RAJINISH MENON, CIR & DIRECTOR AT MICROSOFT INDIA, WAS HERE IN KOCHI. FWD BUSINESS HAD AN EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH THE MAN WHO IS ON THE QUEST OF MAKING AN IMPACT WITH THE YOUNG ENTREPRENEURS OF INDIA.
The Kitchen 4.0 which was held in Abad Hotel M.G Road was powered by FWD. The event saw the participation of many stalwarts like Rajinish Menon (CIR and Director – Startups at Microsoft India), Rekha Babu (CEO, BCG Group), M P Joseph Menacherry (Advisor and Consultant to Government of Kerala), George Muthoot (Executive Director- Muthoot Group), Zaheer Najeeb (Executive Director at Airtravel Enterprises ) etc. The Kitchen is a collaborative platform for both big and small organizations, providing the bigger organizations a platform to meet prospective partnerships and expansion opportunities and at the same time, give the smaller ones a chance to pick up a tip or two from the big players. 13th of August was the fourth edition of this event and it panned out to be a special one.
The event also gave FWD Business the opportunity to speak to Mr. Rajnish Menon, who was thrilled to be a part of the event. Mr. Rajinish was one of the speakers at the event. He shared some encouraging words for the young entrepreneurs of Kerala. He stressed the importance of technological innovations—which I found to be really inspirational. His words were owerful, crisp and made the listeners think. It was truly inspiring! I finally caught up with the man and this is what he had to say to the readers of FWD Business.
What is the process involved in building a business?
Although sounding simple, it’s a pretty complex and interesting journey. The first 100 days, as they say, is crucial and most of the anxieties that the entrepreneur would face in the short run or sometimes even in the long run can be avoided if the steps are taken well. I have elucidated some of the critical ones and have tried a logical sequence. Any business starts with an “Idea”. Sometimes it can also be introducing a whole new concept and building a new customer profile and base. In parallel, an entrepreneur must start eeking co-founders or team members who are willing or able to see the big picture and share into his idea.
The crucial element in the journey is for the entrepreneur to build on his idea by validating with potential customers and start having detailed discussions with folks relevant in that ecosystem. Most entrepreneurs shy away from this fearing plagiarism of his idea or in some cases where he talks only to investing community.
Writing down your plan, creating the business plan and the sales plan falls next in line. That drives and brings more clarity of thought to himself.
Next in line or rather parallel to an earlier point is getting his entity a legal structure post, in which the entrepreneur should start either pooling his own capital or borrowed capital to get to building on the idea. It’s important that he prioritizes his investment into appropriate technology hugely depending on how customers would discover and consumer his solution
This is another crucial point where depending on the business the capital needs to vary and the entrepreneur should use his best judgment or seek external mentorship to understand the quantum of raise. Never “come up with a figure” but do a logical calculation as to how much is required and for what? Clarity on the utilization of fund is most critical as most entrepreneurs tend to underinvest or overinvest.
What are the initiatives run by Microsoft Ventures for the young entrepreneurs of India to succeed?
There are multiple levels of engagement Microsoft Ventures does to enable the growth of the ecosystem. We believe that startups need a healthy ground to germinate and grow. Every element in this cycle is important and our endeavor is to work with all. Take a look at what we have done so far and that gives you an idea of our support to the young entrepreneurs and the community. We conduct events to showcase startups to leading corporates in the region and around the world leading to successful business closures for the startups. In the first year itself, this initiative has resulted for over 70+ deals for startups with leading businesses worldwide. We have joined hands with stalwarts in various verticals like Reliance Industries,
ISDI, Deshpande foundation and ISB and launched accelerators with each one of them powered by Microsoft Ventures. In addition, we have also tied up with Brand Capital of Times Group to give media access and make available media assets of the Times Group for the startups. With our partners, we have organized Think Next Roundtables, which brings together leaders and deliberate on key issues affecting the ecosystem. So far, we have hosted roundtables on Corporate Venturing with NASSCOM, Women Entrepreneurship with WEConnect, Mergers & Acquisitions with iSPIRT, SaaS with iSPIRT, All India Accelerators and Incubators Meet with Kyron, IIITH, Kyron and TLabs. As a result of these roundtables, Microsoft Ventures, along with its partners have also developed collaterals to guide the startups further with The Annual India Technology Product M&A Industry Monitor and Jumpstart Guide to SaaS Marketing.
Our partnership with Deshpande Foundation to power their incubator program, ‘Sandbox Startups’, focuses on developing entrepreneurship in tier II & tier III cities. We conduct weekly masterclasses where we bring in evangelists and thought leaders in the ecosystem to talk with the startup community. We have been working very closely with the investors to help their startups grow faster through our accelerator programs. Many startups from our present portfolio have been recommended by their investors for our programs. Early this year, we partnered with Indian Private Equity & Venture Capital Association (IVCA) to extend our reach to a larger investors’ community. We also invited these investors to nominate their portfolio startups for our Hi-Po program, which helps Series stage startups to grow through Microsoft Ventures’ strategic interventions across all aspects of a business.
In last three years, 85 startups have graduated from our accelerator programs, including noted startups like Nowfloats, Zoomcar, Explara, Nanobi, Loginext, HealthVectors, CariQ and Appknox. Our portfolio startups have raised an average of 500,000 dollars after graduating from our programs. We have also seen four acquisitions from our portfolio till date – Adepto, Bookpad, Native5 and Plustxt. As the ecosystem evolves, we have brought in new programs to meet the startups’ needs. New programs, Accelerator Plus, and Scale Up were launched earlier this year, aimed at Seed and Series stage companies. Our startup hotline, Jumpstart addressed over 5000 queries from startups in 2014.
What is Microsoft Azure? Does Microsoft have any program for startups to use the Azure cloud?
Microsoft Azure is a cloud platform that offers infrastructure as a Service & Platform as a Service and is Hybrid-ready, to suit the variety of needs of customers. It’s a flexible cloud platform that can satisfy any application need. It delivers a 99.95% monthly SLA and enables you to build and run highly available applications without focusing on the infrastructure. Microsoft Azure enables you to use any language, framework, or tool to build applications.
Does Microsoft have any program for startups to use the Microsoft Azure?
Microsoft has instituted a program named BizSpark for startups to use its products and cloud offerings. BizSpark is a global program that helps software startups succeed by giving them access to Microsoft software development tools, connecting them with key industry players, including investors, and providing marketing visibility to help entrepreneurs starting a business. Startups get up to 750 dollars per month of free Azure cloud services for three years; that’s 150 dollars per month each for up to five developers including free software and tools such as Visual Studio and Office. The program is available to tech startups less than five years old, privately held, and earning less than one million dollars annually. Recently Microsoft has also launched the Microsoft Azure 120K offer which helps cover a startup’s cloud computing costs by providing up to 120,000 dollars worth of Azure over one year. Through this offer, every dollar startups save on their cloud computing costs means more money for them to spend elsewhere for hiring developers, investing in marketing, acquiring new customers, etc.
How can the BizSpark Plus program be useful to the startups of India?
The best thing about the BizSpark program is that it’s a global program and available for all startups, including those in India, who intend to start their business and can now go ahead and think about getting their business off the ground without having to worry about the cost to be incurred for buying software products to build their solutions. BizSpark Plus program, as mentioned before, is offered to startups which are part of the cohort of a partner accelerator who is affiliated for this program with Microsoft. The FREE Azure cloud credits given are to the extent of 120,000 dollars with free five licenses of O365, Bing Credits etc. Startups part of the accelerator get the benefit of their program and the software from Microsoft which would significantly help them grow their business without worry about the infrastructure costs.
How do you rate the Digital India programme initiated by Prime Minister Modi?
This is an important initiative of the Government that aims to connect the entire ecosystem of public services through the use of information technology and transform India into a connected knowledge economy. Very rightly the Government has brought back the focus on making ‘Technology’ central to enabling change. Recently, Kerala had a unique distinction as it achieved 100% Mobile Density, 75% E-Literacy they being declared as India’s First Digital State! The famous social networking giant Facebook recently announced increasing investments into Indian small businesses to advance Digital India. Microsoft partnered with the premier financial and business news portal, Moneycontrol.com and India’s leading business news channel CNBC TV18 to present a new program named “Accelerate India – Technology for Growth” where industry stalwarts, business leaders, policy makers, entrepreneurs and thought leaders came together to share thoughts on how technology adoption can help leapfrog a generation of innovation. These examples tell us how Digital India
is being adopted. I am confident that we will see even more increased investments from all stakeholders thereby truly using technology to upscale and bring about a massive change in the way business and governance is done in India furthering productivity to all-time highs.
We read about your interest in furthering Ycenter, which is a social innovation training company found by Dhaniya Pujara. Can you explain something more on this?
YCenter aims to create Learning Programs for college and university students for them to transform their classroom education into creating tangible and measurable impactful solution for communities in developing world. Currently, students from American universities are working with the team in Africa mostly in the healthcare sector. In India, they have launched the program where similar Social Innovation Learning and Workshops for Indian youth will be provided for six weeks so that they get to create solutions that solve India’s social problems. Eventually, these solutions in itself can be turned into for-profit social enterprises with Ycenter’s mentorship and development. I see a lot of similarity here with their objectives and ours especially when it comes to harnessing the power of students and young minds in finding relevant local solutions and that’s the reason for us supporting them in this endeavor.
A few words on The Kitchen?
I liked the vision with which Kitchen has been set up. In fact I feel that Kerala is a state with massive startup potential because of the natural progressive minds of the people, the eagerness of the young minds to get the best as they are exposed to better living in the Middle East and also with the existence of good financial capital thanks again to good old traditional capital from successful entrepreneurs and of NRI(Ks). Such a collaborative platform that connects marketers, designers, tech geeks, startups and businesses to explore projects and work together is the need of the hour as it brings about relevant and meaningful partnerships.
Where do you rate the startups of India compared to Silicon Valley or other ones around the world?
Startups in India are in no way different from their counterparts in Silicon Valley or other places. The hunger for growth and driving up innovation is very much present amongst our entrepreneurs. We must understand that India as a country has its own challenges and one of them is that our startups do not have the luxury of their solutions being adopted with ease by customers in India much as it happens in US and other developed markets where local customers buy solutions from startups and are forever ready to experiment and help startups. It’s only recently we have seen capital flows into startups at a massive scale as we see today. As a culture, again, it’s now that there is recognition for entrepreneurship as opposed to smart people finding jobs. So, overall we are leapfrogging, as we did always in most sectors, even in this sphere and although we are still some way to go compared to Silicon Valley, Tel- Aviv or China etc. I am confident we will be not be lagging behind when it comes to innovation or coming up with more solutions that are locally relevant and that would be global beaters.
Text: Firdouz Hameed Photos: Various Sources