Rakesh Balaji is 28 and has a seven-year track record as a chip design engineer. He wants to quit his job and start-up with his own company in Bangalore. Dreaming about an idea and marshalling the courage to quit his job with a California-based semiconductor products’ company is hard enough. But Balaji’s toughest challenge yet is to find funding for his idea. Balaji and hundreds of other aspiring entrepreneurs swarmed the TiE Entrepreneurial Summit in Bangalore, earlier this week, as they tried to figure out how to fund and grow companies in a brutal business environment.

As a Silicon Valley-like-start-up culture begins to take root in Bangalore, long considered the world’s destination for outsourcing, India’s young entrepreneurs are facing a tough reality. Finding partners, investors and employees is tricky at the best of times. But in a recessionary global economy, it can be simply overwhelming. The nervous energy was evident as young men and women flocked around successful entrepreneurs such as Azim Premji of Wipro and Vijay Mallya of United Breweries who were at the TiE summit. The three-day event, billed as Asia’s largest for entrepreneurs, had 43 sessions and 135 speakers and 22 panel discussions.

Entrepreneurs venturing into a wide array of sectors such as security, clean energy, aerospace, leisure and medical systems hung on to every word. TiE, short for The Indus Entrepreneurs, is a Silicon Valley-based not-for-profit founded by successful Indians to help support Indian start-ups by providing advice, contacts and funding. It seemed like Padma Duraiswamy (32), founder-CEO of Bangalore-based Chimera Technologies, which provides services to self-service kiosk developers, was in the need of all three. Duraiswamy was at the TiE event to get “pepped up”, she said. She wants to expand her company, figure out a future direction and muster up some funding. “Should I take the venture capital route for funding?” she wondered aloud. In a gloomy economic scenario, small start-ups have the hardest time, said Sanjeev Joshi, a director at incubating firm Invendis Technologies. Funding is squeezed dry and valuations are at a dismal low.

... contd.