For the past two days, an event named Proto SE brought together entrepreneurs, technologists, investors as well as members of the fourth estate under one roof at IIT Madras. If you would like to experience this event vicariously, you could start by reading several posts on the blogosphere.

Tolmolbol was one of the chosen few products selected to present at Proto SE. And here is our story.

“How was it preparing for Proto?”

As a nominated company, we were allotted 6 minutes on the stage to present to the attendees and we needed to make every second count. Luckily for us, our product was already live and we could show the product in action. Nevertheless, I took a snapshot of our live site and ran the application hosted from my laptop rather than risk running into a poor internet connection whilst on stage. This had its own last minute challenges because things like Google maps need an internet connection to work properly. The other issue was in figuring out the right format for the presentation. We started of our preparation by looking at a dozen odd videos on Demo. It should be noted however that at Demo, you get 10 minutes to make your pitch. Proto is a far more exciting challenge because you have only six minutes to say what matters most. Despite the lack of time, Amit and I took every opportunity to prepare for this challenge including one mock demo at the Hyderabad airport in front of a few amused passengers :).

“What was it like on the first day?”

For a presenting company, the first day involved a closed door mentoring session. The way this was organized was as follows. The participating companies belonging to each sector were grouped together and were given 30 minutes each to present the six minute demo to a closed group of mentors. In parallel, there were other mentors advising companies in different venues within IIT Madras. Apart from the six minute pitch, each company received a critical assessment of the demo as well as valuable feedback on how to field questions about the product, the market need and so on. On the flip side, attending this session meant we were forced to miss the business and technology tracks of the conference. You can’t win ‘em all, can you? In the evening, there was a closed door networking dinner with VCs representing almost all of the big funds focused towards investments in Indian companies.

“So, how was the second day?”

Once again, we had to wake up early and rush to the venue as the presentations were scheduled to begin at 9:30 a.m. We reached IIT at about 8:30 in the morning and met with the early birds who had arrived. Some of them included companies that presented during the first edition of Proto like SpotEazy. In the intervening time, we distributed flyers to the seated audience.

And then the show began.

All of the demos were interesting. To be honest, I couldn’t really focus on them as much as I would have liked for we had our own presentation to worry about. But I particularly liked the presentation of the folks from Mocodile. It was a conversational demo similar to ours.

We chose a conversational style of presentation for two reasons:

a) Tolmolbol has a whole lot of cool features – local search, maps, a local social network, events, classifieds as well as a forum to ask questions and guide the community. We wanted to showcase the complete suite of city specific features rather than dwell on just one single thing. Otherwise, the audience may not completely grasp the vision behind the product or the problem we are trying to solve.

b) The second reason to keep the presentation in the form of a dialogue is that it is easy to remember what you have to say succinctly when there is a prompt in the form of a question. It is easy for one person to ask questions such as “Can I do this?” and “Alright, so can I do that?” and for the other person to say, “Oh yes, let me show you how”.

The presentations concluded at around 2 PM and within no time, we were transported to a room for interactions with media persons as well as investors. In hindsight, we should have had our lunch. Because if there are some persons on earth who you have to meet with fully charged batteries, those people would include media persons and venture capitalists! Personally, I was happy to see the energy left in our team after two full days of hectic activity. I was happier still to receive loads of invaluable advice from quite a few well-meaning VCs. And yes, at the end of the day, there was one more dinner at the beautiful Madras Club to look forward to - courtesy the gracious folks from Mentor Partners. The invite failed to mention that this club has a strict dress code. But let me save the funny story of what happened next for another day!

“What did you, as a company, enjoy the most about Proto SE?”

This was the question posed by a journalist from the New Indian Express. For me, this was a difficult question to answer because I had trouble picking a favourite. So, I talked about the two things we enjoyed the most. The first was the opportunity to closely interact with other entrepreneurs. We got to meet some of the wonderful people behind startups like BuzzWorks, Voiee, Tekriti, Inasra, MineKey, Tyroo. The complete list is quite long. Apart from the entrepreneurs themselves, there was another special group of folks who made all of this possible. And that is the people who are part of The Knowledge Foundation. It was quite extraordinary to see the level of involvement of the people behind Proto. Therefore, getting to personally meet the incredibly passionate folks behind many startups as well as the people behind Proto was my most memorable experience.

In conclusion, Proto SE was successful in opening new opportunities for entrepreneurs aspiring to build a great company. As a nominated company, we thank Vijay, Ravi, Jagadish, Syed, Siddharta, Kiruba and the other great folks in the Knowledge Foundation for envisioning and organizing Proto. If you are either planning to start a company or an entrepreneur yourself, just shoot us an email at info@tolmolbol.com if you have any questions. We would be happy to help and share the valuable lessons we learnt through this experience. And I wish you the very best of success in chasing your dreams!

This entry was posted on Monday, July 23rd, 2007 at 12:03 pm and is filed under media, press, fun. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.