Udhay is a veteran of the technology and entrepreneurship scene, having helped found his first entrepreneurial venture straight out of college in 1991. Since then, he has been invoved in various pioneering ventures,
including (among other things) India's first web site company (in 1995), and India's first startup to get silicon valley venture capital funding (in 1999). He has helped build Yahoo!'s first social media network (before facebook existed) and was recently helping Intel build new products for the Indian consumer. In addition, he set up and ran the startup accelerator at the VC fund, Axilor Ventures, and spends a lot of time helping startups of various kinds further refine their product and strategy.
He is also the force behind the well-known discussion group silklist, since 1997, which makes it one of the longer-lived email lists on the net. Discussions on silklist have ended up inspiring articles, books, Ph.D theses, and sociological studies. Recently, he helped found the 'unconference' styled event,
The Goa Project, which aims to bring interesting people of all types together to learn and collaborate..
More info about Udhay on
Linkedin.
Alok Mittal, did a session on this During Proto. SE. The video and Transcript will be up in a few days. Will link it up once its ready.
I personally believe that this list from Sequoia is misleading. It is exactly this sought of data that is misguiding entrepreneurs into contacting VCs in the early stage of their business. This list portrays that a VC has excellent understanding of the space and is willing to take a high risk and enter a business based SOLELY on concept and all the factors mentioned in the list.
Instead the VC model is very different. Most VCs are essentially composed of teams of finance specialists, who in their 40 year career have to look at over 100 industries and atleast 5 – 7 at any given time. This makes it impossible for them get very deep into any industry no matter how hard they try. Even VC partners who were once entrepreneurs will be looking at multiple industries once they change their job to being a VC, and this will automatically dilute their knowledge of an industry.
VCs thus need to work with slightly more mature ideas with PROOF OF CONCEPT firmly in place. In short they need to see traction in your project and it is this traction which becomes their lead factor in influencing their decision to invest in a project.
So what should an entrepreneur at the very early stage do? He needs to contact an angel investor who is active in his industry and explain his concept using exactly the factors mentioned in Sequoia’s list. This will work because the angel having indepth knowledge of the industry can work on concepts.
NEA- US Indo ventures, provides you a very dilligent business plan template as well : http://www.neaiuv.com/resourcecenter_templates.htm
This is very useful information, when we think about business plan or approach to VC. Here is another good resource for first-time entrepreneurs.http://www.erasmic.com/pres/raising_seed_capital.pdf
this is been there since 2 yrs on their site atleast