23 Nov, 2008
The Entrepreneur
This bronze work depicts the self-
made man in his struggle to chisel
himself from common stone.
Blindfolded, The Entrepre-
neur must trust his instincts. Not
knowing if the next strike of the
chisel will cut himself off at the
knee or allow him to move further
toward his goal, he continues
unimpeded by his mistakes.
Inside this issue:
Patent Management 2 gan Stanley for example; they emptied out
Vision India 2020: Lucid 3 days.
Smart ways of Bootstrap- 4
ping
A Peek at Entrepreneur- 5 its. Even in the case of ICICI, the bank's
ship Summit 09
Bilion Dollar Company of 6 42%. However, ICICI showed an overall 27%
one employee
Talk by Prof. Joy Laskar 7
About us 8 be given to Dr. Manmohan Singh and his
How is India affected by financial crisis?
"Fundamentally strong" is the phrase most
often used to describe the Indian economy
in this period of global financial crisis. Why
then have these fundamentals, been un-
able to prevent the Sensex from falling
below 9000 mark, or the dollar from cross-
ing the 50-rupee mark?
The free-fall of the
Sensex can largely
be attributed to
the withdrawal of
money by Foreign
Institutional Inves-
tor FII’s). Last
year, the total
inflow by FII’s was
$17bn. This year,
the outflow presently stands at $10bn. This
outflow has more to do with crippling for-
eign banks than the Indian economy. The
market is falling because these foreign
banks are in dire need of money. Take Mor-
their entire portfolio of Rs 2200cr in two
Consider SBI, India's leading financial con-
glomerate; it has beaten all projections and
posted a 40% growth in its quarterly prof-
Indian operations posted a profit growth of
decline due to its overseas subsidiaries.
Credit for the comparative insulation of
Indian banks, from the financial crisis, must
team. While framing the deregulation poli-
cies in the 90's, they made sure that banks
remain sufficiently regulated.
Foreign banks are also largely responsible
for the fall of the rupee. Large foreign
banks have been withdrawing money in
rupees from the Indian market, and taking
it to the US market in dollars, in order to
sort out their own crisis. With the excep-
tion of the Chinese Yuan and Japanese Yen,
most international currencies have weak-
ened against the US dollar. The Yen and
Volume 3, Issue 4
Yuan have grown stronger due to unwind-
ing carry trade, where people borrowed in
cheap yen to invest in other high yielding
assets. This sudden new found strength in
the dollar isn't going to last long as its
cause isn't fundamentally good enough for
it to remain so.
Today, India is not as insulated from the
rest of the world as it was in the late-90s.
Cross-border transactions contribute sig-
nificantly to India's present economy. The
Indian IT industry, more so the BPO indus-
try, will probably be the worst hit in the
following six to nine months. This hit will
last until someone fills the void created by
Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, and other
foreign banks coping with bankruptcy. The
real test of the Indian economy's strong
foundation will be its GDP growth rate; to
see if it can achieve the projected 7.5%.
(Bank to BPO contribution)
While none of the economic pa-
rameters show any cause for concern, the
regulators need to make sure things re-
main that way. Crashing markets is the first
stage of any financial crisis. This will not
have a significant long-term effect. Al-
though it is unlikely that India will reach
the second stage, where non-financial
firms get affected, poor regulation can
push the country to that stage. Otherwise,
we can look forward to a healthy long term
economic growth.
- Abhilash B.N
Dollar vs Rupee over the last 6 months
The Entrepreneur Page 2
The Art of Patent Management
Management of patents is
a central issue for the success of
start-ups in the technology sector.
If a company like IBM files
a patent on technology developed
by your start-up, you won't have
Volume 3, Issue 4
first rights over the usage of your
own invention.
Before discussing the nu-
ances of patent management, it is
essential to understand what
a patent means. An appropriate
government body grants a set of
exclusive and jurisdictional rights
to the inventor like distribution, sale,
use and export; these rights are col-
lectively known as a patent. For ob-
taining a patent, an invention must
satisfy three basic criteria: Novelty,
Non-obviousness and Utility. Inven-
tors who publicly disclose their inven-
tion before filing a patent lose on the
grounds of novelty.
An entrepreneur must therefore
know
1. The level of disclosure to make in
public before filing a patent
2. The parts of the invention that are
patentable, and
3. Whether those parts have already
been covered by any other prior art.
Knowledge and Intellectual
Property is a startup's prime asset.
Realizing the commercial value of the
intellectual property is crucial for a
startup. The value it adds to the busi-
ness is well depicted in Gordan V.
Smith's famous book Intellectual
Property: Licensing and Joint Venture
Profit Strategies'.
Intellectual Property is a legal
definition of ideas, inventions, artistic
works and other commercially viable
products that are the result of one's
creativity. In the same way real estate
titles and bills of sale establish owner-
ship of tangible items, intellectual
property is protected by patents,
copyrights, and trademark registra-
tions.
Patent management deals
with obtaining, maintaining and lever-
aging gains out of patents. This proc-
ess involves various technical, legal
and business skills. Identifying, devel-
oping and assessing the technology
involved in a given patent, requires
some amount of technical knowledge.
Legal expertise helps understand the
boundaries of the patent, scope of
possible infringement, and selling or
licensing the patent. The end objec-
tive is to maximize profits from
the patent, which involves business
skills.
While numerous profession-
als are often involved in obtaining and
maintaining patents, it is also possible
for an entrepreneur to do the work by
themselves. Professional help is often
essential if the invention is complex
and the potential profitability is high.
Some of the biggest compa-
nies in the world generate billions
of dollars through efficient com-
mercialization and licensing of
their patents. Take IBM for exam-
ple; they generated revenues in
excess of US $1 billion from more
than 30,000 live patents in 2007.
The University of California, during
the same period, generated over
US $100 million from its 3,000-odd
patents. As rightly said by Jackie
Hutter, IP &Patent Business Strate-
gist, "[The] goal of building a
solid patent portfolio, is to make
your business an attractive target for
investment, or acquisition by a larger
company.” Patent portfolio manage-
ment hence involves the study,
valuation and commercialization of
patents.
A recent study shows that
60% of all patents filed in the US are
by individuals. However, as far as
revenue generation is concerned,
corporates make 99% of the revenue
from all patents procured, leaving
individuals with only 1% of the pie.
This happens because individuals are
not aware of the ways in which their
patents can be monetized. The situa-
tion is worse in Asia because indi-
viduals here are more ignorant.
To summarize, it can be said that a
person who owns intellectual prop-
erty must
1. Be aware about the extent of dis-
closure of the invention
2. Actively manage their patent port-
folio
3. Analyze the value of, and exploit
the patent proactively
- Kanav Hasija

Vision India 2020: Lucid
The author, Sramana Mitra, is a well known Silicon Valley Entrepreneur, who has founded 3 companies, is a Strategy Con-
sultant for over 70 companies, including SAP and Cadence among others, and the content from her popular strategy blog at
www.sramanamitra.com is syndicated by Yahoo! Finance, Indian Daily, etc. She also writes a weekly column for Forbes.
This is part 3 of Sramana Mitra’s the 20 part Vision India 2020 series. For the previous two parts refer to September and October issues of
The Entrepreneur. The next article in this series, Vision India 2020: Darjeeling, will be published in the February 2009 issue of The Entre-
preneur.
In 2004, we started investigating the issue of K-12
education, especially in Math and the Sciences. As part of
this endeavor, we interviewed a number of teachers at vari-
ous high schools in the Bay Area. Two nuggets came out of
these interviews (1) there is no standardized methodology of
teaching (2) there is no methodology for personalized skill-
gap analysis.
Lucid was founded upon these two core founda-
tional blocks. They had implications well beyond the local
schools and students.
As Chris Kaegi, a teacher at Galileo High School in
San Francisco explained, “If a teacher has to teach 50 kids per
class, across 3-4 grades, it is very difficult to keep track of
which kid has absorbed what’s being taught, and which one
has not.”
This results in a chain of problems as the child
moves from one grade to the next. A “D” in 7th grade de-
grades to an “E” in 8th grade, followed by an “F” in 9th
grade. If you don’t know how to do fractions in Algebra, how
would you solve quadratic equations?
With our knowledge of Artificial Intelligence, we
concluded that a knowledge base of content was needed
that is aligned with a methodology of teaching. This method-
ology would include personalized skill gap analysis, such that,
a student studying Basic Algebra could be tested to identify
exactly where her knowledge gap was. Be it in dealing with
fractions or exponents, this knowledge base and analytics
software was capable of getting to the heart of the problem.
Once the problem was identified, the knowledge
base had modules for teaching each one of the areas that
needed focused attention.
Of course, Venture Capitalists at the time hated the
Education market, since some had tried to penetrate it with
marginal success, including the legendary John Doerr. The
conventional wisdom was that you don’t make money in
education. There was a lot of truth to this assumption, since
getting products into schools was an up-hill task.
However, in 2008, the Web 2.0 era was fully mani-
fest, and Web 3.0 was about to be launched. Web 3.0 turned
out to be all about personalization.
Against this backdrop, Lucid was launched with $8
Million in Series A Venture Capital led by a firm called Emer-
gence Capital. It was a powerpoint financing, with no other
asset yet in place. It took us 3 years of absolute stealth-mode
Research & Development to come up with a scalable meth-
odology for Math (Arithmetic, Algebra, Geometry, Trigo-
nometry, Calculus) alone that covered grades 6-12. We cre-
ated and licensed an enormous amount of content that
aligned with the methodology at our development center in
Page 3
India. We involved teachers who had particular reputations
for being “great teachers,” studied their “art” at great depth,
and encapsulated as much as we could into a “science.”
Then came the go-to-market challenge.
While we wanted this to be a worldwide service that
every Math teacher at every school in every country adopted
to teach every single one of their students, we had to seg-
ment the market and find a business model that would let us
penetrate and get early traction.
We chose to go with North America with a Web 3.0
approach. We created a Community for Middle School and
High School Math teachers to interact, exchange ideas, and
organically engage with one another. We also had a Commu-
nity of Middle School and High School parents at each of the
schools that our teachers taught in, who participated in the
exchange.
Most importantly, every teacher who adopted our
methodology in their schools, managed to get the buy-in of
the parents to pay for the service.
This was very important from a business model per-
spective, since it allowed us to bypass the school system alto-
gether.
It also meant that our target customer base re-
mained constrained to affluent families in North America. We
did have teachers and families using our service elsewhere in
the world, including India, UK, the Middle East and Australia,
largely due to word-of-mouth. But by and large, we con-
sciously chose not to fight the battle yet of tackling the less
affluent or poorer segments of our eventual target audience.
We accepted this segmentation reality for 5 more
years, because it allowed us to refine our methodology, build
company valuation, raise a great deal more financing, and
expand into other subjects beyond Math, including Biology,
Physics, Chemistry, World History, World Geography, English,
and English as a Second Language.
All the while, we grew our revenues at a 113% CAGR.
We could have become profitable by 2016, but we
took our time. We were addressing a big problem, and we
chose to do it right. We invested in building the most remark-
able Content partnerships with Discovery Channel, A&E, CNN,
etc.
In 2020, however, we were extremely profitable, and
had an operating margin of 29% against a revenue of $3.6
Billion.
And, we were so well-known as an effective method-
ology by 2017, that Gates Foundation came to us with a pro-
posal to fund a roll-out of our methodology into the poorer
schools all over the world.
In 2020, thus, we are the leading global educational brand.
 Page 4
The Entrepreneur
If You’re smart, you don’t need capital!
The author, Chaitanya Sagar, is the CEO of www.p2w2.com, an online marketplace for services like writing,
business consulting, research, software, online-tutoring etc. for small businesses in the US and India. Using
P2W2, you an outsource your work and get it done or take up work, deliver it and earn money.
Volume 3, Issue 4
Well I must restate it. If you are smart, you
don't need much capital. I am an advocate
of bootstrapping – starting a business with little or no
capital. Bootstrapping minimizes cost to experiment a
new idea (more ideas get tested). And it helps you instil
a culture of cost consciousness in your business. But
more importantly, it helps you to think outside the box
and look for ways to get things done.
I heard a speaker once say "Penury (poverty) is
strategy" in the context of start-
ing companies. Is it just theory or
can you really implement it?
Here are various ways to do that.
1. Handling your workstations:
You already have your laptop/
desktop. There's no need to buy
one for separately for work.
Check if your employees have
their laptops and if they will be comfortable using
them. This cuts down on any capital you would be
unnecessarily putting n to buy workstations for your
company. You can also use free web space to save im-
portant material securely. This makes using personal
computers less risky since, even if a few fail there is no
loss of important or sensitive data.
2. Office Space: You have your dorm or your house. You
don't need additional office space to start with. Usually,
you also have access to the internet in these places. So
the need to buy/lease that expensive office doesn't
have to bother you. Most bootstrappers have started
out in their garages, dorm rooms, even backyards or
libraries since they did not need to bother with the lo-
gistics of an office space to work efficiently.
3. Advance Payment from customers: Ask your custom-
ers to pay in advance. There is no harm in doing this as
long as you have a money-back guarantee for undeliv-
ered services or similar work policies that make custom-
ers easier to trust you with their money. Getting the
cash up front takes a lot of the load off your mind and
also makes you more accountable to your customers
4. Credit from Vendors: Check if your suppliers can wait
a little bit or you can pay them in installments. If some-
one does not want to lend you, just sit in their office all
day long. They will get fed up of you and will start lend-
ing. If you get money from your customers in advance,
you may even be able to make little money on the float!
5. Lease. Don't buy: In case you do have to buy some
inventory or company assets, its safer to lease as many
of them as you can. You need a server. But you can opt
for utilitarian monthly payments as opposed to one
large payment. This makes rationing your funds easier
as you spend cautiously and only on what you really
need at that time.
6. Employee investments: Quite a few companies offer
the choice of stock options to their employees. This has
the psychological effect of employees putting in better
work to ensure that the company stock keeps going up.
The same strategy can work for small boot-strapped
businesses as well. You could ask your employees to
work for stock options for part of their salary.
7. Swapping jobs: You could swap services, e.g., you are
good at technology/writing/marketing while a friend is
good at graphic design. You
could swap those services for
each other. This helps all the
members involved bring out
their strengths for the business.
Also, this helps you to approach
more customers from all fronts
without limiting yourself to your core competency.
8. Smart selling: You could choose services/products
that don't take too long to build, reducing the need for
capital. This is a tricky matter and you need to think
long before floating a company about how you will be
offering your services, and what your work terms will
be.
9. Short opportunities: You could take up short dura-
tion opportunities, such as dealing in designer gold jew-
elry during the festive season. You can experiment with
low capital requirement and fast. This might not be as
lucrative but usually offers good lessons and a little cash
flow never hurt.
10. Stewing your idea: Work part time on your idea. In
the mean time, keep your day job. Ditch the job when
you make progress. That way, you can earn pocket
money. You might think that you are jeopardizing your
reputation and will be labeled a job-hopper if you do
this often. Make sure you fulfill your immediate respon-
sibilities at your current job before taking such a drastic
step.
Most if not all of the above are implementable.
Check out other such ideas. We discuss many such
ideas at p2w2 blog (www.p2w2.com/blog). I wish you
the very best in your venture.
 Page 5

A Peek at Entrepreneurship Summit 09

Entrepreneurship Summit, a
two-day event organized by Entrepre-
neurship Cell IIT Kharagpur, is one of
the biggest platforms in India, for aca-
demicians, new-age entrepreneurs,
eminent business personalities, ven-
ture capitalists, and students alike, to
gather and share their entrepreneurial
endeavors and experiences, and to
pledge to take Entrepreneurship in
India to greater scales.
Entrepreneurship Summit
’09, the third edition of the Summit, is
scheduled for 10th and 11th January,
2009. It aims at promoting entrepre-
neurial awareness among the stu-
dents, and will witness varieties of
guest lectures by distinguished speak-
ers, panel discussions, focused work-
shops and a host of events such as
Case Study analysis, Business Ideas
competition, etc. This year’s summit is
part of the Entrepreneurship Week
that is being celebrated in IIT Kharag-
pur, starting from the 2nd of January.
The week kick starts with a
guest lecture by Dominique Trempont
Forbes Profile, director of 3Com and
Finisar, accompanied by Sramana Mi-
tra, who is also a Silicon Valley Entre-
preneur, has founded 3 companies,
and is a strategy consultant for over
70 companies including SAP, Cadence
etc.
The very next day will wit-
ness the first ever Barcamp in Kolkata,
at the IIT Extension Centre. A conflu-
ence of the best bosses, entrepre-
neurs and students will share ideas
and opinions in this one-day un-
conference event.
Lined up for the rest of the
week are a panel discussion on 4th
January, and a knowledge camp on
alternative sources of energy on 6th.
The biggest of the knowledge camps
conducted thus far, promises to edu-
cate both a layman and hard core
researchers, as they go about discuss-
ing the hottest topic in today’s sce-
nario.
The E-Week also includes a
Venture Funding Conference, which
will showcase the launch of Global
Ventures Lab. It is a collaborative ef-
fort of IIT Kharagpur, University of
California Berkley (UCB), USA and
University of Jyvaskyla, Finland to
promote Entrepreneurship and Inno-
vation, under the theme ’Hi-Tech
Growth Ventures and Education-
Enterprise Model.’ The conference
will attract participation from all over
India, USA, and Finland.
The two new inclusions this
year to the competitions category at E
-summit are ‘Rede’ - The Parliamen-
tary Debate, and Negocio - The Web
Entrepreneur. While the former is a
typical parliamentary debate, it is the
first of a kind that solely focuses on
business and entrepreneurship. The
latter is a b-plan competition specifi-
cally on business models based on
web technologies.
The E-Week, that concludes
with the Entrepreneurship Summit on
10th and 11th January, will host a
myriad of lectures and workshops by
eminent professionals in the field of
business and entrepreneurship. Lec-
tures by Anand Pillai, senior VP, HCL
Technologies, Rajiv Dingra, founder of
WATblog.com, and Aloke founder of
ixigo.com, and a workshop by Fractal
Analysis on Credit Risk Management
will be the highlighting events during E
-Summit.
For more details/updates
regarding Entrepreneurship Summit,
visit the site www.ecell.iitkgp.ernet.in
and www.ecell-iitkgp.org/esummit.

DOMINIQUE TREMPONT is an American Execu-
tive and a board member in large multinational high tech
companies and start-ups. His experience spans a globally-
run material science corporation to enterprise and con-
sumer-focused software and services. Dominique is cur-
rently on the boards of three public compa-
nies: Finisar, 3Com and Energy Recovery Inc. At 3Com and
ERII, Dominique chairs the Finance and Audit Committee.
He obtained his Master of Business Administra-
tion from INSEAD, and a BA in Business Administration and
Computer Science from the Catholic University of Lou-
vain in Belgium.
In 1993, Dominique was recruited by Steve
Jobs to turn around NeXT, first as Chief Financial Offi-
cer and later expanding to lead all operations. Dominique
led NeXT’s shift from hardware to software and brought
the company to profitability. Mr. Trempont has also
served as CEO of Gemplus Corporation, a smart card appli-
cation company, during 1999, and as President and CEO of
Kanisa, an early-stage enterprise knowledge management
software startup. He was also CEO-in-Residence at Battery
Ventures, a venture capital firm, from September 2003 to
September 2005.
Sramana Mitra has been an entrepreneur and a strat-
egy consultant in Silicon Valley since 1994. Though her
fields of experience span from hard core technology disci-
plines like semiconductors to sophisticated consumer mar-
keting industries including fashion and education, her cur-
rent focus however, is primarily in the realms of Web 3.0
and Enterprise 3.0, and related infrastructure. She has a
particular interest in Media and Retail companies and their
transition to a Web-centric world. Sramana Mitra’s popular
blog article series, Vision India 2020, is being published in
The Entrepreneur on a regular basis.
BarCamp is a hugely participative freeform conference
(or unconference) where people talk about what they're
working on. BarCamps are a lot of fun as participants get to
meet a lot of like-minded people. The topic of discussion is
usually related to upcoming technologies. This is the first
ever barcamp being organized in Kolkata. Find out more on
the official BarCamp Kolkata website http://
barcampkolkata.org/
The Entrepreneur Page 6
A Billion Dollar Company of One Emplyee?
The author, Gowri Shankar Subramanian, is the CEO and co-founder of Aspire Systems, an outsourcing product development
firm, which is also winner of Deloitte’s Fast500 Asia Pacific and Fast50 India programs .
Over the last two decades, there has
Volume 3, Issue 4
been an increasing trend towards outsourcing
several non-core business activities. Interest-
ingly, the definition of what is non-core keeps
evolving and many core activities keep getting
converted to non-
core. So, what's
the limit and
where will the line
be drawn eventu-
ally in terms of
what should be
done internally
and what can be
outsourced?
Outsourc-
ing, as a topic, has
been debated ex-
tensively, but as it
becomes global in
nature much of the
heated debate is
around job losses
to China and India. Leaving aside geopolitics, what needs
to be looked at is how far can outsourcing go towards
improving a firm's productivity (with productivity defined
as revenue per employee).
There has been a substantial climb in productiv-
ity over the last two decades with companies like HP,
Cisco and Microsoft having revenues in excess of
$500,000 per employee. While it is easy to attribute this
to the IP and brand advantage enjoyed by these firms, it
is also true that these firms employ tens of thousands of
people in their extended outsourcing ecosystem and this
allows them to constantly innovate and not be distracted
by non-core activities that can be done better by an out-
sourcer. Given this trend, how much more can productiv-
ity levels climb?
Today, all activities from order-taking to logis-
tics, support, IT and finance are outsourceable. The rapid
evolution of technology and shrinking of distances has
only contributed to accelerating this phenomenon and
has made outsourcing more profitable by bringing global
talent to the table.
What is core is now considered to be R&D, Marketing,
and of course, Strategy. But even this is being ques-
tioned on an every day basis. If we are to take the exam-
ple of software product firms (Independent Software
Vendors), product development was once considered a
core activity and hence non-outsourcable. But now
things are changing with the advent of a new breed of
Outsourced Product Development companies
whose only mission is to make core product
development an outsourceable activity!
Given this trend towards continuous increase
in the scope of what can be outsourced, will
we one day see a
billion-dollar com-
pany with just one
employee and
everything else
outsourced?
While I might be
exaggerating what
is possible, this
question provides
a fundamental
philosophy around
which we can
build a business -
outsource every-
thing you possibly
can to achieve the
maximum produc-
tivity levels.
Any firm has to make a call on how it will react
to this trend -- either deliver a product/service and tap
these outsourcing trends in every aspect of its business
or become an outsourcing firm itself. While this vastly
simplifies matters, it provides a premise on which to
build a firm's philosophy. Outsourcing firms will employ
people on a massive scale and will have lower revenues
per employee, while others will focus on figuring out
how best to tap the outsourcing ecosystem to build a
high-value, high-productivity business.
Naturally, following the tenet of speaking from
experience, the question is what have we done at our
firm? If everything is outsourceable, there must be
someone to outsource it to and we focus on providing
that service in one niche area of software product de-
velopment. Traditionally, product development has
been viewed as one of the core competencies of ISVs.
But we firmly believe otherwise and we have helped
many ISVs to change this mindset and reap benefits.
Except for this specialist business activity, we try to out-
source everything else required for our own internal
requirements.
Given what we see happening around us every
day, I am sure the day is not far off when we will en-
counter a billion-dollar company with just one em-
ployee!

Talk by Prof. Joy Laskar
(Director of Georgia Electronics Design Centre)
On the evening of 13th November 08, Prof. Joy
Laskar, Schulmberger Chair in Microelectronics and di-
rector of Georgia Electronic Design Centre, met with us
to give us an insight into the Entre-
preneurial Process and approach to
start-ups in Georgia Tech Univer-
sity, Atlanta. He was born in our
very own Kharagpur but was
brought up in Clemson, South Caro-
lina,USA.
Also present was Profes-
sor Dhrubes Biswas, Prof. in charge
of Entrepreneurship and Incubation
Program, who has been closely acquainted with Laskar
for more than 20 years.
Professor Laskar has seen-through the launch of
4 companies that deal in Integrated Circuitry (IC) and
Chip design, over the last 12 years, producing a turnover
of the order of $50-60 million. He started the first four IC
companies in Atlanta.
Professor Laskar began his presentation with a
frank opening stating the obvious- the reason a person
wants to become an entrepreneur is simple- to make
money. He then took us through the minds of Venture
Capitalists, showing us what we must take care of in
order to catch their attention, gain their trust and get
their funding. Firstly the idea must be good, not neces-
sarily great. But more importantly, you must have a plan
to eventually acquire a huge turnover. VCs are not going
to want to put their money in a company that will get
them marginal returns. He asserted the fact that, though
we as technologists tend to emphasize on the technol-
ogy we are selling, VCs are more interested in marketing
strategies, management and your team’s executive abil-
ity than on the technology itself. Therefore, they are
willing to take technology risks, but not market risks.
Laksar also added that in order to gain attention
of a VC, we must establish credibility in that particular
‘space’, i.e., the field in which your start-up is estab-
lished. It could be done by independent validations
through reference calls from either other VCs or compa-
nies considered reliable in that particular ‘space’. Thus,
through this sort of networking and triangulating, what
Laskar calls a ‘low pressure zone’ is created around your
proposal, and this reduces apparent market risks, as VCs
live in constant fear of losing the biggest deal.
He then went on to stress on the importance of
having a well thought out exit strategy, and told us a
little about past start-ups that he has been closely asso-
ciated with; namely, R-F Solutions- manufacturers of low
power radio frequency products including remote con-
trols, GSM telemetry, GSM modems, RFID and radio
Page 7
modules, Quellan- a leader in Ana-
log Signal Processing and RF Noise
Cancellation
ICs, Gtronix-
a fabless
semiconductor company develop-
ing novel analog technology to
extract real-world sensory information for portable con-
sumer electronic products.
He proceeded with a guide on how to deliver a
powerful elevator pitch. An elevator pitch (or elevator
speech) is an overview of an idea for a product, service,
or project. The name reflects the fact that an elevator
pitch can be delivered in the time span of an elevator
ride (for example, thirty seconds and 100-150 words).
Venture capitalists often judge the quality of an idea
and team on the basis of the quality of its elevator pitch,
and will ask entrepreneurs for the elevator pitches to
quickly weed out bad ideas and weak teams. (To view
the full presentation visit: http://erc.atdc.org/
documents/perfectpitch.pdf)
He ended his talk with the message that we
had two very important plus-points that we must take
full advantage of: the fact that we are below the age of
35 and secondly, the fact that we can provide a first
person’s insight to India - currently the world’s biggest
potential market.
This truly enriching session ended in a question
-answer round where he answered queries of the stu-
dents gathered there. Laskar with his own wit and
charm left us all inspired to become succesful entrepre-
neurs.
The Entrepreneur
IIT’s rated fifth for entrepreneurship...in the world!
YouNoodle has published a list of Top University Startup Here is the list of top universities rated by Younoodle:
Communities, and the IITs are ranked fifth aka your very
1. Stanford
own IIT Kharagpur. Since most of us are fascinated with
facts, lets put it this way: 2. MIT
First in Bengal (Goes without saying)
Volume 3, Issue 4

First in India (Ofcourse we count the other IIT’s in) 3. University of Cambridge
First in Asia (Ahead of Tokyo University, Seoul, NUS, etc)
4. UC Berkeley
Fifth in the World
5. IIT India
“YouNoodle develops innovative ways to bring together
the information, people and technology that help start- 6. University of Oxford
ups succeed.” Basically, it is a platform for the top en-
7. NUS, Singapore
trepreneurship clubs and competitions to communicate,
follow members’ startups, and predict their success. 8. University of Copenhagen

If you’re form Kgp and are interesting in starting up,be 9. Stockholm University
sure to make a profile, add your startup, and join the
Entrepreneurship Cell, IIT Kharagpur community on 10. UC Davis

Younoodle.
- Provided by Younoodle

Entrepreneurship Cell ABOUT US:

Entrepreneurship Cell, IIT Kharagpur is a student body which
promotes entrepreneurship among students. It invites various
eminent entrepreneurs to deliver lectures to educate students
Write to us at: about the joys and hardships of entrepreneurship. Case study
editor.theentrepreneur@gmail. workshops, Knowledge Camps, patent workshops are conducted
throughout the year to involve students in activities that are es-
com
sential to an entrepreneur. Ecell also actively incubates startup
Contact: ideas by linking the right investors with the right entrepreneurs.
Naveen Y.S: 9734428955 It does this through four competitions conducted on an annual
basis:
Peeyush Agarwal: 9831633161
Concipio | The B-plan competition

Pensez | The case study competition

Ecalirez | The social entrepreneurship challenge

Envision | The product design competition

Ecell also conducts a 2-day event called Esummit on an annual

http://www.ecell-iitkgp.org/ basis to invite people from all over the country to participate.
theentrepreneur/
The ultimate objective of Entrepreneurship Cell is to inspire more
startups.