The Venture Intelligence Blog

Deepak Srinath of Viedea has an interesting post on the subject: ...the trend that has left me partly amused and partly concerned is the rapidly growing breed of entrepreneurs who are in the “business of mentoring and incubation”. I have interacted with many such “mentors” over the last few months and barring a few exceptions most have left me with the feeling that they do not have adequate experience or skills to mentor a startup. Some of them are barely out of college themselves and many of them claim to be serial entrepreneur s (on closer inspection, it’s more like ‘serial company starters’, none of which have managed to last beyond a year). It’s extremely worrisome that young entrepreneurs with smart ideas could be signing up such mentors, giving them equity and wasting a lot of time in the bargain. A good mentor is a critical part of an entrepreneur’s journey. A few tips for entrepreneurs from my own experience – ... 2. You may need multiple mentors on your entrepreneurial j...

From a Businessworld article Far from being hotbeds of student-driven entrepreneurial activity, like in a Stanford University or an MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), India’s B-school incubators now find themselves on the sidelines of the powerful entrepreneurial wave that is sweeping the country. During 2000-10, close to 150,000 startups have sprung up outside such incubators; 37,500 of these are in the five metros, according to Amit Grover, member of angel investment firm Mumbai Angels. Among the eight incubators the IITs and IIMs set up nearly two decades ago, SINE is tagged the most successful. Since 2004, it has incubated 35 startups, of which 20 are ‘graduated’ and are in various stages of progress. Three have shut operations due to reasons including their inability to raise fresh capital, difficulties in finding customers and gaining scale at the right time. Others have been in the incubator well beyond the incubation period of three years for similar reasons. For exam...