Upasana Taku

Sanjeev Bikhchandani's talk hosted by Entrepreneurship Development Cell (EDC) at IIT Delhi, India

I wanted to attend a TIE event at IIT Delhi on Nov 11, 2009 but due to various things that cropped up at work ended up being late for that event. So decided to attend another entrepreneurship event hosted on campus at IIT Delhi - an informal talk and Q&A with founder of InfoEdge, Sanjeev Bikhchandani. Sanjeev is quite the poster child for Indian startups and internet entrepreneurs with his first web portal Naukri.com (Naukri = job in the Hindi language) retaining its number 1 spot in the job market for more than 10 years straight. Interestingly enough none of the other web portals owned by InfoEdge are #1 in their respective vertical spaces.

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Here is a somewhat verbatim summary of Sanjeev's presentation:

How do u get an idea? Most entrepreneurs germinate ideas from personal experiences.

A slide was presented for each of the numbers below:

1 - recognize obvious in your face opportunities

2 - talk to customers!

3 - first mover advantage is important (you build your brand for cheap and your mistakes are cheaper when u have no competition)

4 - solve an unsolved problem

5 - how large is the potential market?

6 - how scalable is the opportunity (VC money does not fund small business, with VC you will be compelled to build a large company to provider the 10X+ returns to investors)

There are 7000 headhunting organizations in India because this profession is all about high touch (to customers) by high quality professionals, thereby these businesses are inherently not scalable.

7 - whats the competitive landscape like? its an uphill task to last in a market when you have strong entrenched competition or you are not early to market.

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