I had missed this story in San Jose Mercury News about how Bangalore is turning a Silicon Valley in terms of entrepreneurship. (Ed: It’s not quite!) Bangalore has always been India’s startup capital. But a Silicon Valley? Not yet. The article, however, cites the example of higly educated engineers in Bangalore starting up when they [...]

IIT Kanpur is organising Megabucks, an annual entrepreneurship competition, from February 11-12, 2006. The event is a platform for spotting ventures/business plans of students and professionals.
It aims at serving as the right platform for budding entrepreneurs to act on their ideas and talents to develop them into reality and nurture them to form exceptional enterprises, [...]

New Vernon To Pick Up 20 Per Cent Stake In Broking Firm Motilal Oswal
Today’s Hindustan Times reports that New Vernon Capital, a fund promoted by Arshad Zakaria, has emerged as the front runner to pick up 20 per cent stake in Motilal Oswal, a leading Mumbai stock broking firm. (More details and link later)
India a [...]

This is the last item possibly I can write on TiEcon India 2005.
One refrain I heard at the event’s last session was that why aren’t there enough VCs from non-tech background. Alok Wadhwa, Chairman and MD of Cornerbook Store, clearly a non-IT business, thinks there are not enough VCs from the non-ITsector. The problem here [...]

This is an interview with Danish entrepreneur Morten Lund in Business Standard. Lund, who has set up nearly 50 companies including Skype (acquired by eBay for $2.6 billion) and antivirus software Bullgaurd, was in India to attend TiEcon India 2005. Excerpts:
Is this your first visit to India?
No, it’s my third. I love Delhi, even though [...]

Sunil Jain of Business Standard has done a great piece (Lunch with Business Standard) on Sanjeev Bikhchandani, founder of Naukri.com. I have a great admiration for this man. He built one of the most respected internet businesses in India. He built a virtual company with real revenues from scratch - from zero to Rs 100 [...]

This is a one-page item I wrote on Rajesh Jain in Business Today on what he is doing now. Read on:
One way to find out which way technology is headed is to keep an eye on Rajesh Jain. The man has been there (ahead of time, actually), done that. He built a cluster of sites, [...]

So IIM Bangalore is also planning its version of Band Of Angels. The N S Raghavan Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning (NSRCEL) at IIMB is setting up a hub of angel investors, HNIs and venture capital funds in Bangalore. The hub, to be launched in the first week of December, will bring all earl-stage product-oriented technology [...]

So private equity-backed alternative energy phenomenon, Tulsi Tanti (of Suzlon Energy), has become India’s fourth richest person. I don’t really know the business model of Suzlon, but it looks like Ashish Dhawan of ChrysCapital and Ajay Relan of Citigroup Venture Capital have trust in him and in his business.

According to Business Standard, Citigroup, which had [...]

Venture investment is getting more and more specialised. New Ventures, a VC firm from the World Resources Institute (WRI), links companies that are engaged in energy efficient and environment-friendly activities with investors. A great idea. They have been doing a good job in many countries like Mexico, China and Brazil. Now New Ventures is planning [...]

Unemployment among youth is the biggest issue everywhere, and that leads to crime. In Kashmir, unemployment is sure a problem, and a big reason for the youth swaying into terrorism. So how can this be tackled? By enhancing entrepreneurship and creating jobs in the Kashmir’s rural sector. Social venture capital has a big role to [...]

Reading Ed Sim is a great lesson in entrepreneurship. This post on how an entrepreneur should treat criticism of his product is revealing. He writes:
I admire entrepreneurs for the risk they take and the unerring confidence they have in their product and market opportunity. However, what separates some of the great entrepreneurs from the average [...]

Canbank Venture Capital Fund has launched Bharath Nirman Fund with a corpus of Rs 55 crore ($12 million) to invest in the manufacturing and services sectors. That’s not a lot of money considering other private equity firms raise huge amounts like $200 million each. Canbank found it even raising this sum a difficult thing. Because [...]

Here are some interesting presentations by Vinod Khosla, partner at KPCB.
Web 2.0: The one on Web 2.0. has 33 slides and analyses the trends and potential/opportunities in Web 2.0 (click here for the PPT presentation)
Biofuels: Alternative fuels or biofuels are getting hotter. It has attracted Khosla’s attention. Click here for the PPT presentation.

EBay Inc. founder Pierre Omidyar is upbeat about microfinance (so is India-born Vinod Khosla of KPCB). Coming back to the news, Omidyar and his wife Pamela have given “$100 million in eBay stock to Tufts University to create a fund that will invest in international microfinance, or lending to people who are too poor to [...]