This was my second start up saturday. The last one being in Bangalore more than 6 months back. They have evolved since, making it a paid event.
When I entered Vizisense was making a presentation. I had never heard about them before, but they seem to be doing interesting things. And were pretty open in terms of what they do, how do they do etc.
The question and answer session was pretty mediocre with some one interested in the great Indian exalted ambition of "Value", being sought. I was surprised that compete wasn't mentioned even once, though somebody did mention comcast. A lot of questions were boring, though the presenter was super courteous and deflected the difficult ones with ease.
All start up events do not run on schedule, by design, anywhere in India. So we have this perennial race on covering something really important by the speaker, moderator egging audience for asking that "last question", audience dying to ask a question.
The audience crowd perhaps was pulled from SP, with dudes reading newspapers on the last bench. A very common phenomena in top B schools.
Overall the crowd was a lot more than I had expected, given that the organisers were charging Rs 100/50 per attendee. On top of that people had a funny sticker on their T shirts which announced their names. I did not pick one.
I understand that economics of such a event at this level do not work out, so its ok when people are trying to tweak things to see what works and what doesn't.
The next session was a talk by Deap Ubhi, about his start up Burp. A few takeaways.
Mr. Mani will spend a lot of time in US as he will try to concentrate on the US business of Just dial.
In 10 years justdial this year may make a to of 25 millions and profit of 1 million. I guess INR and not USD.
The VC exit ecosystem in India is not very well developed. In the silicon valley at least the bigger companies are buying smaller companies either for the idea, the system or the product that has been created, the star team or just to help a friend. The same may be absent in India.
The idea of burp was simply an arbitrage opportunity to create a local listing in the India Market. Exactly like printo.
Burp will do revenues of 6.5 cr this year, break even in april 2010, though infomedia is loosing money. Info media 18 is a listed company but I could not find its annual report on the web.
The accuracy of data in infomedia is about 50%.
Burp was unsuccessful in many VC pitches and finally the person they got was a strategic investor who could leverage burp along with his/her other investments.
At the time of the sale, burp had offers from Google and another company. Since Deap was brought up in US, there were times when I could not pick up a few words because of his accent. This was one of those times.
Burp will have a tie up with nivalink.
My over all judgement was that he did a good job in stating the facts as they stood, without sounding way too enthusiastic and going overboard. And since our problem is that we worship success and burp looks like a success, we want as much sound bytes from those, who have been there and done that.
The problem with the Indian market is the GDP and the IT, ITeS success stories. Everybody seems to be trying to replicate the same in other areas, start ups, green technology, VC scene etc.
My judgement is that the picture is not as rosy as it looks. Sure Deap made a lot of money and did have an opportunity to exit, which very few get in India. He might have a taken a few positions which did not turn out just right.
If I was in his shoes, after a year of operations, if I had seen a lot of PR in restaurants in Mumbai, I might have dumped the local business listing model and would have gone straight into restaurants in mumbai dropping every thing else. Set up a payment gateway, take bookings, do food festivals, whatever. But that's just me.
In future start up saturday's the questions need to be moderated and people need to stop asking three questions and expecting people to remenber all three before answering.
Minutes after Deap expressed his disapointment with sms mobile business not turning out very well, there was a talk/sales pitch by a company on mobile campaigns. Had it been an informative talk, I might have stayed, but it was a simple sales pitch. I got bored and left.
I am no journalist or a professional blogger or an event reporter. Had I been one , I would have definitely made an attempt to make this piece more structured and spent time on putting a flow in place. It is a notes for myself type of piece.
p.s. I have got burp wrong throughout this piece, the url is www.burrp.com, though there is some IP level conflict, my browser is either taking me to the Bangalore landing page or the Delhi landing page, though i am in Mumbai.
