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Kick-starting start-ups

Kanchana Suggu

If you are a young entrepreneur with innovative ideas about IT and e-commerce and the like, you might be interested in what McKinsey and Company has to offer. For they intend to help professionals, existing entrepreneurs or even students financial and technical support if a panel of experts deems your idea worth the trouble.

Mr Ashok Alexander, Director, McKinsey and Company, India said that the new venture,

T O D A Y

• Keyboards in cabinets • Wipro-Autodesk pack

India Venture 2000, will benefit budding entrepreneurs in three ways -- "through learning, through the opportunity to network and through building a potential access to funds".

Alexander said McKinsey has undertaken similar talent quests in the United States of America, Germany, Holland and Switzerland earlier: in Germany, McKinsey attracted 54,000 entrepreneurs and generated 40 businesses, and, in Switzerland, 20. All details, including details of the online participation procedure, are available at the India Venture 2000 web site.

Around 100 coaches around the world are a part of this project. The advisory board comprises of gurus like K V Kamath, Rajesh Jain, N R Narayana Murthy, Managing Director, Infosys and Dewang Mehta, President, NASSCOM.

According to Jain, Indiaworld's managing director, "India is a brand name, but Indians aren't. These days, people in the age group of 25-35 years are more and more willing to take a chance. Indiaventure 2000 hopes to facilitate the mentoring and networking, to finally bring the entrepreneurs and the venture capitalists together".

The four major venture capital funds involved with the project are Chrysalis, ICICI Venture, Infinity and Walden. Coaches from Infosys, TCS, Satyam, Bharati Enterprises and entrepreneurs from successful ventures like hungama.com, contests2win.com and arzoo.com will also be actively involved in this venture.

"Our goal is to see that ideas eventually lead to creation of wealth. In our own VC we have been grappling with problems related to entrepreneurs. We believe that the knowledge industry has enormous scope for wealth creation. That is the reason we are in this business", said K V Kamath.

McKinsey will do the initial screening of applicants and their ideas will be then forwarded to the 'right person for the right kind of money'.

McKinsey hopes to generate at least 15-20 businesses in India. But all the ideas have to be in by the last week of February 2000. "We hope to get the businesses started by June 2000 definitely," Alexander said.

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