Will I ever raise money?

One of the greatest challenges of any start-up is getting funds. Read on to find out how you can step up to the occasion.

My college-going daughter and I kid one another that New York city must be filled with single neurotic women who can’t find Mr Right.

And their ticking biological clocks aren’t helping!

We joke about this, for that’s the impression you’d get from the innumerable movies that we’ve guiltily enjoyed watching together.

If you replace "Will I find Mr Right?" with the question "Will I ever get funded?" we might as well be talking about the typical entrepreneur who’s tired of pitching to their nth prospective investor. And the ticking cash-flow situation doesn’t help either.

So that the suspense doesn’t kill you, let me answer your question. Hell YES! you will get funded.

Now that’s behind us, let’s talk about What the hey "getting funded" means.

I assume most folks -- young (and some not-so-young) entrepreneurs -- when they talk about getting funded mean raising capital from a venture capital firm -- or at the very least an Angel group -- in other words, institutional investors.

If so the answer is a little more sobering -- most folks will likely NOT raise institutional investment! But then again you are not most folks are you?

Don’t be discouraged -- and if you are that easily discouraged -- you might want to check if really want to be an entrepreneur.

Statistics from countries in which entrepreneurship and the start-up ecosystem are healthy and active -- whether the US, EU or India -- indicate that less than 1 per cent of all start-ups raise angel or venture funding.

Regardless of what you’ve read or heard, at the end of the day institutional investors are looking to get a good return on their money.

Both in the Indian context and even in the larger world of cloud computing, mobile apps, fat-pipe world, folks want to see far greater validation and customer or user traction.

Unless you are Ashok Soota or Elon Musk its unlikely anyone’s going to write checks, because they think your idea’s hot. So the best way to raise funds, is to have done two things

#1 built a business that shows promise and demonstrates you can actually execute

#2 having raised some money in one of three ways spelt out below, to achieve #1 above

The best way, IMO, to achieve #2 is of course to get customers to write you checks.

Numerous businesses such as Practo that have gone on to raise serious money began this way.

My first business Impulsesoft too got its start this way.

It has the advantage of letting you know, that someone actually values what you are doing and is willing to write a check.

Many businesses however, need capital to even get rolling.

PayTM (One97) founder Vijay Sharma did freelancing on the side to generate cash.

In his own words "At one point of time, before I could raise funding, to earn monthly survival money and capital for the business, I started doing some freelance assignments. I worked half day on those and half day on one97. It was tiring but at least I was able to have it going."

Most folks usually get friends, families (and other fools, including yourself) to write you a check or more.

Finally you could borrow money -- could range from family, bank (personal loan against collateral), credit card or that usurious money lender you may not yet know.

It all depends on your risk appetite. Here you are asking someone else to take a bet on you and you need to take the first step.

Sure the world is changing -- FlipKart began with an investment of Rs 6 lakhs and the same amount will NOT get you started in that business.

When Federal Express was getting started they needed upwards of $80 M and starting a new airline needs some REAL money.

So sure some businesses can’t get off the ground without serious capital -- but usually such a business is started by folks or businesses that have already done one or more business.

You as a first time entrepreneur can and will raise money -- only keep in mind it will take longer than you reckoned, will involve kissing a good deal of frogs and is far more in your hands that you realise.

Finally in the Indian context, it’s important to keep the right perspective.

If as an entrepreneur you feel it’s hard to raise money, the story on the other side for an angel or VC is also not all hunky-dory.

Angels and VCs are sitting on money and not finding enough good deals -- a lot of money is chasing few quality deals -- which is why you read about those unrealistically large numbers the other guy or gal seems to be raising. Here’s what you do.

• First quit reading about who’s raising how much money
• Keep building your business -- in other words get customers, ship product, collect revenue
• Build a strong board of advisors and mentors who can help you and your company grow
• Get out there and keep hustling -- networking, building relationships and pitching.

Illustration: Uttam Ghosh/Rediff.com

The author K Srikrishna is an entrepreneur, mentor and angel investor. He's the co-founder of Zebu Games and blogs at designofbusiness.com.

On a thali trail: Meandering through Delhi's state bhavans

Harnoor Channi-Tiwary 

Delhi’s hidden secrets for food lovers

Though Delhi has enough food options to deserve its unofficial title of being the Gastronomical Capital of India, there is a hidden secret that even many locals are not aware of. The beauty of Delhi’s diversity lies in the kitchens of people from all over the country who bring with them a vast variety of flavours and cuisines. Thus, what is termed as ‘Indian Food’ (which is usually just Mughlai/ Punjabi food) is just the tip of the iceberg of what the country has to offer one’s palate. So where does one go to best explore these cuisines?

State Bhawans are the answer to all your questions.

Guesthouses of sorts for politicians and state officials, these bhawans also each have a canteen that serves food local to that state. Most of the canteens are open for the public and are very reasonably priced. With cooks originally hailing from the respective states, the food is as authentic as it comes. Andhra Bhawan is the first thing that comes to mind when one mentions State Bhawans but there is so much more that you can explore. Located in and around Chanakyapuri, the central location makes it so much easier for one to visit them often. Do call them in advance to check timings. 

Baking Special: The knead for a loaf

Bindu Ajit 

When she was growing up, Bindu Ajit had only heard of the Challah. After years, she discovered its recipe and got to it right away.

The Jews begin each meal of the Sabbath with two loaves of bread called Challah, each woven with six strands of dough.

The twin loaves symbolise the double portion of Manna that fell on the day before the Sabbath, reminding the Jews that God would provide, even if they would refrain from working on the Sabbath.

As a child, when I heard the story of Manna falling, I always imagined it to taste like my mother's pound cake, powdered and mixed with honey.

In what feels like another lifetime, I recently happened to stumble upon the recipe for the Challah, and immediately decided to try it out.

Mixing up a sticky gooey dough, and kneading it for a good while with sweat trickling down my temples, watching my hands turn it into a warm silken smooth ball, was quite simply such a joy. The feeling of being able to create something beautiful with my own hands is naturally a special one.

By the way, this specific activity may also prove very beneficial, if you happen to be in one of those moods when you really need a punching bag to get some steam out of your system. An absolute win-win.

After leaving the dough covered a while, I came back to find it had puffed itself up to double the size! Gently punching it down and waiting for a repeat performance was not disappointing either.

Braiding it into a pretty shape was such a delightful task, I thought to myself, I could do this every single day and not ever tire of it.

After yet another majestic rise, the shaped dough finally went into the hot oven, and with much impatience I waited in eager anticipation.

The aroma wafting through the house was extremely promising and I was earning myself some seriously envious neighbours.

But nothing could have prepared me for the feeling of absolute wonder when I peeked through the oven glass and saw the most gorgeous golden brown loaf of bread sitting there.

It was very hard to believe that this beauty was created here in my own little kitchen, and not in some fancily equipped pastry kitchen.

Slicing through the firm crust to find a soft and light texture inside, and bringing a piece to my mouth to taste the delicious flavour, was the proverbial the icing on the cake.

I fear this could now become something of an obsession. I am constantly looking forward to the next loaf and longing to feel dough in my hands again.

I feel certain that this is just the beginning of a long and beautiful journey for me. I visualise and dream of a hundred different loaves that I shall bake, and the happy hours spent on them.

I hope I shall find myself baking bread until the Alzheimered day when I end up happily playing with flour and not a clue what it was intended for!

Now it amazes me that many people are intimidated by the idea of baking bread. And there are far greater numbers, to whom the thought has never occurred, to try bake a loaf of bread.

Been there done that, on both counts. And today I have come as far as believing that every single person should add this to their bucket-list.

It's not rocket science, it won't blow up your kitchen, it costs barely anything, and the absolute worst case scenario is some dough in your bin. But it might just turn out to be an awesome and intoxicating ride that you ought not to miss.

So go ahead, bake some bread. It's enriching, enlivening, and most of all, therapeutic.

What's not to loaf?

6 deadliest air crashes in recent times

The aviation industry is experiencing turbulent times. On Tuesday, a German Airbus carrying 148 onboard crashed into the French Alps. The French transport minister says that it is unlikely that there are any survivors.

In the wake of the tragedy, Rediff.com takes a look at the major aviation disasters of recent times.

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Flight: Air Asia Flight 8501

Date: 28 December 2014

Details: The aircraft operating from from Surabaya to Singapore, crashed into the JavaSea during bad weather, killing all 155 passengers and seven crew on board. Two days after the crash, debris from the aircraft and human remains were found floating in the Java Sea. 

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Flight: Sepahan Airlines 5915

Date: August 10, 2014

Details: The HESA IrAn-140 (an Antonov An-140 built under license) crashes shortly after takeoff from Mehrabad International Airport, Iran, killing 39 of the 48 people on board. 

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Flight: Air Algerie AH5017

Date: July 24 2014

Details: The McDonnell Douglas MD-83, operated by Spain's Swiftair, was heading from Ouagadougou to Algiers carrying 116 passengers -- 51 of them French -- when it disappeared over Mali amid poor weather near the border with Burkina Faso.

 

Flight: TransAsia Airways GE222 

Date: July 23 2014

Details: Forty-eight people died when the Tawainese ATR-72 plane, carrying 54 passengers and four crew to the island of Penghu, crashed into stormy seas during a short flight. It made an abortive attempt to land before crashing on a second attempt.

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Flight: Malaysia Airlines MH17

Date: July 17 2014

Details: Pro-Russian rebels are widely accused of shooting down the Boeing 777 en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, using a surface-to-air missile near Grabove in eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people on board, 193 of them Dutch.  Obviously, they denied responsibility.

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Flight: Malaysia Airlines MH370

Date: March 8 2014

Details: There is absolutely no clue whatsoever over what happened with this Boeing 777 en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 227 passengers and 12 crew on board ever since it disappeared from radar over the Gulf of Thailand. Despite vast effort, notably in the hostile South Indian Ocean, to date no debris of any kind has been found from the flight.

10 ways to avoid being home-sick while studying abroad

If it's your first trip abroad, it is natural to miss your home and loved ones. Read on to find out what you must do.

Everyone expects studying abroad to be an incredibly exciting experience.

However one phenomenon that can hamper the entire experience is “homesickness.”

Mostly fuelled by the cultural shock, homesickness can be a little daunting to deal with.

Here are a few valuable tips, which will help you overcome homesickness with ease.

1. Keep in touch with your family and friends

An assurance that your loved ones are just a call away is a great way to make you feel at home in a new setting.

Use Skype ,Whatsapp, or Facetime to keep in regular touch with your loved ones without causing a dent in your pocket.

2. Use online mediums to connect with people

You can spontaneously engage in unplanned chat sessions with your family and friends on G-chat, Skype chat or Facebook.

This will take your focus off from constantly thinking about what’s happening back home.

Keeping in touch with your loved ones does help but make sure that you don’t overdo it and end up getting completely dependent on them emotionally.

3. Visiting local temples, churches, and mosques

Paying customary visits to ISKCON temples, churches and mosques will make you feel connected to your religious roots and impart a sense of well-being.

4. Celebrate festivals with your peers and local community

With a little effort you will always manage to find folks from your home country.

Make it a point to regularly visit community centres and actively participate in celebrating festivals with them.

This will serve as a fantastic way to build new bonds of friendship and beat the homesickness blues.

5. Eat in an Indian restaurant

Occasionally sinking your teeth into a familiar cuisine will give you feeling of being at home; even if it is for a short while, it will surely serve its purpose.

6. Walk into an Indian grocery store

A random visit to the neighbourhood Indian grocery store and spotting Amul, Rasna and Parle-G is sure to bring a smile on your face.

7. Go with an open mind

You are going to a new country and be ready to embrace it with arms wide open.

Removing this mental barrier will help you broaden your horizons and help you in welcoming a new set of friends.

Be open to the idea of utilising your free time by closely working with student bodies and clubs.

If it still doesn’t help, don’t shy away from making the most of university’s student support services.

With a little counseling and student-mentoring program, you will settle down quickly.

8. Join a student group

Becoming a member of Indian Student Association will allow you opportunities to interact with your Indian peers and instantly feel at home.

9. Learn to be self-sufficient

You will miss your mom more than ever when you are required perform daily chores like washing, cooking, and cleaning.

Learning to single-handedly manage yourself will equip you to stay on your own and stop you from feeling forlorn and secluded.

10. Gear yourself up for a different climate

One important factor that students fail to anticipate is the difficulty in adapting to an altogether different climate.

Researching and preparing yourself for the unique climatic conditions of your host country will enable you to weather initial body shocks and adjustment challenges.

There are many like you out there struggling to acclimate themselves to a new setting, but rest assured it will soon start getting better.

Reassure yourself that homesickness is a 'transient emotion' and the sooner you get out of it, the better it is.

Do your utmost to convert your overseas higher education experience into a cherished memory for your lifetime!

Collegepond is a career guidance company whose aim is to help students achieve their potential, crack the competitive exams and guide them in the application process for various courses across the globe.

15 practical tips to be mindful and beat stress

These can help you be more productive and have a stress-free life

Photograph: Giulia Bartra/Creative Commons

While working out in the gym on a treadmill this morning, I was catching up on the daily news on the TV fitted to the treadmill. The gentleman exercising next to me did not have the TV switched on, which surprised me. When asked if there is some problem with his TV, he said, “No, I am following mindfulness”. Whoa! I have been trying to follow mindfulness at work and this gentleman was way ahead in the game and trying to follow it during exercise too. This is so right: you can’t be mindful only at work and not otherwise. I do realise that it is a fundamental change in the way we spend our day that can make us more mindful.

The concept of mindfulness, inherited from Buddhist traditions, has already caught the attention of companies like Google, General Mills, and Target. Harvard Business School has also included mindfulness principles in its leadership programmes.

So here I thought of compiling a list of 15 practical tips which can help you be mindful in day-to-day life, be more productive and have a stress-free life. Here you go:

1. DO NOT multi-task. Period. You will end up messing up several things at the same time.

2. Plan your day ahead of time. Make a to-do list of all the items (personal as well as professional). You will be in a better position to prioritise and execute things.

3. Don’t feel guilty about taking rest. When you are weary, take a break, refresh and renew yourself, your body, your mind and then get back to work.

4. Eat well: This might sound trivial but it has a significant impact on our mood. Trust me J! Always carry some healthy snacks with you.

5. Have your priorities clear -- for the day as well as life. Don’t just take your to-do list and start executing the items. Prioritise the tasks before you get into execution.

6. Follow a routine -- you will save yourself from decision fatigue when you don’t need to decide on what to do next, every now and then.

7. Take out some time to have fun, spend time with family, give time to your hobby and relax.

8. Steve Jobs was so right when he said, "The only way to do great work is to love it". Do only that work which you enjoy. After all, we all spend more than half the day at work so might as well do only the interesting things.

9. Don’t think about past or have regrets about the past -- you are not going to live there. Have the end goal in mind and live in present.

10. Have self-discipline. It’s one of the most important qualities that can contribute to your happiness and success. This is one trait which is crucial to accomplish goals and lead a healthy lifestyle.

11. Instead of doing it fast, concentrate on doing it well -- you will eventually end up spending less time in doing that thing.

12. Meditate -- being super busy is not an excuse for not meditating. In fact, you need it all the more when you are very busy. Take out at least half an hour for meditation every day.

13. Frequently look at your to-do list during the day. If something on the list can be done in less than 2 minutes, do it right away. Otherwise, delegate/reprioritise/reschedule it. Checking the items on to-do list gives a lot of pleasure J

14. Switch the phones to silent mode (even better, switch it off) when you are doing something really important. The work done in that un-interrupted period will be done faster and better.

15. Respect time -- yours as well as that of others. Don’t be late for meetings, don’t have lengthy talks on phone and don’t send unnecessary emails.

These small changes in our day-to-day schedule can have significant impact on how we feel at the end of the day. Try these and let me know if these worked for you! 

Khiv Singh is AVP Sales -- America, Sapience Analytics

Water and Boko Haram

Water scarcity is often a factor in conflicts, but is India ready to cope with limited water resources?

Most of us in India are only dimly aware of what has been going on in conflict-ridden zones in the world, and even less aware of the underlying reasons for conflict. It took Soli Özel, a Turkish professor from Istanbul who was speaking at a conference organised in Delhi last week by the Ananta Centre, to point to water as an important underlying issue that gave birth to Boko Haram, the violent Islamist group in Nigeria that has resorted to kidnappings and mass killings.

Specifically, Lake Chad used to be the size of Israel. Over the last two or three decades, 95 per cent of the lake has dried up, depriving communities around its periphery of their traditional sources of income from fishing and farming. Refugees from poverty-stricken northeastern Nigeria, which borders the lake, began streaming away from the area years ago, in search of work and a livelihood. That is the area where Boko Haram (which means “Western education is forbidden”) was born, replacing a more moderate version of Islam that had prevailed till then.

Prof Ozel referred also to the role played by successive droughts in Syria, which has been torn by conflict since March 2011. As it happens, the country suffered four droughts in a five-year period to 2010, and various scholars have pointed to the connection between water scarcity and political/military strife.

Peter H Gleick, in a paper for the American Meteorological Society (Water, Drought, Climate Change, and Conflict in Syria), refers to “challenges associated with climate variability and change and the availability and use of freshwater” in a list of the causes underlying the Syrian conflict. 

It goes without saying that water scarcity is by no means the only reason for the strife of recent years in Nigeria, Syria and elsewhere, but it has been an important contributory factor that is usually ignored. The question is, what is happening here at home? The unexpected damage done to the standing rabi crop by unseasonal March rain has already caused a crisis in millions of farming families.

Cloudbursts and floods have ravaged the economies of Uttarakhand and Jammu & Kashmir in recent years. Inter-state water disputes have become ever more intractable – between the states of north-western India, including Delhi; Karnataka and Tamil Nadu; Tamil Nadu and Kerala; Telangana and Andhra Pradesh; and so on. Think also India-Pakistan and the Indus waters. 

That the conflicts have a sharper edge in the peninsular part of the country reflects the fact that water resources in the southern states have been more fully used than in the north, while demand for water continues to grow. But, equally, Punjab faces a groundwater crisis that will become more evident over time.

For the country as a whole, per capita water availability has dropped to a third of what it was at Independence – because the population has trebled and we have done little to augment water resources. From being water-abundant, the country is now classified as water-stressed. By the time the population peaks and stabilises in a couple of decades, India will be water-scarce – like Morocco is today. Are we ready for what that might mean?

Most of the water goes into farming, but India has unsustainable cropping patterns that do not reflect limited water availability. There is no (eco)logical reason why water-hungry sugarcane should be one of the principal crops in Maharashtra, or why paddy should be grown in Haryana. India has become the largest exporter of rice in the world, and sees sugar exports as a solution to the domestic glut. But exporting rice and sugar is like exporting water.

If we are to cope with the coming water crisis—an existential challenge if ever there was one—Indian agriculture will have to change. While the Green Revolution was born out of improving the supply of assured irrigation water, in the future crop technology will have to focus on how to grow more with less water.