Its not all doom and gloom, atleast at TIE

I am attending the three day TIE event that is happening here in Delhi. For those of you not familiar, TIE stands for the The Indus Entrepreneurs - a networking place for Venture capitalist and entrepreneurs. The theme of this year's conference is "Entrepreneurship Comes of Age". The conference seems to be well attended with atleast 400 or so delegates (ha, ha .. attendees, but delegates sounds so much more official). The buzz however seems quite muted from the Bay Area TIE events that I have attended. It is a reflection of where the market is at.

The key question on everyone's mind at the conference is are Venture Capitalist still investing. And the answer is , drum rolls please, yes somewhat. But still the audience is still not convinced. Lucky are the few that closed their funding rounds before August. As per Darwin's theory, it is only the strong that will survive, and this recession, or depression, since it is not really a recession in India since the country is still expected to grow at 5-6% per year. But from the way everyone is talking it sure feels like a recession.

Some key takeaways:

• Its all about execution we all know. And the panels of TIE reaffirm this boldly. 99% of the time you can rest assured that someone will, and most probably multiple people, will have the same idea as you. But very few people will be able to create an efficient, operational and commercially viable business out of it. So always know that there is competition .. but just go ahead and create the best product/service that you can.
• I also enjoyed the comment that business is really about common sense. But it is unfortunate that common sense is not really all that common.
• People first - before anything else, ie. meaning before raising money. A good team is paramount. And the current correction in the market is providing much needed respite to the labor situation - aka - people's expectations regarding salary are much much more reasonable.
• Corruption still seemed to be a major topic. Quite a few questions were posed regarding this in the India context. All one can say is that things are getting better but far from where they need to be.
• The right time to be an entrepeuneur is ofcourse when you have that fire in your belly. But more practically after you have had 4 -5 years of experience.
• The right time to spot an opportunity is when you are strong and the competition is weak. Which is NOW!