Year 2010: Startups, Goofups and all the learnings

Just finished reading this brilliant book "the art of choosing" and chose to write my views on the year 2010 as the year comes to an end. I am told summing at the end of the year is a nice practice, i have attempted to put down my observations of our Startup World, please share your views.

2010 by all means was a fast year, all of us were buzzing with non stop activities. Every entrepreneur i spoke to was at work, and hard work. Many achieved alot but some did (or in a few cases were forced to) shut shop or switch back to job. I found this interesting, while many startups are coming up on a daily basis (and now everyone is talking about it) but many are also closing down. My open ended questions for the year 2010 are -

1. Did the year 2010 saw the opening up of jobs in a big way as compared to the last 2 years ( and so the getting back into the job for many startups)?

2. Did Startup become the educated class's new lingo? many are aware about what a Startup is and many more are planning to start in the coming year (preparations in the stealth mode is on as i write this piece)

3.Did VCs still top the chart of Startups as far as "the most important person" to meet is concerned? Surely many were humming the word VC all around the country.

4. Did the corporates become more accepting of Startups and

loosen their purse strings for them? ( atleast in the creative industry we saw many big clients give the creative/advertising rights to Startups, any other let us know..)

5. Did all the Startup events yield value for Startups, as 2010 superseded 2009 as far as the events were concerned across India..sure money is coming so there must be some value?

6. Mumbai Angels and Indian Angel Network still remained the top 2 Angel Houses which we heard about..No other big consortiorum of angels came up.. if i have missed something let me know

7. Media became more kind to the Startup story - more and more national and regional media is now writing about startups, the trend will only increase in 2011

8. PR took a front seat in 2010, if a startup has better PR it seems to fare better? ( e commerce ventures case in point),most of the e commerce startups i interacted with had a PR agency or a communication person in house.

9. Bangalore, Delhi and Mumbai still dominated with Startup buzz..though Pune,Chennai,Hyderabad,Indore and ofcourse Ahmedabad were buzzing too. For us at YourStory we got a lot of stories from Baroda too this year.

10. Facebook became a den for Startups, with almost all having a "PAGE" and "Like" i assume was the button which all of us pressed.

Many more things happened ths year, for all of us individually and as a Startup. But the best part is all of us survived, may thrived :) and learnt alot this year.

Lets continue the momentum. So lets together enter 2011 with a lot of hope and alot of luck:)

Shradha Sharma