Attended headstart - a 3day meet on startups - third day

This was the most useful day for me. Apart from the keynotes, there were three interactive sessions, which are conducted by VCs and others.

The first interactive session is from Srini Vudayagiri of Lightspeed ventures. I am very much impressed with the presentation. The main thing he said was not to look for VC money at the starting stages. Get the money for the starting stages from 3Fs(Friends,Family and Fools). The last F was the group of people, who blindly believes you. One more thing he said was, no VC will be signing up NDA in USA so in India. Its a very rare thing to happen.

The next session is from K Ganapathy Subramanian of Mydunia. He was previously in venture funding some time and now running the startup Mydunia. This session was very much on the practical side. He said that VCs typically take 20 to 50% stake in first round. And seed investors give half a million to to 1 million for 20 to 25%. He said that it takes typically 3 months to get the money deposited into ur account from the starting of the talks with the VCs. There were some query from audience on how to valuate the company. He clearly said there is no procedure to valuate a company. The clear example given was somebody from Skype, saying the day when Skype got sold for $X billion as a sad day. Ideally the valuation should be as high as possible. One more question from audience was, what to promise for the 3Fs in return, while taking the initial money from them. The initial answer was "nothing" :). The question was re framed to tell, what he offered when he got investment from the 3Fs. He said that assume, this is the last time you are seeing this money :).

The third session is from Deepak Srinivasan, CEO of Mobiance. The session was about Product management. I initially thought it would be like a theory class. But it turned out be very different from what I thought. That was a great session on what skills a Product manager should have? and when does a startup require a Product manager? A very good example for the craziness of a product manager is given as follows. One of the product manger at Sony, dipped the digi-cam into the water and showing the bubbles coming out of the water, said that the digi-cam can even be shrinked. The product manger should never think of the feasibility. They should have great visualization. Steve Jobs was the best product manager according to him.
A book named Crossing the castle by Geofry moore is suggested by him. The dev team should never report to a product manager. These are some of the few points said by him.

The last presentation was from CEO of mapunity. The presentation was very different from the rest of the sessions. This is the same company which is running btis, htis which provide traffic information at present in an area in Bangalore and Hyderabad respectively. This is completely community based. A novel approach to solve the social problems. All the people contribute part time. The simple theory he believes is that any social thing should be available free of cost. Many were impressed by his speech and approached him after the speech to know more about how to contribute.

After this, there were some announcements from the organizers. One of them is that there will startup Saturdays on every 3rd Saturday of a month. They even provided the group id where further info can be found. The groups name is friends-of-kickstart.