Category — Entrepreneurship@India

I was invited as a speaker to Conquest2007, an entrepreneurship focused event at BITS Pilani, one of India’s top engineering schools. I was part of the session on ‘Challenges in Globalisation and Scalability for a startup‘. My talk centered on the slideshare experience and the kind of challenges we are facing as we scale up. The audience consisted of engineering students, faculty members, participants from industry, venture capital firms etc. It was a great experience to be back amongst engineering students and one cannot help feeling nostalgic about your own educational institution. The event was organised by CELBITS, the entrepreneurial club at BITS and was sponsored by SAP.

Here are the slides for my talk shared via slideshare.

Other speakers at the workshop included Ashmeet Sidana from Foundation Capital (a Silicon Valley VC firm), Manish Vij from Quasar Media and Kunwar Sachdev, CEO of Su-Kum (the invertor company).

Also take a minute to go through a few snaps that I clicked using my camera phone. The photographic quality is not great, so bear with me on this.

About a year back, I wrote a post on this very blog titled ‘Starting up Business in India– Beware of the ROC redtape!‘. This was basically a narrative, about how I had to spend three (exasperating) months in getting our startup registered with the office of the registrar of companies (ROC), New Delhi, as a private limited company. I must inform you that, to this day, that post remains the most popular post on this blog, attracting readers from various corners of the world. So much so that, if you Google for ‘Starting a company in India ‘, a reference to this post, is ranked number one amongst the 106,000,000 search results that Google throws up.

But, in what can only be described as a mind boggling turn of events, the Economic Times carried a report today about how it took a software company in Delhi, less than an hour to get their company registered with the ROC office. The software company, Corporate Professionals eSolution Pvt Ltd, got registered from the promoter’s own office in an hour, with some synchronized legwork thrown in at two government offices.

This is how, Pavan Kumar Vijay, the company’s promoter narrated the process: “With all documents ready, we applied online for the approval of the company’s name at 10.41 am. The name was approved in a few minutes. Then the memorandum and the articles of association were stamped and the power of attorney notarized at the Tis Hazari court by 10.50 am. The scanned documents with digital signatures were then filed electronically to the Registrar of Companies (RoC). Soon after, the certificate of incorporation was obtained at 11:40.”

For reading the article, check out this link.

The article mentions that the government plans to further simplify the process by introducing an electronic stamping system, which should bring down the time taken for incorporation to 20 minutes. I am lost for words as I read this story…

Its possible that this is an extreme case but the fact is that, information technology is bringing about a paradigm shift in the way even our governments operate. It is leading to greater transparency, faster throughputs and reduced red-tapism.

Much as we never miss out on an opportunity to criticize the government at the drop of a hat, on this occasion, I can’t help congratulate our government for enabling this. Full marks to them for allowing something like this.

Update- Aditya (who works with TCS) has informed me that the technology for this new incorporation process was provided by TCS. I think this is a PATHBREAKING effort by TCS and deserves to be applauded. Unfortunately, none of the reports I have read about this (including the ET one) cared to mention this.

Ever since we organized DelhiBarcamp, I have been asked this question many times over– ‘what made you all think of organizing an event like this, in a place like Delhi?’

Well, the answer to this question is obviously a no-brainer. For, BarCamps (anywhere) are a great way for the tech community to learn from the experience of others in a shared and unrestricted manner.

However speaking for myself, I can say that I was motivated by a selfish self-interest as well. For, I head a small software product development team at Uzanto. I have previously attended events organized by Nasscom & TiE but those events typically are dominated by the mid & large sized tech companies. They don’t capture or reflect the aspirations/concerns of the small tech/startup community. And so, I had hoped that BarCamps would provide me an opportunity to discover and meet lots of other (similar) software product startups.
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The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE) is organizing its annual conference in New Delhi called TiEcon India 2005 from 14-16 December. The theme for the conference is ‘Entrepreneurship Unleashed’ and it is billed as the biggest entrepreneurship conference in Asia.

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I got a chance to attend the TIE event in New Delhi titled ‘Unleashing Entrepreneurship in India ‘. The event featured Bill Gates & Narayanan Murthy in conversation with Prannoy Roy, who himself is a very successful media entrepreneur, apart from being India’s best television host. I had expected it to be a small gathering but about 300 people from Delhi’s corporate and entrepreneurship circuit attended it.

The discussion wasn’t about Microsoft and Infosys; rather it was about Bill Gates and Narayana Murthy, the individuals, at the helm of their respective companies. It was about their persona, their motivations, their views & interests and how they feel about their entrepreneurial careers.

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