Diksha Dutta's Blog, page 2

What entrepreneurs taught me about life

As a writer covering startups, I have lost count of how many entrepreneurs I have met in the past half-decade. I never declined a meeting with an entrepreneur. Not after my first one. Some of them became mentors, others  remained acquaintances while a few are now close friends. Nevertheless, each of them managed to teach me something about life.

I also remember being often told something or the other on the lines of not understanding entrepreneurs because I am not one myself. In this article...

Conferences and Events: How to benefit from them as a startup

When I began my career eight years ago as a cub-reporter in a national business newspaper, I often wondered why my editor was careful about the conferences he chose to attend. As the junior-most member of the team, I was the default representative for my newspaper in almost every conference that happened in Delhi’s technology and startup ecosystem of the time. I have even attended four conferences in a day. Looking back, I have come to appreciate my editor’s discretion, and also why some smar...

Don´t have a tech co-founder for your startup? Relax.

“Steve Jobs did not know technology. He had never designed anything as a hardware engineer, and he didn’t know software. He wanted to be important, and the important people are always the business people. So that’s what he wanted to do,” these were the words of Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple in an interview last year. Even Walter Isaacson has not hesitated from talking about Steve Job’s lack of technical skills in the Job’s biography which was originally published in 2011. The truth,...

How startups manage time and teams better with technology apps

“The bad news is, time flies. The good news is, you’re the pilot.” ― Michael Altshuler

 The good news is that I have seen genius entrepreneurs and their brilliant teams come together to build a startup. The bad news is that I have witnessed them fail because of poor time and team management skills. For a startup, time is money and it should be spent judiciously ; teams are their  biggest asset and they should be valued. Technology can be used to solve these two problems, here is why and how.

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What to expect from the TiE Global Summit 2016

13th December,2016: Yesterday morning, I received a call from an early-stage entrepreneur who wanted to know my views on whether he should be attending the two-day TiE Global Summit 2016 or not at the Taj Palace, New Delhi on the 16th &17th December, 2016. While my instant reply to him was ,“Yes, of course you should!”, I myself was  left with some food for thought that what and how could he possibly gain from an event like TiE.

Is TiE just another startup event or does it have something excl...

Should you work with family members in your startup?

You cannot choose the family you are born into, but you can definitely choose whether to involve family into your business – your enterprise, your professional space. As a startup, this decision becomes even more crucial.  Are you ready to take that chance of mixing the professional with the personal? To break the adage of keeping the two apart?

When I began my research for this piece, I found numerous articles elaborating  various reasons why one should not work with family members in a busi...

Rs 500-Rs 1000 notes ban : Initial hiccups lead to “good days” for startups

10th November, 2016, New Delhi : When I spoke to Hyderabad-based entrepreneur Ashok Reddy yesterday morning, he was a hassled man. It had much to do with what happened  the day before i.e. the evening of 8th November 2016. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the ban of Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes in the country, in a move to eradicate fake currency, corruption and illegal income. More details here.

Reddy’s phone did not stop ringing the morning after this announcement and he was busy w...

Can entrepreneurship be taught?

Can any form of ‘art’ like dancing, painting or singing be taught? It is often claimed that one is either born an artist or one is not. Only if you have the inherent rhythm can you be trained as a dancer, only if you are born with a sense of aesthetics can the artist in you be honed. Similar is the case with entrepreneurship. The will or the instinct to be an entrepreneur cannot be taught, but some quintessential entrepreneurial skills can be.

 The question is not whether entrepreneurship can...

What to consider when you expand globally as a startup

Five years  ago, when my sole occupation was that of a business journalist with a prominent national newspaper in India, I had the opportunity to interview John Flannery — the then President and CEO of the India operations of General Electric.  Headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, this American multinational conglomerate was focusing its efforts towards having a sound strategy   for increasing its footprint in India.  To quote Flannery from that interview:

“The key thing for GE as a globa...