Sun Startup CTO Tech Forum
The Sun Startup CTO Tech Forum on November 11th was a half day event targeting about 50 attendees from 25 to 30 startups in Bangalore. The event saw a turnout of over 45 startups CEOs/CTOs/Founders from 30 different startups.The event opened with a one hour panel discussion where the panelists from the startup community spoke about their own experiences. The key takeaways of the discussion were:
Startups can build world class products at very low costs, using minimal resources with a short time-to-market if they pick the right technologies. Open source tools, reusing and building upon existing 3rd party components has a lot of benefits in terms of cost & quick prototype development. To cite Sloka Telecom's example - Sloka had plans to roll out a WiMAX product. They were overwhelmed at the cost of development which
amounted to a few tens of millions dollars. After some serious R & D Sloka turned out a competitive & cost effective product for under a million dollars. Their mantra was to leverage open source tools, low cost equipment & focus on the bare necessities.
Focus should be on functionality rather than the features and presentation when startups want to quickly roll out a prototype. While there is a natural tendency to experiment with bleeding edge technology, the general opinion is to go along with technologies that are tried and tested by a few successful companies.
Scalability considerations for the application and deployment choices should be made early in the development cycle to avoid re-architecting entire products after deployment. This seems to be the most common issue that most startups continue face and most of them learn the hard way. Rohit Agarwal of techTribe & Mohit Saxena of mKhoj both covered different aspects of this problem.
Mohit Saxena drew examples from his personal experiences at his 1.5 year old startup thats scaling and growing rapidly.mKhoj a mobile ad serving company, went from serving 100k ad impressions to 1 million in less than a month! When they began development they focused on getting the product to market very quickly
without considering a potential scaling issue. When their application started crashing and resources maxing out, they had to go through a entire cycle of re-architecting to scale up.
The event concluded with 2 Sun Startup Essential partner case studies - ChannelMentor & mKhoj.
Great forum, good feedback, lots more work to be done. Before I forget, we must thank the guys at headstart.in and Netmagic Solutions for their support & enthusiasm!!
Posted at 04:45PM Nov 21, 2008
by Aparna Kumar in Sun |
