Entrepreneurs

Obama proposes ‘startup visas’ for entrepreneurs to start companies in the U.S

Posted on by LiveitupSoul

We all are going through the pieces of content stating that a new proposal is presented by Obama led government in the favor of entrepreneurs. Let us have a clear understanding of what we are hearing.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is publishing the White House’s International Entrepreneur Rule. The program grants temporary visas to startup founders from other countries if their companies meet certain requirements, like financing from U.S. investors.

The report published by the U.S Citizenship and Immigration services (USCIS).

“America’s economy has long benefitted from the contributions of immigrant entrepreneurs, from Main Street to Silicon Valley,” said Director León Rodríguez. “This proposed rule, when finalized, will help our economy grow by expanding immigration options for foreign entrepreneurs who meet certain criteria for creating jobs, attracting investment and generating revenue in the U.S.”

 

To qualify for what the White House calls “startup visas,” entrepreneurs must own at least 15 percent of a U.S. startup, and demonstrate the company’s growth potential, investments from qualified American investors, and “significant public benefit to the United States.”

The rule would allow entrepreneurs that fit those requirements to stay in the U.S. for up to two years. They could then apply for an additional three years if the company shows continued growth and benefit to the American public (like increases in capital investment, job creation, or revenue).

The administrative reforms announced by the President in November 2014, if fully implemented, could boost the nation’s economic output by up to $250 billion, while shrinking the federal deficit by $65 billion over the next ten years.  – Tom Kalil (White House Deputy Director of Tech and Innovation)

Big brands like Microsoft, Amazon or other tech cos., rely heavily on H1-B visas to bring skilled workers from other countries into the U.S. It works only for people migrating to this country to work for established companies but this will open up possibilities for entrepreneurs to start their own businesses in the U.S., and that was a change welcomed by many tech and startup-oriented groups.

We welcome this initiative and also apply our efforts to nurture more and more startups. This will also boost the synergical impact in the Entrepreneurship world that has been spreaded through the endless efforts by our community –  Igniting Entrepreneurs.

http://www.fb.com/ignitingEntrepreneurs

 

Must read story of a man who made 43000 Crore from nothing

Posted on by LiveitupSoul

The inspirational stories of fight against odds, unbelievable struggle and extraordinary success are always popular. But few stories make the space that can not be occupied by others. Few stories become inspiration  for generations.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was the son of an upper-middle-class dentist. Bill Gates was a millionaire before he started Microsoft in 1975. Google founder Larry Page’s parents were both professors; Google co-founder Sergey Brin’s father was a professor and his mother was a NASA researcher. But the man we are talking about is the only son of a construction labourer.

The story of 39 year old Jan Koum(as of 2015), is inspiration for the current generation on internet entrepreneurs. A man who did not have hot water facility at his home, the man who cleaned the floors of a grocery store at the age of 16, the man who stood in the que for collecting food stamps, is now a Silicon Valley badshah.

He owns an asset of more than rupees “430000000000”, as of May 2015. It is U.S. $ 6.8 billion which accounts to more than rupees 43 thousand crore Indian Rupees.

Jan Koum is man behind a product used by 800 million users( as of April 2015) globally. He is the man behind the most popular messaging app “WhatsApp Messenger”.

The story of Jan Koum is worth reading and learning. Jan was born and raised in a village on the outskirts of Kiev, Ukraine. He was the only child to his parents, his mother was a housewife and father was an ordinary construction labourer.

He belonged to a family miles away from technical innovations and science. His family rarely talked on phone because they believed that phone are recorded by the state(government). Jan practically had nothing to ignite his passion for technology.

Koum once said to Forbes “he still pines for the rural life,” he told Wired that life was rough: “It was so run-down that our school didn’t even have an inside bathroom,” he said. “Imagine the Ukrainian winter, -20°C, where little kids have to stroll across the parking lot to use the bathroom. Society was extremely closed off: you can read 1984, but living there was experiencing it.”

Prompted by the unstable political environment in Ukraine — students were regularly questioned for mocking politicians in class — and increasing anti-Semitism in the Ukraine, Koum and his mother moved to Mountain View, California, when he was 16. Short on cash, the two stayed in a modest two-bedroom apartment on government assistance. Koum’s father, who died in 1997, never made it to Mountain View. Koum’s mother worked as a babysitter to make ends meet, while he swept the floor of a grocery store. Later, when his mother was diagnosed with cancer, they lived off her disability payments. (Koum’s mother died in 2000.)

An indifferent student, Koum, who didn’t have a computer until age 19, taught himself computer networking from a manual he bought at a used bookstore and later returned. Koum attended San Jose State University and worked part-time as a security tester for accounting firm Ernst & Young. Part of the work involved inspecting Yahoo’s advertising system, a task that prompted Koum to cross paths with Brian Acton, who later became his business partner.

Koum worked with Yahoo for nine long years, on October 31, 2007, at a saving of $ 4,00,000( appr. Rs.25,00,000 as of May 2015), he thought of of freeing up for some time. In the next one year, he did not do much but the developments in his life paved the path for him.

In 2009, Koum bought an iPhone, he could not use his iPhone in the gymnasium as their policies did not allow it. He started using Skype while in gym but frequently forgot his password. By this time, he had decided  to create an app that worked seamlessly on one’s iPhone by using a phone number for identification. Koum convinced Brian Acton and started working on “WhatsApp”.

They both were looking better employment opportunities simultaneously, by this time they both were turned down by Facebook. Brian Acton was turned down by Twitter too.

Around that time, the founders got a small group of former Yahoo employees to pool $250,000 in seed money. Early days were the stuff of startup legend. The company leased space in the same building as Evernote, which later took over the whole space and kicked them out. The office furniture was cheap stuff from IKEA and employees wore blankets when it got cold. In early 2010, WhatsApp was bringing in about $5,000 a month. Things steadily improved until the company’s breakthrough year, 2011, when WhatsApp hit the top 20 in Apple’s App Store.

Since then, there has been no looking back. Till 2014, WhatsApp made such a big impact that Mark Zuckerberg had send a friends request to Koum. Now when Koum is a billionaire, he still has not forgot his past. When he signed the deal with Facebook, he chose the same social services building as the venue where he stood in a queue to collect food stamps.

GST Bill : Impact on Startups !

Posted on by LiveitupSoul

What is GST?

The biggest indirect tax reform since 1947, GST bill is expected to bring about an economic integration of the Indian economy. GST is gonna make the process of indirect taxation, easier and effective. The tax payers will pay one consolidated tax instead of the bundles of taxes including State Value-Added Tax (VAT), Central Excise, Service Tax, Entry Tax or Octroi and other indirect taxes.

“The challenges faced due to a complicated tax system on business transactions has been debated for a long time”. This tax will be levied on manufacture, sale and consumption of goods as well as services at the Central and State government levels. “The distinction between Goods and Services will be reduced gradually, thereby making tax compliances easier,”. Most of the developed countries use this form of taxation for ease and convenience and to avoid double taxation.

GST would be payable on price actually paid or payable, termed as “transaction value”, which will include packing cost, commission, and all other expenses incurred for sales. This tax will be payable at the final point of the consumption. The GST will have two components – the Central GST and the State GST, thus, empowering both the State and Central government to legislate and administer their respective taxes.

Except the Tamil Nadu government, which believes that this bill will take away the autonomy of the State government, all other States are in support of the bill.

What would be the impact of GST on Startups?

GST is believed to benefit all businesses in India, but small businesses can rejoice for the following reasons:

1.   Ease of doing business: Any new business needs to have a VAT registration from sales tax department. A business operating in many States has to face a lot of issues regarding the different procedures and fees in each state. GST will bring about a uniformity in process and centralised registration that will make starting business and expanding in different States much simpler.

2.   Higher exemptions to new businesses: As per the current structure, any business with a turnover of more than Rs five lakh has to get VAT registration and pay VAT. GST will make this limit higher, to upto Rs 10 lakh and, further to it, businesses with turnover between Rs 10 and 50 lakh will be taxed at a lower rates. This will bring respite from tax burdens to newly established businesses.

3.   Easy taxation: Currently, a startup spends a lot of time and energy to manage the various taxes at various points. Adhering to different regulations at different States make the process very complex. GST will simplify the process by integrating all taxes, making the process of paying tax simpler.

4.   Respite for businesses in both sales and services: Businesses like restaurants, which fall under both sales and service taxation, have to calculate the VAT and service tax on both items separately. This makes the calculations process very complex. GST will not distinguish between sales and services, and thus the tax calculation will be done on total.

5.  Reduction in logistics cost and time across States: Many transport vehicles get delayed during movement across States due to small border tax and checkpost issues. Interstate movement will become cheaper and less time consuming, as these taxes will be eliminated. “The whole Indian market opens up for manufacturers as interstate supply becomes tax-neutral,”. This will also bring down costs associated with maintaining high stocks, as there will be undisrupted movement of goods. As per a CRISIL analysis, GST can reduce logistics costs of companies producing non-bulk goods (comprising all goods besides the primary bulk commodities transported by railways – coal, iron ore, cement, steel, food grains, fertilisers) by as much as 20 percent.

How does GST reduce the cost of doing business? Unlike VAT and service tax, GST is essentially a tax on value addition at each stage, and levied at point of sale and not purchase. This means that the consumer bears the GST charged by only the last dealer in the supply chain, thus making it cheaper for the consumer and increasing the profitability of his business.

Secondly, there are various other taxes levied by the Central and State government on production, manufacture and distributive trade, where no set-off is available in the form of input tax credit. These taxes accumulate and lead to increasing the cost of final product which the consumer has to bear. GST subsumes all these taxes which are set off at each stage starting from producer and ending at the retailer, thus easing the burden on final consumer.

GST will assist in bringing down fiscal deficit by boosting tax collection and simplifying the tax regime, which is expected to bring about better compliance.

To conclude, we can say that somehow it is a win-win situation for the Government as well as the consumer. Entrepreneurs, directly or indirectly will be benefitted by GST.

#IgnitingEntrepreneurs

 

Snapdeal: It can be slow but painful ending !

Posted on by LiveitupSoul

On June 8, American e-commerce major Amazon announced an additional $3 billion investment in India, making clear its intention to win in the country. This throws up a massive challenge for all homegrown e-commerce companies, among which Snapdeal could be hurt the most.

The Gurgaon-based firm currently has Amazon India (Amazon.in) snapping at its heels for the second position in an overcrowded market. Snapdeal lags Flipkart on most metrics, and is only marginally ahead of Amazon.in.
 

Launched in 2010 by Wharton graduate Kunal Bahl and IIT-Delhi alumnus Rohit Bansal, Snapdeal has around 150,000 sellers and delivers in over 5,000 cities in India, according to its website. In March 2016, its gross merchandise value (GMV, or the total worth of merchandise sold through a marketplace) stood at around $4 billion.

 

The company is backed by Japan’s SoftBank, the Alibaba Group, Taiwan’s Foxconn Technology Group, American e-commerce firm eBay and Tata Sons chairman emeritus Ratan Tata, besides venture capital and private equity investors such as BlackRock, Nexus Venture Partners, Intel Capital, and Kalaari Capital.

“Finding their identity from last 2 years”

Despite such strong backers, Snapdeal is increasingly losing relevance among customers and needs to find its unique selling proposition (USP) soon.

                           

“Snapdeal has been having an identity crisis for the last couple of years,” said Sanchit Vir Gogia, ‎chief analyst at Delhi-based Greyhound Research. “Flipkart has the advantage of a strong logistics infrastructure that they have developed in-house. And Amazon has long years of experience and deep pockets. But Snapdeal has not solved the logistics problem and it will suffer because of the lack of ecosystem.”

Flipkart vs Snapdeal

Snapdeal was founded three years after Flipkart (2007). Even six years after its inception, though, the company has failed to bridge the gap with its older rival. If anything, the gap has only widened in recent years.

The two companies do not share most of their financial figures publicly, but, based on available information, here’s how they stack up:

 

Valuation: Earlier this year, Flipkart was devalued by multiple investors to anywhere between $9 billion and $11 billion. Even then, it is valued higher than Snapdeal, which was reportedly worth $6.5 billion in February.

 

Funding: Flipkart is among India’s most-funded startups, having raised around $3.5 billion in 12 rounds, according to online startup database CrunchBase. Snapdeal has tapped the market 11 times, but could raise only $1.7 billion.

 

App stats: The number of downloads of Flipkart’s android app far outnumber those of the Snapdeal app. The Flipkart app is rated 4.2 on a scale of 5 by users on the Android Play Store; Snapdeal’s is a tad lower at 4.1.

Seller recall: Amazon is the favourite e-commerce brand among Indian sellers, followed by Flipkart, a study by New York-based market research firm Nielsen said in June. Sellers are important because firms with a greater variety of products attract more buyers.

                                                      

The Amazon threat

Amazon, which launched its Indian arm in 2013—six years after Flipkart was founded and three years after Snapdeal—already has a formidable presence in the country.

The company’s investment commitment to India is now higher than the total funds raised till now by both Flipkart and Snapdeal together.And it looks like Amazon is rapidly rising to the top.

 On May 28, it had 24.1% monthly active users (MAU), way higher than Snapdeal’s 13.1%. MAU represents the share of mobile users in India who open a company’s app at least once in a given month.

Nikesh Arora, former president of SoftBank, which is an investor in Snapdeal, recently acknowledged Amazon’s threat to Snapdeal.

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“In the last two years what has happened is that Jeff Bezos has come out and said he wants to win India at all cost. He will spend billions of dollars in India and that’s a new competitive fact. You have to figure out a way to compete with that,” Arora told The Times of India in an interview.

 

However, Snapdeal itself is confident about its position. “Amazon’s ‘threat’ to Indian e-commerce players is being overstated by media,” a company spokesperson told Quartz. “We spend less time thinking about what our competition is doing than thinking about what we can do for customers. ”

 

Winner’s market

Historically, internet-based businesses have often had a single dominant market leader—like Facebook in social networking and Google in search.

 

“I don’t believe the Indian market will be able to sustain two big domestic players and one big international player,” said Anindya Ghose, director of New York University’s Center for Business Analytics. “In about three years, I believe, the Indian market will have to consolidate into one international and one domestic player. So it will be Amazon, and either Flipkart or Snapdeal.”

 

Based on current data, then, it is not hard to call the winner among Flipkart and Snapdeal.However, Arora, who was on Snapdeal’s board until recently, disagrees on this count.

 “In India, you will have a dominant player and others will exist, too. It won’t be a winner-takes-all market, either in e-commerce or in ride-hailing,” Arora told a newspaper. “The question is who will be the big and the small players, (and) with what market share?”
 

At Snapdeal

In the meantime, Snapdeal, like rival Flipkart, has been grappling with internal challenges.Among other things, the company has missed its sales targets. Snapdeal’s GMV of around $4 billion in March 2016 was far below CEO Bahl’s $10-billion target.

 

There have also been several top-level exits in 2016. In January, senior vice-president of marketing Srinivas Murthy resigned. In May, it lost its prized Silicon Valley hire Anand Chandrasekaran, who was its chief product officer. In June, the business head for electronics, Saif Iqbal, quit.

 

At the other end, the company is going slow on hiring. “We plan to remain very close to our current employee strength over this year,” a Snapdeal spokesperson said.

 

In May, The Economic Times reported that the company had scaled down operations in its regional offices at Bengaluru, Mumbai, Kolkata, and Hyderabad, and may even shut down a few if it fails to raise a fresh funding round. Snapdeal, however, trashed these reports as “incorrect, baseless and misleading.”

The company is attempting to tap into the talent pool in Silicon Valley. On May 30, Snapdeal said it has set up a data sciences centre at San Carlos, California, which will help it hire veteran data scientists who could help Snapdeal develop stronger capabilities around analytics and predictive behaviour.

 To its credit, Snapdeal has been more aggressive in terms of acquisitions than rival Flipkart. The company is credited with the biggest acquisition ever in the Indian startup space—mobile payments startup, Freecharge, for around $450 million.
 

Since 2010, Snapdeal has acquired 13 companies, while Flipkart bought nine.

 But experts are unsure if all these acquisitions will help Snapdeal find its mojo. “It is incredibly difficult to find a USP in e-commerce retailing. There is only so much one can fight on reducing costs and margins,” Ghose of New York University said.

Startup- 5 Step Action Plan for Entrepreneurs!

Posted on by LiveitupSoul

“It’s all about the priorities along with the ‘Will’, how faithful and dedicated a person is, defines the intensity of success in a startup” 

Starting up a venture or initiating something on your own gives immense pleasure and the feeling of satisfaction. Whether it is successful or not successful, but yes! It gives the strength to the character of a person. The startup leader wears many different hats to perform variety of jobs and in the end he is a skilled man, who is different from the 90% crowd who haven’t even tried.

It takes determination with fortitude to leave a well paying job to pursue the dreams and taking risk to start a venture. These people are unique in themselves and have their own kind of respect in the minds of people around them. Some of these brave people have shared their views and experiences for those who are on their way to become an entrepreneur, let us have a look on it.

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1. Research, Research and more Research : 

If you are about to or have already left your job, then you would have already set the eyes on some problem or an opportunity that you want to address. But even before you write a line of business plan or code make sure you spend considerable amounts of time to validate your idea. Talking to your expected target audience, your customers and stakeholders, and conducting on-ground research definitely deserves top priority, instead of jumping headfirst into building a product, or a deck for that matter.

As a startup, you will encounter many barriers and challenges, and the only way around them is to know your stuff- better than anyone else. Unbiased information from candid potential customers and users will either give you further validation or help you alter some of your visions accordingly. Either way, it’s a win-win situation.

2. Dividing the Ultimate Purpose into actionable goals, with deadlines:

The thing to remember is that you are now in the driver’s seat- so drive responsibly!  It is not like the corporate job, where we expect the manager to draw up a vision . Creating a vision is our own responsibility here, also the vision(ultimate purpose) needs to be broken down into realistic goals along with a deadline to keep a watch on ourselves.

Building a ‘plan of action’ document with resource allocations and deadlines is the key to effectively building and running a business. The action items need to be realistic and should be achievable with your existing or future team. For the progress of startup, the target dates are considerably important to ensure the unnecessary energy and resources exhaustion.

Entre2

3. Focus on Sales:

‘Constantly work on building relationships and the sales revenue will automatically improve.’

It can be all too easy to get stuck in a romantic view of the business when one is doing what he/she loves, forgetting the fact that it also needs to be profitable. Every single day, the focus must be there to generate the revenues. The founders must not ignore this fact at least till the time they are not having a sales team, even if they have a sales team, they are the “Chief Convincing Officer”. 

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4. Don’t over-burn, or it will burn your startup:

Make sure not to succumb to worldly desires during this whole period because it will only put you in an unpleasant situation later on. No matter how much money you have in the bank- always think efficient and effective. Get an old aircon or laptop even if it has a few months of life left, instead of buying new ones; and make sure never to waste any energy/electricity. Never block capital.

5. Don’t be hasty:

You must learn not to rush things, because success takes time. Patience and determination is extremely important. Don’t drive too fast thinking it will make the road shorter. Feeling pressured into doing things too fast is what should be avoided at all times. Endure and persevere, because if you simply hurry things, it will impact negatively on the work. Ironically, if you push things too soon it may only take you farther away from your goals.

To sum up, if one approaches this path sensibly, responsibly and maturely, starting up can be a priceless experience. Unfortunately, it can’t be learnt sitting in a classroom or enrolling in an online entrepreneurship course.

Hard work pays off all the time, so no matter what your next day or week throws at you, don’t ever give up hope. Leave no stone unturned and keeping pushing hard to see your vision transform into reality. There will be days that will leave you unnerved, but then take a moment to remember the dream you had, long before all this happened, and stay true to it. Trust yourself, it will work !

Keep going ! All the best !

Lessons from Entrepreneurs who fell to rise !

Posted on by LiveitupSoul

As the saying goes, “the best way to learn is to learn from failures” and if from other’s failures, then we are defending ourselves to fall.

“Business is an art as well as a science.”

It’s a matter of practical experience, judgment, foresight and luck. To be successful in business, the mastery is necessary in basics. Luckily, all business skills are learnable. One can learn anything which is needed to learn, from other’s failures or the obstacles they have faced in their journey. There are no limits–except the limits you place on your own imagination.

There are three major reasons why businesses fail: lack of money, lack of knowledge and lack of support.

So what are the essentials of business success? There are key areas of activity that determine whether your business will thrive or die:

1. Marketing- It is the backbone of every business, enable to determine and sell the right product to the right customer at the right time.

2. Finance- For every business, whether expansion budget or Working capital this pillar plays a vital role. There must be sufficient funds before launching any venture, “half investment is equal to high probability of failure”.

3. Production- The ability to produce products and services at a high enough level of quality and consistency over time.

4. Distribution- The ability to get your product or service to the market in a timely and economic fashion.

5. Research and development- The ability to continually innovate and produce new products, services, processes and responses to your competition.

6. Regulation- The ability to deal with the requirements of government legislation at all levels.

7. Labor- The ability to find the people you need, deal with unions, establish personnel policies, training and organizational development.

 

RTG2- IE blog

 

From the above list, we will now define some specific reasons for business success –

  1. Solving a Problem – Having a product or service that’s well suited to the needs and requirements of the current market.
  2. Business Plan – Developing a complete business plan before commencing business operations.
  3. Market Study/Analysis – Conducting a complete market analysis before producing or offering the product or service.
  4. Strategy -Thoroughly developing advertising, promotional and sales programs.
  5. Financials – Establishing tight financial controls, good budgeting practices, accurate bookkeeping and accounting methods, all backed by an attitude of frugality.
  6. Resources – Ensuring that there’s a high degree of competence, capability and integrity on the part of key staff members.
  7. Responsibilities – Having good internal efficiency, time management, clear job descriptions, accompanied by clear and measurable output and responsibilities.
  8. Effective communication – Among the staff and an open-door policy for managers, especially the business’s owner.
  9. Focus – Generating strong momentum in the sales department and placing a continued emphasis on marketing your product or service.
  10. Customer is the king – Making concern for the customer a top priority at all times
    Putting determination, persistence and patience at the top of the list on the part of the business owners.

    So now you know the essentials of business success and the factors responsible for the company’s growth and success !

    The above points are the experiences of the entrepreneurs who did not succeed in their Ventures, by focusing on the weaknesses an entrepreneur can succeed but for that the acceptance is needed.

    All the best !

 

@Igniting EntrepreneursOfficial