Comfort Zone

How comfortable could you get before it starts bothering you? Before the very comfort ends up becoming a source of unease, if not discomfort? For me, this would happen fairly quickly. I'm pretty used to change. New schools, new cantonments, new friends - things were great growing up as a fauji kid....

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Homecoming

Back in Delhi ! It feels good.. good to be back where I belong, good to be where I wanted to move to during all those years in Hyderabad, good to be where the food is great and the people boisterous. Yeah, it's a good feeling ! Ever since I bought the T-bird, I'd always dreamt of riding around...

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Why didn't I think of this?

Now that the MBA is over, I think one of the things that'll remain with me (hopefully) is something that Prof. Pablo Martin de Holan said at Segovia to the effect that an entrepreneur is basically a person who is always looking for opportunities, anywhere and everywhere. With this in mind, I see so...

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ReviewPro - taking web 2.0 to the hotel sector

This Wednesday, we had RJ Friedlander over for a talk. He talked a bit about his background, his company, and it's business model. The focus was on the later stages of a startup's evolution, when you have a product out in the market, you have sales and the startup is maturing. The talk was interesting,...

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Minube.com - perhaps a tad too much going on?

Today we had Pedro Jareño of Minube.com talking about his 3 year old social-travelling startup.  AN INNOVATIVE,  CLEARLY DEFINED CONCEPT Minube has a fairly simple and clear mission - to focus on the 'inspiration' phase of planning a trip. The way they see it, inspiration is followed...

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Part-time entrepreneur

Last time, we had a remarkable story presented. Picture this - a lady needs to start a business, any business, so that she can pay taxes, and then become eligible for retirement benefits from the state  she starts the business in a small town in the province of Galicia, Spain  2 people work part-time to run the business, sourcing tools and selling them online  They become successful,...

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Chicisimo : using PR for community-building

Yesterday, we had a session with Gabriel Aldamiz-echevarria, founder of Chicisimo. Gabriel was here to talk a bit in general about his entrepreneurial story so far, and then specifically about using PR for a startup. In this case, the success or failure of Chicisimo hinges on it's ability to build a...

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Inaki Arrola - Keeping it real, keeping it simple

We've all heard the old saw about common sense being fairly uncommon. Inaki Arrola, an eminently normal guy feels he's "strange" when compared to entrepreneurs. He just might be right...This session, we got some pretty grounded, real-life insights. 2 people in his family, buying the same car, comparing...

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Fund-raising, serial entrepreneurs and Kaka

Ka-ching !! the sound of money raining in from VCs....Yesterday, we had a session with Jorge Mata, a successful serial entrepreneur and investor, the man behind My Alerts and Berggi and many more. Jorge gave a talk on raising funds for startups.The talk was extremely interesting - the topic was money,...

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Masterclass - the business of blogging

Last week, we had the first 'live' session at our 'managing tech startups' class. We had Julio Alonso talk about bootstrapping, the attention economy and the importance of analytics in the attention economy. JULIO ALONSO and WEBLOGS SL A brief bio. Long story short, in 2005, Julio left a successful...

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Online news sites suck !!

Reading news articles online is a pain. There is hardly any content, you have click through a gazillion pages to get to the point, and the ads keep distracting you from the (largely useless) content.AdBlockplus is the solution, I hear you say...Hmm. Only partially. I'm using it, and I usually end up...

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Hire for attitude, train for skill

Hire for attitude, train for skill - that's the gist of a new article in the HBR. Can't argue with it, it makes perfect sense. But then, I thought about the industrial scale recruitment drives that quite a few companies launch for entry level positions. No way you can effectively gauge the attitude...

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