Pitching your startup to VCs
December 8, 2008
You might have already read this, but was pretty good that I wanted to post it on my blog.
Canaan Partners, recently released a slide deck on Slideshare called ” Canaan Entrepreneur Pitchbook” .
It’s a workbook style presentation that is intended to help entrepreneurs give the right pitch to VCs and angel investors. If you have been successful in pitching to VCs/ angels before, what do you think ?
Is the entertainment industry recession proof ?
December 3, 2008
Makes me wonder as I look at Yahoo! Buzz – year in review 2008. These are the top 10 search terms in Yahoo search.
- Britney spears (Music /Entertainment)
- WWE (Sports Entertainment)
- Barack Obama (Politics)
- Miley Cyrus ( Entertainment)
- RuneScape (Online gaming entertainment)
- Jessica Alba (Movie star / entertainment)
- Naruto (Entertainment)
- Lindsay Lohan (Movie star / entertainment)
- Angelina Jolie (Movie star / entertainment)
- American Idol (TV / entertainment)
Note that 9 out of the 10 terms are entertainment oriented, a trend which is similar to 2007.
Wonder if this is a reflection of Yahoo users or whether the entertainment industry is recession proof ? What do you think ? (Note: Britney spears is worth $110 million)
There are two beasts in entertainment which I feel when legalized in India, could change the face of entertainment and prove to be a great opportunity for startups.
- Gambling on TV / in casinos.
- Pornography on TV.
What do you think ? Any ideas for killer startups in this space 🙂 ? (or should we say hot startups 🙂 )
Understanding the new “social” consumer behavior
November 6, 2008
I just finished going through the Consumer experience report, from Razorfish a survey which has documented the online behavior and characteristics of more than 1,000 “connected” consumers on the internet. This was refreshing to read in the midst of all grim news and presentations from VC firms and the layoffs in internet firms.
The Consumer experience report looks at:
- People’s life online and their exchanges and networks that they build on the web
- Changing consumer behavior heralded by Web 2.0, UGC and the voice of the consumer
- what is the real impact of the “social web”;
- Key drives for transactions and purchases on the web
- and who is really using the mobile web and what are they doing.
The survey report is nicely documented and gives several key insights into online consumer behavior. If you are building a consumer internet product, it would suggest you go through this report.
Here are some thoughts I found encouraging, with potential for building opportunities on
- Search as the start of most online experiences
- Increasing importance of user experience design and designing for the “Facebook generation”
- Emergence of online video as a rising star and increased adoption across demographics
- Accelerated adoption of social media technologies at a breakneck speed – Increasing popularity of Twitter, Facebook and other social technologies which connect people and enable conversations
- Peer driven search and search from social recommendation sites driving digital commerce
- Market for smartphone is growing and adoption of online mobile services nascent
- Growth of mico conversations and social media tools like twitter -“I don’t remember how I kept in touch before!”
- Increased use of widgets which mashup data from various sources and can be accessed on the web and mobile
- Increased demand for data visualization and enabling users to track their activities over the social web.
So what are your thoughts on the report ? If you run an Internet startup, what are you doing to leverage this ?
You can download the entire report in PDF from here.
FailCamp – learning from other entrepreneurs about failure
October 24, 2008
FailCamp‘s idea is simple – get a bunch of inspired people together and enable them to learn from each other and from other entrepreneurs who have battled (or give in to) failure in their startups.
This is a wonde
rful initiative and I am keenly looking forward to this event in Chennai.
Here are the event details
Date and Time – November 16,2008
Venue – Tenth Planet, Chennai. (Looking at pics, venue seems to be super cool! and an interesting company – they do outsourced projects on open source technologies)
Registration – FailCamp Wiki
If you are going to be at the event, leave me a comment here or over on my twitter stream.
Open Coffee Club meetups
July 31, 2008
I will be attending the open coffee club (OCC) meetup on August 3rd. 08. Details of the event are here.
For the unintiated, let me talk about OCC and what it does. 
OCC bangalore is an open forum for Entrepreneurs, VC’s and budding Entrepreneurs to come together and connect with each other at the grass root level. The group holds its meetings every alternate Sunday in Bangalore.
The Open coffee club was an international initiative to enable entrepreneurs to connect with each other and started off in London in 2007.
The meeting this Sunday, Aug 3rd is very interesting where we will be meeting Mr. Rajeev K Purnaiya, a serial entrepreneur who recently launched hooeey – a tool which enables users to manage their online productivity.
Before this, Rajeev founded CyberBazaar, India’s first and largest conferencing company which was eventually acquired by WebEx.
This is going to be one great meet with many other interesting people like Vijay Anand of Proto.in, Sameer Gulgani of Morpheus Venture Partners, Anjana Vivek of VentureBean, Anjana Kaul of Footprint ventures and Ganesh Rengaswamy (Ex-Greylock) expected to be there.
The event
Date: 3rd Aug 08
Day: Sunday
Time: 10:30 AM – 12:30 PM
Venue: Principal Axis, 34/1 Crescent Road, Bangalore, 560 001.
Office Board Line: 4126 6279/80/81 (request you to call the front desk in this week and make sure you get the directions correct so as to avoid delays on Sunday.
Mark your confirmation of attendance from here.
If you plan to be at the event, we can catch up there, drop me a message on Twitter or leave a comment here.
Making better products 