Finally, the curtain of the recession seems to have lifted. While the market slump has drawn blood in the form of lost jobs and made the market more cautious, it has not stopped some gritty entrepreneurs from seeking and finding their pot of gold.
In fact, when everyone else was worrying about what the recession would do to the future, some people just rolled up their sleeves, dug their heels in and created their own future.
It is perhaps ironic that the announcement of the TATA NEN Hottest Startups Awards 2008 came just after the recession had taken hold of the economy. About a hundred startups were identified in the fray and five were named for the top position.
Rajesh Varier’s activecubes solutions, founded in 2007 and offering business analytics services, placed first among the TATA NEN Hottest Startups. Close behind was Vamsi Krishna’s Lakshya, which helps students prepare for engineering and medical entrance examinations. From India’s booming agribusiness sector was Amith Agarwal’s Star Agri, which provides comprehensive warehousing, procurement and collateral management services for agri-commodities. Also on the list was Pavan Kumar Vijay’s takeovercode.com, which provides IT-enabled legal, financial and management consultancy to companies. From the consumer retail sector, the judges picked Jay Gupta’s The Loot, a multi-brand discount store that helps shoppers buy their desired brands at half the price.
Several hundred companies applied for a place among the Hottest Startups. The wealth of ideas that came to the fore was a clear indication that entrepreneurs were looking for opportunity in hitherto untapped sectors.
Among the most vibrant and unusual business ideas were in the underserved sector of sports. GoSports, for example, works with promising athletes “to groom the next generation of world-beating Indian sporting champions” and aspires to “invigorate the country’s sporting ecosystem.” On the other hand, there are companies whose work borders on social activism. DailyDump provides products that enable us to manage household waste and convert it to useful high-quality compost.
That, however, is only the tip of the iceberg.
In a May 2009 story about India’s successful young entrepreneurs, The Washington Post reported that the economic slump did not halt the dreams of India’s budding entrepreneurs. The Post article outlined the success stories of Rajesh Razdan’s mCarbon, which provides sophisticated call-management services to cell phone users, and Zibika.com, an online personal finance portal focused on the insurance market, started by 25-year-old entrepreneur Arun Balakrishnan.
According to the Post, “Analysts say that although the amount invested in start-ups dipped in the first quarter of 2009, the number of deals did not.”
Does that mean that the best is yet to come?
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