The Startup Awards: Do They Matter?
Startups long for visibility in search of their customers! I was also longing for visibility for my startup in 2014. Looking back, each stage now looks like a temple to me. The time and effort a founder and team put into presenting their best face to the world is priceless.
I presented ActOnMagic at numerous events, including Hot100 Technology Companies, Ericsson Startup Conclave, Nasscom Product Conclave (2014, 2015), and IBM Cloud Conference 2016. Each of these events provided introductions, investor connections, international contacts, good friends, and more.
During one of the NPC sessions, Dave McClure taught me an important lesson: When you speak to a founder, what do they talk about most? Is it the problem they’re solving, their customers, or awards and recognition? It’s not a good sign if the startup only talks about recognition! This indirectly indicates that they either don’t have customers or their customers are not satisfied with their offerings.
However, some startup awards helped me both strategically and financially. In 2014, ActOnMagic was one of the Hot100 technology startups. I traveled to Mumbai (by bus to save 2000 bucks – blame bootstrapping) to receive the award. Netmagic, one of the event sponsors, awarded each winning company Rs. 75,000 in cloud credits.
Through my Citrix colleagues, I received the contact of Netmagic’s CTO, Jayabalan S (popularly known as JB). I wrote to him, explaining that we were a Hot100 technology award company, solving specific problems and providing dashboards for CXOs. I visited the Bangalore DC2 Datacenter and demoed our initial offering in 2014.
Two years later, when JB started another initiative, he asked if I was looking for funding. The rest is history, and I will write about it separately.
The NPC 2014 event gave me the opportunity to meet the CIO of Tata Communications in Mumbai. The Mini Cloud Conference event introduced me to Sebastien, VP of CloudStack, who later provided introductions to many European cloud providers and eventually offered us a development project for his Skippbox.
While startup awards are valuable, the connections we make at these events and our efforts to nurture these connections are even more important. The rest is God’s grace. Sorry, everything is God’s grace.
