As I say, nobody is ever going to bother with what you do, till the moment when you ask something from them. And when that happens, they might as well be prepared for it.

Proto.in has nothing to do with “creating awareness” about entrepreneurship. There are plenty of other organizations which do that, and we partner and support organizations and the unconference movements in making such things come to life. But Proto.in does mean business, and its a platform where you come to graduate into the real world scenario where money and revenue alone makes sense.

Time to learn the rules of the game, or perish. There is no two ways about it.

PS: It is not personal. I am sure they are all wonderful people

It is very essential for entrepreneurs to be tough and all that, at this stage, it does more harm than help building a dream. When you are a kid, what you need is an dream to live no matter how poor you are doing in all areas of your life. Because, it is too early to write off a wonderful person.

The people who start it, have a inherent ego, which is to be expected, if you ask a incubation model to work where diff pieces have to fit into the overall jigsaw, what you are asking is that the teams merge together (eventually), which begs the question who leads, there are mergers (very few) most are takeovers. In fact trying to adopt this model will lead to the same headache that VC’s have of getting the entrepreneur to step aside when the time is right.

I would personally just like to get all the MD/CEO/founders/whatever to actually talk to each other in the first instance, 300 plus startups each with a user base of perhaps 1000, thats 300K customers across India, thats not bad to prove a concept.

Iqbal

I think that is where the entire aspect of Angel funding comes into play and i hope there is just a deluge of angel that can come into the indian market place to bring structure and sense into the entire startup scene. I think the lack of a sufficient environment to be able to support and grow startup teams is the core issue why there is a myopic view to solving a problem. Lack of experience among the start up members needs to be necessarliy supplemented by an environment that can address this limitation. How did all of the valley startup succeed in the first place. Even me as a pretty experienced professional with signifcant exposure to the market find it a enormous task to startup. And i am not talking about funding, just the lack of information, support, mentoring, support groups just scares most of the serious ones run away and a lot of the ones that attempt are pretty flaky.

Just my 2 cents

Any any such orchestration is going to require a holistic perspective, control, and organization. Is there even anyone, even TiE, who posses such control?

Here is something that a recent HBS article has to say about Prof. Christensen,who devised the case method study for MBAs

“Christensen believed wholeheartedly in “the teachability of teaching” and that “a good class discussion can be developed, rather than merely left to the randomness of chance or genetic.”

It is the experienced person who has the knowledge and knows the mistakes and errors he/she made when building their biz ..they have gone thro the unchartered territory as it were and learnt how to navigate the choppy waters.

@Kamla: This is essentially the issue. The expectations between the startup entrepreneur and the “mentor” is far from matching. I think a good teacher also requires a good student to work with. Now that’s a rare combination to come across, I find.

I spent the weekend in Delhi with a startup who wants a mentor who would let them do whatever they want to, and would just lend his name to raise funds. Unfortunately its not an isolated case.

Analogy: A good teacher can do a whole lot to help and mold students… a similar thing is needed for entrepreneurship in India.

Thanks,

Kamla