The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : Innovative ideas will be funded here

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Apr 23, 2007
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Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

Innovative ideas will be funded here

Staff Reporter

Entrepreneurs step forward to create Chennai-specific venture capital fund

CHENNAI: Even Tad Hurley and Steve Chen needed investors who would listen to their idea when they started out with a project called youtube.com in early 2005.

On Friday evening, a group of industry captains from Chennai under the umbrella organisation — The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE) — stepped forward to do precisely that: listen to young entrepreneurs and if the idea is good enough, fund it.

R.Ramaraj, founder and advisor to Sify and president of TiE-Chennai chapter, said 10 investors, including himself, had pledged Rs.25 lakh each for the fund. From every contribution, Rs.20 lakh would go toward funding entrepreneurship ideas cleared by a screening committee. The remaining money would be used for holding entrepreneur development programmes and meetings.

"Let us hope that the youtubes of tomorrow come from Chennai," Mr. Ramaraj said. "The fund is not restricted to IT or Web ventures. Any innovative idea is welcome."

K.B.Chandrasekar, CEO of Jamcracker and recipient of Ernst & Young Northern California Entrepreneur of the Year in 1999, said Tamil Nadu was a hotbed for entrepreneurship. He hoped that the fund would fuel innovations in the State. Gopal Srinivasan, director of TVS Electronics, likened the acronym of the organisation, TiE, to "Tamil Nadu is Entrepreneurship." "Let us hope that it grows to that," he said.

With 10 investors already pledging Rs.2.5 crore to the Fund, TiE members said they hope the fund to grow up to at least Rs.50 crore.

Tips for entrepreneurs

Before the launch of the fund, investors, Pravin Gandhi of SEED Fund, and GV Ravishankar, associate, Sequoia Capital India, explained the entrepreneurs the dos and do-nots of approaching funding agencies for entrepreneurs in a discussion on "Patterns and Parameters in Angel and VC investing." Mr.Chandrasekar moderated the discussions.

Mr. Gandhi, who has been an angel investor for indiagames.com among other projects, advised the entrepreneurs to work out solutions for problems rather than create solutions that will go around looking for problems to solve. "Youtube worked because there was a genuine need for people to share videos on the Web. But forget making variants of youtubes or orkut. It simply won't work because the solutions are already there."

Mr.Ravishankar said venture capitalists will want to have certain control over the entrepreneurs because they too were answerable to their investors. So he asked the entrepreneurs to understand the need for systems of control. He pointed out that Sequoia was incidentally one of the early investors into youtube.com because they saw the scalability of the solution developed.

Other investors include Adi Saravanan, founding board member of Allsec Technologies, K.Pandiarajan, founder of Ma Foi consultants, Prabhakar Ram, founder of Newgen Imaging Systems, Praditpa K.Mohapatra, director on the main board of RPG group, Ram Mohan, director of Afilias India Private Limited, H.R.Srinivasan, prime founder of Take Solutions, and Suresh Kalpathi, chairman and CEO of SSI Limited.

TiE Chennai office is situated on 76, Venkatakrishna Road, Raja Annamalaipuram, Chennai - 600 028. Phone:24617358 / 59. Website: www.tiechennai.org

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