Challenging the status quo ….

Barcamp 4.0 concluded with much fan fare. This time the unband collective created quite an interesting atmosphere by adding music to mileu. Because of recent dislocation on the personal front, I happened to visit only the 2nd day of the barcamp. As usual, I made my way to the mobile collective, blogging collective (as I explore ways to increase my reach with my blog) and the startup collective. Startup collective had a great interactive talk by Vijay Anand & Tejas from proto.in. They had a lot of experience to share and advice for Indian entrepreneurs, which is quite valuable. Most of the folks I have met here in India think that as soon as they have an idea, they gotta start looking for VCs as if nothing else matters. What happened to really looking at the business model, prototype, early customer feedback etc? I wonder if the services industry has caused this problem. But let me leave the services guys out of this discussion.
Post that, Amit (forget his lastname), ran an interesting session ‘Why am I not able to do my startup?’. He listed out some 13 reasons that came from the audience spanning – family commitments, lack of ideas, financial commitment, social culture, lack of idea nurturing, right business model etc.
Those who had gone down the path, had interesting experiences to share.

To me everyone had skipped ‘Mentoring’ completely. I would have perhaps highlighted lack of good mentors and how to leverage a mentor-mentee relationship, as my first problem. I would expect any entrepreneur to seek out someone with whom they can share, brainstorm and learn about how to tackle all the different problems they face when starting out. A good mentor should be able to help the mentee think through all the issues in a non-judgemental way. Either they have traveled down the familiar road or they have a good understanding of the challenges that startups essentially are – human endeavors to solve problems which no one else has.

Personally, each stage & transition in my life has had influences from different folks- essentially thought leaders. I have learnt from them, shared my worries, received advice and moved forward to the next level. I also expect the VCs to provide that mentoring and support, but most VCs in India may not be of the kind who can provide this help.