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The highlight of headstart was Ashish Gupta‘s keynote session on Company building, then founder of Junglee and now VC at Helion Ventures. The session was candid, interactive, honest, and chock full of lessons learned. If you ever get the chance to hear Ashish speak again, drop everything you are doing and go listen to him. Nikhil has the notes from the talk; Nikhil, Vinayak & I were going wow this guy is brilliant during the entire keynote. Maybe the headstart folks should allocate an entire day to Ashish next time!

I had the opportunity to chat wish Ashish before his keynote; I asked him about how he built a rockstar team at Junglee that included the likes of himself, Peter Norvig, Venky Harinarayan, Anand Rajaraman & Ram Shriram — folks that I have heard off. Ashish mentioned that they were many more rockstars and that hiring all of them had to do mostly with luck and some associated to the fact that all 4 founders were from Stanford!

People:
It was nice meeting some old friends, Vinayak, Nikhil, Badri and Venki and many interesting conversations with some new ones; Harish is weaving a web of data, met Srinivasan of Amagi — a disruptive company working on targeted local video advertising, Chirayu Patel of SnappyFingers, Anthony Hisao of EnTrip, Arjun Ram of Taaza, Sid Banerjee of IndusGeeks, Ganesh Rengaswamy – to whom I mentioned the gaping hole in the sub $500,000 funding category i.e. India missing the First Round Capital, Union Square Venture, Founders Fund and Ambient Sound Investments type of VC’s. Also met a few people who read Hacker News.

Startups:
There were many interesting startups, in no particular order, Tringme working on Web Telephony, IndusGeeks working on Metamersive Learning Spaces — really cool applications of their technology, Entrip – a travel blogging website with a slick UI, Snappy Fingers – a Q&A based search engine, WisdomTap – an aggregator of product reviews.

Headstart also had a tutorial track, I attended the ones about Yahoo BOSS & Google’s Open Social, quite informative. On the whole, it was a good use of 2 days and worth the time. The startup ecosystem in India is vibrant and interesting!