CyberChef offers middle eastern, continental, south east Asian and even regional cuisine from all over India, cooked by home chefs Raghav who lives alone in Gurgaon has asked his cook to not come on evenings from Friday to Sundays. For, these are the times when he craves for that special ghar ka khana. It is not that his parents have started parcelling him the food from his hometown in Himachal but it is the new startup in Gurgaon, CyberChef that delivers homemade continental or Lebanese to his house. Neha Puri, co-founder of CyberChef, got the idea of starting this virtual marketplace for home cooked meals when she was doing her Masters in Marketing and Strategy from Warwick Business School, UK. There she saw how a lot of women of Indian origin would cook and sell Indian food to the students in the university. As a student, she absolutely loved it and it made her life so much easier. When she returned and saw the increasing cosmopolitan crowd in the metros, she put the two together to tap on the business opportunity and started the company along with her brother Anuj Puri in February 2015. From the very beginning she was sure she doesn’t want to hire professional chefs. “Home chefs offer the novelty of changing the menu every day which lets us offer more variety to our customers on a daily basis.” Another thing, she adds, is these women keep trying new recipes, and some are their family recipes passed on from generation to generation. “We would never get a chance to try such heirloom recipes if it wasn’t for these home cooks.” This is essentially why their business shouldn’t be compared with the Indian dabbawallas. For, they don’t offer dal, roti and sabzi but middle eastern, continental, south east Asian and even regional cuisine from all over India. She started with 25 home chefs, all housewives, in Gurgaon. In two months they have got 30 more chefs and expanded their base to Mumbai. They do more than 1,000 orders on a monthly basis, wherein the price range for a meal is between ₹150-275. The advantage of this business model is it doesn’t only offer affordable and home cooked food to the customers but also gives an opportunity to the housewives to become entrepreneurs, with whom they work on a revenue sharing agreement. Anjali Adya, a Gurgaon-based home chef, who has been with CyberChef since its beginning says, “This has been a great opportunity because they encourage me to try different recipes and master my skill. This has also helped me get market access and my kids are proud that their mother has now become a ‘professional’.” The responsibility of the home chefs is to cook the best meals and try innovative recipes, packaging, delivery, marketing and logistics is taken care by CyberChef. It is these women who act as brand ambassadors for CyberChef and spread the word in their social circles. “If they grow, we grow with them,” says Adya. One of the main concerns of being in this business, shares Puri, is the problem of time. People don’t want to wait for too long for their food. They should get it within 30-40 minutes of ordering. So, getting the right logistics can make or break this business. Moving on, Puri wants to focus on expanding their base to Pune, Bangalore and South Delhi and get 150-200 chefs at each location by end of this year.
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Housing.com co-founder and CEO Rahul Yadav's resignation news on Thursday (25 June) sparked a buzz on the social media platforms. Economictimes.com quoting two people directly aware of the development said this time his resignation will be accepted by the board of the real estate portal, .However, both Housing.com and economictimes.com later denied that Yadav has resigned. Yadav, 26, who has been involved in a string of controversies, will be asked to stay on at the company and oversee product development. In May this year, Yadav resigned as the CEO of Housing.com, capping several weeks of drama at one of India's most watched startups. Yadav wrote a scornful resignation letter on April 30 to board members and investors denigrating their "intellectual capability" and giving them a one-week deadline to "help in the transition". The portal shot to fame as one of India's startup success stories after Japan's SoftBank led an investment of $90 million ( Rs 550 crore) in December, valuing it at Rs 1,500 crore. Since then, Yadav has been in the spotlight for the wrong reasons — he became embroiled in a social media dust-up with Sequoia Capital Managing Director Shailendra Singh. Housing was founded in 2012 by a dozen college-mates from IIT-Mumbai, of whom three have left the company.
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The newly proposed institutional trading platform for start-ups is going to put Indian regulation on the global map of being investor friendly, says Vishal KrishnaThere have been several start-ups that had the potential to list on the Indian bourses if such an opportunity had existed in the past. The entrepreneurs of popular start-ups such as RedBus, Myntra and BookPad exited, selling off to large companies (Naspers, Flipkart and Yahoo), because the only card they could play was to either to sell or merge their companies. The Indian entrepreneurial community registered their parent companies in Singapore or New York or Hong Kong because of easier listing norms. They also went to those cities because of the tax norms and easy exit offered to private capital. Sensing a loss in value for Indian entrepreneurs the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) has finally agreed to create an Institutional Trading Platform exclusively for startups, which will be part of the BSE-SME platform. Thanks to the experts, such as Rajeev Khaitan, of Khaitan and Company, Sudhir Sethi, of IDG Ventures and Mohandas Pai, chairman of Manipal Global Education Services, Sebi, is in the process of releasing a blue print for listing startups. However, for now the entire details have not emerged in full because the regulator has laid out some procedures of how a startup could list in India (See guidelines to listing table). What it means now is that the likes of Flipkart and Snapdeal have a chance to go public without showing profits and the intrinsic long term nature of the ecommerce business is validated. These firms can now survive in the long run with institutional capital and not be dependent on short term capital. “The move allows investors to exit in India and it allows entrepreneurs to build long term businesses,” says R Natarajan, CFO of Helion Ventures. He adds that this discussion was in the making for the last three years and has finally come to fruition. The trading platform will allow companies to list in the Bombay Stock Exchange Sensex at the company’s discretion on the basis of their growth. “India has several startups solving problems related to the country and offer global solutions. For founders, it is a great way to raise capital,” says Sanjay Swamy, founder of Angel Prime Partners. He adds that this platform would be investor friendly and promise exits. Reports add that $1.5 billion, worth of private capital, flowed in to India in the first half of the year. Most of these are Venture Capital investments that come in for five years. An exit within the country and that through an IPO will make India a startup friendly nation. May be global investors are smiling now and Indian entrepreneurs have a reason to cheer up. Here is what Sebi has proposedThe Guidelines• The platform shall now be called as Institutional Trading Platform (ITP) and shall facilitate capital raising as well. • The said platform will be made accessible to: a. companies which are intensive in their use of technology, information technology, intellectual property, data analytics, bio-technology, nano-technology to provide products, services or business platforms with substantial value addition and with at least 25% of the pre-issue capital being held by QIBs (as defined in SEBI (Issue of Capital and Disclosure Requirements) Regulations, 2009), or b. any other company in which at least 50% of the pre-issue capital is held by QIBs. • No person (individually or collectively with persons acting in concert) in such a company shall hold 25% or more of the post-issue share capital. • Considering the nature of business of companies which may list on the said platform, disclosure may contain only broad objects of the issue and there shall be no cap on amount raised for General Corporate Purposes. Further, the lock in of the entire pre-issue capital shall be for a period of 6 months from the date of allotment uniformly for all shareholders. • As the standard valuation parameters such as P/E, EPS, etc. may not be relevant in case of many of such companies, the basis of issue price may include other disclosures, except projections, as deemed fit by the issuers. • Companies intending to list on the proposed ITP, shall be required to file draft offer document with SEBI for observations, as provided in SEBI (ICDR) Regulations, 2009. • Only two categories of investors, i.e. (i) Institutional Investors (QIB as defined in SEBI (ICDR) Regulations, 2009 along with family trusts, systematically important NBFCs registered with RBI and the intermediaries registered with SEBI, all with net-worth of more than Rs. 500 crore) and (ii) Non-Institutional Investors (NIIs) other than retail page: 2 [ www.sebi.gov.in ] individual investors can access the proposed ITP. • In case of public offer, allotment to institutional investors may be on a discretionary basis whereas to NIIs it shall be on proportionate basis. Allocation between the said two categories shall be in the ratio of 75% and 25%, respectively. • In case of discretionary allotment to institutional investors, no institutional investor shall be allotted more than 10% of the issue size. All shares allotted on discretionary basis shall be locked-in in line with requirements for lockin by Anchor Investors i.e. 30 days at present. • The minimum application size in case of such issues shall be Rs. 10 lakh and the minimum trading lot shall be of Rs. 10 lakh. • The number of allottees in case of a public offer shall be 200 or more. • The company will have the option to migrate to main board after 3 years subject to compliance with eligibility requirements of the stock exchanges. • For Category I and II AIFs, which are required under the SEBI (Alternative Investment Funds) Regulations, 2012 to invest a certain minimum amount in unlisted securities, investment in shares of companies listed on this platform may be treated as investment in 'unlisted securities' for the purpose of calculation of the investment limits. Grandfathering of existing companies listed on SME-ITP. • The existing companies listed on SME-ITP may continue to be guided by the existing regulatory framework for them including applicable relaxations from compliance with corporate governance requirements. Rationalisation of disclosures for proposed ITP as well as main board. • Further, in order to rationalize the disclosures requirements for all issuers whether intending to list on the main board or the proposed ITP, it has been decided that the disclosures in offer document with respect to group companies, litigations and creditors shall be in accordance with policy on materiality as defined by the issuer. However, all relevant disclosures shall be available on the website of the issuer. Also, the product advertisements of an issuer will not be required to give details of public/rights issue.
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If you play in the share market and have the capacity to invest Rs 10 lakh in an IPO, very soon you might be buying the shares of an India start-up. But be cautious, as the relaxing of norms for the start-ups by the Securities and Exchange Board of India may make a lot of investors lose their money. “Start-ups by their very nature are risky investments. Thus Sebi has done well to keep the retail investors out of the start-up market. The retail investors, given their limited access to research and data, are ill-placed to take exposures in companies with fewer disclosures. However, institutional investors should also remain wary since rules such as these doing away with standard valuation parameters such as P/E,EPS (which of course may not be relevant for start-ups) may have a tendency to create a bubble in the start-up market which may bust later on,” said Deep N Mukherjee, Senior Director, Corporate Ratings, India Ratings & Research. The decision has been taken despite historical data indicating that a majority of IPOs start trading below their listing price within one year of their launch. According to data provided by Prime Database, in 2008, 81 per cent of the listed IPOs were giving negative returns within one year of their listing. In 2009 and 2010, the percentage was 50 per cent and and 82 per cent respectively. The situation was a little better in 2014 because of the stricter disclosure norms that Sebi had brought in for traditional companies. However, the relaxation for start-up in the disclosure norms is likely to spurt the percentage of negative returns once again. Mukherjee further adds “if there are not enough disclosure by such companies, investors may lose money because start-ups often have unique business models or products which may only give an illusion of easy understandability." According to the Sebi statement, the standard valuation parameters such as price to earnings, earnings per share and so on may not be relevant in case of many such (Start-ups) companies and the basis of issue price may include other disclosures, except projections, as deemed fit by the issuers. By doing away with disclosures like price to earnings, earning per share of the company, Sebi is allowing the companies to not disclose the profitability of the businesses. Instead of these norms, the companies will be disclosing information like ‘traffic on the website, conversion of visit into customers etc. “A lot of tech companies have not made money in many years. There would be many such companies which will look attractive as per revenue but take decades ,if ever to generate free cash flows,” adds Mukherjee. For example, Jabong, an online fashion retailer, incurred a loss of Rs 293 crore on revenues of Rs 438 crore in 2013-14. This means the company loses Rs 33 on revenue of Rs 100. Even Flipkart, the largest online retailer by revenue, has not made profit yet. The company is valued at $11 billion but investors like Rakesh Jhunjhunwala have questioned the business models of the company openly. While Sebi is under pressure to stop the flight of Indian start-ups to the foreign markets to raise money, but it also needs to ensure that the Indian investors do not lose money by investing in these companies. Sebi is treading a risky path by allowing start-ups to list without letting investors understand their business models. A question from Jhunjunwala in a TV interview explains the risk of investing in start-ups, “the real companies who have given returns to investors had been built by the cash flows of those businesses, not by investors”. We know that most of the Indian start-ups have been burning investors’ money to show revenues on their books. Should one invest in such start-ups without knowing enough about their profitability?
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The Indian School of Design and Innovation (ISDI) signed a three year partnership with Microsoft India to set up ISDI Creative Accelerator, a programme that offers design and innovation for successful start-ups. With this collaboration, Microsoft will provide access to software and technology. A memorandum of understanding was signed between the two in Mumbai on Wednesday. “We are creating solution to translate young dreams into reality through integrated entrepreneurial environment and continue to be the focus for students, design innovators and corporate.” said Radha Kapoor, founder and executive director of ISDI, “Design in technology must be human centered to spark new innovation, it must be user friendly and create value without disrupting technology.” she added. Creative Accelerator programme has been designed in way that it will bring universities, students, young entrepreneurs, investors and corporate under a common platform. Bhaskar Pramanik, chairman of Microsoft India (BW Photo by Umesh Goswami)“Design is core and integral aspect of many industries. We are happy to work together with ISDI to develop a design accelerator for start-ups. We will bring the best technology and industry expertise to fuel the growth of this entrepreneurship and India, ” said Bhaskar Pramanik, chairman of Microsoft India. India is the third largest base for young business with 3000 technological start-ups after US and United Kingdom. It will touch around twelve thousand mark by 2020. This initiative will begin from Mumbai by providing six month program in design, technology and business innovation. Participating start-ups will have access to business mentors, technological support and designing experts to gain valuable market analysis and global scenario. This will be launched on a pan India basis after its launch in Mumbai in August.
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Whether you are building or buying, there are some guidelines to follow, says Karan KuraniIn a startup, there are always has 100 different things that need to be done at any given point of time. There are umpteen ways you can accomplish those tasks. Many of them can be solved by using tools that other companies provide. Some of them clearly require something to be custom built internally in your organisation. And then there are some, often pesky, things that are in the middle. You can solve the problem by using some third party tool/software, or you can also build a replica of that tool internally with a few tweaks here and there that would be nice to have. It’s these situations which cause a lot of sunk time in wasteful projects that could have easily been solved by just using some existing solution out there. But how do you decide when it’s good to build something in-house vs just buying your way out of the problem? I would like to walk you through two situations where the build vs buy question typically pops up. The first one is the problem of “Big data” (or even little data for that matter). The world is awash in data, but data is not the same as information. Data is just a fact, or an observation. It is information which empowers your organisation to make decisions. There are entire companies built to help you convert your data into actionable information. Whether it is to help you track your funnel for sales conversions, keep track of how many times in a user returns to use your product per day/week/month, at what points are your users getting frustrated and dropping off, and a million other things. Karan KuraniBuilding and maintaining such systems in-house is an expensive, time consuming affair. Adding to the difficulty is the fact that the people who are well versed in this field are rare, and are super hard to recruit. Therefore, there are a lot of companies out there who promise to provide you the same kind of insight into your data at a fraction of the cost and time of building in-house systems. Many of the products currently on the market are pretty good at their specific use cases. New Relic, for example, is an excellent way to monitor your infrastructure and the raw performance of your application. Google Analytics is another great free solution to measure the basic metrics of your website / mobile app. But, it’s not as well defined when it comes to business metrics - especially if you are a startup. A startup by definition is something new and its business model is undefined early in its life. This means that nobody - including the founders themselves - know what the best way to measure the business is. This means there is no one stop shop which will have all the things that your startup needs to measure its health. DoctorC’s dashboard was customisedAs an example, at my current company - DoctorC, we needed a dashboard which measured all our critical metrics for the current day at a glance. We wanted to know how well each of the city was doing and what was contributing to its progress as well as how far or close we were to our daily goal overall. It should also update in near real-time so we know what’s happening now as opposed to 60 minutes later. There is simply no solution out there which would provide such functionality out of the box or that can be modified like this without significant tech development. And since it is so critical to our business we built the dashboard from scratch. Each bar would turn green if the goal of each acquisition channel is hit. The circle for the city would also turn green once its goal passed. The bar on top would similarly green once our overall daily goal was hit. The more green we saw the better our business was doing - we can process everything in a very visual manner. It also acts as motivational tool where the entire company would try together to get as many greens as possible every day.This investment has paid off immensely. This is exactly what is right for our organization specifically, not for anyone else. It has helped us move fast in decisions since we have the right data at our fingertips. It was an explicit, conscious choice we made to strengthen our business.What we did not do - we did not build our own infrastructure monitoring tool - we use New Relic, we did not build our a/b testing/optimization tool - we use Optimizely, we did not build our own servers - we use Amazon Web Services, we did not build our web analytics software - we use Google Analytics and Heap Analytics. We use off the shelf software as long as they are saving us time and money and are very well defined in nature. Anything that is specific for our business and which we absolutely must have our way - without any compromises - is built in-house. Learning from the NYTimesThe second example of an in house tool that is core to a large business is New York Times’ internal Content Management System (CMS) called “Scoop”. It powers all their workflows for publishing articles on the web, mobile and print. Apart from that, it allows them to render images that are automatically cropped and aspect ratios adjusted so that the writers and editors don’t have to worry about managing how images are displayed. There are several other features which are very specific to NY Times such as “Story Budgeting and Planning”, a tool used to coordinate the publication of articles across multiple news desks across the world in different time zones in a painless way. It’s tightly integrated into their workflow in a way that is not found in a generic CMS. For NY Times, the entire experience of writing, copy editing, publishing and post publication editing is handled seamlessly with minimal friction with Scoop. They are currently changing “Scoop” so that they became a digital first organization. They have this flexibility because they have built Scoop from the ground up for themselves. It is beholden to no other organization than NY Times itself. The results speak for themselves, nytimes.com and its mobile site are industry leading media websites in the world that improves constantly day after day after day. Anything that you find unsatisfactory in the market and doesn’t serve your business needs is up for grabs. After that, it’s all a question of prioritizing what you want to build. Another point to note is that the “in-house tool” does not need to be fancy or use heavy technology. It can be as simple as a simple spreadsheet which is filled manually every day - we still do that for some of our internal projects. In the end, there are 2 simple things that you must ask yourself -1. Is the thing you want to do critical (and I mean really absolutely “Oh my god, my business will die without this!” critical)?2. Are there zero off the shelf tools that will allow you to do exactly that critical thing?If the answer to both is yes, you should seriously consider building it in-house, even if you just started your startup yesterday. This philosophy is, rightly so, independent of the size of the organization. Karan Kurani, is co-founder of DoctorC, a startup clustering diagnostic centres and consumers with technology
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The Scaale Group, a Venture Resource Ecosystem, is spreading its wings in India. Based in San Francisco, it works with over 150 venture capital funds to find startups that can make an impact in areas such as but not limited to education, healthcare, SaaS, big data, travel, food tech and more . Scaale’s investment club called Cross Border Angels has already invested in a Hyderabad incubated company, Jay Robotix, for an undisclosed sum. It has also invested in seven companies, across the world, with an average angel round of $200,000. The group’s founder, Kaushal Chokshi, says that India has enough ideas that could be funded and taken global. However, talking to BW|Businessworld's Vishal Krishna he feels a policy framework, for startups, is the need of the hour for India to become a powerhouse of entrepreneurship. Here are the excerpts of the interview. Where is funding headed, is there some reality today that there could be a bubble?I think the motivation comes from exits. Thousands of people get excited about it and the exit rates are so high that there are so many entrepreneurs who want to start businesses. Yes the best ideas get funded; the bubble hype is the valuation itself. It is not the quality of ideas. It is a business model that everyone is betting on and it is fine. This is how entrepreneurs are made. It is just the beginning of some good things to happen in India because of private capital. The bubble itself is a process. It is a necessity to find the best ideas. I agree there is very high valuation today but it is not a bubble that will stop investments from happening. I think any innovation around the world has gone up because of immigrants. The case in point is India. There are so many Indian companies going abroad. So, such entrepreneurs need Angels that can fund companies going global. These companies have implications to change society and we need to de-risk their presence or focus from the Indian market. There is better exposure if one goes global and the best practices can be implemented on a global scale. It makes exits all the more easier. What markets are your favourites?USA, Spain, England and India are growing in terms of entrepreneurs. Even Estonia has startups; it is tremendous. I have met several companies in the product software and hardware side there. If they can do it, why can’t India? India needs to make it easier for startups from a tax and listing perspective. One of our startups, Jay-Robotix, has gone to Singapore. They started out of Hyderabad. The city state is wise at picking companies that can keep them ahead in the future. Robotics is such a good bet. The current Indian government is very serious about entrepreneurship and wants to help such companies. Let us what comes from policy to foster growth of startups in the next four years. What do you think India should do?Tax incentives, for investors and entrepreneurs, are a must. We need to define the best practices for a nation of entrepreneurs. Today we do not have a framework and this why intellectual property goes abroad. The state governments should also look at this in their budgets very seriously. To be honest, job creation happens from startups. It is a compelling story to change society. Technology innovation today is getting people get noticed and people around 30 years of age have a career goal of changing society with their idea. Such businesses command transparency and, today, people are saying that they can go achieve things. This is a change in India. You no longer need contacts to grow; it is a culture of meritocracy. I must also add that education can aide this growth. People of all ages should be given the opportunity to learn. Age is no longer a barrier. To be honest, city states can run things much better than large nation states. How much of our entrepreneur pool is stuck in investment jargon?Yes people spoke about cloud, mobility, big data services three years ago; now they call it SMAC, which is social, mobile, analytics and cloud. These are just terms. But what is the difference between research and innovation. Research is about spending money to drive innovation. Innovation is using an idea to triple bottom lines of a business. We are looking for innovation. I do not look for Unicorns, as they call it. I want people who can change lives. We like companies with technology intervention in Health care, security and education. Technology for future cities is also very interesting. We need to look at how Singapore, Hong Kong, Estonia and Kosovo are fostering growth for entrepreneurs. With the Indian government starting a smart city called Gujarat International Financial Tec-City it is a great move to set up a financial centre for financial tech startups. We are already aligned with that program. This is the intention that we are talking about. So India has to seize this. Look at it this way, that startups are creating a cashless economy and Indian banks should embrace these companies. Today Aadhar, which has such great technology and data, has opened up its APIs to build applications. Imagine the applications that can use data to change lives. Social impact is very important for India. Will legacy companies open up to change?Take the example of ZipCar which got sold out for $450 million. This disrupted the car industry. Nobody has to own a car anymore. Most exits around the world are corporate buy outs and are all under $30 million. Legacy companies are the ones who are running accelerator programmes. Startup companies can get bought within two years. This is another area which will see major growth in the coming year.
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Microsoft Ventures, a technology startup accelerator, by software giant Microsoft, announced the launch of a new corporate engagement initiative called Innovation for Corporates (ICI). The new initiative aims to work with enterprise based startup businesses to innovate and drive growth. Innovation for Corporates offers three programs titled MAP, PIA and Hi-Po. The Market Access Program (MAP) will bring startups and enterprise businesses together to work together. The Partner in Acceleration (PIA) program allows corporates to know their resources and network to set up their own engagement with startups. The High potential (Hi-PO) program works with top startups backed by corporates to build them into stronger business respectively. Ravi Narayan, director of Microsoft Ventures in India, said "We have been working with various corporates for years to help them with their business problems with innovation from startups." He says that many enterprise businesses are looking at Microsoft for guidance. Over the last three years, Microsoft Ventures in India has built a portfolio of 74 startups through its program, with an impressive $500,000 average funding and four exits till date. Microsoft has also partnered with Reliance Industries for their accelerator program, GenNext Innovation Hub. On the partnership Vivek Rai Gupta of GenNext Venture fund says, "We have been able to mentor the startups and help them gain traction very fast." It also partnered with NASSCOM's 10,000 startups program. Tyler Bryson, general manager for marketing and operations at Microsoft India, told Businessworld that the culture of innovation at Microsoft is driving excitement and enthusiasm across the ecosystem. The new series - Think Next Talks, bringing speakers from across the industry and cultural spectrum to discuss how the innovation can improve work and life. Think Next 2015 saw over 400 CXOs from leading corporates and the conclave witnessed the top technology products in the country and the graduating Summer 2015 batch- AdPushup, Frilp, iReff, DailyRounds, Uninstall, iBot, FortunePay, Customer XPs, FlamencoTech WAGmob and Gazemetrix.
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