Attended a conference called SmartTechie Startup some time last week.. (Friend told me about this and finally ditched also.. I guess these 2 words goes as synonyms.. Had a similar ditching experience with different fellow in the same week) Conference was a nice, informative one.. ofcourse its boring also. You get lot of funda and you will get sleep and I slept after lunch :) In the morning, there were some sessions and a closing session keynote was from RK Misra the "Lead India" programme winner. There was a session on Cloud Computing by an Amazon guy. He explained what it is and why and all stuff. One point worth mentioning here is - "Can you see the big elephant in the room?". He wants to say that there are lot of things that need to be done between making the product and giving it to customers like the estimation for the infrastructure needed including servers, storage area etc and having the ability to scale as users increases. In the closing keynote session, RK Misra stated the keynotes with his career and explained what all the startups, initiatives he made. He used the trailers idea from US to make a mobile house in Japan and became a overnight celebrity and case study for those who want to do business in Japan. Then, he started a company in telecom domain in India when everyone was in the Y2K and outsourcing technology. He made a successful exit from both of them. As a CEO, he needs to travel through out world and he faced problems in air tickets reservation, and this made him to start a air ticket booking website and he was one of the very few who made these attempts and became hit. He planned his life to take retirement at 40 and he done that. Now, he is in socio-political world. He arranged many meetings between business and political people to help public and made many successful mantras. He started a plan in Rajasthan, with the help of this business and political people, that helped villagers to increase their monthly income. He gathered the students who failed in 10th and +2 level and arranged for them coaching as security gaurds, BPOs etc that showed them a bread earning way. He started the website changeindia.in. His message was to be socio-aware entrepreneurs.
In the afternoon, there was a open discussion forum which included a panel with big shots from HP, Infosys, Dell and Yahoo. This was very informative. Slept in the starting and the topic at the time I woke up was - when we need to go to change CEO? and this triggered - do we really agree to have some one who have completely different ideas from founders? Then, next one was - are the today's entrepreneurs ready for the the second challenge once their startup becomes hit? Infosys guy (sorry, I don't remember the name :( ) is one of the founder of Infosys and a close friend of Narayana Murthy shared his experience. In 1989, they went through the phase where they thought to sell the Infosys. In the room, when all the other founders present along with Narayana Murthy, were discussing this and everyone agreed to sell it, as they were not able to continue it. Narayana Murthy told them that he will buy their shares and that made his other friends to be with him, worked a lot, chalked out a plan to go to IPO in 1992. They executed the plan and made to IPO in 1993. Very inspiring one right!! Discussion was going in the lines how the response came from the audience. One more worthy point here is - There is no need for foreigners to invent in food, education, energy areas as they are very much self sufficient of these things and it is us who are facing problem with these and we are the one to invent solutions for these problems. So, instead of providing solution for a problem having a view of a customer whom you doesn't know and doesn't have clear idea, invent the solutions for the problems where you know the customer (end uses) and the people get benefit from that. Here, they were mentioning the mChek idea from Airtel as the Best one. They closed the discussion with the question to panel "What they are expecting can grow in coming future?" Responses were - 1. Development in food, energy, education areas (and I forgot one more area) 2. As mobiles became part of every ones' life now a days, solutions from that angle 3. Information/data analysis (I guess this is something to do with data mining, statistics, pattern recognition etc where lot of banks, stock market people do this)
Penned (Typed) down almost all worthy points that I remember.. going to sleep..
Sunday 1 June, 2008
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