a mARTIAN dIARY

Some months ago I had written about the Angel Investors and the Entrepreneurship culture that I found very refreshing in UK and without doing much research concluded that it would not be very prevalent in India. BIG Mistake! The sheer number of hits coming from India that this page has been getting is testimonial to the fact that there is an urge within our society from both innovators and from the VC side.

Recently while tracking back an organic it at my site via Google for search “angel investors in India” some links caught my eye and I browsed though them. There seems to be a lot of genuine activity going on which is very pleasing. Of course, the general feeling you get from these links is that the investment environment has still not reached the levels that I found in UK; where a person was pitching a product that would help hold an umbrella better to an Angel VC listening very intently. But still it’s very encouraging to see that such venture capital environment is growing.

Indians by nature are a creative lot. By it’s largely a necessity driven innovation rather than a dilettantish innovation. Take a look at a sack, in a developed county, I have read that a sack is manufactured for a particular purpose and use for that purpose alone. In India due to our sheer numbers, this is not even imaginable. The sack has its own life cycle starting for edible products then down to fertilizers to coal and so on. Agreed that this is not exactly innovation but re-use, but such kind of circumstances do force us into being innovative or thinking out of the ordinary, simply because the normal way of thinking won’t work.

Similarly I remember a NDTV series on Indian indigenous inventors who have invented home-made tractors, innovative manual water pumps etc. You could argue that these are very specific to the problem and there would be no larger markets but unless you do a case by case analysis we might actually be letting a lot of ideas rot. Also it bores testament to the fact that such thinking is in-built into our genes.

Hopefully by the time I am in need of “Angels” the situation would only improve. Last time I had stopped by asking about investors in India. I am going to answer that in part now. Here are some very interesting links

Needed: 10,000 Angel Investors

List Of Angels Investors  In India (Its easier to let someone else maintain :P)

Seven Common Tactical Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make in their Initial VC Pitch which are Simple to Fix