Himanshu's Blog - Technology, Entrepreneurship & Business

First of all,the title of the post should have been "Megabucks:Day 2(+2) in a Nutshell" ,since two days have passed by since the event is over

and damn,I have still not updated my blog.Jokes apart, let me try to recollect the event happenings on the second day in Megabucks.

Morning-Afternoon innings:
a.
The day started with case study competition and believe me it was very boring and I thought that the teams were very bad.Some of the teams did not even know to frame proper gramatical sentences

, which made me think about our educational system for a while

b.
The highlight of the day was a talk/discussion on "Woman Entrepreneurship", which was spearheaded by Ms. Vineeta Singh,Co-founder of Tenaday.Yes,you guessed it right,she is the one who is behind "The Deutsche Bank controversy"(she is the one who rejected one crore offer from Deutsche Bank to be an Entrepreneur) and she seemed a true Entrepreneneur.Myself and Ashwin managed to interview her and it was our first podcast(which would be uploaded very soon).We also gave her few tips on Blogging and she was quite impressed with us.Who knows,she may consult us for "Blog Marketing"

Seen below in the photo are Vineeta,Ashwin and Myself(from L-R).I am looking very serious in the photograph

Afternoon-evening innings:
a.
There was a surprise in the package and we met our old friend(from the unconference circuit) Aditya Mishra,Director of Corporate Innovation,TCS.We three gave a talk on Unconferences,Blogging and opportunities in the mobile space(this is Aditya's domain of interest).The response from the IITK guys was not good and many of them were not interested in the talk.I just tried to collect feedback from few of them-Some felt talk was irrelevant,some felt talk was too techie and some felt the talk was very boring

Finally,I communicated the law of two feet(which is used in Unconferences) which says "If you are not feeling comfortable,use your two feet to go to a more comfortable place".
Even though,our message to take unconferences to premier institutions like IIT failed or was not taken in a proper sense,still we managed to have a smile on our faces.Seen below in the photo are Ashwin ,Myself(in center) and Aditya

b.
After the sad ending to our talk,we thought of networking with few people.Again a surprise-We met guys from Jobs4Freshers who were interviewed for startups.in . It was the time for them to pay us back and hence,we picked up a free T Shirt from them

and also,we had good conversation on the Web 2.0 market along with enhancements which can be made to startups.in
Seen below are the guys from Jobs4Freshers along with myself and Ashwin

c.
Finally,it was time to take dinner which as usual,very excellent .Just managed to borrow "Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki" from Rajiv,CEO of Jobs4Freshers and read one chapter in the night

Bye-Bye Kanpur:
Left Kanpur at around 11:00 AM on the next day(8th April,2007) and carried some good(and bad experiences) from IITK.

Moral of the story:
I have not studied from IIT and after this visit,I learnt one thing:"Every person studying in IIT is not a genius/highly intelligent,may be he/she has a slight edge over normal guys like us".Would end my article with this learning.

Photo Courtesy:
You can find photos of the entire trip here
This is what Ashwin has to say about the event on 07/04/2007

Labels: Entrepreneurship, Megabucks, Startups.in, Venture Capital

Reached IIT Kanpur at around 1:00 in the afternoon on 6th April.The lunch at IITK was excellent and guess what happened after the lunch

I slept from 3:00 to 9:30(due to the excess heat in Kanpur and also due to the tiredness of the journey from Delhi to Kanpur).

Spoke to some of the organizers here in Kanpur regarding the session on Blogging.There is a change in the plan and we(myself and Ashwin) have planned to have the session,the Unconference way.Yup,we would have an open session which would focus on the topics discussed in my previous post.

The reason for this change was that many IITK guys(with whom we interacted) did not know about unconferences and hence we decided a change in the plan

The session is slated at 7:00 in the evening.The other sessions would start at 8:00 in the morning and we hope to go there on time.

We also received the Startups.in T-Shirts and it felt very nice to wear the T Shirt.For the other startup-ers who have missed this event,below is a small glimpse of the Front and Back side of the T Shirt

So,what's happening for the next two days?
There are business competitions and interesting sessions on Entrepreneurship(check the image for the details) and not to forget our unconference session at 7:00 PM(on 07/04/2007).