Due to the overwhelming amount of spam comments on the Teknatus blog, we've enabled moderation of all comments. We've also disabled the ability of non-registered, non-verified users to post comments.

Apologies but managing the spam has been too time consuming.

Delhi's first installment of Startup Saturday is scheduled for the 13th of December 2008. The event will be held from 2pm till 6pm at the American Center, New Delhi.

We're very excited to be working with the gracious team at the American Center to help add a little something to the burgeoning entrepreneurial community in the Delhi/NCR region.

The American Center is located on KG Marg, right next to Connaught Place.

Please sign up if you'd like to demo at Startup Saturday Delh. Please sign up here, f you'd like to present on a specific topic related to starting and running a startup.

Registration and additional details will be coming soon.Registration for Startup Saturday is now open

Please check back here for updates.

We look forward to seeing you at Startup Saturday, Delhi.

If you would like to present at Startup Saturday, please fill out the form below and we will contact you regarding which session we have an opening for.

This is an absolutely great presentation by Dharmesh Shah, co-founder of HubSpot, that was originally posted at OnStartups. The presentation is honest, funny, and very informative.

To help the Indian Startup Ecosystem in some small way, we're going to be involved in setting up the Delhi chapter of Startup Saturday which is a part of HeadStart. We'd like to use this forum to help startups in the Delhi/NCR region showcase their products to a community of peers, media, and investors.

If you or your company is interested in demoing, please complete the form below.

This is a nice presentation on the need for startups to be lean and how agile development can help the process. It would have been nice to have audio to go along with the presentation by Steve Blank (Board Member) and Eric Ries (Co-founder and Board Observer) of IMVU.

IMVU was founded in 2004 and is doing roughly $1 million per month in revenue. IMVU is a 3D chat service where you can pick and choose your own avatar and much like SecondLife, you can purchase items in the virtual world, using real world currency to buy in-world credits. I haven't used IMVU but users can create items in-world that can be sold to other users for credits.

Below is a nice little video from IBM explaining enterprise mashups succinctly and in a language that non techies could understand. Enjoy.

I came across this presentation by Saul Klein from Index Ventures. What I found most interesting was slide 33 which is a table listing the top locations for deals in 2007. Bangalore was number 17 with $335 million in 35 funding rounds and New Delhi was 18 with $316 million in 23 funding rounds. It's the bottom of the list but it was interesting to see New Delhi even on the list in 2007. I'm not sure how dramatically this will change in 2009 and beyond but it's interesting to note that after Bangalore, New Delhi was the place where the majority of VC funds in India were deployed.

Most people advising startups focus on critical points like the business model, revenue model, and team. Remember, I said "critical" but I'm going to skip over them since so many people already discuss them.

In this post, I'm going to present a straight-forward check-list of other, very important things to do when rolling your own startup.

• Think about corporate governance issues on day 1. Whether you have a partner, partners, or it's just you, you should identify how the company will be governed.
• In good times, we tend to loosen our belts a bit and be a little lax in our control of expenditures. It can be excused when times are good but good times don't last forever. Keep strict policies on managing your cash (and cash-flow) at all times.
• Manage every aspect of your expenses. Know what your fixed and variable costs will be. Put in a process for tracking money that you and other employees have spent on behalf of the company and have a reimbursement policy. A very simple expense spreadsheet could do the trick.
• Whether you're prospecting for clients or not, figure out how you're going to run sales and marketing in your company. Use some form of a CRM. The cheapest and simplest way to get started is with a spreadsheet. Don't go wasting time on setting up your own free CRM and definitely don't waste the money on a paid CRM service until you're generating revenue and have a team of sales/marketing folks that are managing many clients.
• Think about and layout your equity plan for founders, investors, employees, etc. How many classes of stock will there be? What, if any, vesting cycle will be used for founders and employees? Will employees buy stock in the company? Will employees be GIVEN stock in the company for free? Will the employees be given options (ESOPS)? What are the economic impacts of these models to the company and to the employee? Much of what you decide and do here will also affect point 1.
• Find a good CPA/CA that has experience working with these kinds of corporate structures and share allocations, etc.
• Find a good attorney with relevant experience and build a relationship with him/her as well.
• Build a library of various types of contracts that are relevant to your business. Many of the relevant contracts can be found for free on the Internet. However, it is worth having a good attorney review them to make sure you and your business are protected.
• Learn a bit about the law, a bit about economics, a bit about financial accounting, and a bit about technology. Entrepreneurs and top-line managers MUST have a knowledge of all these things to be effective in running the business.

Here are a few resources that might be useful.

Resources:

• Startup Exchange
• Startup Nation
• BlueBlog

US Resources:

• Small Business Administration

Indian Resources:

• NEN Online

Please let me know of other very important items that you've come across.

Hiring is one of the most important tasks of any startup. It's critical to the success of a business. Hiring people can be fun and even motivating.

When hiring a person, you're as much selling your business and yourself as the candidate is selling themselves to you and your business. Hiring quality people in India is very difficult. Being able to rely on them is 10x harder.

Bringing on a hire can make all the difference in getting your startup off the ground, or running it into the ground. Firing someone, even the wrong person, is never fun and it's never easy to do. It's especially difficult to do when the conversation turns emotional. However, as a business, you must make a very logical and unemotional decision about hiring and firing. Just because your business absolutely needs a network engineer, doesn't mean you should hire the first or second network engineer that comes in for an interview (2 candidates might be all that you'll get). It is better to take your time, look at as many candidates as you can. It's far less risky to take your time finding the right candidate than taking the chance of hiring the the wrong person.

Ankit, the lead programmer on Bride's View told me that I trust people too easily. I told him that is probably true, but to run a business, you MUST trust the people you hire to do what needs to be done. Trusting employees to do their work is about necessity. I trust people to do what they have to do. I trust them to give their work 100% if not 150%. I try to give them time and the tools and training they need to ramp up. However, when faced with a situation of retaining or firing the wrong person for the company, I've taken a very binary approach. Either the employee fits or doesn't. If they don't, they must go. This has set me back in terms of money and time but keeping the wrong person on board, I will be wasting more time and more money.