Photo Credit: Startup festival

#BangaloreRises at @startfest - Retrospective

Couple of weeks back, Sumeet Moghe and I attended the Startup Festival together. Below is a retrospective we both paired on.

Summary

A week back Sumeet & I attended the Startup Festival here in Bangalore. It was a excellent learning and networking experience to say the least. Startup Festival was similar to an unconference, but spread across three neighbourhoods in the city over a period of three days. It was also to some extent Bangalore (and India’s) own version of SXSW. Wait a minute, no there were no bands performing or film screenings but in terms of the concept, there were many aspects which really stood out, such as:

• it was well spread across the city
• sessions, vendors, hosts, restaurants, pubs and all others were participating in it
• a good mix of new product/startup launch, VC-mentor gatherings, art festival, early morning fitness activities, panel discussions and more
• a wide range of startups too ranging from tech, education, art etc.

It was all about startups

One thing that I really loved about the way it was organized was that they tied up with only startups (well to a large extent). Here are some examples:

• Startup Festival website, branding and design by Beard Design
• Startup Festival online ticketing by Ayojak
• Startup Festival mobile app by BLUNKIT
• Startup Festival free local commuting between venues by GOGreenBOV
• Startup Festival morning fitness session by BOTS, 1000Yoga and RunnersForLife
• and so on...

In addition they involved local restaurants, coffee shops, pubs and educational institutes to keep the community connected during the day and after the sessions in the evening. Having said that, there was some serious backing too with Government of Karanataka and TiE on board which means we can at least hope some of results from this festival will have an impact on the larger ecosystem. One of the biggest force behind this event was Unstoppable India - with Vlad and his team of entrepreneurs who hold an outrageous belief that entrepreneurship will change the course of history. Unstoppable was founded by Vlad Dubovskiy with his prior work at the Unreasonable Institute in Boulder Colorado and his love for design and branding served as inspirations behind Unstoppable. While I am at it, I also want to highlight Unreasonable at Sea.

“Unreasonable at Sea is a radical experiment in global entrepreneurship, design-thinking, and education, designed to scale-up effective technological solutions to the greatest challenges of our time. We do this by hedging our bets on the most thrifty, resourceful, creative, and disruptive class amongst us: entrepreneurs. We are a mentor-driven accelerator for tech-entrepreneurs who desire to take their ventures into new international markets, and we choose to work exclusively with companies working on “intractable” social and environmental challenges. We could think of no better way to accelerate our portfolio companies‘ ability to scale across borders than to put them all on one ship, align them with some of the world’s greatest mentors, and set sail more than 25,000 nautical miles while visiting 13 countries over the course of 100 days.”

All wasn’t well always

Alright, so all was not well, with this being Startup Festival’s first edition, I am sure there were lots of opportunities to learn (for organisers and for us).

• Having it spread across a neighbourhood can be great, but in India, even with maps it can get really difficult to locate a venue. Especially when the venue is a startup in a small 500sqft room on the 3rd floor in a narrow by-lane in a crowded area. More landmarks and a better volunteer group would really help.
• Panel discussions were very ordinary. The set of speakers and the views put down seemed too cliche and there’s a lot that can discussed and actions that can be taken to better the ecosystem. Definitely a lost opportunity for all of us.
• Need to further leverage Twitter and Foursquare. Only after receiving feedback on day 1 & 2, is when the official twitter handle started to share landmarks, venues, timings etc via twitter. For venues, we could have simply used Foursquare lists, one for each neighbourhood. It would have surely worked better than the printed maps we got.
• The mobile experience was ordinary. A dedicated mobile app with all the details as on the website would have been a huge advantage. I can actually see how well that could have been connected with twitter, foursquare and other places where users are already there. Also, that would have given a better opportunity for attendees to participate live during sessions. There’s lots more we can do in this space.
• Expect more maturity and awareness amongst the participating speakers/startups/vendors. Lot of sessions were completely off-track which didnt add any value to anyone. Some sessions were taken too lightly. AV setup struggle is a perennial problem for most of us. Maybe we need a startup in this space to fix that issue.
• Another aspect which seemed missing was the connection between startups presenting across the event. This is just a suggestion, but after attending variety of sessions, it seemed like some of the startups could actually work together, complement each others products and services, and which would eventually contribute to larger vision that they individually have set for themselves.

A few interesting startups we visited

• http://www.itshandmade.in: Really cool startup that the founder started in college and is now a marketplace for over a 1000 Indian artists. Very little capital invested, very cool idea, just two people running all operations. Inspiration for us on how to do something by frugal means. The founder operates with a strong conscience - equilibrium in price, giving back to the community, personal relationships, no hidden pricing.
• http://forushealth.com/forus/: Really geeky people in the medical technology space. They’ve developed technology to bring down the duration for eye tests from 5 hours to 5 mins. Their 3nethra device works in autos or even on camel back. It’s connected by a webcam over mobile phone networks. It’s bringing down the cost of treatments and checkup by deskilling the process for the patients.
• Cloud9 Hospital: Met Dr Kishore Kumar who’s amongst the best pediatricians in the country. The hospital has amongst best survival rates in the world 99.83% for babies and 100% for mothers. This is despite delivering several babies in the 24-32 weeks range. They’re on Forbes’ businesses to watch list. They’re looking to subsidise proper maternity and child care for the poorest of the poor and while Dr Kumar was very secretive about what he is doing about this, but was confident that in the next two years he’ll be able to make NICUs and advanced neonatal healthcare available to the poor of Bangalore. He also mentioned that he’s working with his 4th IT partner because of 3 consecutive failures - said it was his biggest bottleneck at this point.
• Collaborative Community: Interesting design startup with a very strong social impact focus. They have four focus areas - branding for social enterprises; UX edge which is their capacity building initiative; craft design where they consult with local craftsmen to help the saleability of their products; and space design. They operate on a profit sharing initiative with Sulochana trust. Interestingly, they’re operating on a community model where they have a core team and an extended community from which professionals join them on a project basis. With time they expect to grow their company by bringing in people from the community.
• Bhumi Putra/ Alok Shetty: Architecture wizard; he’s managed to create what he calls a black box theatre - a mobile 250 seater auditorium using a 40 foot shipping container. Takes about 4 hours to set up and costs just a million rupees - a fraction of what it’ll cost if you had to build or buy one. I’d consider this to be Jugaad though it isn’t low cost.
• Appiness: While the founders don’t really inspire confidence, appearances can be deceptive. They’re a design firm and have won more than 25 design awards in the last year or so of their existence. Interesting to see how a small professional services firm can gain so much acclaim in a short period of time.
• BeardDesign: Absolutely kick-butt design firm - their portfolio is awe inspiring. They had the entire team come down from Goa. They work out of one house in Goa and work only with startups for the creative freedom they get. One of their designers - Fatema did perhaps the best talk of the conference; about how startups can work with designers.