Nasscom to launch Entrepreneurship Club

BANGALORE: The National Association of Software Companies (Nasscom) in India

will launch an Entrepreneurship Club (EC) on October 2, 2000, for enabling

hundreds of techies to start their own enterprises with the help of IT industry

leaders. Announcing this, Nasscom president Dewang Mehta said the gameplan was

to facilitate CEOs, CTOs, and COOs of its member companies to become mentors for

those IT whizkids who have ideas and plans for exploiting frontier technologies.

Together they will rope in venture capitalists (VCs) to fund such projects.

"Out of the 716 registered software companies with Nasscom, about 150 have

agreed to join the EC and become mentors of any potential entrepreneur. Once

concepts and ideas take concrete shape, many of them will partner as angel

investors. They will also volunteer to participate in EC meetings once a

month," Mehta said while delivering his keynote address at the two-day

conference on "Cyber Entrepreneurship-2000", organized by the Indian

Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore.

The EC will also have direct access to VC funding as all the 86 VCs, which

are members of Nasscom, have confirmed their participation in the Club. Nasscom

will provide EC guidance and consultation required by the techies to launch

their own start-ups.

An exclusive Web site on EC will also be hosted on the Nasscom portal (www.nasscom.org.com)

to help potential entrepreneurs overcome their teething problems in terms of

procedures, rules and regulations, clearances, and source of funding.

According to a recent Nasscom-McKinley study and the projections made

therein, it is estimated that IT-enabled exports alone will generate RS 81

billion fore by 2008. Projection for the current financial year (2000-01) is

around Rs 4 billion, and Rs 6.5-billion for the next (2001-02).