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
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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/

The Startup Asia Chase Is On!

Following the venture trail, the journey has led from Silicon Valley to China and then on to India and Vietnam – and next, newly emerging markets such as Russia and Brazil, which are both angling to build their own Sand Hill Road ecosystem.

Just as Silicon Valley and China had their successes in online travel, e-book retailing, gaming and social networking, the next frontier tech zones are following their example. I wrote Startup Asia to track their progress.

Everyone knows China’s breakthrough Internet companies: Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, Ctrip, DangDang, Renren. But they don’t yet know their counterparts in India, which is fast on the rise. Nor do they know their look-alikes in Vietnam, Russia or Brazil.

But count on these copycat models to break through in the world’s next hotspots. Why be so sure? Because if the business model works well in one market and can be adapted locally to another culture and language, then why not?  If that new market has a switched-on digital populace, it’s almost foolproof – particularly if the same venture capital firm is behind them, which they are in most cases.

See venture capitalists (above) who spoke at our recent Startup Asia event: Kabir Misra, Kumar Shiralagi, Naren Gupta, Bill Tai, Tim Chang, Peter Wagner.

Keep reading at my Forbes.com column. Click:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/rebeccafannin/2012/01/31/the-startup-asia-chase-is-on/

Silicon Dragon Lady on DingDing.TV

To ring in the Year of the Dragon, I recently appeared on web TV with Diana Ding, the founder and host of DingDing.TV on her talk show Innovation Dialog. See clip from show, Silicon Dragon Lady.

Diana is a terrific interviewer and she managed to get more comments out of me than most do. (Guess folks are curious about how a girl from smalltown Ohio could end up as a journalist and book author writing about startups in Asia.) See Startup Asia and Silicon Dragon. Those in the studio audience also had an opportunity to ask so many pertinent questions that I was under the mistaken impression that they were cued up in advance.

The show was aired live on several Bay Area stations just ahead of the State of the Union address by President Obama, so I'm not sure how many folks listened in. But the beauty of the web is that viewers can tune in later on. The show will be accessible for a month afterwards its original date, January 26, 2011.

  

Mid-career U.S. and European professionals in their 30s and 40s are making it in China and can’t get enough of the place.

Fritz Demopoulos, (pictured) 43, a Southern Californian and MBA grad from UCLA’s Anderson School of Management hasn’t mastered Mandarin, but has scored two Chinese Internet successes over the past decade. In June 2011, Baidu invested $306 million in the travel search engine Qunar he formed in 2005 and he stepped down as CEO, turning management over to Chinese staff. Demopoulos, who was born in the U.S. to a Greek dad and Austrian mother, got his start in China as business development manager for Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., working alongside Wendi Deng in the late 1990s in Hong Kong and mainland China, and running information technology portal Chinabyte.com. He next joined NASDAQ-listed Chinese portal and gaming company Netease and worked closely with the CEO on a two-year turnaround. In 2001, his first China startup, sports portal Shawei, was bought by Hong Kong-based Tom Group for $15 million.

With his credentials, Demopoulos could write his ticket. He’s exploring opportunities to start another business or become an active investor, and plans to continue working in either Hong Kong or Beijing. “I don’t think I will be based at the debtor to China, ie the U.S.,” he says.

Richard Robinson, 43, hails from Boston and still drops the “r’s” with his accent though he’s long ago broken through the language and cultural barrier on a whirlwind tech startup career in China.

To continue reading this Chapter One excerpt from my recently published book, Startup Asia, see Forbes post:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/rebeccafannin/2011/12/08/go-east-young-entrepreneur/

Tech Gets Exciting in India, 5 Years Behind China

Mumbai street scene from Silicon Dragon ventures

The only other tech market in Asia that is halfway as exciting as China is India. It has the promise to close the gap with China but is no match yet. India’s mobile market is large, venture spending is vibrant, and high-profile IPOs such as MakeMyTrip are happening, with more on the way soon from up such swift up and comers as mobile ad service inMobi and PC help center iYogi.

Plus, India has proven it is rich in R&D and a lot more than outsourcing. Even so, red tape and poor infrastructure hold back the entrepreneurial spirit here. Investors Bill Draper, Lip-Bu Tan, and Sumir Chadha did the trailblazing in India. Today India’s venture leaders such as Ashish Gupta and Sudhir Sethi are looking for the next, new thing in mesmerizing India – the world’s second-fastest-growing economy and Asia’s third-largest economy.

At IDG Ventures in Bangalore, I met with Sethi, who is chairman and managing director and runs the tech media company’s $150 million India fund. It’s one of five funds in the IDG Ventures network established by Pat McGovern, the visionary founder and chairman of International Data Group in Boston. If a strategy works in one locale, then IDG works to bring the formula to startups in other places. China has proven to be a gold mine for IDG, where it’s made multimillion-dollar returns from early investments and successful IPOs of instant-messaging service Tencent and search engine Baidu. India could be next.

During a trip to India, I met founders of startups with advances for everything from detecting lung cancer at an earlier stage to recycling electronic waste in a cost-effective way, to bringing solar power to villagers, to offering superfast mobile searches, to three-dimensional online games, to robotic-powered vacuum cleaners. India’s also become a mecca for low-cost and sometimes jerry-rigged inventions—in Hindi, jugaad. Tata Motors’ tiny Nano car at an itty-bitty price tag of $2,500 and the Indian government-backed tablet computer selling for $35 are some examples. So is my favorite find: a Nokia cell phone with a built-in flashlight. India may not have a Google, Apple, Baidu, or Tencent yet, but it is moving into more technical work than writing software and answering phones.

Yet India’s entrepreneurial journey is at least five years behind China’s path. There’s no Jack Ma or Robin Li in sight or a big-time IPO like Youku. India lacks the entrepreneurial buzz and fast pace of China tech clusters. Indian entrepreneurship has been led by grassroots efforts, and the government hasn’t always been venture friendly.

If India is ever to break through, it needs to ditch an image as just for outsourcing or low-cost engineering and business services—a major challenge for the world leader of the booming $500 billion global outsourcing market. But India could eventually become a tech minipower and grab some of the limelight from China. Contemporary corporate centers such as Whitefield on the outskirts of Bangalore and the Gurgaon satellite city in Delhi showcase that India is rising.

See Forbes post, Nov. 27, 2011:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/rebeccafannin/2011/11/27/tech-gets-exciting-in-india-5-years-behind-china/