For startups in town beyond the launch of the T-Hub at IIIT, Hyderabad, 2015 was a year that facilitated them with grand platforms to voice out their ideas to the right investor-base and a wider crowd. The scale of events ensured eminent speakers and entrepreneurs offering a truer picture of the global scene.
Lots of companies with fancy ideas, business models but for the right investment found an ideal pathway to takeoff. There was good bonhomie and networking among aspirant entrepreneurs, application developers who made the most of the workshops, competitions in the events.
What made the difference? The rise in number of participants, yes. While the largest startup event this year, August Fest featured nearly 4200 participants, even the small-scale summits, meets had about 150 people turning up.
It has also got to do with how events have attracted younger crowds by bringing fun into the entire exercise, with a dash of innovative networking sessions, art, film screenings and surprise rewards.
“To go beyond a local crowd, we travelled across 13 cities and to international avenues, conducting boot-camps and meet as many people as possible.
This helped them take us seriously,” reveals Kiran Maverick, founder of The August Fest, who has plans to scale up the event as the world’s 5th largest startup conference for 2016.
Focus on app-oriented startups, social value Most of the conferences and meets, be it Innofest, the TiE Smash gave a preference to entrepreneurs, whose business revolved around e-commerce, specific technologies and mobile apps.
Within the commercial space, the presence of social value was stressed, the example being iDiya, an event hosted by ISB, Hyderabad that encouraged aspirant entrepreneurs to come up with feasible business models, in a bid to boost social entrepreneurship.
Encouragement for women Beyond the division for women in the FICCI that hosts sparse events to tap aspirant women entrepreneurs across the city, there was a surge in such summits.
Angel Summit, hosted a month ago, celebrating equality and opportunity as a theme, felicitated women from different walks of life and provided surprise financial help to the most promising firms around the country. There were exclusive developer meets, coding competitions including Geek Angel’s Hack Day that helped companies spot promising talent among women.
Growing number of hackathons Hackathons, largely popularised by the Hyderabadhackers.in group with IoT Hackday (around the smart city theme), the Hackers Summit, the Smart City Hack at BITS, Hyderabad evinced good interest from techies across the city. “These are places where startups have seriously considered for hiring competitive developers who could also code well,” finds out Sanjeev Kosaraju, a co-founder of an alumni network Vaave.
Investor-interest and flipside The city took a few steps ahead in attracting investments from unknown quarters, as most of the above events gave enough scope for business accelerators to fund startups that made convincing pitches.
Some startups benefited by such financial grants and investments include Enabli, student community network Yo Grad, Playyoursport (mobile app) and Hostelduniya.com. “Most of the companies are just jumping in the bandwagon for investment, unsure of the sacrifices they need to make in the future. Entrepreneurs shouldn’t have false hopes of funding and keep that the only goal when they start a firm,” cautions Rajive Dhawan, author and founder of Namesake Productions. Sanjeev too is glad for the good work done through the year, but feels a lot of catching up needs to be done to prepare better frameworks for businesses and the event scale to match up to Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru.
