Though there are thousands of startups and hundreds getting funded and countless people online to create in digital market and flourishing startup echo system of India, Sharad Sharma is not happy. Sharad Sharma is earliest startup mentor who is also most respected in Indian tech industry. He is also angle investor active with two dozen of investment and co-founder of ISPIRIT the Indian Software Production Industry Round- Table. ISPIRIT held a closed door retreat called Product Nation Growth – PNGrowth for 200 selected startups to see if these startups are prospective enough to become leaders in their class either in domestic market or global and if they could be a forte aimed at SaaS solution or even a cloud based customer support kit. It was a real painful process. The entrepreneurs had to deal with unnerving question from peers and co-hosts of the program, the professors from Duke University and Stanford University.
Nobody in the echo system actually calls a startup a prospective failure. The VCs politely tell them to come again when they have more footing and the mentors are poorly qualified to assess, said Sharad. PNGRowth with volunteers from iSPIRIT and grants Universities was free and it showed an unvarnished mirror of startups which was not gratifying though the startups who attended represented the cream of Indian startup scene. Sharad expected at least 60 out of 200 startups to come up to expectation but it was only 14 which is clearly shows that we are creating quantity but not quality. The sad part is the rest who are not up to the mark do not even know it and are only wasting precious time .the only persons benefited are test prep centers. This situation does not solve the country’s economic issue. The Ecosystem needs to have minimum success levels to get escape velocity which does not seem possible by the result seen in retreat even conducted in Mysore.
