Wait a minute before you sigh, another accelerator in India!
It may seem at first that the young startup ecosystem in India already has too many accelerators and incubators vying to net the best among sprouting companies. But, on closer inspection, you may find that many of these greenhouses for fledgling startups are as good as being in the real estate business. That is, a number of them just give a rent-free space in a well-connected locality for startups to work from, and take a substantial equity in return for that privilege, instead of providing the support, mentorship and connections that startups need the most. Little wonder that most ‘incubated’ or ‘accelerated’ startups meander off and die. Or, if they manage to survive, they often end up kicking themselves for giving up so much of their equity for nothing.
Jaarwis wants to take a different track. This global accelerator from Hong Kong, which will kick off its first batch in India in February, promises to roll up its sleeves and work right alongside its incubatees. And it has all the wherewithal to do that, with the tech savvy it commands, just as Jarvis (Just Another Very Intelligent System) did for Iron Man in the super-hero movie.
Investor-turned-entrepreneur Gabriel Fong, CEO and founder of Hong Kong’s smart logistics company GoGoVan, and technologists Kuldeep Bhayana and Jaspal Sarai initially founded Jaarwis Technology in late 2013 to start their own new tech startups. The trio has five Jaarwis Technology ventures up and running already: portable embedded device Tag, food guide with in-built point-of-sale Foodsonic, marketplace for handymen CallFixie, payments enabler SecureBot, and web-enabler for small businesses Scribe A Store. These are run from Jaarwis offices in Hong Kong, Gurgaon (a satellite town of Delhi in India), and Melbourne in Australia.
Then the penny dropped: instead of just starting up and running their own companies, why not share their knowledge and experience more widely to help other promising young entrepreneurs make it? The experience with conceptualizing, building, and running the Jaarwis Technology ventures got Fong, Bhayana, and Sarai thinking about starting an accelerator to help others kick-off their cool ideas.
“If we can help startups to save time from not having to second guess every time they have to make a big decision, we would have done our job. In the startup world, every mistake can be fatal. We want to help startups move faster with confidence, and guide them away from fatal pitfalls,” says Fong in an exclusive interview with Tech in Asia.
“Our accelerator will be a rapid deployment partner for every startup we pick,” adds Kuldeep Bhayana, who will be based in Gurgaon, where Jaarwis has just rolled out a smart working space that can accommodate 40 startups at a time.
Before founding Jaarwis, Bhayana was the CTO of a global wireless M2M business headquartered in Australia. Jaspal Sarai was that company’s CEO.
Just like the fictional Jarvis helps Iron Man execute his world-changing plans, the Jaarwis accelerator wants to help entrepreneurs launch startups that can go global. One of Jaarwis’s key propositions is that from day one, it wants the incubatees to think of a global market. “Start in India, but think global,” that’s its mantra. Given the background of the accelerator’s founders, it certainly seems capable to help Indian startups do exactly that.
Why do 99 out of 100 startups fail?
Fong has been in the private equity and venture capital space for the past 20 years, actively investing in tech companies in China and the rest of the world. Essentially, his job was to pick the right businesses and the right team, invest in them, and help them scale up. He retired from the investment career in September 2013, and very quickly co-founded first GoGoVan and then Jaarwis Technology.
What struck him the most over the years was the impossibly high percentage of startups that fail. “A lot of people nurse the romantic notion of startups out there to kill the world. However, out of 100 startups, 99 will fail. That is because though a lot of people come with interesting ideas, they are just too young. They don’t have the experience or know-how to properly convert that idea into a real business,” says Fong . “At Jaarwis Technology, we were at the other extreme. All three of us co-founders have had decades of experience in strategy, investing, and execution.”
The Jaarwis accelerator was born when they thought: “Why not institutionalize our collective expertise?”
Indian internet companies’ market cap 1.5 percent that of China’s
Taking the Jaarwis accelerator to India was the next logical step. Bhayana pointed out to Fong that there was a lot they could do in a country with so much potential whose entrepreneurial spirit was just being unshackled. Currently, India is the world’s fastest growing startup ecosystem currently, with more than two tech companies sprouting every day.
Fong couldn’t agree more. As he puts it to Tech in Asia now:
I have earlier invested in Indian technology companies, and I see great potential. When I compare India to China, 15 years ago, they were roughly in the same stage of development. But now, when you look at the market cap of technology and internet companies in India versus those in China, India is at 1.5 percent of China. That doesn’t make sense to me. India is a country where people speak fluent English. Indians tend to be very good managers – if you look at the top management at global investment banks, most are of Indian origin. And Indians are technically proficient too. Despite all this, why should it be that in technology and internet businesses, India has only 1.5 percent market cap of that of China? That is something I want to try and change.
As for Bhayana and Sarai, there’s a strong personal motivation too. They want to give something back to their country. “Helping Indian startups become successful will be a great thing for India,” says Fong.
Idea on paper to $5 million valuation in four months
Jaarwis has already picked four startups in India to incubate in its first batch, and several more may be identified this weekend at a pitching session in Gurgaon, for which startups from all over the country have been invited.
One of the early birds is a small team of former aerospace engineers who want to start an intelligent event discovery platform. Bhayana found their idea powerful but the team is very young, with no experience in execution. Though the incubation program starts in February, Jaarwis has already found them a CTO, CFO, and other key team members.
Thanks to its own tech ventures, Jaarwis has a 100-strong technology team and several mentors available already to work side by side with its incubatees. “We will help you take your startup to market in four months. Even if you come to us with just a great idea on paper, on the 120th day, you will have a running company with a valuation of US$2 to 5 million. And we will take you to a pool of investors and help you get funding to scale further,” says Bhayana confidently.
“We have an hour-by-hour schedule for them that will crunch the usual 12 months time-to-market cycle for startups to four months,” he adds.
To a question on whether Jaarwis is adopting the Rocket Internet model of crazy fast deployment, Bhayana points out his accelerator will be different: “We are going to take a lot of responsibilities on behalf of the startups we pick, but we are not going to be the majority stakeholders, like Rocket Internet tends to be for its startups. We will be more like the pit-crew with seven to 15 percent stake – a minority co-founder.”
The Jaarwis founders know from long experience that it’s not the idea itself that fails in many instances. Time to market and flawless execution are what can prevent promising startups from committing suicide.
This post <a href="https://www.techinasia.com/this-jaarwis-will-make-iron-man-out-of-startups-in-india/" title="This Jaarwis wants to make Iron Men out of startups. And it just arrived in India”>This Jaarwis wants to make Iron Men out of startups. And it just arrived in India appeared first on Tech in Asia.
This Jaarwis wants to make Iron Men out of startups. And it just arrived in India
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