Amar Goel, of Komli Ad Networks has a brilliant writeup about venture capital and when it makes sense to go for it. He explains the rationale behind the VC business and the need to balance your own plans with that rationale, before you embark on your quest for seeking venture money. Here are some invaluable pearls of wisdom from his detailed post:

“…the sexiness of a press release saying you raised venture capital from XYZ and ABC lasts about 1 day…”

“…if you want to build a $3M business over the next 5 years do not raise venture capital…”

“…VCs are not in the business of coming up with crazy ideas and then throwing them against the wall and seeing if they stick. That is the job of entrepreneurs….”

Go read the entire article here. And thanks Amar for thinking straight and communicating clearly.

Why am I linking to this article here? (this incidentally is my first blogpost referencing completely another blog article) Well, I interact with a lot of first-time startup entrepreneurs in India and most of them don’t understand the venture capital business (and that partially includes me as well). Venture capital is hugely glamourised in India (as it is in other parts of the world) and many of its seekers have little clues about its internal workings. And when they don’t landing funding deals, it leads to dissapointment and frustration. IMHO, much of the blame in this situation lies squarely with the entrepreneurs themselves. This article is a must read for them.

(via Alootechie)

Rediff has just launched a media sharing portal called iShare. This allows you to share different genres of media- videos, photos & music, all at one place. Something like this from India’s biggest portal was long overdue. I think till now mainstream Indian portals i.e. Rediff, Sify, Indiatimes etc have largely touched user generated media with a barge pole rather than going full blast. That might begin to change with iShare (I think others are likely to follow suit).

That Rediff is giving iShare a serious shot can be gauged from the fact that it has released a desktop uploading tool for ishare (screenshot below). This is a 1.6 MB download that sits on your desktop and media files can be dragged ‘n dropped into the tool for uploading to iShare via your Rediffmail account. I spent two minutes downloading and installing it and it seemed to work flawlessly. The site has different sections for video, photos & music and the content can be spliced along popularity, recency & user ratings. The music & video sections incidentally have clips/songs from popular Hindi movies (many of which are likely to be copyright insensitive); it will be interesting to see how the copyright violations issue plays out on iShare.

So how is iShare significant and can it stand up and be counted in a situation where the only video and photo sharing sites that have traction in India are the global defaults i.e. Flickr & Youtube. The answer to that question depends on who you are asking; I for one believe that there is a strong case for Indian versions of Flickr & Youtube to gain ascendency inspite of the popularity of the global sites. What is needed is the convergence of a few causal factors like –
– content integrity in terms of its relevance to India
– availability of an anchor destination that draws millions to the base site
– long term strategy overriding short terms tactical considerations

Rediff could well be a perfect candidate for the nucleation of these factors. Watch this space !

Silly thought– Is Rediff tryng to be the Apple of India? First iLand (their blogging platform) & now iShare? What do you think?


Screenshot of the desktop uploading tool