Brajeshwar

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StartupPizza + Work = Success!

The start-up ecosystem in India has taken a new height. Today, a lot of talented, fresh graduates from college have an inclination towards entrepreneurship. The case was not the same a few years back. While entrepreneurs are made by both – choice and circumstances, a handful of them have graduated to a full fledged company with a long list of employees, a heavy portfolio of clients or an application that’s stuck to the heart and minds of many.

While trying to find out reasons for this change in India, I could smell several reasons for growth in the Internet based start-ups. Not all may be true for an entrepreneur but somehow the strings are attached to one of these.

Few reasons for the growth in the web based entrepreneurship include;

• Emergence of web based start-ups which could eventually reach good heights. These include Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Orkut and many more. A web based startup does not involve large amount of initial investment and if the product gets popular, a lot of VC’s step in to escalate the ranch.
• Availability of high speed internet is another pillar to allow budding entrepreneurs to think on these lines. Dial-up days in India could never see as many internet start-ups to roll in. Popularization of Rich media has an important role attached to it.
• Recession for sure has given birth to a lot many freelancers which turn on to start a company if things go well for them. Decrease in the number of job opportunities has led many fresh graduates to utilize their talent and work on freelance projects.
• The lifestyle of a start-up and the feeling of creating something from scratch which would be credited to one’s own name is a yet another strong reason for talented youth to start a venture. Not all companies would allow you to work in shorts and have a pizza slice in a hand while you code!
• Emergence of events like BarCamp, iAccelerator, Proto, HeadStart and other have created a good knowledge amongst people to understand what lies beneath this ecosystem and how can things work well (not always though!).
• Mentors like Paul Graham and others are now popular across the pan-asian countries. Thanks to WordPress, Blogspot and other publishing platforms which created a wave of online journalism and blogging.
• Presence of several incubation centers and mentorships provide temp a lot of youngsters to chain themselves to an all together different environment which involves a lot of role-plays. An engineer at a start-up is often a multi-task specialist.
• India as a good outsourcing option is a reason for a lot of foreign businessmen to allocate projects to Indian startups. This brings in some good amount of foreign currency and a viable reason to run your own show.

The reasons are many. The idea is to sustain a living, escalate a product/service and emerge as one of the bluechip companies which either continue to get bigger or find a prospective buyer and make big money. The credit in either of the cases remains with the start-up who toiled hard to get there.

I would want to elaborate on the lifestyle a start-up has in one of my future posts.

Praval, the author of this article is an independent blogger, entrepreneur and social media evangelist. He writes articles, stories and reviews on Startup ecosystem, Blogging, Internet business, Wordpress, Linux, Open Source Software and technology in general.