The Union government will introduce entrepreneurship education in 3,000 colleges across India in the next five years to support the growth of startups, a senior official said.
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When people hear the name Vir Das — they think of the guy from Delhi Belly or of his comic repertoires. What most don’t know is that he also owns a niche comedy-driven production house Weirdass Comedy, which besides organising comedy festivals, also functions as a brand agency. The artist-cum-entrepreneur in conversation with BW Businessworld’s Shubhi TandonWeirdass Comedy is a ‘comedy consultancy’. As strange as that sounds, there is such a thing. Led by Vir Das, the company started off organising live tours and comedy festivals in 2010. But soon after it was creating comedy content for brands and advertising agencies as they queued up for ‘funny content’ for their campaigns.This led Das to set up production capabilities in-house and offer ‘comedy consultancies’ to brands. The consultancy has since worked with companies such as Travelocity, Flipkart, Micromax and most recently Rebtel for their ad campaigns.“We decided that we should cut out the middleman — the advertising agencies. For example, Rebtel was looking for digital videos and television commercials (TVCs). So we designed their entire digital campaign and directed and edited their TVCs, where I functioned as a brand ambassador. There was no external agency at any level,” says Das.One of the first TVCs that Weirdass Comedy executed was for Flipkart around their Big Billion Day sale ahead of Diwali last year that featured Das. “It is a journey which started off just writing scripts for TVCs for clients and agencies. Then we slowly got into production and started producing videos. And eventually, we ventured into advertising for brands that are looking to get in the comedy space,” he explains.Das calls himself a ‘comedy consultant for brands’. When asked why brands need one, he opines, “A brand is looking to not just reach out to its consumer but also make meaningful content to reach out to consumers. I believe, as opposed to invading your consumer’s digital or individual space, if you can give them something cool, then that positions your brand as witty, and intelligent — and that is basically what every brand out there is going for.”In the ad campaigns for both Flipkart and Rebtel, Das was also the brand ambassador. He feels that having a comedian as a brand ambassador is a very good idea as he/she has a happiness connect with the consumers. He explains, “The minute people think of a comedian as a brand ambassador, they think they are happy to see that person. That is a good, instant connect that comedians have because they do not rely on superficial aspects but on the happiness aspect.”The company has a complete production department that helps in producing TV shows, digital videos and social media marketing as well. It has a talent pool of comedy writers, directors, choreographers, cameramen, etc., who produce videos and content for brands. “We took everything comedy and made a company. We are your one stop shop, we don’t need another agency to come on board. We offer a 360-degree solution — from talent, to targeting different mediums of marketing, to content,” says Das.When asked about what advice he would give to brands or marketing officers, Das says, “Open your minds to comedy so you can reach your consumers in an intelligent manner. You can’t buy ‘cool’ and I think that is something that comedy can do — whether you buy it or not, it just says you are cool.”(This story was published in BW | Businessworld Issue Dated 05-10-2015)
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Happay takes a bet on 50 million SMBs who are struggling to streamline their expense management, writes Vishal Krishna Tracking expenses in an organisation is very difficult. Even today an employee has to submit bills. Many of these bills cannot be verified and there are also many cash payments that companies cannot keep track of. Today a business worth Rs 100 crore, spends at least Rs 5 crore on admin related expenses and some of these expenses cannot be tracked. There are no payment solutions integrated into the systems of companies. There is an ERP system to place orders. But payments cannot be paid because there are many layers of approval needed. To disrupt this archaic system, Happay, a startup from Bangalore, as created an expense management app that enables departments of various organisations to manage all their vendors and expenses. All small businesses order online but they pay only through cash on delivery. The problem is that the owner would have told his cashier that all payments can be made only after his approval. The business delivering the product has to run around 10 odd times to get the money. Similarly employees too have run to their office accounts to get their expenses disbursed. Offices spend a considerable time in checking their expenses. This conundrum is being solved by this 2 year old startup. Anshul Rai and Varun Rathi, batchmates of IIT-Kharagpur in 2010, founded the company with a business to consumer (B2C) model where people could transfer money to anyone from their app. However since this market was not scalable and did not add any value. They decided to pivot the model and focus on payment solutions for SMEs. “While we were building the consumer business, a couple of SMBs approached us to create a payment solution for them. This was how the idea was born,” says Anshul, the CEO of the company. Their business is funded by Prime Venture Partners, who have put in $500,000 to make the business scale up. Today India has over 600,000 FMCG distributors, 50 million small enterprises and 500,000 corporate entities that work with small businesses. There are payments systems needed to make the system robust and transparent. There are over 40 million organised workers in India and 150 million semi-organised workers. The payments industry is worth more than $1 trillion and is waiting for technology to pay a major role in its disruption. Happay is not the first solution for the business to business industry. But it is the first one to think through from an Indian context. It is only a matter of time before PayPal, Square, Amazon and Dwolla figure it out for the Indian context. Happay has a wonderful model of issuing corporate cards to all its employees and the card is managed by the accounts team of the organisation. Happay gives them real time dashboards of expenses made by employees during a sales meeting in another city. These cards are issued by a bank which has partnered with Visa. The co-branded cards, of Ratnakar Bank and Visa, which Happay issues, once with the organisation, will be loaded with money and given to the employees for their expenses. Say for example a management executive on a sales visit will stay at a 3-star hotel and pay for food there. The average daily bill can be Rs 8,000 and this can be tracked by the Happay App. The corporate credit card is just one line of business. The also help automate expense management and are also getting in to vendor payments on the manufacturing side where their systems pull money from the bank account of the entity to pay the vendor. Typically their technology will be the bridge between the manufacturer, the vendor and the bank.
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Ashish Dhawan, founder and CEO, Central Square Foundation, feels the centre can play a pivotal role in solving India's primary education problems. Arshad Khan reportsThe Indian education system has not changed much since the time of Independence. However, since the Union Government wants to bring about reformations in the sector by launching flagship schemes like Skill India, entrepreneurs in the education sector feel that time is ripe to promote privatisation in the sector and that government should assume a more monitoring role. Ashish Dhawan, founder and CEO, Central Square Foundation says, “The need of the hour is to re-asses the role of the government. The primary role of the government should be more about setting standards and not implementing policies. The central government should assess whether states are following the blueprint and it has to incentivise states to follow the best practices.” Dhawan also believes that the centre can play a pivotal role in solving India's primary education problems, even though it is a state subject. He adds that states should be encouraged and that particular states should be identified; those that lag in adhering to the set pattern. Dhawan is currently working on creating a country-wide database for India on 'Know My School' portal which will be aimed at providing information on all primary schools in the country. This will be based on 200 parameters including board examination results which he feels will help regulatory bodies implement policies decisively. Opining on a regulatory body for private institutes, he said, “The reason why private schools flourished in India is mainly because governments could not deliver. Currently, around 43 per cent children are enrolled in private schools and it is estimated to breach the 60 per cent mark by 2025. As the private sector has grown manifold, there is an urgent need for a regulatory body which will monitor both the private and public educational institutions.” Although private colleges extract an exorbitant amount as the tuition fees, the return on investment (ROI) is actually not very promising. Dhawan observed, “Colleges need to publish ROI on the expenditure made by the customers (parents) which will be made on the basis of their placement data.”
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On the flight back from Ahmedabad to Hyderabad, in 2007, the environmental scientist Narayana Peesapaty looked at the food served to him in plastic crockery and wondered the plastic waste it generates every day all over the world. The thinking time that flights offer, he started brainstorming on the alternatives for plastic utensils. This idea transported him back to one of the hot afternoons on the farm where his team had used sorghum (jowar) roti as a spatula to eat daal. The jowar roti was so hard that they kept it dipped in the thick curry but it didn’t become soft as they finished their lunch. That day Narayana Peesapaty landed in Hyderabad with his big entrepreneurial idea – using flour to create disposable utensils. By the end of 2007, he left his job as a Senior Scientific Officer with International Crop Research Institute for Semi Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), Hyderabad to focus full time on creating eco friendly utensils. Cutlery being the simpler, smaller of the utensils, he started focusing on developing that. He worked for three years from his home kitchen to develop the right recipe for cutlery. He could make spoons, sporks and chopsticks from a mixture of different kinds of flour. He used a certain proportion of millet, jowar (sorghum), rice and wheat which he kneaded with water. The higher proportion of jowar flour is deliberate. Peesapaty shares,“During my research, I learnt that one of the main reason for groundwater depletion is the reduction in cultivation of dryland crops like jowar. One of the ways I want to help is by creating its demand through my products and increasing its consumption.” He added some spices too, cumin and rock salt so they can be consumed after use. If not consumed, they can be discarded by throwing in mud or in potted plans to decompose, which usually takes between three to seven days. This edible cutlery has absolutely no vegetable and animal fat or any form of preservatives or emulsifiers. It is then baked at over 200 degrees to reduce the water content to 1.75 per cent. This gives the spoons and sporks the shelf life of three years, says Peesapaty. With the prototype ready, in 2010, he took a loan from the bank of Rs 4.5 crore to purchase the machinery to manufacture it at a commercial scale. Currently, he uses the technology used in biscuit factories but, Peesapaty says, he is working to develop a fully customised integrated system to develop his edible cutlery. They started selling the product in November last year from their website, organic stores and organic bazaars. In less than a year, Peesapaty claims, they have reached monthly sales of Rs 2 lakh and most of the demand is from households . But, his plan is to get caterers for parties and marriages onboard since it is at large-scale gathering the consumption of plastic utensils is huge. He is now working to develop a knife but hasn’t been able to crack its recipe yet. “Plates, bowls will also be introduced but it will take a while before I develop the workable, practical model,” says Peesapaty. So, before we gorge on the plates, we will be content with eating the spoons and sporks that he sells at Rs 4 per piece. The company is looking to raise funding to start manufacturing units across the globe.
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Mohandas Pai, the hot shot ex-chief financial officer of Infosys, minces no words. After taking over as chairman of the board at Manipal Global Education Services, he has dedicated a majority of his time to startups commenting on their current affairs and has become a self-confessed constitutional liberal fundamentalist. He believes that Article 29 and 30, which protect the interests of the minority, have been wrongly used by the political class to divide the country’s majority. He says that the political class should instead focus on providing 300 million jobs and adds that if India does not wake up to skilling individuals or providing them jobs then “we are sitting on a gunpowder keg, which can explode any time and destroy the social structure of this country.”Somewhere in the depths of his outspoken demeanour, he has also been, like other Infosyians, vociferous about setting up an ecosystem for startups to list in India and also raise money with reduced tax structures. Indian companies today are constrained by regulation and are “behind the curve”, since the wealthy are scared to invest because of tax implications, when it comes to global capital. He is also part of a government committee on road transport that aims to use technology to improve services for businesses and citizen. He has also set up a Rs 600 crore startup fund along with Ranjan Pai, the chairman of the Manipal Group, and has invested in a dozen odd startups.Mohandas Pai has an opinion on everything and constructs his argument pertinently. “The Competition Commission of India should look at the way discounting is done in e-commerce companies. Gross merchandise value is not a good measure to determine the success of these businesses,” says Pai in an interview with BW|Businessworld. He adds that such a measurement is a “fraud”.However, being the capitalist that he is, he adds that this business is here to stay. He agrees that these Indian companies must realise that being dependent on foreign funding can ultimately result in them shutting down if there is another business that can raise an equal amount of money and start discounting. “The consumer will always move to where there is more discounting,” he says. And this has already happened with Amazon announcing a $5 billion war chest to take on Indian startups Flipkart and Snapdeal. Pai believes that if Indian sellers are asked to sell at discounts then there is no one other than the consumer benefiting. Take away discounts and one would know how this industry really functions. That said Indian startups need patient long-term capital from within the country to help them succeed. “I see startups providing three million jobs in a decade and creating a value of $500 billion,” says Pai. However, for this to happen, the government should give startups support in terms of infrastructure, finance and information from the policy level, for this to become a long-term play. He says that India has plenty of problems to solve internally and startups can intervene with technology and services. India needs disruption in supply chain, health, education, financial inclusion and skill development. The reality, however, is that 60 per cent of startups will perish and the remaining 40 per cent will become global innovators. The smartphone has changed the game in favour of consumption and will eventually become a source of information for all kinds of services. “Today, there is obscene valuations following not so great ideas. It is absurd to see why only those who can raise large money survive. It looks very oligopolistic,” says Pai. India is dependent on a clutch of foreign private equity funds for the growth of its startup economy. He also discusses issues such as data sovereignty, where the data of Indian consumers is sitting on the servers of global corporations. “What is the Indian government doing in terms of this snooping that is happening in the West? The Prime Minister’s Twitter handle’s data is sitting somewhere else. We still have the mental moorings of being a colony.” He also takes a dig at net neutrality and suggests that it should be in favour of consumers and not companies that use free data and accumulate consumer traffic, through the telco networks. He says that Telcos behaving like “bullies” is not going to solve the purpose. These days, however, he is on the lookout for companies in the internet of things (IoT) industry. If Indian manufacturing can embrace IoT, then production lines can be automated, which will hasten the Make in India initiative. However, the conundrum is that with automation fewer people will be employed. So the opportunity is in building talent in services such as analytics, retail, supply chain and transportation. He warns that extreme poverty and lack of jobs will lead to the growth of evangelism (monotheism), which eventually will kill liberal education and scientific thought processes. No wonder India is a land of opportunity and a land of extremes.“Let us not light the powder keg or at least cut the fuse.”— Vishal Krishna(This story was published in BW | Businessworld Issue Dated 24-08-2015)
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Vijay Ratnaparkhe has been at the helm of Robert Bosch Engineering India Limited (RBEI) for several years. RBEI has literally defined the Euro 50 billion parent company, Robert Bosch GmbH's, outlook towards the connected world. Today, there are over 16,000 engineers in RBEI and all of them are focused on building software that makes connected and smart applications a reality. It is software that is going to make all machines intelligent to reduce the impact on the planet by moving the world to adopt better safety standards. Added to that there is regulation clamping down on automobile companies to lowering carbon emissions and machines need to be made smarter if they are to reduce pollution. RBEI is bustling with activity with global cars, of General Motors and Jaguar, being parked in the "experiment" lab to make them smarter vehicles. RBEI has filed over 250 patents in the past two years and Ratnaparkhe attributes the success to the core engineering training that his company has enabled. In a chat with BW | Businessworld's Vishal Krishna, Ratnaparkhe says RBEI is now focused on building connected cities and have the bandwidth to do so. Excerpts from the interview: How is the engineering talent shaping up? And what is a smart city?It has been depth oriented and a skills oriented organisation. We have filed fewer patents as compared to 2013 because we focused on creating a larger value driven approach. In this centre we are building products, which is why we are pushing engineers to innovate for the global market. Last year we filed only 79 patents. This centre is operating for the worldwide group. We have not only built global products, we have also built local products. The predictive maintenance platform for the Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation was one of the few things that allowed us to show case how software can really change the way we manage our buses to reduce maintenance costs and increase driver productivity. However that remained a pilot. When it comes to smart cities we are already pioneers in building applications for automobile manufacturers. For a city to be smart it goes beyond just connectivity. The Ministry of Urban Development along with all leaders of the State is planning a road map. They will have to keep aspects of energy conservation, cleanliness and safety as the priority for a smart city. Here sensors from cars to homes to government run infrastructure to various other stakeholders is reality and someone has to define a new business model. What kind of business models would come about?There will be service providers in every layer. There is data analytics for video and images, which is needed for security applications. This will be dominated by the product players and will give us a play in building rugged cameras and sensor and also adding analytics to the portfolio of services. The question is who will hold this data. What is the role of the government in a connected world and will they add payment services with third party service providers. It will be a co-creative business model with several IT Services players, start-ups, government and product companies coming together. However, we need standards. It is these standards that will define what next. Today there is a case for building machine learning for predictive maintenance. The industry will require data scientists and these individuals will build statistical models to understand rate of crime, failures in lighting systems and much more. Smartness is not just for cities it will be required in manufacturing and our sensors will analyse machine to machine communication and their rate of failure. Also there will be prescriptive analysis. We have been focusing on connected cars for several years, where is that heading?Adaptive cruise control has become a standard in the west. Things like emergency breaking, haptics for acceleration and several safety features will become standard applications. The cost of the hardware is falling and the software cost in the car is going up to at least 10 per cent or more in high end cars. There are several new applications that are coming to mid ranged Indian cars, which will be catering to safety, entertainment and connectivity. You have seen a pilot with one of the top OEMs in the country where we allow the app to mirror phone applications on to the entertainment screen or the telematics unit of the car. We have opened a new engineering centre in Mexico that will also do a lot of work on connected vehicles. Manufacturers are already placing a bet on standards for connectivity, is Ethernet or FlexRay only time will tell. Smart cities in the west will have cars that will communicate with each other by 2020.All cars launched by 2018 in the west will have smart applications. By 2018 RBEI will increase its software presence for home applications, health, automotive and energy side of the business. We done a small pilot for a Kerala based hospital on connected apps for consumers and the hospital. It was basically an app for mothers to be engaged with the hospitals on creating appointments for treating their children and also to engage with the hospital staff through the app on enquiries. What about the role of start-ups?We follow startups closely globally with the parent company's venture fund. In India the activity has picked up tremendously and there are ideas that we are always scouting for, either to engage with them or just to look at the skillsets. I cannot tell you the nature of our work with engaging startups here. Like we discussed there are several opportunities and we need to look at the ideas base before we engage with them.
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It is turning an idea into a successful commercial story that captures the imagination of the NextGen today. Gone are the days of young people pursuing stodgy jobs; this is the age of following your passion and starting your own enterprise. BW | Businessworld applauds this spirit; and to capture it, is organising the Young Entrepreneurship Conference and Awards to felicitate the enterprise in today’s youth. The event is on 23rd July 2015 at The Leela Ambience, Gurgaon, Delhi NCR. BW | Businessworld did a special issue on startups, issue dated June 2015, and it is with this event we are felicitating the young winners who can be the potential future leaders of corporate India On the sidelines of the awards ceremony, BW Businessworld is organising a half-day conference. This is an attempt to bring the best minds together in the startup ecosystem and discuss the key attributes for entrepreneurial success. The event will kickstart by a welcome note from V Vaidyanathan, CMD of Capital First, who has been responsible for India's largest management buyout of a listed company. As part of this MBO, private equity player Warburg Pincus acquired a majority stake (70.57 per cent) in Capital First. Our first panel discussion is on how these business leaders built fastest growing companies out of India. Some of the founders that the startups can learn from are Rahul Sharma, co-founder and CEO, Micromax; Mohit Tandon, CSO, Delhivery; and Yatin Shah, founder, IIFL Wealth. Business owners have to take several decisions, big and small, every minute in their entrepreneurial journey. This can be quite overwhelming, personally and professionally. Our next discussion is on how these founders – Rahul Yadav, former CEO of Housing.com, Vikas Malpani, co-founder of Commonfloor, Neeru Sharma, co-founder of Infibeam went against the tide and stood by what they believe is right. India needs to do much more to improve the ecosystem for women entrepreneurs is a given. It ranks a low 70 out of 77 countries in the Female Entrepreneurship Index 2015 (formerly known as the Gender GEDI). It is to talk about these issues we have five women leaders — Anshulika Dubey, COO, Wishberry; Ashwini Deshpande, co-founder, Elephant Design + Strategy; Sairee Chahal, founder, SHEROES.in; Neha Juneja, co-founder and CEO, Greenway Grameen Infra; and Upasana Taku, co-founder, MobiKwik — to share their experience of building companies and suggest policy changes to get more women to join the fray. When to raise funds? How to raise money? These questions can be mind boggling for any first time entrepreneur. To unravel the funding game for these entrepreneurs we have Natarajan R, MD and CFO, Helion Ventures; Mohit Bhatnagar, MD, Sequoia Capital; Karan Mohla, executive director, IDG Ventures; and Dev Khare, MD, Lightspeed Ventures India on the panel to share their gyan.
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Japanese internet and telecom conglomerate SoftBank Corp, which backs Indian companies Ola, Snapdeal and Housing.com, will avoid investing in early-stage firms, shifting its focus entirely towards backing more established companies, according to a report. The Tokyo-headquartered company will no longer make small bets in early-stage companies and instead focus on bigger investments in more mature businesses, according to a news report in re/code website quoting SoftBank’s India-born president Nikesh Arora. “As we look at the future for the next tens of years, we believe that the way to preserve the long-term sustainability of SoftBank is to be large, minority shareholders of many assets. We believe that it’s less crowded in the large-check marketplace,” SoftBank president Nikesh Arora was cited as saying by news website Re/code. After shutting its VC unit, SoftBank will invest directly in late stage start-ups, according to Re/code. SoftBank has invested close to $1 billion in these Indian Internet start-ups in the last six months and pledged to invest a total of $10 billion over a decade in the country. The company owns roughly a third of Alibaba, which has a market value of more than $180 billion. It is also one of the most prolific start-up investors with a portfolio of anywhere between 1,300 and 1,500 companies, according to various media reports. It’s unclear how the shift in strategy will affect SoftBank’s current and potential deals in India. The move marks the first significant move after Arora took over a larger role at the firm. Arora, who was senior vice president and chief business officer of Google, had quit the tech giant before joining SoftBank in September 2014. He is now one of the four non-Japanese in the 14-member board of SoftBank.
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Rahul Yadav, the ex-CEO, of Housing.com, announced on Facebook that he will be back with his new venture in a month. Sources said the new venture could be in the real estate sector. While it is still too early to know who are his investors this time, the innate brilliance of Yadav cannot be undermined but this time around, investors are sure to want to know how he would scale it, build his team, and do more due-diligence around it. In 2012, Yadav, along with his batchmates from IIT, co-founded Housing.com. Investors had bet big on it and pumped in $121 million in four rounds.Meanwhile Yadav posted on his FB profile these words:"If the path is smooth, dig your own holes. If no challenges, create them on your own.'Just for the sake of practice. Just to push yourself to the extreme. Just to become stronger. Just to make things interesting. Just to make things fun.I'll be back...this time with 100x.... [10x of last formula (10x)]30 days to go.Is the world ready?" Yadav was sacked by the Housing.com board on July 1 for his behaviour with investors and media. “The board believes his behaviour is not befitting of a CEO and is detrimental to the company, known for its innovative approach to product development, market expansion and brand building,” the company had said.Last week, Housing.com appointed Rishabh Gupta as the interim CEO of the realty portal. Search for an interim chief executive is underway.
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