About Me

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Mumbai, India
I run an IT Security consulting firm based out of India. We started off from scratch in 2001 when I was 21, and have offices in Mumbai, Bahrain, and UAE. The idea behind the blog is to share the stories of how we run the business, the deals we make, the deals that break, the heartburn, and the sheer joy.

The Ultimate Startup Guide

The Ultimate Startup Guide is an e-book that provides answers to all your questions related to starting and growing a business in India. Everything you wanted to know about entrepreneurship in India from ideation to registration to marketing to hiring. The book contains a large number of practical examples, anecdotes, interviews, and motivational material to help you get started, and to grow rapidly in a booming Indian economy. If you've got the idea, this book will help you through with the execution and realize your dreams. Here are some of the key questions you will find answered in this book:
  • When starting a business, what are the legal issues involved?
  • What form of incorporation is better suited to which type of business?
  • What tax issues are involved?
  • How do I start a business and what are the pitfalls?
  • How do I market my business in the absence of significant funding?
  • How do I get funded?
  • What are the basic accounting concepts I should be aware of?
  • What is a business plan and how should I build one?
The brief table of contents of the book is as follows:
  1. Getting started
  2. Ideation
  3. Forms of Enterprises
  4. Funding
  5. Basic Accounting and Taxation
  6. Import and Export Licensing
  7. Trademark and Patenting
  8. Rules for NRIs and Foreigners
  9. Building a Business Plan
  10. Marketing on a Shoestring
  11. Website and Branding
  12. Women Entrepreneurs
  13. Templates
To order the Ultimate Startup Guide - email me at kkmookhey@gmail.com.

Details of the book are:
Title: The Ultimate Startup Guide
Author: Kanwal Mookhey
Pages: 150
Additional: Companion CD contains numerous templates for building your business plan, calculating cashflow, preparing profit and loss, and balance sheets, preparing invoices, your resume and profile, marketing material, websites, contracts, and many other useful and motivational material.

Saturday, August 26, 2006

Asia's top young entrepreneurs

One of the key factors in a country's economic success is how conducive the overall environment is to entrepreneurship. This includes the regulatory, financial (credit availability), and social environments that influence how many entrepreneurs are created, and how many of them are successful. One of the most heartening things that has happened in the past few years, not just in India, but other Asian countries, has been the number of young entrepreneurs coming up.

Businessweek.com recently selected 20 of these young capitalists as part of a special report and has a competition going where you can login and vote for your favorite candidate, who will win the best Asian entrepreneur of the year award. Here are my favorites (disclaimer: I have a bias against scions of business houses):

  • Arif Ayub, Softflux, Pakistan. Offers all sorts of software development, management consultancy and then some, with 70 employees and targeted revenues of $120 million by end of the decade. Ooh boy. The dude also has a private equity fund Saltflow!
  • Sasikanth Chemalamudi, Habits, India. Is a creative learning company, and is also involved with projects in rural India to promote self-employment. Probably the only chap on the list with a strong social entreprenuerial streak.
  • Mao Kankan, Majoy Entertainment, China. Tthis guy takes online gaming to a whole new level. Players actually play from the same physical location, and games involve players shooting each other with infra-red pistols. Bring it on, I say!
  • Kentaro Iemoto, Clara Online, Japan. This guy is simply amazing. Battles and survives brain tumor at 14, launches his company at 16, and now manages six data centers.
  • Victor Lang, Global Futures, HK and Chicago. This is one of the most unique ideas I have come across. Provides educational material for those interested in learning about international conflict resolutions and diplomacy. They also host simulated UN conferences!
  • Hendy Setiono, Baba Rafi, Indonesia. I am a foodie, so this choice is now biased. This guy runs a chain of fast food outlets from portable booths to shopping center outlets.
The biggest disappointment is that there are no women in the list. They could easily have found a number of women with great ideas, and who are possibly already more successful than the 20 on the list. The other downside is that a majority of the entrepreneurs are in the ICT space, with four of them offering solutions in the mobile phone space.

PS: Of course, I would've qualified too, except that I'm 26. Anyone doing an under-30 list?

9 comments:

TheExperimentalMom said...

Now that you list the younger entrepreneurs AND your age, 26 does seem quite old!nice post btw...

Kanwal K Mookhey said...

Sparsh: No kidding! Sometime it does feel as if time is running out :) Some of these chaps are barely out of their teens. And thanks!

A K Ravishankar said...

Hi
This is really a nice blog,I come accross,as I am intersted in entrepreneurship,I find this blog so intersting one.

Kanwal K Mookhey said...

biot2020: Thanks! If you need any specific info, let me know.

Anonymous said...

I would like to bring a few things to the notice of this blog. Arif Ayub for one, was 28, NOT 23 when he appeared in businessweek. He falsely misrepresented his age, and his company is somewhat of a well put togther scam. He has had one client in 5 years, Meezan Bank, which had a one time contract with him. If you see his offshore facility in Pakistan where he claims to have 60 + employees, you'll find that none of them are professionals, except for 3 or 4. Thats because Arif hires internees, and freelances the work that he needs to get done.

Reason? so he can project how big his company is, and how much growth there is. They dont have a single project, and have 60 people on the payroll, which is taken care of by so called 'investors' in the US. Ask yourself this. A company that's been around for 5 years, has had one a time contract from one client, where is it generating revenues from?

He is either money laundering or something even worse. There are a lot of good scams out there, he is one of them.

He fires 40 people at a time for no reason, then rehires more people. I'd like to see who his real clients are. This guy should be investigated by the SEC or some governing body.

Businessweek should rectify its mistake by featuring him and launching an investigation into his real age at the time he was featured. Arif comes from Pakistan, where getting an fake id card made isnt too big a deal. Would help to check his date of birth from Wharton School of Business which he attended.

Here is another link where he has been accused by someone, and very rightly : http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/0/385/RipOff0385118.htm#358540

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