Sukshma

In every Pune OpenCoffee Club meet, you can’t help but notice the energy that Entrepreneurs bring with them. It is exciting and infectious. However, the Pune OCC is proving to be more than just about youth and learning. On July 3rd, Neeraj Arora of Google’s Corporate M&A wing, Neill Brownstein and Anjana Kaul of Footprint Ventures spoke about their respective organizations and philosophies. Over 50 Pune OCC members turned up for the event.

Boundless energy and enthusiasm are part of the Entrepreneurial profile. Of all the faces in the Pune OCC, of the founders pairing up to start, you just can’t tell which company is going to be the next big one out of India.

The newer Pune OCC members have been asking if the OCC was working with a blueprint or a plan. It does not. Just like the other OCC’s (especially Chennai), the Pune OCC was started to accelerate networking and so far it has worked incredibly well.

Our real-world regular meetups help build trust and familiarity between the attendees and guests. This in turn serves as a foundation for more meaningful interaction down the line. There are other organizations, like the recently resurrected TiE Pune that will provide the structure, discipline and other necessary characteristics for the rest of the startup eco-system to work.

Thank you Navin for covering the details of the event on PuneTech.

~ Santosh

When I started the Pune Open Coffee Club in March 2008 on the suggestion of a friend, Vijay Anand (Founder, Proto.in), little did I know that in a short span of three months, the Club would attract over 200 members.

Anjali and I used to brainstorm ways of marketing POCC, and one of the ideas that really helped was coinciding our first major POCC meeting with the VC Circle conference in Pune in April. Since the conference was filled with investment bankers, the VCs who wanted to meet entrepreneurs came to the POCC event

It’s exciting for us to see new members joining the Club every week, especially with all the action they’re bringing with them.

Here are some of highlights of June and July in case you’ve missed something.

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Image courtesy of kiwanja.net

Ken Banks devotes himself to the application of mobile technology for positive social and environmental change in the developing world, and has spent the last 15 years working on projects in Africa.

In his essay, Mobiles in Africa: A Travellers Perspective, Ken Banks describes the entrepreneurial spirit thriving in Africa around the mobile industry,

“..Mobile phones are attached to bikes (two and three wheelers), and even boats, and taken to where the business is. In Uganda these bikes, known locally as boda boda’s, are hooked up with spare batteries and desktop mobile devices to create what are affectionately known as Bodafones”.

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“Failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was and began directing all my energy into the only work that mattered to me. Had I already succeeded in anything else, I would have never found the determination to succeed in the one arena where I believed I truly belonged. I was set free because my greatest fear had been realized and I was still alive, I had a daughter who I adored, I had an old typewriter, and a big idea, and so, rock bottom became the foundation on which I rebuilt my life.”

– J. K. Rowling choses to talk about the benefits of failure and the power of imagination in her commencement speech at Harvard. Keep reading →

I don’t get paid for working long hours. (I don’t even get a comforting “I appreciate how hard you worked” speech from a supervisor).

I don’t get paid for the million emails, thousand proposals, and hundred presentations I’ve produced.

I don’t get paid for saying no to short-term opportunities in the interest of focusing on the product.

I don’t get paid for the hours I spend building the company’s morale, the team morale, and later my own morale.

I don’t get paid unless a large portion of the market accepts my product.

Who am I?

An entrepreneur Keep reading →

Quote of the day on Entrepreneurial Judgment by Marc (pmarca),

You’d better not have a lot of doubts about what you are doing because everyone else will, and if you do too, you’ll probably give up.

Of course, an entrepreneur’s doubt avoidance is only a plus right up to the point where it becomes pigheaded stubbornness that interferes with her ability to see reality, particularly when a strategy is not working.

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