Articles by Anjana Vivek

Getset and Go were getting tired of running their business. Theirs was a 5 year old company, started with enthusiasm and a high level of energy. But ... 2009 had been a bad year. Orders had come in... at a very slow pace; money had come in... at an even slower pace. Things, however, now seemed to be looking up. The market was slowly improving. In fact they even had an offer from the Zing Group, who wanted to invest in their company, perhaps even buy them out over a period of time. It was now decision making time for Getset…

This is the time for New Year resolutions. Often made...So maybe we can do this with a difference as we enter the new decade. The one thing that this decade gone by has stood for is change! Change in the way we look at the world, change in what we took for granted. There has been a shift in equations, from the West towards Asia. We have had a President in the US who is different, a woman winning the Nobel Prize in economics for the first time, an Indian Olympic Gold... and much more. Social networking, twitter.. and mobile…

As an entrepreneur/founder you have many choices when you set up your company. One of the first few things you may like to think about is the employee policy and salaries. Gyan, the business advisor, recently met a few company founders and they informally discussed this aspect. One of the points raised by John, the founder of a high-growth, four-year old company, was that there have been enough and more debates about the top of the pyramid salaries in recent times. He wanted to take a different line of discussion in the meeting ... and look at the salaries down…

Today (October 27, 2009) at the first day of the NASSCOM Product Conclave and Expo 2009, it was good to see the level of interest in startups and the product ecosystem in Namma Bengaluru.  Participants were a mix of start ups, large corporates, evangelists, VCs, academicians and of course The Press. I also met entrepreneurs who had come from outside the city to attend this programme. Guy Kawasaki, MD, Garage Technology Ventures delivered the keynote address. I missed some of it, but  caught the tail bit where he said that "experts" could also go wrong. He gave examples of how the…

Gyan, the business advisor was participating in an informal discussion at the fringe of a two day conference where many entrepreneurs were present. The discussion was focused around the sudden interest in M&A deals in early stage ventures and valuation of these companies. Mukesh referred to two companies which were being acquired and then spoke about one other company where the deal was stalled because of differences in valuation. Gyan, "It is not about valuation alone, I understand that there were other issues, related to regulations and tax matters. Valuation is just one aspect of deals and growth in a…

Entrepreneurs have many questions about IP protection. This is particularly relevant in these times, when we talk of innovation and creativity ... driving the next wave of entrepreneurship. Here is a detailed guest post on this topic by Dr. Kalyan C. Kankanala, co-founder Brain League IP Services. Brain League is a company that was incubated at NSRCEL, IIMB and IP protection is their area of expertise and interest. Read on to get Kalyan's tips for IP protection...Intellectual Property protection provides business and competitive advantage to a company. While IP is important for all companies, its value for A Start Up Company,…

This is the story of how four women who met through an entrepreneurship programme teamed up for a prestigious city event, that allowed them to showcase their designs. They showcased their work at Bangalore Fashion Week which took place at Ottera, Electronic City from July 23rd to 26th.It all started when Bangalore Fashion Week organisers invited Babita Jaishankar in June 2009 to apply to participate. As a fashion designer, Babita was thrilled with the honour. But there was very little time to get organised! Desperate, she turned to Cynthia Sapna, a retail designer now full-time into photography. Babita and Cynthia…

Are you interested in writing a business plan? Is it to show to an investor? If you are planning to write a plan for your business or to help someone or are just curious about the noise made about business plans, here is a game for you to play. A game, where you get to be a virtual entrepreneur, without going into the pain of actually having a real company out there to run. If you are game for this game, think of yourself as an entrepreneur starting or running an existing business and...read on...First: The backgroundBefore thinking of preparing…

The newly introduced regulations on Limited Liability Partnership (LLP) have been briefly discussed in the post below. This is in response to the query in an earlier post: Company incorporation or partnership. This post has been contributed by S.C.Sharada and Jayashri Murali, Directors, Lex Valorem India Pvt. Ltd (Sharada.sc@lexvalorem.com and jayashri_m@airtelmail.in respectively). A LLP is basically a partnership firm established under the LLP Act, 2008, consisting of Partners who contribute to the capital of the LLP and is a legal entity which is regulated by the regulatory authority who is the Registrar of Companies. The main requirements to establish a…

Background: Negotiations are a part of life, whether it is in business or in the political arena, whether it is in selling a company or buying a stake in a business or raising venture capital for your company. In the last week of sessions of the MPWE 2009 at IIMB (Management Programme for Women Entrepreneurs) we had a negotiations role play for purchase/sale of a business. The participants were divided into 8 teams, 4 representing the buy side and 4 the sell side. We therefore had 4 sets of negotiations. The learnings of this were so good that I wanted…