As one of India’s most prolific business incubators, our employees deal with “startups”, “funding”, “investments”, “equity” and more of such terminology on a more-than-regular basis. Clearly, it is one of their primary responsibilities to have the right understanding of these terms and legalities.
Accordingly, to help them understand these better, CIIE conducted two workshops on Friday, 06 June 2014 — first half of the day was dedicated to “legal aspects of startup investment” and other half on “social media and its importance”.
The legal workshop was conducted by Mr. Sankar Swamy from KLaw — Krishnamurthy and Company, who is a law graduate (LLB) from University of Pune. KLaw is a prominent law firm that does a lot of work in this space.
The workshop covered topics like financial instruments, legal implications of startup funding, cap tables, the new Companies Act and compliances, share transfers, exit rights and policies and more. It was an interactive workshop, where people talked about real-life scenarios and what could have been the possible solutions. Also, a practical exercise in form of a case study was shared with the participants to solve. The case study was about a hypothetical startup with questions on investing at an early stage, following up and exit. Solving the case study was not an easy job for many, but the mood in the room was definitely one of excitement. Eventually, with the help of a few team members who are more “investment-oriented” than others, everyone was able to get a ‘more-or-less’ clear understanding of the study.
The latter half of the day was dedicated to a session on social media. It was conducted by Mr. Jaydip Parikh, who is a serial entrepreneur and currently works with Infibeam.com as a digital evangelist. The session covered the benefits of various networking tools like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Quora, etc., and how best to utilize them. Jaydip also spoke about various software tools like Hootsuite, Buffer and the like, that could be used to better manage our social media properties. One interesting exercise during the workshop had our team members do a simple “tweet and retweet” exercise. This was primarily led by Kunal — our CEO, and this became a sudden hit, with our tweet having scored 4 favourites, and 30 retweets! Here is the said tweet below:
On the whole, the workshops were a welcome change from our mundane work schedule to learn something different, exciting and highly beneficial!
