Impacting a Rural Eco-system
Sramana Mitra
Founder and CEO of One Million by the One Million (1Mby1M) Global Virtual Accelerator
During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Tom Fallenstein, President and CEO of Fun.com. Tom has built a niche e-commerce company up to $55 Million in revenue with no outside funding from rural Minnesota. He discussed his organic growth strategies, and how his company has impacted a rural eco-system profoundly by creating a large number of jobs.
LukPik
As for the pitches, first up, Ashwin Swarup from Hyderabad, India, pitched LukPik, a cloud service for retailers in India to make available their inventory so that consumers can figure out where to buy a certain garment. The assumptions in the project have a number of issues and Tom and I pointed out so that Ashwin can work on them.
Kiyaa
Then Hima Sailaja Theerdhala, also from Hyderabad but visiting San Jose, California, pitched Kiyaa, an Indian doll a la Barbie. Sailaja has already sold about 4000 units, and is working on developing a defensible strategy. Tom and I both really liked the business. It has very exciting potential.
ExCell Matrix Biological Devices
Next, AK Dutta, from Hyderabad as well, pitched ExCell Matrix Biological Devices. Not exactly our area of expertise, especially issues like whether medical devices can be funded by equity crowdfunding, I declined to advise this entrepreneur.
Amusingly, the pitches today were by entrepreneurs from Hyderabad, India.
You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:
As always, I would very much like to hear about your business, so let me invite you to come and pitch at one of our free 1M/1M public roundtables. We will be holding future roundtables at 8 a.m. PDT on:
Thursday, August 20, Register Here.
Thursday, August 27, Register Here.
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