For the second edition of Google’s popular mentoring programme, Launchpad Week, the company has selected 16 Indian start-ups focused on areas like user experience, user interface, product strategy, technology, marketing, business development and presentation skills. This seems like a great opportunity for potential start-ups who will be allowed to pitch to VCs on the concluding day.
The programme is aimed at encouraging the local start-up ecosystem and to support existing accelerator and incubation programmes. This is Launchpad Week’s second iteration that will be held in Bengaluru as a part of its yearly four-part series. The weeklong event is held in other parts of the world as well like Tel Aviv, Barcelona, Paris, Berlin, Singapore and Berlin.
To propagate diversity, this edition has opened to start-ups outside Bengaluru as well – three each from Mumbai, Delhi NCR and one of Hyderabad. Some of the start-ups that will be part of the programme are Bengaluru-based furniture rental company Furlenco, Gurgaon-based contextual news start-up Newsbytes and capital-based mobile travel marketplace SeekSherpa.
“We have taken only startups that have dealt with real experiences on ground. The cost it incurs to the founders is minimal but they get validation from real customers. We have identified startups that have validated their ideas much more thoroughly this time. They have used the classic product management approach with step-by-step iteration to validate their ideas. Even before the prototype, they have done a market study to assess the interest levels among 200-300 potential customers. The pedigree of entrepreneurs is very good,” said Sunil Rao, country head – developer relations and start-up ecosystem at Google India.
The group of mentors present in the event include Cisco’s UX lead Muthu Rajamani, Adobe Systems consumer group’s design lead Sharad Baliyan, Redbus co-founder Phanindra Sama, Google’s programme manager and member of its developer relations team in India Amrit Sanjeev and JPMorgan Chase vice-president Saurabh Chandra. To learn about go-to-market strategies, Seedfund’s managing partner Bharati Jacob and Srijan Capital’s partner Ravi Trivedi would also be present.
