Startup Dunia

This post is syndicated from Silicon Valley Entrepreneur and Strategy Consultant Sramana Mitra’s blog, Sramana Mitra on Strategy, where she writes about entrepreneurship, venture capital, emerging markets, strategy, policy, leadership and sundry other business topics. Sramana Mitra has been the founder CEO of 3 startups, Interim VP of Marketing of 7 startups, and has consulted for over 70 companies including public companies such as SAP, Cadence, Webex, and others.

If you are a regular follower of Indian blogosphere, you would already be familiar with her popular blog. For those of you who are interested in entrepreneurship, I encourage you to bookmark her blog - she writes some amazing stuff on India and entrepreneurship in general.

Enterpreneurship is a critical element of a growth economy, and India is poised to unlock a Silicon Valley like entrepreneurial boom through the next 10 years. The beginnings are already in place, steps have been taken in the right direction.

I have written extensively on the topic of entrepreneurship and venture capital in India, and thought it would be a good time to summarize the various pieces.

Last summer, I started digging into the topic, and came up with my first nugget: Too Much Money, Too Few Deals, highlighting the excess capital chasing Indian startups, and the lack of fundable deals.

Around the same time, I also wrote my popular Concept Arbitrage series, which led up to the widely read Venture Capital in India article. In these, I explored what kinds of deals have been getting funded, and why. Consumer Internet turned out to be a big trend from last year, for India, while non-tech sectors like retail and real estate are also big money-making opportunities. In fact, I highlighted the retail trend in my piece about Oak Investment Partners’ India Retail Fund.

This year, as we have explored the issue of seed capital for entrepreneurship in India, the situation has got more dire, with more money going into India. This has led me to the conclusion that India Needs More Incubator Funds. I continued an exploration of the incubator fund requirements, while entrepreneur Sujai Karampuri wrote some passionate pieces on why we need technology product companies in India, and why we don’t have any.

Finally, I suggested some areas for technology entrepreneurs in India to explore as segments where new companies can be formed: SaaS, Enterprise 3.0 and web 3.0.

In summary, I am optimistic about India’s entrepeneurial potential, and look forward to tracing its developments over the coming months and years.