Saturday, November 08, 2008

Notes from TiE-ISBConnect - Sateesh Andra, DFJ

Sateesh Andra is a Venture Partner with DFJ India. Sateesh started his Silicon Valley career in the early nineties and has extensive background in general management, marketing, product strategy, and technology development.

Prior to DFJ, Sateesh was the fo founder and CEO of Euclid Software, a leader in the IT Governance space. He has also served in product marketing and engineering leadership roles at Tsqware (Conexant), LSI Logic, VLSI Technology (Philips), and Wipro. You can read more about Sateesh here.

Sateesh spoke about the Spirit of Entrepreneurship - My Journey. Here are my notes from that session.
  1. Have passion in your idea for a period of time.
  2. Dream big.
  3. Study your idea.
    • Understand the stated value proposition vs the implemented value proposition of your idea. 
    • Is your idea a pain killer or a vitamin. In times of hardship people stop using vitamins but the do not stop using pain killers
  4. Raise money from the right people. Do not just take money from any source that offers it to you.
  5. Perform market research
  6. Start local and analyse the market before going into other geographic regions
  7. It is not a bad idea to bootstrap an idea initially. It helps one get clarity and will be in a better position to negotiate with VCs later.
  8. Look at different ways of doing sales such as direct sales, partner sales and tele sales.
  9. If a fast growing market place you will need money to grow fast. For example the current online travel market.
  10. Look for strategic partners and customers who will fund the business initially.
  11. When rolling out the product or service one needs to understand the customer requirement and how the customer is approached.
  12. Ensuring that internal capabilities can meet customer requirements when performing rollouts is important.
  13. It is good to have beta customers as it helps to be in touch with the customer when developing the product/service.
  14. Reason for investing in mginger was the team behind the idea, the market opportunity that exists in that space and the number of customers that they had already. Their cost of acquiring every new customer was very low.
  15. VC's look for documentation and precesses before investing in a company.
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