It was an article in Financial Express, a business journal. The topic was about “Buzz Entrepreneurs are creating in Chennai”. I was quoted in the article along with Suresh Sambandam and Chandu Nair. One thing common between all of us is that we participate in several entrepreneurial and tech communities like Chennai Open Coffee Club, Nasscom Emerge, TiE Chennai, The Startup Centre and Chennai Geeks. Some of us mentor startups. Some of us advice companies. Most of us spend a lot of time with fellow entrepreneurs. We have a sense that Chennai is rising. We don’t want to hype it too much, but we like what we see in the entrepreneurial scene.
I personally feel that we are somewhere in the beginning of a big wave of young entrepreneurs. Our Chennai OCC meets are more fun. We all are striving to be Lean Startups. We learn from the Silicon Valley gurus like Steve Blank and Eric Ries, put our own spin, and experiment. A recent mentor day at TiE Chennai had over 100+ people attending (and 19 mentors). There is a sense of euphoria, cautious optimism and a feeling that we have the potential of being big players in a Global market. We have, of course, a long way to go. Companies like Zoho, OrangeScape, Fresh Desk are inspiring many Chennai product companies.
It started with a post from Venkatesh Krishnamurthy, a familiar figure in the startup community. He posted the Financial Express Article and tagged me. I read the article and tweeted it. Like I do most of the time, I also shortened the URL using bit.ly. Within minutes, I got bit.ly alert. The link received about 23 clicks. I was not really surprised. The Chennai community is a very supportive one. You can see the stats here. What really surprised me was that there were clicks from countries other than India.
That is social media for you. It is powerful and the best part of it is, the results (however small) are visible immediately. Within an hour of reading a Facebook post, I am hitting Publish on this blog post.