Story of a young professional quitting his job to follow his heart to become the next Steve Jobs. With no money but only stars in his eyes, he looks upon successful mentors to guide him. Seemingly filling this gap, a group of successful professionals get together to form a ‘super angel network’ to not only guide but also fund thousands such budding entrepreneurs.
To connect the ‘super angels’ to these budding entrepreneurs the super angels organize a conference with a registration fee of a whopping Rs 27,000! For an accelerator with a stated mission of “to spur frugal innovation for the world by drawing upon the immense potential of technology and human creativity”, I have a few questions:
1. Would a young entrepreneur starting up ‘frugally’ be able to afford Rs 27K. Even if he could, 27K equals to 2700 clicks from potential clients through Google Adwords. What’s a better option, meeting a bunch of potential investors networking at his expense or test his product in the market!
2. What’s “innovative” about asking these poor entrepreneurs to pay the costs of running your event. An event designed to connect you to entrepreneurs who could make you billions. Can you not be ‘innovative’ in using your connections in raising sponsorships. Or even better, get the ‘superangels’ to pay for the conference to avail the opportunity to invest in these potentially amazing billion dollar companies.
3. Couple of things you supposedly are bringing to the table is: connections & money. You clearly don’t want to spend your money and lack connections willing to sponsor.
4. If the high fee is to prevent non serious teams, then would it not be better to
a) Keep it free
b) have a lot of entries & spend money on vetting the entries.
This would enable you to truly reach out to the lowest common denominator in India & live up to your goal of letting anyone achieve his dreams. This would also make this the most remarkable event of it’s kind in the country. A La GOOGLE CODEJAM.
5. Are any of the ‘Super Angels’ paying to be a part of this event?
I recently joined an entrepreneurship network ‘Ascent‘ founded by the statesman entrepreneur Harsh Mariwala. ASCENT finds its genesis in Mr Harsh Mariwala’s passion to enable established and potential businesses to scale up fast and realize their full potential. This was launched last year and 100 entrepreneurs from mumbai were selected. The aim is to go up to 10,000 entrepreneurs across India.
Even though the lowest turnover of a selected company in Ascent is Rs 50 lakhs and goes all the way upto 500 crores, there was no fee collected from any entrepreneur for any of the activities. Mr Harsh Mariwala himself met & vetted all the selected entrepreneurs. There have been several large scale events organized by Ascent with eminent speakers, professionals & entrepreneurs. All were funded through sponsorships.
The point here is, Harsh Mariwala is genuinely committed to creating and helping entrepreneurs. He is creating an environment where entrepreneurs can do what they do best: create enterprises. He believes in the entrepreneurial spirit of India & is not hesitating in investing his time own time and money for this. He is building a sustainable foundation open to all.
Another great example of nurturing entrepreneurship is, a for profit global virtual incubator, ‘One Million by One Million‘, started by ‘Sramana Mitra‘. As it’s much more easier to create several million dollar companies than a single billion dollar company, she has set about helping create a million million dollar companies. For a fee of 1000 USD she provides lectures, strategic guidance, lean & capital efficient strategies & introduction to customers, channel partners & investors. I have been reading & following the articles being posted by her and they are truly insightful and apt for any aspiring or in practice entrepreneur. For all those aspiring entrepreneurs, this would be money well spent!
The biggest challenge of a single owner founder is not funding, motivation or time but loneliness. The times when things don’t go as planned or when big decisions need to be made, are the times when support is most needed. Not family or friends, but fellow entrepreneurs are who can come to your aid at these moments.One such network providing this in India is the Rodinhoods. A community by and for entrepreneurs.
It’s time for opportunists to stop taking advantage of youngsters with dreams who are made to believe that the only path to success is raising funds. Funds are merely tools to an end, not the end itself. 90% failure rate of VC funded companies should make entrepreneurs vary of the pitfalls of being funded too early. Pitfalls like scaling too fast, not figuring out the correct market fit, spending too much on customer acquisition, losing the company culture, investors & entrepreneurs vision not being aligned etc. End of the day, no amount of lectures, conferences, planning, research, networking is going to help you build a successful venture. Only getting started and being persistent under all odds is what is going to bring success. As the famous comedian Eddie Cantor once said, ” It takes twenty years to become an overnight success”.
Vinay Chhoda
Amit,
Really admire you for having the guts to say whats on your mind (and probably on every entrepreneur’s mind) when it comes to the 27k conference that you speak about.
What pisses me off the most is like you said, how many of those delegates, etc actually paid to attend the conference? If its supposed to be super elite blah blah blah, then keep it private or invite only. Why have it invite based and then tell other people – oh if you want to attend you have to shell out 27k? Why not price it more reasonably and reach out to a larger audience. Most entrepreneur related conferences are priced at about Rs.1500-2000. What were these guys smoking when they came up with that number…
The commercial angle of the whole thing would discourage many entrepreneurs and eventually end up killing the ecosystem these very so called experts are trying to build in the first place.
Amit Arvind
Thank Vinay for replying. I was certain nobody would voice an opinion. It is unfortunate that entrepreneurs don’t realize that investors are there for their own good, and they believe they will make money, they will invest. You don’t need to pay 27k to pay for their networking event to get a chance to get their card.
When I read all this noise belittling other ventures like Flipkart etc for various things: there was not one voice commending them for trying. As an entrepreneur failure is inevitable, it’s all about accepting your faults and getting on with the job. Entrepreneurs should atleast give fellow entrepreneurs a looser rope!
Regarding conferences, there are severl bodies like Silicon India, VC Circle etc who organize such events and charge huge fees. Difference is they are not investors themselves but facilitators and are clear that the event is for profit.
With regards to this event, it was the mission statement of the accelerator which got me to write, “Our mission is to spur frugal innovation for the world by drawing upon the immense potential of technology and human creativity.” This event showed cleared lack of following up on their mission of frugality & innovation.
A good read on what takes to be a real entrepreneur is https://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/8-qualities-of-fearless-entrepreneurs…
For other entrepreneurs, time to believe in yourselves and stop thinking that an investor is doing you a favour by investing. It’s just business. Show him the money!
Amit Arvind
If I were an investor, I would not invest in startups attending. Simply because they show a lack of understanding of bootstrapping a making each rupee go the furthest.
Maybe the best reply I would get, and I would be glad to retract this discussion then, is if the accelerator can put down facts on how startups get more than their value for the buck by spending to attend!
Rahul
This is not related to the post.. but hoping community would accept our cause..
From one runner to other.. Join us in our fight against cancer…
https://www.facebook.com/run4cure
Alok Rodinhood Kejriwal
wow – makes me think..
We should GIVE money to really promising entrepreneurs to attend therodinhoods open houses :-))
Amit Arvind
Now THAT sir, is thinking out of the box 🙂
Pawan Deokule
As an entrepreneur who is frugal and counting every paisa spent (pardon me if ‘paisa’ does not qualify as a currency any more, but we earn on those basis and count by it still!) we have to be very careful as to where we spend our time. Money is only worth what you can gain from it.
An event costing a certain amount would not be worth an entrepreneurs time because the economics would make sure that he finds a free way to meet the participants offline to benefit his paisa and time. I for one would just take the list of participants and find them online to engage in a meeting that is more lucrative to time and free! Is that not what makes us entrepreneurs in the first place? We Indians are so good at jugaad and finding loop holes.
Quoting from Alok’s notes on Eric Schimdt,”40% of Silicon Valley Startups have indian founders!”
Ratnakar Gokarn
Hi Amit,
Ascent foundation : Eligibility
A minimum annual turnover of
Sorry, no offense intended to Ascent, but it is elitist.