D. Murali of The Hindu Business Line in conversation with Shradha Sharma, founder of YourStory.in, on TechSparks

Here are excerpts of the interview;

Can you tell us the story behind TechSparks?

There has been a lot of buzz about entrepreneurship. While mapping entrepreneurship in YourStory from 2008, I found a huge challenge in the market when it comes to starting up and then scaling — especially in the product technology space.At the ground level (beyond the launch euphoria), start-ups face difficulty on a day-to-day basis to build and sustain a product. Many good ideas/ventures have to shut shop because they do not have money, mentoring support, advisors, or client commitment.

This triggered the idea: Why not do something meaningful for these young ventures? With TechSparks, the whole emphasis is to give a national platform to product start-ups and enable their go-to-market strategy. TechSparks is thus not only about finding ventures from across India but handholding them to connect with their market – it could be through getting funding, corporate connect, mainstream media exposure, or just finding the right advisor.

Do you see any patterns in the IT start-ups in India?

In the last two years, the quantum of IT start-ups has substantially risen. Besides the obvious one, Bangalore, cities such as Ahmedabad, Kochi, Baroda, Coimbatore, Visakhapatnam and Kolkata are coming up with interesting IT start-ups.

Young entrepreneurs are ready to take the risk and pursue what they believe in. But in terms of infrastructural support to these IT start-ups, we are still way behind. Also, the market remains largely unorganised, and it is difficult for a start-up to access multiple resources/opportunities easily. On a positive note, many more seed funds and angel investors are operating today, which has increased the access to resources.

Slowly, the IT start-up ecosystem is shifting from the ‘outsourcing' space to ‘product' space. It is still hard to start a product company in India, and then sustain and scale it. But, at least now, with more investors/angels/VCs coming up in India, this space is picking up. However, we need more proactive efforts from all the stakeholders to make the pace comparable with the West.

I see a lot of young people showing interest in the app development space. Mobile, cloud and e-commerce start-ups are certainly on a high rise.To Read the complete interview, click here

Source: The Hindu Business Line

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