run.

know how to play the game. You have a lot of time after work or during the weekends and yes, you have a lot of av-enues to spend that time. But when you know you’re working towards an idea, you start figuring out time to devote to the idea. So it was probably a 7-8 months period from us getting an idea, working on it and then leaving our jobs to finally pursue that idea. So it was not that difficult to one day get up and say I want to quit my job and start working on this idea. It was a gradual process where we worked on this idea and when we thought that things were at a stage where we could pursue the idea full time, we quit. Luckily for us, Opera was very supportive. They actually allowed us to work part time also while we quit the company. That was very helpful of them. So that really eased the need to take a hard decision to quit and start something new. I think the fact that I had someone else going through the exact same that I was going through helped a lot too.

About ShopsenseShopsense, essentially, is a technology company in the retail space which is trying to enhance cus-tomers’ shopping experience. We build products and deploy them at physical retail locations to help engage custom-ers and help brands sell more. We work with the latest in retail technology, be it a touch-screen, gesture based system, pressure sensor or internet enabled sensor, to deliver a fantastic digital in-teraction product.

Investment and fundingLuckily, we were at a stage where we had financial backing through our very early

“If you are looking to become the founder of a technological company but don’t have good engineering fundamentals then you’re never going to be able to build that company.”

to set a trend for future employees.Obsess about design. Today when eve-rything has become much easier to build, good design takes you a long way in your success and even though you can start working with freelance design-ers or juniors who can do photoshop but please think about design as a major component of your startup no matter what you’re doing. May it be process design or product design or interface design, think seriously about design right at the begining.Lastly, when you’re starting a company, please be mindful of creating processes which will define how the company is going to run. Be aware of the culture that you’re about to create in the com-pany, the policies that you want to lay down for the employees and create those processes upfront.

Harsh Shah, Co-founder of Shopsense, outside the office

What is the story of Madrat Games? Rajat: So my brother Manuj got this idea while travelling as the best way to pass time, when you are in a train is by playing board games. It made him ponder as to why there were so few Indian board games when popular board games like Scrabble and Boggle existed in at least 30 other languages. He shared this idea of creating a Hindi Scrabble with Madhumita, (who is my wife now) and we were extremely fas-cinated by it! But at the same time the task was very challenging because the Hindi language has over 600 sounds, half letter, compound letters, matras, all of which had to be taken into ac-count. If we had blindly copied Scrabble then we would have ended up having 4,000 tiles and using a board the size of a double bed. We must have played the game hundreds of time to come up with a workable design of Aksharit. After designing the first pro-totype, we registered for a business-plan competition at IIM Calcutta and to our surprise, we won that competi-tion which gave us the push to pursue this further. The investors told us that Aksharit had the potential of becom-ing the game of masses in India.

Your company manufactures board games for the learning and enter-tainment of people of all ages. Where did the inspiration for such a differ-ent venture come from?You see, when we were in IIT, we used to discuss the flaws in the primary education system of India and how

very less children had exposure to an all-rounded education, which in-cluded extra-curricular activities and inculcation of life-important skills for the holistic development of children. We thought that we will do something about this, may be open up a private school, sometime later in life. After I graduated from IIT, I went to CMU to pursue a Masters’s degree and also did a job for 3 months at Amazon but I was never happy doing that! So I came back to India and Madhumita and I visited all of the different schools with varied teaching styles across India. Rishi Valley was one school that we found, which was very different in its approach towards teaching. On our visit to the school, School the principal suggested that we take up teaching at Rishi Valley School to understand the learning process better. We spent four years there. Rishi Valley being a board-ing school, we saw the children both inside and outside the classroom. We observed how kids could learn by making and breaking toys. That’s when we realised the very nature of games, which have a powerful role to play in learning. Even the so-called weak students would come and tell us that they had began to love science as it began to be taught through games; that opened a door to their learning. So that was an intriguing experience and it proved very valuable in found-ing MadRat Games.

What was the impact of the game when you initially launched Aksharit?For introducing our product, we went to Chhattisgarh to demonstrate Aksharit to the teachers of govern-ment schools and their response was tremendous. They gave us an order of 6000 games for 1000 schools across Chhattisgarh. We were really nerv-ous about the product going out in the market for the very first time. So to test the effectiveness of the prod-uct, we gave a postcard with our Bangalore address to teachers of the 1000 schools who were going to use Aksharit with a simple objective ques-tionnaire asking them the utility of the game. After 5 months we got 750 postcards with their responses and we were thrilled to read the reviews. They had given us a positive feedback ex-pressing that ‘Hindi basha me baccho ki ruchi me atyadhik sudhar hai’. Subsequently 3 other governments installed their belief in us- govern-ment of Madhya Pradesh ordered for 600 schools, Rajasthan ordered for 400 schools and Bengal for 300 schools. The initial impact was huge!

How do these games that you design improve the learning experience?Actually games build a very

enthusiastic positive environment. A kid tends to think ‘if I do this, I’ll win this game’. So the game becomes en-gaging and once you win a reward for learning something you never tend to forget it. In the game you have small goals, small rewards and then you win eventually. Basic thing in designing the game is that we put the reward at that particular step where learning is involved. We want them to solve five equations in their head for which they get rewarded.

What were the main Challenges that you faced as a startup?Through our prod-ucts we wanted to make teaching of Subjects like Science, Maths and our native language Hindi in-teresting for kids. The kind of impact we were looking forward to, could be achieved only by approach-ing the govern-ment schools. Unfortunately, bu-reaucracy takes its own time. It took 2 years to pass one order! We were a startup and our investors suggested that we needed recurring revenue channels to scale up the brand. So we shared the game with nokia, google, apple, chrome webstore who then launched the digi-tal version of the game. Recently we went full-fledged into retail. So chang-ing our market strategies from gov-ernment initially to digital and even-tually to retail has been the biggest challenge.

How are you expanding in terms of business and team?We started with a 7 membered team that has now grown into a 50 mem-bered team. We achieved a milestone in September when we sold 1-lakh units reaching around 1.5 lakh families in India. Initially our company worked on a business-to-business (B2B) model

with three main distribution channels: the government schools for physical board games, webspace for Intel’s net-books and app store, and the mobile with a partnership with Nokia where our signature game ‘Aksharit’ was pre-bundled on Nokia touch phones. Now we have switched to a business-to-consumer (B2C) model focusing solely on retail stores. Our next expansion plan is exports and we plan to launch in Middle East and Sri Lanka by next year since the markets are similar to India in these countries. Our main aim is to build a brand.

Why did you change your marketing model? Has it proved to be effective?B2B was an unpredictable model and not scalable. Today, MadRat Games has 55 games in its portfolio that are in the market across 1600 retail stores in the country with an average price range of Rs. 150-Rs 700. Of this, 150-200 stores are part of big chains like Hamleys and Shoppers Stop, while others are stand-alone, independentoutlets. Every month we launch four-five new games. Our portfolio includes various licensed products (such as the Chhota Bheem, Mighty Raju, 9XM) as well as our own line of board games that are focused on enhancing learn-ing and entertainment. 15-20 percent

of games are learning games while the rest are popular, recreational games including some with Bollywood or Indian themes designed for the age bracket of 3-14 olds.

What is the USP (unique selling point) of the Madrat games?We’re the only company in India that does everything from start to finish that is from designing the product, product development to manufactur-ing, to marketing and distribution. The biggies in this field flood the market with toys and games that have worked best in the USA and UK markets and the small companies just copy and release cheap versions of those game. This is a reason why original games like Aksharit have not been launched in India till now. We create products keeping the Indian audience in mind.

What entrepreneurial qualities did you develop during your time at IIT and how has that helped you in es-tablishing the foundation of Madrat?More than anything IIT gives you the confidence to do challenging prob-lems day in and day out. You develop skills on problem solving which can be applied to any problem. When I graduated with a Computer Science degree from IIT Bombay, where I was competing in class with some of the brightest minds of India, I knew that if I can do this, I can solve any problem that comes across and that confidence has really been the foundation of my success.


“E-commerce is probably the best thing that has happened to the Indian middle class

and emerging small businesses. As a business model, it appeals to the ‘value-minded’ Indian mindset, which is about getting the best value for money spent.”

As evident from the graph, ‘E-commerce’ has transformed from just a buzzword to a modern-day reality. It has extensively changed both, the way people shop, as well as the way transactions are made. Today, E-commerce has equipped us to be able to make purchases at any time of the day as per our leisure, from the comforts of our homes and offices. While this fairytale of E-commerce started with travel tickets going online, today the online market has blossomed and not only stocks electronic gadgets, books, and apparels, but also movie tick-ets, groceries, jewellery, baby products and everything else imaginable. If that’s not enough, there have come up enter-prises which also help you buy and sell second-hand products (olx and quikr, anyone?). Many traditional brick-and-mortar retailers, like Croma for exam-ple, are also keen on strengthening their online presence. Recently, Motorala

launched the new Moto X mobile ex-clusively on Flipkart even before it was available in offline stores, as they pre-dicted that Flipkart could reach a far larger market than the traditional route provided. Needless to say, the handset sold out on the very day it was launched.

How Commerce reached India?

Internet companies in India started in the mid-1990s, but they mostly featured classifieds, matrimonial and job offers. Internet, at that time was just a new word to many Indians. So there was a feeling of distrust of the Internet itself, let alone online payment systems. This is probably one of the biggest reasons why Indian internet companies at that time were unable to establish themselves in the e-commerce sector, which was al-ready starting to flourish in the West.It was only in the next decade, the mid and late 2000s that the Indian e-com-merce industry really took off. The first e-commerce services available were mainly offered in the travel industry but slowly and steadily, all forms of E-commerce services became popular.

Reasons for Growth of E-commerce sector in India:

The E-commerce sector in India started to grow rapidly from 2005-06 onwards. The simple explanation for this was the growth of a young tech-savvy gen-eration. The home internet usage rose by about 20% between April 2006 and April 2007. With a burgeoning middle class, this number was bound to in-crease and present-day E-commerce biggies like Flipkart and MakeMyTrip made sure that they grabbed this opportunity with both hands and

established themselves in the industry.

This E-commerce industry had a very strategic advantage over its conventional retailing counterparts. They could pro-vide goods at lower prices than they were available elsewhere, since they would save on staff and property. Also they were able to showcase a larger variety of goods to a wider set of potential user base, thus benefitting from the ‘long-tail’. Moreover, urbanization was accom-panied with issues like traffic congestion and busy lifestyles which hampered the prospective of offline sellers. People pre-ferred to have the desired commodity at their doorstep rather than spend time, money and efforts to search for the product in a traditional marketplace.Another aid to this rapidly-growing in-dustry was provided by the growth of online banking services. Online trans-actions became a lot more smoother and issuance of credit and debit cards surged. Also, in a major boost to the E-commerce industry, the ability of banks to offer a safe and secure transac-tion environment made more and more consumers trust online transactions. However, the clincher came recently, in the form of CoD (Cash on Delivery). Since India has a vibrant cash-rich econ-omy, this is the most preferred payment option for 80% of Indian consumers.As of 2014, most of the E-commerce companies are yet to start making money. However, due to their growth prospects, many investors are showing interest in funding such companies. Flipkart, for instance, has raised well over $500 million in multiple rounds of funding.

Problems associated with E-commerce

The fundamental problem in India has been that many people still don’t own credit and debit cards and still others don’t have access to the Internet. This problem, though, is being solved at a very fast rate.

Also, one of the major issues for the con-sumers has been the language barrier.

Almost all the content on the World Wide Web is in English which inhibits a considerable percentage of Indian pop-ulation of using the facilities. With in-creasing literacy rates, this problem too, will cease to be an issue in the future.

Future of the E-commerce Industry:

Even after an average annual growth percentage of around 34% since 2009, the E-commerce industry remains a miniscule portion of the $500 bil-lion retail pie. According to Forrester,

a leading global research and advisory firm, the Indian E-commerce sector is set to grow the fastest in the Asia-Pacific. With a huge population at its disposal, demand is bound to increase with ever-improving internet facili-ties like Public Wi-Fi spots, 3G/4G internet, etc. as well as rapid urbaniza-tion and globalization. The advent of smartphones in recent years has also been a boon to e-commerce companies and will continue to boost the sector.

The entry of a global powerhouse like Amazon will only encourage more competition in this space and in the end will help improving the quality of services provided. In fact, Wal-Mart

too recently announced that it will pilot B2B e-commerce models in 2 cities. With some policy changes ex-pected from the NaMo Sarkaar with regards to Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), the competition will only help consumers go easy on their pockets.

-By Vaibhav Bhosale


Indian society loves security. Back in the old days, rich people were always the ’landed ones’, meaning

that if you are rich then it’s almost a given that you hold pieces of land and a house or two. Even in these days, most of the society equates success with se-curity and comfort. Security, in particu-lar, is very alluring. Probably, that is the reason why when a child studies well, the people around are relieved – ‘Great, now she’ll get a good comfortable job to repay all the hard work she has done’. The mantra is - you work hard at stud-ies, and then you lead a comfortable life, or you neglect studies and struggle your whole life. So, it’s almost unthink-able to study hard and then struggle in life. No student wants, that when she is done pushing her limits to study, an-other stretch of hard work awaits her. Its not only about the student though, even the parents and well-wishers feel that a hard, rough student life de-serves a well-paid, secure, cushy job. It’s not only the society in which we live in that has such a rigid mindset. Even in academics, most schools don’t emphasize on ‘straying away from the mainstream’, as entrepreneurship can be put in a crude way. We know about busi-nesses - the ones which are run by fami-lies and the ones which have been started newly, but hardly spare them a thought in our oh-so-busy lives. The streamlined nature of studying for entrances over the past couple of years hasn’t helped much in exposure to this very new field.

After my rigorous prepara-tions for jee, I had quite a lot of free time in my hands after my exams were over. Now that I didn’t always have to keep solving questions all day, I had started exploring the world outside my little shell. I stumbled upon the topic of entrepreneurship referred to quite a number of times in articles while skimming through the newspapers. I knew what it was in theory and my pre-conceived notions had decided that it wasn’t my cup of tea, yet it continued to pique me. The world of entrepreneur-ship made its presence felt for the first time in my life, and it seemed huge, too fantastic a concept to be able to fit into my world. Interesting, but impossible. Then I entered IIT Bombay. Days were bombarded with activities and nights with co-curriculars. Before long, I came to realize that there was an E-Cell in here that was quite active. It seemed ironical to me at first that the place where people think getting in itself assures placements, has people who are ready to let go of that oppor-tunity. I filed it away as the errant be-havior of geniuses. Then the night of orientation approached. I was by no means very enthusiastic about it, but was curious about the topic as a child is for a newly acquired toy and more than that, I wanted to know what to-be-engineers do in a business club. I had the barest idea of entrepreneur-ship and wanted to know what it was that was causing so much hue and cry and giving rise to what according to me, was an elite group of people. Moreover, if worse became worst, I could actually

say that I had sampled it before deciding that it wasn’t my cup of tea. The orien-tation, when it dawned, cleared all my thoughts about entrepreneurship. The video was inspiring. The guest speaker Mr. Ajeet Khurana, gave us a glimpse of what success in entrepreneurship is and regaled us with the victory tales, all the while alluding the failures. I heard how the life for an entrepreneur was – both to-be entrepreneurs as well as success-ful ones. I realized that day that there is a huge world outside my own tiny little world where entrepreneurship is not just a fantasy, something to be mar-veled at, but something to labor hard on, something to put years of your life into. I had a phantom taste of glittering successes and heart-wrenching failures. Now that I know much more about entrepreneurship than I did before entering college, but nowhere enough, I find myself at an impasse. The concept is so far-reaching that I’m intimidated by the very idea of starting from scratch. It’s far from what I had believed it is and now I’m on shaky ground. The glamour of entrepreneurial successes never fail to dazzle me and keep reminding me of the fruits of labour. But, then, the fact that for every success there are a thousand failures lying around does little to boost my confidence. I’m very much inspired by the idea of wielding autonomy over my own work. The feeling of being able to say that the whole idea is mine seems heady. The concept of materializing my brainchild almost makes me forget my concern for issues like funding and mar-keting. I got a taste of entrepreneurship in all its glory and gory, but I’m undecid-ed as to whether I’ll live up to it or not.

- By Kavyashree

MBA, given the high costs and time in-vested in it.

Firstly, the cultural experience is un-precedented – one really gets to experi-ence a ‘flat-world’. My home aptly has a moniker of an international hostel, as friends stop by from across the globe. Also, I believe that a lot of learning hap-pens during travels. Most top B-schools organize trips to various parts of the world to learn from first-hand cul-tural and professional experiences.

Moreover, at school I had access to some of the finest minds in the world. Noble prize laureates and industry experts made up the faculty and the diversity of classmates was baffling. As Dr. Dipak Jain, former dean of Insead mentioned at a ReachIvy event, “Having global ex-perience is a necessity and an entry bar-rier to top schools. Hence, the difference is the quality of classmates. When you are at Stanford or Princeton, all of them are so brilliant.” Learning from other classmates who started their businesses is an asset when starting your own en-trepreneurial venture. I had access to an eclectic mix of experiences and got a deep insight across several industries and functions in the short span of two years. Faculty, students, investors and industry experts help you ideate further,

For every Jobs (Apple) there is a Donald Trump (The Trump Organization) / Sheryl

Sandberg (Facebook) / Warren Buffet (Berkshire Hathaway) and closer to home, Anand Mahindra (Mahindra & Mahindra). While the list of the former cluster may dwindle, that of the second lot, armed with an MBA from a top school, continues to swell.

Child prodigies like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg are rare and difficult to cultivate using traditional education methods – ask Harvard, they tried! If you believe you belong to their tribe, I urge you not to read ahead. However, like me if you believe you have aca-demic prowess and more importantly have the drive to create impact, read on.

Why do you need an MBA if you want to be an entrepreneur?

This question tops the list of FAQ’s as students embark on their explora-tory journey towards higher educa-tion and begin evaluating an MBA.

I am a Harvard Business School gradu-ate and founder of a boutique admis-sions advisory, ReachIvy. Two years at business school made me dismiss any doubts I had about the effectiveness of an

making the foundations of your busi-ness model almost water tight. Business school can help you get a head start with your idea. You can examine vari-ous business models and experiment within the safety walls of the school by participating in the myriad B-plan com-petitions hosted on several campuses.

Lastly, the professional network that I became a part of is colossal. In ReachIvy’s Speaker Series, LBS alum Pratik Agarwal, VP corporate Strategy at Vedanata Resources rightly points out “In a business that I started I found that one of my potential cus-tomers who runs one of the largest broadband businesses is actually a classmate of mine.” Similarly my pro-fessional network is very connected and supportive. Whenever I reach out to them, I always get a response.

It has now been four years since I gradu-ated and I continue to appreciate and un-derstand the value of my degree everyday.

ROI on your MBA

-Vibha Kagzi, Harvard Business School ‘10 and founder of ReachIvy, a Boutique Educational Advisory.


Ajinkya Deshpande and Saniya Pawar


It is a truth universally acknowledged that there exists a technological para-dise amid the orchards of San Fransisco where people come from all over the world to reinvent themselves and rein-vent industries. Silicon Valley, for the past 60 years has served as the hub of cutting edge research in technology and innovation. It wasn’t puffery when Elon Musk claimed “I think people from Silicon Valley can do anything”. Companies like Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Intel, Hewlett-Packard and Apple were already redefining the technology industry in the 60s & 70s, long before the internet bubble hit the valley. The dot-com bubble in the 1990s ushered in the era of an “online revolution” with Google, Yahoo and later, Facebook making Palo Alto, an epicentre for wildly successful technol-ogy, and generating billions of dollars in annual profits. Recently, there has been a quite an uproar in the blogosphere about the “Hyperloop vs. Instagram” debate with experts complaining about “how technology has taken a backseat in the Silicon valley”. With the Valley’s ecosystem being called into question, it seems fitting to reflect upon how it all started and what has changed over the years. When did people stop innovating and start duplicating?

It isn’t a coincidence that the best minds of the world converge in one place of opportunity, new technological knowl-edge & means for high tech research. Silicon Valley was formed as a milieu of innovations by a large pool of skilled engineers and scientists from major universities in the area, generous fund-ing from an assured market with the

Defence Department, the development of an efficient network of venture capi-tal firms, and, in the very early stage, the institutional leadership of Stanford University. The pillars of this ecosystem were laid as early as the late 1950s when William Shockley, a legendary applied physicist and the inventor of the tran-sistor, rented out a small place in Santa Clara Valley and started his company Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory. He scoured universities to recruit the most brilliant minds in engineering; soon, they were making leaps in semi-conductor research and were poised to bring out a commercially viable silicon transistor. However, due to Shockley’s failing leadership, the company began to crack soon. Experts trace the begin-ning of Silicon Valley to one morning of June 1957, when a team of 8 people decided to leave Shockley and start their own company. Its inception was a US dollar bill with 8 signatures on it, popularly referred to as the Silicon Valley’s Declaration of Independence. Each signature belonged to the pio-neers of the microchip industry in Palo Alto, headed by Robert Noyce.

This was an extremely dangerous move, given the social and work culture in the US at the time. It was a known rule that when you joined a company, you stayed with the company for most of your life. Starting a company on your own was seen as an extremely unor-thodox and shameful move, unlike the liberal attitudes today. The burden of failure was enormous. This precise moment in June 1957 was the starting point of the start-up culture the valley today thrives on. This team, headed by

Robert Noyce, built a company, Fairchild Semiconductors, in a rented warehouse to just be able to do the research they wanted to do. They knew that they could build a silicon transistor and that it was going to be a very successful and innovative product. In 1958, they invented the first efficient silicon transistor and later, in 1959, the first commercial integrated circuit (IC). It was an extremely important and disruptive technology, which revolutionized the elec-tronics industry. Even as Fairchild enjoyed its meteoric rise, many of the company’s founding employees left Fairchild to start their own companies in Palo Alto, position-ing themselves as direct competitors in the integrated circuit market. In Santa Clara valley, these companies were popularly re-ferred to as Fairchildren. With over a 100 new companies coming out of Fairchild, there were constant start-ups and the whole idea of venture capital was starting to grow and prosper. Later, in 1968, Noyce would leave Fairchild to start another company of his own; a purely technology driven com-pany which would give the world its first microprocessor. The company was Intel and it embodied the very values on which Silicon Valley functions today. Everything about it was designed to encourage inno-vation, from the company wide stock op-tions to an open plan office. The idea was that innovation could come from anywhere and you didn’t need to go up a chain of command to get someone to listen to your idea. It was a culture of meritocracy and not hierarchy. The Silicon Valley, as we know it today, was pioneered by purely technol-ogy driven companies like Intel and Apple who did not really worry what the tech-nology would be used for, but engaged in research because they loved doing it.

Today, Palo Alto is a labyrinth of online technology companies functioning amidst a highly efficient start up eco-system. With companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter among others, taking the centre stage today, there is a simmering discontent in the entrepre-neurial community on how innovation has taken a backseat in Silicon Valley. The emphasis on short term ROI (Returns on investment) has killed the attitude of in-novation in the valley. As Silicon Valley entrepreneur Yves Behar recalls, “The first thing people do is look at you straight in the eye and say, ‘What’s the ROI [return on investment] on design?’ And, as you know, there is no R.O.I. on design”.

Critics claim that, in the recent years, Silicon Valley has been a victim of a sys-tematic failure in the start-up ecosystem due to various reasons. To begin with, too much hype around the online sector has led us to lose sight of some real innova-tion opportunities, most of which occur in the offline world. It’s a shame that copies of copies of websites or apps that spring out of Google or Facebook are glo-rified while truly novel innovations like Hyperloop have difficulty reaching the market. Most of the investors in the valley choose to operate on a volume investing system, not a value investing system, thus plainly refusing ventures that seem too big or too crazy. This means that early stage funds, super angels, and micro VC’s are primarily interested in investing $50,000 a piece in hundreds of different start-ups instead of investing $4,000,000 a piece in a select few. This strategy spec-ulates that a few start-ups will be suc-cessful, and will pay for all of the losers. This is a stark contrast to the investment

attitudes that prevailed in the valley in the 60s through the 80s. Investors were thoughtful and invested in one or two ventures they really believed in. This is not to say that the present approach is bad or wrong. However, we cannot ignore the fact that most offline tech-nological ventures need huge start up capitals, even to cover the cost of manu-facturing prototypes, Hyperloop being a prime example. Ignorance & rigidity in investment attitudes can mean losing out potential life changing inventions. Yet another ticking point for inves-tors today is the sacred MVP or “mini-mally viable product”. Some of this can be traced back to the book The Lean Startup, which advocates that start-ups make a minimal viable product and measure it in the marketplace before proceeding further. It’s a way of validat-ing a business model and assuring that there are users who are willing to pay for it, before too much money or time are invested. However, the catch here is that big (offline) technological ventures like Fairchild or Intel wouldn’t have an MVP. It would take millions of dollars in upfront capital to begin manufacturing, long before any users or revenues are gained. And, it is beyond dispute that for the world’s first silicon transistor or the world’s first microprocessor with far superior qualities and far better efficien-cy than existing devices for electronic applications, there WILL be users, tons of them. There is no need to speculate or prove anything here. Such a prod-uct will succeed, if and when invent-ed. However, today, without an MVP, most investors will not even grant you a second look. It is important that we acknowledge the different roles that an

MVP plays in different kinds of ventures.

Despite all its problems, Silicon Valley continues to be a leading hub for high-tech innovation and development, ac-counting for one-third of all of the ven-ture capital investment in the United States. However, it is a valuable exercise to understand where we come from and question what it is that we are collective-ly moving towards. We need to ask our-selves,” Are we ready to believe that life changing inventions could come from anywhere, anytime? That we are open minded and crazy enough to acknowl-edge them when they come? And that there is no one formula to investing in new ventures?” It is crucial to have faith and belief in the genius of people and their ideas. As writer Kim Mai Cutler remarks, “Everyone engaged in the act of changing the world is self-delusional on some level. Some small percent-age of the time, the delusional succeed. This is the entrepreneur-as-hero myth that has become necessary to perpetu-ate the ecosystem in Silicon Valley. As they re-invent themselves, they rein-vent the world over and over again.”

“Those who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do” – Steve Jobs

~By Ajinkya Deshpande and Saniya Pawar


Powai has seen a number of coffee shops, restaurants and bars spring up over the past few years.

But these aren’t your regular hang-out spots where people come to take a break during their working day or chill after a tiring day. In fact, it’s the exact opposite. At any given time, you’ll find a number of buzzwords of en-trepreneurship such as ‘e-commerce’, ‘angel funding’, ‘scaling up’, ‘target audience’, etc. being thrown around and that’s when you realise that these places aren’t popular for gossip but for conversations involving people who mean business, real business.

Here, there’s a rush to take the corner tables because these have access to power sockets. Mobile phones and iPads are plugged in and young men in t-shirts and shorts are often seen hunched over laptops. Some are in groups of two or three, work-ing quietly or bickering over how to fine-tune a website’s layout. Others, clad more crisply, show less camaraderie and engage in what seem to be interviews or meetings.

While entrepreneurial businesses have been developing here for the past six years, the phenomenal successes of companies such as Housing.com and Ola Cabs, among others, has thrust Powai into the limelight and given it the identity of a start-up hotspot. In no small measure can this develop-ment be attributed to our very own IIT Bombay alumni, after all Housing.com and Ola Cabs were both started by a bunch of IITB grads looking to defy the conventional career paths and pave their own way to a successful venture. In fact, some alumni who are only in their late 20s and early 30s have come up with Powai Lake Ventures, an angel investing network which is ready to

Sense, Tushky, etc., and are always on the lookout for fledgling companies.

Young entrepreneurs prefer Powai for a number of reasons, one of which is of course the cost factor. Relatively low rent rates and quick and easy availability of office space as well as accommodation make it a haven for these recent graduates who’re looking to be as frugal as possible. Moreover, easy access to interns and full-time employees from IIT Bombay means that they have enough talent at their disposal and being surrounded by other similar start-ups makes them at ease. After all, trying to grow your start-up at Nariman Point amongst big corporate houses can be quite intimidating for most but Powai, on the other hand, provides perfect comfort for these entrepreneurs.

Avnish Bajaj, co-founder & MD of the US-based VC firm Matrix Partners India, says this trend mirrors what happened in the 80s and 90s in Silicon Valley. “There was Stanford, there was Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and then VCs started flocking to the Valley seeing the number of start-ups that were coming up there. Then a second hub got created in Boston as it had Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). I see the begin-ning of a trend here. Powai could be the start-up centre for India feeding into the talent coming out of IIT-B.”

Over the last decade, Powai has largely become self-contained, and residents who work here say they seldom travel to other parts of the city. Most of the neighbourhood is clutter-free and presents a pretty picture with Greco-Roman buildings, clean boulevards, a lakefront and hills in the background. A

number of cafes and pubs have opened up, including Singapore-based Harry’s, the first for the chain in Mumbai. The presence of well-known developers like Hiranandani, Raheja and Godrej and schools, including Bombay Scottish, is encouraging for young profession-als looking to move in with families.

Companies like Yowoto, Fabbag.com, Quikwallet, started by non-IITBians, are also part of the community. Fabbag.com, a subscription-based e-com-merce venture dealing with beauty products, which recently came up in Powai earlier this year needed a safe environment for its largely female workforce, which tends to work late into the night. And their founders thought that Powai in particular, and Mumbai in general, perfectly fitted the bill. In fact, most start-ups in and around Powai start work only by 11am and extend their working hours well into the night, and that is repre-sentative of students at IIT Bombay too, whose productivity increases inversely with the time of the day. The most important incentive of start-ing up in Powai, however, is this pres-ence of a start-up ‘community’. Local entrepreneurs have an informal net-work and are willing to share leads on where to get cheap photocopies or bulk deals on everything from couriers to laptops or adhesive tape. Every week, there are coffee-meet ups scheduled in some or the other cafe or restaurant. Other events like those conducted by Weekend Ventures and Startup Weekend too foster this sense of a com-munity. And it is this feeling of being a part of something which is much larger than your own venture itself, which lures budding entrepreneurs to Powai.

There are, however, some challenges which Powai faces in its bid to become this successful start-up hub. Nagging traffic jams add a lot of travel time in the peak hours. Also, the lack of its own local railway station and the dis-tance to other important junctions of the city, mean that accessibility to and

fro remains a concern. Some of these problems are expected to be solved now that the metro train system is completed. Another issue is that rents are steadily climbing and could slip out of the reach of younger profes-sionals soon. “It could become difficult to retain employees, who have to pay rickshaws for travelling from the rail-way station to Powai daily unless there are more affordable housing options locally,” says Fabbag.com’s founder.

The growth of Ola Cabs and Housing.com, whose founders were recently lauded at the Forbes 30 Under 30 event, has boosted morale and the atmosphere in IIT-Bombay, so much so that that many students want to be a part of start-ups, says Nikhil Jain, co-founder of Enelek Power. His two-year-old company, currently in-cubated at IIT Bombay’s Society for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SINE), has no trouble attracting talent from the college. In its 10 years, SINE, which hosts and mentors early-stage entrepreneurial businesses for up to three years, has spawned more than 50 tech start-ups, including ideaForge (read Copter in 3 Idiots) and ThinkLabs Technosolutions. However, it only sup-ports product-based companies that involve some intellectual property.

Purple Squirrel, another start-up in-cubated at SINE, has been organising field visits to acquaint students with career prospects other than working with conventional industry giants. Founder Aditya Gandhi says engineer-ing graduates, who often dabbled with big IT firms before looking at alterna-tives, are now considering an early transition to starting up or working with start-ups. He adds, “Being in the area has given me access to all that a start-up needs to survive. It’s the entire ecosystem which has worked for us.”

Big corporations like Tech Mahindra, Wipro, L&T Infotech and Cognizant lie cheek-by-jowl with a growing number of start-ups. The vibe at these companies is young and ener-getic. CEOs wear sweatshirts, carry backpacks, answer calls after only a couple of rings and manage offices where sometimes the average age of employees is 23.5 years. Among the few bits of furnishing in offices are

mattresses that hint at long working hours. While they are able to make do with tight budgets, there is a need for investments. But Venture Capital firms such as Nexus are not packing their bags and moving in just yet. “It is still early days in Powai. More fund-ing and more successes are needed to fuel the ecosystem,” says Suvir Sujan, Co-founder of Nexus Venture Partners.

The winds of change have start-ed blowing in small ways, though. Sand Hill Counsel, which is the legal advisor for many start-ups in the region, recently shifted from Worli to Chandivali near Powai, to be closer to clients. “Mumbai is the financial capital, but it has been losing ground to other cities because it’s not afford-able. Powai provides entrepreneurs a viable option to stay put,” says Shantanu Surpure, managing attor-ney with the law firm. “I expect more people to move to Powai in the future.”

While international cities such as Dublin, Tel Aviv and Berlin have become start-up hotbeds, the Indian entrepreneurial ecosystem has not mushroomed around one city alone. Most tech and outsourcing ventures have chosen the southern city of Bangalore due to an abundance of en-gineering talent there. In recent years, internet and mobile-related com-panies have also made the National Capital Region, especially Gurgaon, their home. What separates Powai from other start-up hubs in India is its level of serious-ness, feels Zishaan Hayath, founder of Toppr.com and a part of the found-ing team of Powai Lake Ventures. “Considering the higher cost of living in Mumbai, the companies here are generally less frivolous in nature than those in, say, Bangalore or Pune.” Their growth has been unplanned and natural. Outside of IIT-Bombay, there are no systematic support sys-tems for start-ups and Internet- or mobile-based businesses have bloomed on their own. Nikhil

Mathur, CEO and co-founder of yowoto.com, says they are look-ing to offer support systems and in-cubation to start-ups in the future.

Start-up founders here welcome the attention that comes from compari-sons with Silicon Valley but reject the moniker ‘Powai Valley’. “We don’t have any valleys here. We need a differ-ent title. Maybe Powai Lake or Hills,” smiles Hayath. While things look bull-ish, it is too soon to be euphoric, say some people. “Start-ups cannot be overnight successes.” A cheeky par-allel between Powai and the Aam Aadmi Party is doing the round which says that “There are talented people in Powai with good ideas but they should be allowed to grow organically without the burden of unrealistic ex-pectations.” For now, though, the in-vestor community has its eyes set on spotting the next big idea emanating from this fledgling start-up hotbed.

back early stage start-ups and give them the initial boost that they often re-quire. Besides Ola Cabs and Housing.com, they’ve managed to back a number of others too like Shop

~By Shivam Kumar, Sagar Sheth


With A DifferenceEnterprises

Social enterprises differ from business enterprises in the sense that they take into ac-

count positive benefits for society, besides self-sustainability. Their vision is to develop innovative products or services that empower the underprivileged, directly or indirectly. Acting as catalysts of change, they seize opportunities to generate social value and un-leash the true potential of the soci-ety. They bridge the chasm between the developing and the developed.

We present to you three such stories of entrepreneurs who have changed the way society works. A change for the betterment of all of mankind.

m.Paani What does it take to win a whopping 1 mil-lion dollars in prize money at the Hult Global Case Challenge? For Akanksha Hazari, a Princeton University gradu-

ate with a MBA from the University of Cambridge, all it took was a dream; a dream to enable every underserved community in the world to invest in its own future. Her winning business model designs and implements mo-bile-based loyalty programs that em-power communities by connecting their spending to life-changing development rewards – in the areas of safe water, edu-cation, healthcare, energy, nutrition and mobility – that is areas they really care about which can transform their lives.

With an estimated 22% of the popula-tion living below the poverty line, India, a country with a population of about 1.3 billion people has a long way to go in improving the standard of living of its citizens. However, a surprising fact is that India also has close to one bil-lion mobile phone subscribers. And m.Paani is one startup which aims to take advantage of this fact to lower the disparity between the rich and the poor in terms of the basic necessities of life.

m.Paani have already tied up with Pratham, a NGO working to provide education to underprivileged children as well as a major Indian telecom firm as a part of setting up a base in Mumbai. They launched two pilot projects earlier this year, one in Sewri and another in

Dharavi. They plan to roll out full-fledged services in Mumbai very soon and are also looking to set up a pilot project in rural Maharashtra sometime next year.

As part of their pilot projects, which jointly cater to around 2,450 house-holds, they have fixed upon a cap of 1,000 users for their services, which are free of cost of course. Every user who enrolls for their services becomes a part of their loyalty programme and gets reward points for certain types of spending and positive behaviours. They can then accrue points, share them with family and friends, and ultimately re-deem them for rewards. For these par-ticular projects, rewards have been nar-rowed down to those in education, and in digital literacy and English learning. About the revenue model, Hazari ex-plains during her talk at the E-Summit ’13, “Since we help our corporate part-ners solve core business challenges by having a social impact, we have a rev-enue-sharing arrangement with them.”

m.Paani is also an Echoing Green 2013 finalist and an investee of UnLtd India.

AyzhAt a time when new hospitals and clinics are cropping up in cities more frequently than ever, there’s little im-provement to be seen in the poor healthcare scenario of rural India. En-ter AYZH (pronounced ‘eyes’), a for-profit social venture dedicated to pro-viding health and livelihood solutions to impoverished women worldwide.

“One million mothers die annually from unsanitary childbirth conditions. Growing up in India, I saw my mother and my young friends who became mothers struggle with financial hard-ships and poor health. After marriage, I experienced unsanitary birthing condi-tions myself and contracted an infection that caused me years of suffering,” said Zubaida Bai, chief executive of AYZH, as to what led her to founding this ini-tiative. AYZH develops low-cost, ap-propriate technology designed to meet the unique needs of women in resource-poor settings. Signature to the AYZH brand is a convenient, “kit style” product.

In 2010, AYZH launched its first prod-

uct, ‘JANMA’, a $2 clean birth kit, which provides women all the components recommended by the WHO for a safe and hygienic birth, using environmen-tally friendly and culturally appealing materials. JANMA provides the “six cleans” (clean hands, clean perineum, clean delivery surface, clean cord cut-ting and tying instruments, and clean cutting surface). It not only saves the lives of the mother and baby, but also gives them a happy, healthy, infection-free start to a new life regardless of where they deliver. AYZH has sold over 50,000 such kits in India, Haiti, Afghanistan, Ghana, Malawi, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, with demand from other countries continuing to grow.

AYZH products are assembled and pack-aged by local women in Tamil Nadu, cre-ating economic opportunity in the com-munities they serve. To date, AYZH has created 1,000,000 additional work hours for women, who enjoy working in a safe, social working environment in their product assembly centre in Chennai.

The enterprise operates an innovative B2B business model, selling to health-based businesses that are capable of giving AYZH significant and scalable access to its target beneficiaries (un-derprivileged women). The two key customer segments that AYZH serves are a) Medical institutions (hospital pharmacies, health care centers, and slum clinics), which resell AYZH prod-ucts to women; b) Non-profit aid or-ganizations (working to improve the health and wellbeing of women and families in developing countries), which supply AYZH products to women.

Additional products which are planned by this ground-breaking startup, in-clude: a newborn kit, a postpartum haemorrhage kit, and a sanitation and hygiene solution for women.

Accolades include Global Leader (2013); Echoing Green Fellow (2012); Ashoka Maternal Health Champi-on (2010); TED India Fellow (2009)

Frontier Markets

In recent years, a host of companies have begun making clean energy prod-ucts and a range of other products spe-cially dedicated to the rural market. Given India’s size and the sheer number of its far-flung villages, rural market-ing is always a challenge. And when the product is relatively new, such as solar lighting devices, the challenge gets even bigger. That’s where Frontier Markets, or FM, comes into the pic-ture. Ajaita Shah, CEO and founder of FM, is of the opinion that reaching out to rural-markets requires a ‘bottom-up approach’. She adds, “We have to iden-tify what rural people need, the price points they are comfortable with, dem-onstrate the use of the product we are selling, and show them why it is rel-evant to their lives.” It is too expensive for companies to build infrastructure in rural India, and have feet on the ground to push products. The terrain is rough and the supply chain fragmented. Ru-ral consumers have a low level of brand affinity and low exposure to products.

To solve this, the staffs from FM engage local entrepreneurs to sell solar energy products. For farmers who own brick-and-mortar buildings, this is a great op-portunity for them to add these products to their offerings and to sell them from their shop and be branded as a Frontier Markets retail location. So a retail net-

work is built through these retail points – which are the fulfillment points for both sales and after-sales service. FM’s trump card is the profile of its agents, to whom it pays a commission. These are village-level community workers, who are already familiar faces in the region, since they also provide some other ser-vice. For example in Chomu district of Rajasthan(where FM started out), they include krishi mitras (farmers’ friends) who are employed by the Krishi Vigyan Kendras, an Indian Council of Agricul-tural Research project, to keep farmers informed about latest agricultural tech-nologies. They also include workers in government-run anganwadis (creches); as well as employees of a privately-owned dairy, which sells milk in rural areas.

Commenting on the rationale for Seed-fund’s investment in FM, Paula Mari-wala, Executive Director of Seedfund, said, “We believe that rural market ac-cess from both, the consumer and sup-plier sides, is a challenging but scalable business opportunity. Frontier Markets is very well positioned to bridge this gap from both sides and has a committed and experienced team to execute this.” With well over 10,000 products already sold, FM’s mission is to provide over 10 million products to 30 million house-holds in India by 2016, and become a global leader in rural distribution and products for low-income households.

~By Arpit Palod, Pradyot Prakash, Sagar Sheth


It’s not uncommon to be facing this dilemma – choosing that prestig-ious corporate job or pursuing your dream start-up! What’s uncommon, though, is daring to choose the latter over the former. But not anymore!With a spate of startups coming to re-cruit from IIT Bombay in the previ-ous placement season, times are fast changing. The same IITians who were in their juniors’ shoes a few years ago are coming back to their alma mater to pick up fresh graduates. And that, by the numbers! Housing.com, a buzzing startup of our very own alumni, hired 12 students from our institute on Day 2. What that essentially means is that they were competing with the likes of big

shot companies like Samsung, Amazon, KPMG, Citibank, etc. to pick up India’s brightest, which is an enviable position that they’ve reached so quickly. And Housing isn’t the only IITian startup which made an appearance on Day 2. Other startups by IITians which have made huge names for themselves, such as Zomato, Myntra, Zlemma and VMock too offered big bucks to our students. This trend of recent startups coming to recruit has only gained momentum since then, with companies like Quikr, Indus Insights, Druva, Webaroo, Snapstick, Ola Cabs, MadRat Games, etc. actively recruiting in the weeks of placements.

There are a number of reasons why students have chosen to join such startups, even though they might not have the cor-porate prestige that coveted destinations like McKinsey and Google boast of. For one, a startup is a company which has re-cently ‘started up’ and is consequently, much smaller in size and hence, one has higher chances of making a direct impact to the work of the company. The feeling of being witness to your own value-addition to the company is unparalleled, something not distinctly possible in established firms. Moreover, the chances of quick learning and both personal and professional growth are highly enhanced in a startup environment as you’re more closely involved with most decisions of the company. The uncer-tainty of future involved in startup jobs, also instill the values of hard-work, ownership and self-sustainability and make employ-ees more accountable to each and every action of theirs. Lastly, working alongside visionary entrepreneurs is a huge incentive for many as they get to learn from and work with true innovators.

Recently, at The Entrepreneurial Conclave 2014, we caught up with Varun Sheth, who along with

actor Kunal Kapoor (Rang De Basanti, anyone?) founded Ketto.org. a crowd funding platform which is creating rip-ples in the industry. Crowdfunding is the practice of gathering small amounts of funds from multiple investor/do-norss via online platforms for private ventures, social causes and projects.Here are excerpts from the in-terview with Varun Sheth:

What is the idea behind Ketto?The idea is very simple - to connect people who have money with those who need money. Fundraising is a very difficult and time consuming task and that’s the problem that we wanted to solve. I, myself, being a finance profes-sional realized that for example, people who are starting up need a capital, of say 50lakhs or 1crore and we saw that an online platform like Ketto was the best way to do it mainly because more and more people in India are coming online and more and more people are willing to take up risks (and start-up), so the initiative came up in terms of creating an online network where we could connect both these sets of people.

Currently, how does Ketto work?We are currently on the first step of our business idea where we cater to social causes. Very soon we are going to launch the next phase that will mainly cater to businesses and startups. Right now we have a 2-way process in terms of how we work. So we have our own database of causes that we feel are the most relevant ones and should go up. We then have our due diligence on the ground after which

we put up the cause on our website. What were the major challenges that you faced with Ketto?There were quite a few challenges. First and foremost was the acceptabil-ity by the market. The market wasn’t educated, they didn’t know how this whole ‘crowd funding’ system works. So a lot of effort had to go in to educate the audience on how to use this plat-form, why it is beneficial, so on and so forth. The other challenge was in terms of actual fundraising. There weren’t a lot of people who were ready to invest. Some of them stopped funding be-cause they believed a lot of regulatory challenges would come around it, as crowdfunding isn’t regulated in India. There were a lot of doubts about how Income Tax, RTI etc. would affect this sector and maybe hamper the industry.

How are you planning to harness the rise of social media in promoting your business?We do use a lot of social media. We use Google AdWords too. In fact, Google has given us a grant of 1.2 lakh dollars for Google adwords. Moreover, my co-founder Kunal Kapoor is a Bollywood actor so he constantly promotes Ketto by talks in the media, and he gets ce-lebrities to talk about it. And of course, over time most of our campaigning goes on the platform. If you’re starting a cam-paign, you are also promoting it. So that’s another way our outreach is increasing.

Given that the Indian society has tradi-tionally been risk-averse, how do you

see the startup culture progressing in the coming years?The biggest challenge I’d say is team building. So you might have a very good idea but executing it with the right people and the right team is very challenging. To be honest, it took us 4 years to build a good team. So finding the perfect team-mates and connecting the dots in the entire team’s perspective is extremely essential for any start-up to do well.

Do you think that the startup culture will be as successful in India as it has been in other countries?For sure. See India is a very big market with a lot of people having a lot of prob-lems which need to be solved. The cul-ture is fairly new here but given another 10 to 15 years, India will be definitely be up there with other developed countries in terms of having a start-up ‘culture’. There’s just a lot of money to be made in India and where there’s a lot of money, everything else is just going to follow.

Finally, where do you see Ketto.org in the coming years?For Ketto, our vision is that we want to be a market place and a supermarket of crowd funding. So whenever you’re going to need money, maybe to start up a business, a social cause or make a movie or music video, you come to us. One day we’ll hopefully be what eBay and Amazon are in the e-commerce sector.

~By Shardul Vaidya

Acquiring angel funds just became easier for IITians!

Thanks to s team originally from IIT Bombay - Prof. C. Amarnath, retired professor of the mechanical engineer-ing department, Mr. Sushanto Mitra, Ex-CEO of SINE and Bipin Kumar, ex Overall Coordinator of E-Cell, who have come together to launch an angel network, the Lead Angels. “Angel networks connect HNIs (high networth indviduals) who are ready to invest time and money into start-ups. They are usually entrepreneurs them-selves and together invest 10-25 % equity in each startup depending upon Pre-Money valuation and investment amount,” said Bipin. The investment deals that they cater to are in the range of Rs 50-100 lakhs. “We aim to estab-lish a managed Angel Network which is easily accessible to college students and young graduates with a focus on IITs.”

News in the world of entrepreneurship, which may or may not be relevant to you, ranging from important developments to utter nonsense, but these are news you simply cannot miss.

Housing.com continues its phenomenal growth-story

Housing.com, a completely map-based real estate search portal co-founded by 12 of our IIT-B alumni, has had some phenomenal growth since its inception in June 2012 .Housing.com have now raised yet another round of funding, this time worth $20 million, led by Helion Venture Partners and Qualcomm Ventures. Housing.co.in acquired the domain name housing.com for a whooping $500,000 in the month of September 2013 from a US fellow who had who had bought the domain for just $50 about 20 years ago. This is their first step towards expanding the company to international markets. The startup had earlier secured $2.5 million from Nexus Venture Partners in June in 2013. With such expansion plans the company is all set to grow larger in the coming year.Enspace had exclusive-ly covered the ‘The Housing Phenomenon’ in its previous issue.

Entrepreneurship – Career of the year?

If the start-up world needed more proof it was in vogue, here’s more: This year, Barbie becomes an entrepreneur. Mattel released its 2014 Career of the Year Doll on Amazon this week. “Entering the entrepreneurial world, this independ-ent professional is ready for the next big pitch,” Mattel’s description for the toy reads. “Barbie Entrepreneur doll wears a sophisticated dress in signature pink that features modern color blocking and a sleek silhouette. Her ‘smartphone,’ tablet and briefcase are always by her side. And luxe details, like a glam necklace, cool clutch and elegant hairstyle, are awesome extras for a smart, stylish career woman.”The blonde beauty appears ready to take on Silicon Valley: She’s getting her very own LinkedIn page and a billboard in Times Square with the slogan, “If you can dream it, you can be it,” as well as the hashtag #unapologetic. The whole campaign is part of a larger push to re-brand Barbie as an empowered woman.

Mile-high startup club

It is becoming the in-thing with air-lines now, riding on the coattails of the booming startup ecosystem. First British Airways came up with a head-scratching program to create innovative ideas in flight, then Turkish airlines launched an onboard startup pitch competition. Now Delta Airlines has come up with a new program called “Delta Innovation Class”.This mentoring program that takes place at 35,000 feet works like this: chosen business and creative leaders in various fields will be travelling to select events around the globe, and they’ll be sitting in the mentor seat. The seat next to them will be open, and entre-preneurs can apply – through a partnership with LinkedIn , which vets these candidates – to sit next to these leaders for the duration of the flight and talk about their business.

Finally even SEBI recognizes the potential of crowdfunding!

In a move that signifies the rising po-tential of crowdfunding, the SEBI on Tuesday issued guidelines to regulate the burgeoning crowdfunding market. There have been concerns raised over possible defrauding of investors given the lack of regulation in the sector. The SEBI has proposed to regulate equity-based-crowdfunding, in which the issuer provides securities to investors. SEBI’s recognition of crowdfunding im-plies that this method of raising capital is quickly becoming popular and news such as these come as a major boost to both, companies like wishberry.in and ketto.org who operate crowdfunding platforms, as well as start-ups who are not able to figure out a way to raise in-vestment. So if there ever was a good time to start-up without worrying too much about the cash inflow, it’s probably now.

Flipkart acquires Myntra in a bid to out’weigh’ Amazon’s increasing presence

India’s indisputably largest e-commerce retailer recently acquired fashion e-tail-er Myntra, strengthening itself against rivals like Amazon, eBay, Snapdeal and a host of other e-commerce start-ups which have cropped up in the country. The deal gives Flipkart an edge in the rapidly growing online fashion busi-ness in India. Flipkart, founded to by two ex-Amazon employees in 2007, will be reportedly paying over $330 mil-lion in cash-and-stock for the buyout, although both companies will still run independently for the time being. “It’s a 100 percent acquisition and going forward we have big plans in this seg-ment,” said Sachin Bansal, Co-founder of Flipkart. Bangalore-based Flipkart, which rose to popularity for selling books and electronics online, said it would invest over $100 million in the fash¬ion business over the next 12-18 months. Myntra Co-founder and CEO Mukesh Bansal will be joining the Flipkart board and will head the fash-ion business at Flipkart. India’s e-com-merce sector is expected to grow mul-tiple folds in the coming years and this deal is a clear signs of its consolidation. According to CLSA report published last year India’s e-commerce market which in nearly $3.1 billion is expected to grow to $22 billion in next five years.


~By Shreya Gupta


The conjuror’s trick Predicting the future is a tricky business indeed. And when it comes to technol-ogy, nobody seems to ever get it com-pletely right. Innovation, while being the keyword, is now as much a competition between technologies as philosophies. On one hand, we have a plethora of open source projects; on the other, patent wars. It may sound like science fiction, but what seems far-fetched today is often the tech-nology of tomorrow. Many such products are close to being launched in the market, or are quite far down the pipeline. Here we will have a look at some of them.

1) Sixth Sense Technology: Just like in the movies, such as Krrish where the display of computer screen appears on walls, commands are given by gestures, the smart digital environ-ment which talks to us to do our work, the futuristic sixth sense technology makes it possible. A wearable computer in the form of a pendant, it uses a camera and a mirror to read various gestures and displays the output using a projec-tor. Developed in the MIT media labs by Pranav Mistry, Professor Pattie Maes and others, the code has been made open source to allow further development.

2) Google Self-Driving Car: An autonomous vehicle like the one shown in the 1989 batman movie is no longer an object of the sci-fi movies! A team of Google engineers has de-veloped a driverless car technology which has now been deployed for test-ing. Long-term plans involve marketing the technology to various businesses and make it widely accessible. Other plans involve a ‘robo-taxi’ service.

3) 3Doodler: It’s like a hot glue gun that melts plastic, so you can write in the air! Fascinating, isn’t it? 3D printing pen de-veloped by Peter Dilworth and Maxwell Bogue, utilizes plastic thread made of either acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (“ABS”) or polylactic acid (“PLA”) that is melted and then cooled through a patented process while moving through the pen, which can then be used to make 3D objects by hand.

4) Paper Tab: If you think that the tab you make all your notes on or play games is very thick for you, meet paper tab! It is a tablet as thin as a paper and is devel-oped to replace paper. These are flex-ible tablets which can be bent just like paper. A number of these tablets can interact with each other. They have used polymer transistor and plastic electronics. The tablet can be bent to do several tasks like turning a page in a document, fast-forwarding a movie etc.

5) Hyperloop:A transportation system designed by Tesla and SpaceX both owned by Elon Musk, the technology when developed will allow low-cost travel at near super-sonic speed. The abridged version is that Hyperloop is a large pneumatic tube, and travel would be similar to the way the Jetson family moved between rooms in its futuristic cartoon household. It will use tubes with near vacuum conditions through which pressurized containers will travel using linear electric motors. Some preliminary simulations say the

idea is feasible with some modification. Funding: Because of the revolutionary aspect of these products a lot of money goes into developing them. Projects like the Sixth Sense and Google Glass were made in well-funded labs. In other situations it becomes important to convey the po-tential of these products to investors. Earlier, one would have needed to hunt for a venture capitalist ready to invest millions into your idea. Now we have crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter which harnesses the minor contributions from many people to generate funding ranging from a few thousand dollars to millions. This was the case for 3Doodler. Feasibility: It becomes important to ensure eco-nomical and technical feasibility if a profitable product is to be created. For example in the case of the Hyperloop, its feasibility has yet to be established by independent entities. Also many people believe the initial financial pro-jections grossly underestimate the cost. Hence, Musk’s prototype will be a litmus test for this technology.

The possibilities are endless. Innovation is going to be one of the most power-ful agents in the market. These ideas are not 10-20 years away but right around the corner. Guess its time for sci-fi movie directors to think ahead!

Here are a few questions from the biz-world. The answers will surely amaze you!

Q 1. Why does Crawford Market, Mumbai hold a place in Indian history?

Ans. Crawford market was the first building to have electricity in India in 1882.Taj hotel came up in 1903.

Q 2. Identify this power couple. One is a tech entrepreneur and the other an author philanthropist. They meet each other at a quizzing event in IIT Bombay.

Ans. Rohini and Nandan Nilekani (Co-founder of Infosys)

Q3. After watches, jewellery and spec-tacles, what category is Titan entering now?Ans. Helmets

Q 4. Which site has beaten Facebook in terms of number of photos being uploaded daily ?

Ans. Snapchat

Q 5. What unique variant of Snickers was launched by Mars International in India before its worldwide release?

Ans. 100 % vegetarian

Q 6. Which popular site started life as a dating site called ‘Tune In Hook Up” but the site was abandoned after it did not generate interest?

Ans. YouTube

Q 7. States are promoting themselves as investment destinations. If Gujarat is vibrant! then Punjab is ?Ans. Progressive Punjab

Takingthe leap-By Ayush Agrawal

Welcome to the Club.

enspace vol ix issue i

Documents

indiasilicon valley

issue i4 enspace vol

issue i2 enspace vol

future decodedpowai

mba vol

iit bombay

silicon roundabout

inblog ecell