The Hindu Business Line : Meet, greet & start up

Little did Balaji Lakshmanan, 26, imagine that the animated discussions he joined in at the Open Coffee Club — a forum for entrepreneurs — would soon take him all the way to the worldwide start-up summit at Stanford University.

On the first Sunday of each month, walk into the Open Coffee Club, currently held at the IIT-Madras campus, and you will come upon a group of young and aspiring as well as established entrepreneurs attired in casuals but engaged in a serious exchange of ideas and start-up trends — all over just a cup of coffee.

Ask the enterprising duo Siddharta Govindaraj, CEO of Silver Stripe Software, and Vaidhy Mayilrangam, Chief Technology Officer and cofounder of Serendio Software, what inspired them to start such a forum in August 2007, and each of them proffers a different reason. While Mayilrangam wanted to share his start-up experiences with likeminded people, Govindaraj wanted to create a platform where entrepreneurs could meet regularly.

Over 18 months now, the participants have steadily increased from 20 to 600. Says Mayilrangam, “Taking clues from the OCC model that was kickstarted first in London in February 2007, we formed one here. While our friends’ circle got to know through word of mouth, quite a few joined after seeing the details on our Web site.”

Free-flowing ideas

What’s interesting about this organisation is that it combines a casual approach with serious follow-throughs. The session begins with a topic of common interest and then the participants break up into smaller groups to continue the discussion.

Dorai Thodla, a US-based entrepreneur who runs Web-based company iMorph, recently started an Open Coffee Club at the Vellore Institute of Technology. “What I like about this concept is that there are neither rules nor hierarchy or even a set agenda, so anyone is welcome to talk. No one hesitates to ask what they want,” he says. Balaji Lakshmanan, who has an MS in Computer Science from IIT-Madras and is the CEO of Geeky Technology & Consulting says, “With members sharing real-time solutions for several practical problems in business, most of my queries get clarified and the people here are my inspiration.”

Networking

Be it students, upcoming entrepreneurs or established ones, the forum offers an excellent platform for networking. Ravi Shankar, 22, product manager at Nora Solutions and an alumnus of IIT-Madras, has been attending OCC right from its inception. “It has been good interaction and I also found a potential software developer for our company during one of the OCC meets,” he says.

One can hear people selling their new launches or services during the informal chats over coffee. At one such session Mayilrangam found a technical writer “who could write for my ads”. Tarun Mehta, a B.Tech student at IIT-Madras, is enthusiastic about the opportunities presented by such a gathering. “We are happy to note that people are willing to take us for internships and we could have a one-on-one interaction with them,” he says.

Investors ahoy!

One of the main requirements for start-ups is investors and although the club throws up enough opportunities for entrepreneurs and investors to meet, Siddharta says, “We don’t keep a database of investors as our focus is more towards networking. We definitely wish to have more experienced entrepreneurs in the forum to share their expertise.”

With the success of the club in Chennai, the idea has been adopted by likeminded people in Bangalore, Pune, Kolkata, Noida, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Vellore and Kochi.

Talking about the experience at the Vellore club, where 100-odd students have registered, Thodla says, “The students are very enthusiastic and keen to know about entrepreneurship. Since their objective is to learn more on the subject, they have invited the Bangalore and Chennai OCC members and even some entrepreneurs in and around Vellore to share their experiences. Such meets have even motivated some second-year students to launch an online hospital database portal. However, the OCC in Cochin (Kochi) is very nascent and will take time to grow; but the best thing is the concept is spreading quite fast.”

Cross-city enthusiasm

The day, location and frequency of meets vary from city to city but the objectives remain the same. Says Santosh Dawara, founder of software technology start-up Lipikaar, about the Pune chapter of OCC, “Every second Saturday, we have about 50 to 60 members attending. Since most of our entrepreneurs are technocrats, we also arranged seminars on managerial topics like ‘How to incorporate LLP, Partnership or Private Limited’ by Jayesh Baheti of Baheti N. Somani and ‘How to market start-ups’ by leading entrepreneurs across the country.”

The Bangalore chapter of the club also arranges talks by people from various industries. Amarinder Singh wants to expand the concept. As he explains, “By restructuring the format we wish to take our meets beyond networking, so that people can navigate themselves and obtain maximum value and skills to unlock a potential. Our aim is also to get entrepreneurs from various fields apart from the IT sector.”

The club was begun in Delhi last year by Shivaas Gulati and in Kolkata by Mitesh B. Ashar, but they are yet to take off in a big way. Ashar, cofounder of Headstart Network, says, “There is a community of entrepreneurs here, but they are not very open, yet there are 15 who come regularly. We are now calling experts to talk on entrepreneurial topics like recruitment, funding, client building and this has helped.”

On plans, if any, for an all-India meet of the Open Coffee Club in Chennai, Mayilrangam says, “It is a big task and to organise such an event we would need extra time to manage the infrastructure and administrative requirements. We are open to participate, if it happens anywhere else.”

Now that’s a start-up waiting to happen.

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