“Whatever you do ,please go & Change the world to make it a better place”
That was one succint message that Draper gave to a gathering of TiE members on Thursday evening. I have gushed about Draper before here. It was basically the same set of slides but contextualized with an Indian tone is what was presented. Inspite of me having heard & seen it before, it was a wonderful presentation & quite a unique experience. If only I could link to that presentation it would be great for those who not attended, Every TiE event is recorded, I believe for TiE archives. If they open it up it could benefit a lot for those who don’t get to attend the presentation physically.
Important points from the presentation.( not captured anywhere else)
– DFJ thinking of setting up office in India
– DFJ announced a $200 M India based fund.
– It is conducting a nation wide business plan competition.
– During Q & A Tim mentioned that hotmail was not the result of an idea which Sabeer had originally pitched but it came up when Tim asked them if they had a better idea and they told about giving out email for free and making money somehow by scale.( The idea they pitched was something related to Javasoft etc). In response to another question he mentioned that even skype was like that the first idea that was pitched was something else.
– To a question that I asked as to what makes him create an India fund when all the previous VC’s who came and spoke did not want to create India fund as they thought India is not ready ( no infra yet), he responded it is purely gut based decision and has no study/numbers to back it up. Now my gut says 🙂 that this is going to be significant point of time/event when we look back after a couple years.
– The question of the day was asked by guy who said this
“Tim in your slide you mentioned that the qualities that you are looking for in entrepreneur are passion, vision & focus but you also mentioned that Sabeer when he came to you it was the other idea than his original pitched idea that you funded which was hotmail & also in the case of Nikolas Zennstrom the second idea that you asked( since the first one was not good enough) they was was skype, so I am little confused in understanding that thow focus/vision are important attributes”
Response by Tim was that it is a good point and that never occured to him , he said forget the last two points, it is just passion, Then to handle the situation in an eloquent way he said these entreprenuers had a vision but with the second idea they had a better vision 🙂
I think this was not just question of the day but question of the year, it is quite paradoxical setting & no one has the right answer to this question but still many would stress about focus/vision.
mtrajan.com 