Hey Guys, 

The RodinHoods Hyderabad Chai Meet was a success !!! 🙂 We thought we needed at most 5 – 7 chairs .. We were wrong .. !!! We needed 20 Chairs by the end and we ran out of space !! ( I had to stand towards the end of the meet 😛 )

The diversity was amazing – We had Photographers, Bloggers, Startup guys who were funded .. We had people who managed Incubation Centers and Co-working spaces, people who were looking for opportunities to work on, people who ran 2 companies, people from the advertising  background and the list just goes on !

Following is an article by Praneeth from HatchStation…

“In our quest to build a solid startup ecosystem fully driven by the high energy entrepreneurs, we decided to hit up Rodinhoods the most famous, active and vibrant community for entrepreneurship in India. In a quick search, Ravi Teja and Chinna co-founder @HatchStation,  found Sistla Abhishek who already took the initiative and invited all the RodinHoods of Hyderabad to hangout  in Hyderabadi-style @Lamakaan.

I heard great stories about Lamakaan and always wanted to check out this place as this is known to be the most popular hangout spot for creative minds in Hyderabad. You should definitely plan your next meeting out there. After having their delicious Samosas, I can daringly admit that it is the best Samosa in town.

As this was our 1st meetup in Hyderabad, everyone assumed there would be only 5-7 attendees but to everyone’s surprise, people kept showing up every 5 mins and we reached 16. We started going around the table with self introductions and I was amazed by each story and their passion towards startups and entrepreneurship. The best I have seen of all the meetups is that everyone tried to give as much feedback as they could and did more of a tiny brainstorming. The crowd consisted of entrepreneurs driven to support Hyderabad startup community, serial entrepreneurs in early & growth stages, entrepreneurs-in-ideation-mode and wanna-be-entrepreneurs-having-no-ideas-yet.

The group shared some basic information on what Rodinhoods is all about , how Alok started it and the how quickly it grew into the most vibrant community in India. We discussed and debated some great ideas on what’s and how’s to keep this group organized, active and grow.

 – Make it happen every Month and may be more than once for initial meetups (The recurring day/date TBD, as the Hyderabad startup community is not highly co-dependent and as each group wants to do their own things, we definitely need to improve in organizing the community at least not to have similar meetups at the same day/time) {At HatchStation, after our recent experience we took the initiative hydstartupcalender.com (coming soon..) to virtually organize and publish all startup events in the city.}

– Invite variety of entrepreneurs to come and share their stories. (successful with exits, bootstrapped eg: owner of Hotel Paradise or Beam Cable or other local business which have scaled out, community thought leaders, gracefully failed startups, you know the list can never end .. )

– Allow at least 3 – 5 Startups to pitch with a hope that they might have some minimal traction from the existing Rodinhooders

– Have each Rodinhood meetups at a different location in the city to gain variety of experience and attract new Rodinhooders

– An over all common theme was to collaborate and contribute to the startup ecosystem.

Few of the Attendees: Raghavendra Kopalle Subbaram Gowra Chakrapani Sistla Venkata Abhishek Indranielgupta Potta Abu Zaffar Kiran Mortha Abhiram Muddu

Shots of Meetups. You should definitely check out the amazing 360/panaromic photos done by Raghavendra https://www.36ty.in/projects/rodinhoods/index.html

On an overall note, this is a great kick off for the Hyderabad Rodinhoods.
Please use #RHHYD for tagging.

Lets Rock Hyderabad Startups!”

Praneeth Patlola (@praneethpatlola)
On behalf of #RHHYD

*****

By the way, we also had press coverage – Thanks to Manoj Surya 🙂

Summary of the Press Report – 

1. Talked about a platform to connect Enthusiasts to Entrepreneurs
2. Help Entrepreneurs explore other domains
3. Work on Advanced Business models and Technology by collaborating with other Experts
4. A new way to approach business by talking about your problems & your solutions and helping get introduced to potential clients

All of us had a great time at the meetup and we’ve decided to do this more often ! With an Agenda and some space of course 😛 🙂