Chennai Regional RoundTable: Why should you attend

Startup events galore all over the place. With entrepreneurship becoming a common slang for making a life of your own like never before and with the media, ecosystem players fuelling its growth, people come around to host events to dish out stories or workshops to entrepreneurs. But we at YourStory believe in bringing real lessons to the table.Is India going to be constrained by its IT services glory? Can we only deliver to someone else’s specs? The world is catching up. Many other countries have been able to deliver what India has been able to do in IT services. A continuous desire to stay on top has propelled services companies to rethink their strategy and get into R&D and consulting, niche domains within services. But we are ignoring the other end of the spectrum—fulfilling customer needs. We in India are capable of developing awesome products to fulfill various customer needs. But what we lack is to tell its story and sell it well. Recognizing this selling and evangelising gap, YourStory has come up with Regional RoundTables in four cities—Delhi, Pune, Chennai, and Hyderabad—in which the focus would be exclusively on go-to-market strategies.

History is essential for us to know how we have evolved and also learn what wise men have done before to make this world a better place. There are enough and more successful entrepreneurs in the product space in India as well as in Internet, Cloud, mobile VAS space who have braved and found a new path to tread. Before you, the startup entrepreneur, step in to change the world and make the same mistakes that many have made before, why not learn from them and avoid making those mistakes? Or find a better way to find a market for your product and sell it well. The Chennai Regional RoundTable would focus on a few essential aspects.

“Tying the Knot with Bharat Matrimony,” the keynote from Murugavel Janakiraman will probably tell you how he was able to blow many a myth. Where marriages are solemnized traditionally through horoscopes and match making offline with families meeting each other, a man from humble surroundings in Chennai rewrote the rules of the game. He dared to make matches online. And find his way to Guinness Book of World Records for tying a knot so many times than others have ever done before. This is a story you will not afford to miss if you are in the Internet space and product space.

The panel discussion involving Suresh Sambandam, founder, OrangeScape and Badri Seshadri, founder, New Horizon Media, the two entrepreneurs from Chennai who were highly successful in their own ventures, will give you a wide spectrum of beliefs, assumptions, reality, and what works and what doesn’t in the market when you plan your go-to-market strategy. The investor angle will be pronounced by Aakash Goel from Sequoia and Vimalraj from IBM will give a corporate angle.

The Indian Institute of Technology-Madras has produced brilliant technologists and engineers who have shaped their path to glory in every part of the world. It is only relevant that Prof. M.S. Ananth, one of the brains behind IIT-M Research Park, will inaugurate the roundtable. Wisdom from someone who has executed something invaluable and of enduring value will intuitively teach you the building blocks of dreams coming real. Prof. Nagarajan and Prof. L.S. Ganesh are set to explain various activities in the IIT-M campus that foster innovation and entrepreneurship. The Centre for Innovation (CFI) is the seed bed for student craziness and creativity whereas they take a concrete commercial and market-facing dimension in either C-TIDES (an incubation facility for technology companies) or CSIE (a research centre for social entrepreneurship which works closely with RTBI and Villgro).

Simply said, don’t miss these three hours of intense startup discussion and entrepreneurial activity. The takeaways can change the way you do business or provide you new ideas to pursue.

For agenda, please visit www.techsparks.in. The events starts at 3 pm at IC&SR auditorium, IIT-Madras.

For free registrations, write to [email protected]

—Venkatesh Krishnamoorthy, chief evangelist, YourStory