Best startups ideas in India
(Too many mentors/angel…)
On an unusually warm winter day last December, inside the iconic Bombay Stock Exchange auditorium, a slim and groomed pony-tailed man was being mobbed.
The bell rang for the networking lunch, but the crowd wanted to talk to only one man — Rahul Sood, serial Silicon Valley entrepreneur and current head of the entrepreneurship accelerator arm of Microsoft. The exuberance at the event — Tech-Stock, organized by Microsoft and two other partners, where 10 entrepreneurs presented their ideas to 10 angel investors — was palpable.
Sood's first venture was gaming PC company VoodooPC that he later sold to Hewlett-Packard. Sood was being grabbed by the arm and made to listen to mini-pitches of business ideas, even as he tried to figure an escape route. This was like Shah Rukh Khan visiting an acting school.
A not-so-young man explained his business idea — car entry with the help of an iPhone. Sood felt it was an innovation that did not solve a problem or meet a need, and the man argued back: "But the idea came from Harvard..." and so on till Sood was pulled away — this time by a lady for another pitch. The fans had no inkling what Sood really thought about these ideas.
"Mostly half-baked, with no customer validation, " he said later, and even told ET Magazine in an interview that India is probably seeing an entrepreneurship bubble that may collapse even if it doesn't go completely bust. In India, today there is an event like TechStock almost every week where entrepreneurs are presenting their ideas to prospective investors or are brainstorming together in code-writing jam sessions — hackathons. Two high-profile events were held yesterday, Saturday, January 18, one in Kolkata and one in Chennai.
More than half a dozen are happening this month. Another such start-up jamboree is Pluggd. in, a platform for tech entrepreneurs and emerging digital media platforms that has grown from 220 people in 2009 to over 1, 500 in 2013, with another 5, 000 logged on virtually. Elsewhere, thousands of business ideas are clogging the inboxes of angel funding units such as Mumbai Angels and Indian Angel Network as well as of high net worth individuals with some cash to burn on the next big idea from India. In 2013 almost 50 accelerators/incubators operated in India; these are organizations that help early start-ups along the way. Two years back there would have been barely 10.
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