Startup Asia tour shines on India

My tour of India's innovation hubs is generating some press. Check out the media coverage here:
Wall Street Journal @ LiveMint
FirstPost

In the first six days of the trip, I traveled from Mumbai to Delhi back to Mumbai and then to Bangalore! Check out some photos from the Startup Asia events here:

Startup Asia Tour

On February 21, I will be in Mumbai again, this time to moderate a Startup Asia panel discussion on India's rise in tech entrepreneurship. Panelists are venture investors Sandeep Singhal of Nexus Venture Partners, Shailesh Lakhani of Sequoia Capital and Hemir Doshi of IDG Ventures India. On stage, I will also interview Indian entrepreneurs Alok Kejriwal of Games2Win and Dippak Khuran of Vserve Digital Services.

Famed inventor and investor Kanwal Rekhi was on my VC Circle panel in Delhi 

 

Startup Asia Mumbai 2012
February 21, 2012, 8:15-11:15am
Orchid Hotel, near domestic airport
Mumbai
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Days 1 & 2 of Silicon Dragon ventures in India

Day 2 in India and already what an amazing experience! Yes, I’ve been here before . . . so I have some idea of what I'm getting into

Late yesterday morning, while I was fighting jetlag, my PC crashed and all my files disappeared. As luck would have it, a call to my good contact at Tie Mumbai managed to find a willing and able IT guy to rescue me. By mid-afternoon, this well-trained Indian software engineer showed up at my hotel, and in less than one hour – I am not kidding – my computer was back, better than before. Turns out my trusty laptop had picked up a nasty virus. A download of some malware fix-it software cleared up the problem fast! Wonder why Norton didn't find it.  And we got the low memory problem solved too on my PC by dumping a bunch of http files.

The evening was time to celebrate that all was not lost. After an hour-long ride from my hotel in south Mumbai, I arrived at the Grand Hyatt in Mumbai and attended the opening dinner, poolside, for NASSCOM speakers.  There, I got an earful from a who's who of high tech in India about what’s wrong and right about entrepreneurship in India.

This morning (Valentine’s Day), I checked in at Apex ‘Summit, where I got to witness legendary entrepreneur and investor Kanwal Rekhi speak candidly about his outlook for the venture ecosystem here. Afterward, Rekhi was surrounded by young entrepreneurs who hung on his every word of advice (I’m chairing a panel he’s on at VC Circle in Delhi, Feb. 15, so more on this topic later on).  

Then, today I managed to miss my flight from Mumbai to Delhi. We got stuck in a horrible traffic jam while passing through some of the worst slums I’ve seen in India.  At the airport, I would have had time to make the flight – if only I’d realized that you have to print your flight reservation and show the print-out to get a boarding pass. So much for high tech!

Jet Airways put me on the next flight -- with a change fee! -- and I passed the time on the airport Wi-Fi – which by the way, you get access to through by a code sent SMS to your Indian mobile phone.

China Venture Hangover: Bottle or Pills?

Venture capitalist Tim Chang says 2012 may bring a “return to normalcy” for deal making in China. But he’s not ready to predict yet whether deal makers will “reach for the bottle or take their medicine” now that the bubble has popped in an overheated China venture market.

“In 2010, the market was overheated, everyone was drinking the kool-aid and pumping it by the gallon. The story for every deal was ‘it doesn’t matter if your startup is profitable, just get revenue doubling every year and we will take it public, and we can worry about getting profitable later.’

But in early 2011, that story fell apart,” said Chang, speaking at a recent Startup Asia event held in tech-central Silicon Valley.

Read more at my post at Forbes:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/rebeccafannin/2012/02/01/china-vc-hangover-reach-for-the-bottle-or-the-pills/