April 1 is the final day to apply for the iAccelerator technology startup incubation program conducted by IIM Ahmedabad's Center for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship and UpStart.in a micro tech venture org made up of successful Silicon Valley Entrepreneurs.

Startups accepted into this program will receive up to 5 Lakh INR in funding along with significant support establishing their companies, getting their business and engineering processes in place and connecting with potential customers, partners and investors. Founders of these companies need to spend May 1 - Sept 1 working from Ahmedabad with the iAccelerator organizers to receive the full benefit of the program.

Dedicated teams of 2 - 5 founders with proven technical talent and a passion and commitment to create successful profitable businesses by solving people's needs with Internet web services or mobile applications are encouraged to apply

Do check out what Freeman has written about the iaccelerator. He spent a lot more time at the program than yours truly and has given the incubation process a much deeper thought.

Some media coverage for the generally media shy program.

The iaccelerator 2008 the startup incubation program invited a steady stream of visiting mentors for interactive sessions with the incubatees, a veritable who's who of successful entrepreneurs of India. Yours truly only had the opportunity to listen to Mouthshut, Naukri founders and Sequoia Capital's Sandeep Singhal. I won't be covering the advice offered by Sandeep Singhal to the startup teams as it involves a bit about their secret sauce. I'll cover the startups and their secret weapons once they agree to be covered on this blog.

Just at the end of iaccelerator 2008 program at this moment is that two of the startups out of the five have agreed to be funded by CIIE and the funding quantum is about 50k to 75k level( based on my earlier conversations with CIIE folks) for a reasonable amount of stake and relatively benevolent terms. Its un-confirmed yet and I have shot an e-mail to Aditi(CIIE) for a confirmation.

Sanjeev Bhikchandani basically happened to be present at the IIM-A Entrepreneur's meet and he had a fairly long public Q & A style interaction for a large enough audience at iaccelerator's work area. To his credit he was very candid about what makes Naukri.com and Infoedge's portfolio of sites tick. (keep reading)

He had a lot of advice to the startups at iaccelerator, which included his take on specific business models and target markets that the technology developed by the startups should be focused on.
1. With all the funding eco-system in place it makes sense to really focus on your idea and not worry about bootstrapping it with services kind of revenue. Naukri.com was bootstrapped in a different era.
2. Build defensible Intellectual Property that fills a void in the marketplace and outrun your competitors using that.
3. Make sure a market exists for an idea and is large enough.

Yep the usual advice above but then you can a learn a whole lot more from listening to him speak how he describes Infoedge's business models, technology focus and execution strategy.

Infoedge currently is the biggest web player in India, wildly profitable, incremental revenue adds 90% to the bottomline, cash reserves exceed 350 crore INR. How did they end up trouncing their better funded rivals is probably a story that has been probably covered better elsewhere. Over a period of time Infoedge has learned how to scale better by watching Google's and Yahoo!s of the world and describes itself as a media business with a very strong technology focus. Infoedge doesn't have a core competence in User Generated Content (UGC). It enters into only 'large' media marketplaces with huge corporate advertising budgets which lend themselves to a structured search( its key technology focus), except for Jeevansathi and Brijj all other properties follow the model. Sanjeev is a big believer in strong technology similar to Google and observes that keyword based search results and advertising have a lot more CPM on Infoedge properties than display advertising inventory they consume.

The key to naukri's success as compared to its rivals is that the rivals ( according to Sanjeev ) are stuck in 1998's technology in job search space and Infoedge has been able to leapfrog in effectiveness by using seach and matching technology which he calls Naukri.com's defensible Intellectual Property. He described what he called the virtuous cycle of the classified search business which keeps improving in effectiveness for both candidates and advertisers due to more job matches and more suitable candidates found with the addition of larger volume of advertisers and users, a classic cycle feeding on itself and growing. This he described as a characteristic of media business the one in which addition of users to the system improves effectiveness without adding incrementally to the costs and winner takes all or most. Which is definitely true of classified advertising space in Jobs, Education and Property classifieds search the key focus areas of Infoedge.

(I am not sure I heard him say 'search' but thats how I describe it)

Sanjeev also spoke about what sort of startups Infoedge would be willing invest into if convinced.
1. Should not be in a key focus area that Infoedge already works, so niche Jobsites, Matrimony, Property, Educational classified
2. A very strong management who can execute, Infoedge doesn't have management bandwidth to handle businesses they invest into.
3. Strong defensible Intellectual Property and technology focus
4. Existing marketplace and media business characteristics.

Now its hard to argue with Sanjeev that someone would be able to dislodge Naukri.com in the conventional way of building a better mousetrap since its about the virtuous cycle fed by volume growth. He does see the threat posed by professional social networks like linkedin spreading into India and transforming the indian job market just as it happened in the west. Which explains Infoedge's investment into their Brijj professional social network project to capture the growing social job search marketplace. He also conceded that as of today the engagement of professional indian social networks like Brijj and its rivals have a long way to go in gaining engagement that fun social networks have. Perhaps he is right that the Jobs search marketplace in India is going to look like this for a lot longer and professional social networks don't just yet pose a threat of obsolescence to Job portals.

'Stay Hungry and Stay Foolish' the book by Rashmi Bansal tells more about Sanjeev Bhikchandani's story and more advice from him to entrepreneurs.

Update 24-07-2008: The official word as per Aditi at CIIE is that the funding round beyond iaccelerator-2008 is not yet decided. It'll be done by end of the 3rd month into the program.

Just finished reading Rashmi Bansal's book 'Stay Hungry Stay Foolish'(ISBN 978-81-904530-1-1) released during the IIMA Entrepreneuers meet organized by CIIE.

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'Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish' is the story of 25 such IIM Ahmedabad graduates who chose the rough road of entrepreneurship.
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Many of the 25 IIM-A alumni profiled in the book were present at the meet.
The book was released during the entrepreneur's meet and I am not sure if its available for sale yet. But highly recommended. The book is divided into 3 sections

• The Believers: IIM-A graduates who took the plunge straight out of IIM-A
• The Opportunists: Who saw an opportunity and capitalized on it
• The Alternate Vision: Social Entrepreneurs who cared about things beyond money

The book is written in a conversational format with the author thinking aloud before having a conversation with an entrepreneur followed by the conversation and a page of advice from the entrepreneur.

The sheer breadth of advice from entrepreneurs proves one big point, there is no consistent formula for success. There are examples and counter-examples of every strategy in the same book.

• There is no other way but to learn from one's own mistakes
• It pays to ride a wave in an upturn but then belief in one's ideas is as important to see through the trying times
• Bootstrap is good but sometimes there is no other way to scale up without a high leverage investments backed by a VC/PE fund
• Jumping straight into the rough is good but so is gaining some experience and building a nice nest egg before taking the plunge
• Its good to have equal partnerships with your co-founders but sometimes there needs to be a first amongst equals for smooth functioning
• You can plan really well and execute it with mathematical precision but sometimes the best of plans can be bested on first contact with the market
• Maintaining independence of your venture ('my baby') for long through the rough road is good but knowing when to let go even when the going is good is needed many times
• Government can be a very conservative regulator and prone to knee-jerk policy actions based on emerging events which can kill entrepreneurial ventures but sometimes they are the only ones who are willing to try out something new providing the much needed lifeline to ventures thinking ahead of their times.
• Small is beautiful but without scale the actual vision cannot be realised
• In all cases IIM-A alumni network helped a lot

Definitely a recommended read for students, as once one of my teachers at my alma mater put it succinctly 'acchi chhokri and achhi naukri is not the only goal in life for everyone'(apologies to women reading this but it applies equally well the other way around).

I have a backlog of what I intend to write about the iAccelerator program and the just concluded Entrepreneur's Meet at IIM-A, both organized by CIIE. So I shall continue to write these posts in chronological order.

Apart from technical mentors like I and Freeman, the iAccelerator program has invited a lot alumni and entrepreneurs to mentor the startup teams by taking up various topics in 2 hour sessions. I'll try and cover a few of these interactions.

Interaction with Faisal Farooqui: Founder of Mouthshut.com

Apart from the usual discussion about how Mouthshut was founded just prior to the dotcom bust and how it survived it, which is documented on the video embed above.

Faisal's 3 hour session with the incubatees included advice on how to be successful as an entreprenuer:-
1. Burn the boats: Being an entrepreneur is not about money, its a by-product. If you have a plan B, thats a sure shot way to fail and actually needing the Plan B.
2. Self esteem and huge ego: Entrepreneurs need to believe in their ideas more than anyone else. Ideas have no value without people willing to back them fully by investing themselves.
3. People Skills, they are in use for anything you do: You need to grow your startup by getting a lot of help from people, whether its partners or employees( paid with equity alone )
4. Hire the best: He recounted that early on he made hiring mistakes at Mouthshut by hiring programmers trained by poorer quality training institutes and not from good engineering colleges and soon learned that as a technology driven company they need to try and hire only the best engineers.
5. Don't die because of end of your cash: Be careful on what you spend your money there might be lower cost alternatives.
6. Apart from technology, learn business.
7. Avoid commuting at all costs, your time is very valuable.

The discussion veered around to how exactly do you 'launch' your web startup to the market without spending money on advertising. Faisal recalled the Buzz mouthshut generated with the friends and family launch of about 600 people who knew about 11 of their employees.

He also recalled the story of how accidentally he pioneered autorickshaw's as the medium to get the word out way back in early 2000s when he started travelling by auto for first time in his life. Now ofcourse we find a whole lot of startups advertising on autorickshaw's with mouthshut itself sticking their ad to almost 12000 autorickshaws every month.

Audience questions included questions like:-

What makes the review conversations on Mouthshut are more objective than say trashy comments on other famous indian sites ?

Discussion on native language(written in roman script) profanity filters on mouthshut.com, legal threats initially while companies didn't agree to the idea of 'defamation' by consumers through mouthshut.

He also expressed his view that startups run by very young people in the audience should not be scared of an old but successful dotcoms in India which aren't doing great in understanding the young people, and worried if he is too old to innovate beyond mouthshut.com. Supporting his hypothesis is his own daughter's favorite site, despite drinking all the mouthshut.com koolaid since birth happens to be youtube.

He also expressed willingness to acquire new kind of websites developed by youngsters who understand their peers better if he has cash available.

The interactive session ended with him gifting a mouthshut.com coffee mug to each participant.

Coming soon:-
A description of interactive session with Sanjeev Bhikchandani: Founder Infoedge(Naukri)

Disabled the comments: Guys please carry on your conversation offline with each other, you already seem to know each other well. -Tarun