i hope unpluggd doesnt follow that route..i sincerely hope

Just because Flipkart founders were from Amazon doesnt mean that they had the ‘license’ to build Amazon of India.
Any given day, I’d like to know how did they build such a neat www consumer product in India.

TO me, thats the biggest challenge with ecosystem – ppl are way too cynical about other startups. everybdy wants to bring others down..and say ‘I am the best’..

I’ll look fwd to this event

Whenever I meet some bigwig, I largely see the vapors from a distance (there are exceptions of-course). Then I walk away to rely on Vodka & Pink Floyd. What pluggd.in is trying to do here is to provide me and you with a third solution – Unpluggd on a rather social and feedback oriented format. Let’s talk on business and nothing else on unpluggd.

Cheer with beer!
Arvind

BTW, Half of the audience was dozing off by the time panel discussion started.

They were happy about showing a movie that is available on web for ages.

Close enough?

Now, assuming that this is right, what is the problem with this list?

Two of these companies – TringMe and Mobme – are regulars in the startup event circuit…as you are undoubtedly aware, they won the Nasscom product innovation award for the startup category in this and last year’s payolas respectively! Of course, this is not to say that they will not be able to provide useful gyaan at your event but it is moot to categorize these companies/speakers the way you have done in your blog preface (serious entrepreneurs who are too busy to attend startup events etc etc)!

Flipkart as you might be aware was started by folks who actually worked at Amazon previously – so if you imply by your description above that these are wet-behind-the-years entrepreneurs who emerged from the left field and managed to crack online book retailing in India miraculously, you are off base in more ways that you can imagine.

Finally Asklaila! This is a company that is aspiring to become the Indian version of Yelp by raising 10s of millions of dollars in VC funding (grossly overfunded if you ask me but that is just my 2 cents!) but has a long way to go before they reach the likes of JustDial far less the likes of Google! But hey, if they are going to talk about how to raise gobs of VC money with a me-too offering, then your event might be worthwhile after all!

Sorry if all of this sounds like a rant and I come across as being facetious…but I have seen far too many attempts like this event that you are organizing that claim to be different but add zero value along any meaningful dimension. That said, I applaud your attempt to try to get something going in the local startup scene…if you want to do something beyond paying lip services, do feel free to drop in to our office any time for some serious brain-storming over a cup of tea (don’t suppose you will have trouble finding our place since you know our office IP address!)

Nevertheless, here are a few of them (guess the names)
• Within 2 years of starting, one of the company owns ‘few’ % of web search in India (they aren’t a search engine).
• A 5-people company has created waves in International telecom space (so much so that their product architecture is being debated by Telecom gurus world over).
• You can’t build an Amazon in India? A young company has just done that (and is clocking substantial revenues within 1.5 years of launch).
• A student startup raised $0.5 mn in college and is now the preferred partner for Telecom operators

For a good business to come up we need

(a) Innovation – that creates something new, meet certain needs / wants of customers etc.. what we seem to be hyping around these days is more on the ‘idea’ or even worse ‘copying an idea’ and not innovation.

(b) Execution – this is completely missed out in many such events.. Great Idea need not mean a Great Business.