I have added few remarks in front of them, but do your own research. Feel free to drop me an email though, if you have something specific to ask. Please do note that this list is not complete in anyway, this is something which I had created for my own reference.

Feel free to add in the below wiki excel along with your remarks, please avoid removing content unless it is verbose or wrong.

Wiki Style List of VC firms and Angel Investors in India (publicly editable) – Feel free to add names/remarks to it

Original list in case the above list is not accessible

You can also check Angellist India too which has lot of names of early stage investors.

There are 2 kind of founders, those who can code and those who can’t!

Fortunately I belong to the first category but if you belong to the second category, start to learn to code right now. After seeing hundreds of startups, even those which are not into IT/Product/Platform verticals, I can safely say that the founder(s) who can build things will always have 3X+ advantage over to those who can’t.

The biggest mistake Marketing/MBA founders make is to think that they can find some rockstar developer, pay him good money and he will build things for us. It just don’t work. It hasn’t worked in the past, it will not work in future too.

As a non tech founder, you have to know what is going on with your product/platform so even if you can’t understand the finer details of the work, you have to sit with the developers and ask them explain why we are doing this and how we are doing this. This doesn’t mean that you have to do full time hardcore coding but spend few hours to understand the tech part of your startup, this will help a lot after 6 months, always remember, it is not your developer who will build your company, you will.

So this means, you can only hire people with < 3 years of experience, preferably freshers. This is where, it gets even more tougher. India's best engineering talent (from IITs/NITs/BITS/IIITs/DCE/NSIT) eventually land up in US for their masters/PhD, the rest lands up in IIMs just after graduation, and those amazing developers who don't chose to do MBA or Masters gets hired by Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Adobe (and dozen more) companies for 12 to 15 lakh salaries with perks and as a startup, you just can't convince those people to leave their Mon to Fri job in Fortune 500 companies.

This brings us to the point why I am writing this post, How many Rockstar developers are there in India who really want to work in a statup ? I know, every startup wants few rockstar developer who can work for peanuts, get some esop and help the founders make millions but how many Rockstars in India are really there who wants to work in a startup ? My answer is, not more than 200.

There are over 1000+ startups looking to hire these 200 people which reminds me of “Rakhi ka Swayamvar”. As per Sumit, this is also a reason why India is not able to build a billion dollar product company. There is absolutely no talent available for startup and desi companies. What scares me is, as a startup founder, there is nothing you can do to change this situation, just keep on trying and struggling against time and hope to find few good people, as the other 1000 startup founders are doing.

Btw, WorkMonk is also looking for an excellent developer (no, NO rockstars, but it will be nice if you can sing and dance) who wants to work with an excellent team, mentors and investors. Please drop me an email to “jobs at workmonk dot in” and we can talk. Make sure you do read this Blog Post too.

Well, for the first three years, my wife was in Nestle and the company couldn’t pay me. The next two years, the company could pay me and my wife was still in Nestle so we were okay. She quit in 1995 and around 1996 I became the Consulting Editor of The Pioneer’s career supplement called Avenues. That gave me a monthly cheque; we were not well-off but we got by.
By that time my reference group had changed, so I was not seeing what my batch mates were getting. In 2000 when we got venture capital from ICICI, I had been through the second round of not taking salary for three years — 1997 to 2000. That was tough.

During that time my wife was not working, so I had to do a second job. I got up at 6.00 in the morning, dropped her to the bus stop, was in the office by 7.00, worked till 12.00 then would go to The Pioneer come back and work till midnight again. This went on for three years.

That was tough, but the thing about doing your own business is that you are probably very happy even though you are not making money, for the simple reason that you are in control of your life and priorities and that is important to me.

Here is a quick review good vs bad of Unpluggd 3

Good

* Great people, great audience, great hosts.
* Great for networking, this time, plenty of time was given for networking and there was good space to meet people one after one
* This time, I stayed till the end (since I knew half of the startup companies showcasing already so wanted to see their way of giving presentation + met some really good ppl too even when presentations were going on)
* food, though not as good as in unpluggd 1 and unpluggd 2, was good enough.
* Goodies, yay, T-shirt + pen drive was itself over Rs 650. Ashish certainly knows how to Roll!

Bad (not that bad actually…)

There were no Bad’s really, just two minor problems,
* It was not easy to find that place, luckily I left early and found it with relative comfort but there were many who couldn’t found it that easily, specially people coming from outside. But we made that up by starting late.
* I felt the hall was little small (the hall for unpluggd 2 was too big, but the honeywell office for unpluggd 1 was perfect, I hope we again book that for next unpluggd) as many were standing at the end (including me)

• “Our assets walk out of the door each evening. We have to make sure that they come back the next morning.”
• “Performance leads to recognition. Recognition brings respect. Respect enhances power. Humility and grace in one’s moments of power enhances dignity of an organisation,”
• “The real power of money is the power to give it away.”
• “In God we trust, everybody else bring data to the table.”
• “Progress is often equal to the difference between mind and mindset.”
• “I want Infosys to be a place where people of different genders, nationalities, races and religious beliefs work together in an environment of intense competition but utmost harmony, courtesy and dignity to add more and more value to our customers day after day.”
• “A clear conscience is the softest pillow in the world.”
• “A plausible impossibility is better than a convincing possibility.”
• “When in doubt, disclose.”

and looking at Sudha Murthy’s profile and achievements, I think she certainly don’t get enough credit like NR Murthy and other founders get.

List of Startups in India with traction

• multi-lingual : Tachyon technologies / quilpad (amazing lisp, open-source, web hackers, got invested from rediff and supposedly rejected Google M&A)
  Lipikaar (revenue making via tech, recently launched dubzer at DEMO)
• user generated content : Muziboo (youtube for audio, winner of 2009 facebook connect india challenge)
• real estate : commonfloor, 99acres (supposedly reaching >40% of indian market in april/may ‘10) ,makaan
• e-commerce : Flipkart,  Infibeam, letsbuy, Martjack (amazing traction/DIY framework for building stores)
• voice : tringme / voicephp (Indian twilio) , callgraph (skype plugins) , voicetap (talk to an expert on phone) , kirusa
• maps : routeguru , sadakmap, mapunity
• facebook : ugenie (weread) , scrabulous guys
• gaming: hashcube (largest sudoku app at one point, incubated at iaccelerator), games2win (casualgames, comscore top 20 gaming reach , well funded ) , lordsofodds ( prediction/gaming via various channels, nice tv tieups, profitable ), Zapak ( Reliance group ) , indiagames ( acquired by UTV, non-casual games )
• offline focus:  nextbit cpu ( licensing deals in millions)  , notion ink ( adam tablet ), ideacts ( cybercafe software, 30000+ terminals, funded by seqoia )
• deals : snapdeals , mydala, taggle
• food related: tastykhana, hungrybangalore, lunchwalla
• online printing : myntra, pringoo, printo & many others
• photo: picsquare ( acuired by infibeam ), zoomin ( co-founded by founder of half/ebay )
• local / classifieds : burrp ( acuired by network18 )  , quickr ( supposedly fastest growing ) ,  asklaila ( amazing rate of product launches, partnerships ) , buzzintown
• search engines / aggregators :
  antya ( small team, nice tech + seo juice), avashya
  blogadda, indiblogs (ala technorati / 9rules )
  guruji ( seqoia funded search engine, pivoted to music search, lawsuits, but still decent traction, future uncertain )
• students / jobs: sutraHR , bixee search ( owned by ibibo group ), bharatstudent, freshersworld, hellointern, pagalguy, minglebox
• ad networks : vdopia, jivox ( both video) , komli, tyroo, networkplay, tyroo ( all well funded )
• movies / ticketing / delivery : bookmyshow, kyazoonga, 70mm, Bigflix ( netflix’ish clone, great retail rollout, Reliance group )
• location yulop
• project management / collaboration: deskaway, remindo, uhuroo, tenmiles (makers of helpdeskpilot,tezaa,etc)
• payment : paymate, billdesk, mcheck, ccavenues
• auto: carwale, carazoo
• travel: redbus, cleartrip ( well funded, largest pool of lisp developers at one point )
• finance/risk : crederity ( background checks ) , dhanax ( ala kiva ), paisa ( stock portfolio )
• sports : cricinfo ( bought by espn )
• health: lifemojo, healthcaremagic
• analytics : wingify / visualsiteoptimizer
• blogging platforms: instablogs (citizen journalism), ibibo, bigadda
• cloud based : e2e networks, orangescape

PS – I have removed some names suggested by bhaskar as I don’t think justdial or makemytrip is a startup.

2. You can not validate ideas and implementations. No one is there to tell you that you are wrong.

3. Have to do all the work which reduces the pace of growth of the startup and increases tension, pressure and worries (many of them are unnecessary)

4. You have to pay all the expenses from your own pocket.

5. You will lose lot of Hair!

/written from my own personal experience

The same applies to any other aspect of the business as well, if you are starting a marketing company, services company or even a brick and mortar business, it is alright if you are looking to have 20 people with different skill set, as founder, you need to know all aspect of the business.

It is a long story and I can’t drop names, but here are some TIPS to myself and to anyone of you who is going to meet VCs (in India) for the first time

Make sure you exactly know their office. Like me, don’t rely on google maps, it is not completely accurate for cities like bangalore where there are lot of one ways and auto walas are total “kaminas” (Jerks). I landed up 2 KM from where the office of the VC was.

I had left at 3:20 and as per google maps, was sure to reach the office at 3:45 but because I left the auto at wrong location (thanks to the locals for telling the wrong route which was one way), I had to run all the way back. Not only this, when I asked the lady is this “the building”, she said yes, so I said, great finally, I took the overcrowded lift and reached 8th floor only to realized that this is not that part of the building (what was that lady smoking ? since she spoke fluent hindi and there was no communication problem). So I started waiting for the lift on 8th floor but even after waiting for 15 mins, there were no remains of the lift. So instead of waiting any more, I took the staircase and start running down, feeling something like Lola . Mind you, for someone who do no physical exercise and spend unhealthy time in front of his laptop, this was not easy as I have poor lung capacity.

Anyway this doesn’t stop here, so the VC building was 500 meters from this building and I had to run all the way again, had to ask multiple ppl where is the main entrance for the building and where is the lift (there were multiple lifts for various parts of the building)

Oh and one more thing, my Rs 35k mobile also stopped working in the middle (this is another long story) and I had to use phone from a pedestrian (thanks stranger) to call to the VC office that I will be late by 30 minutes.

I easily Ran over 3 KMs and was panting heavily, but I feels I did alright considering most of the things were not in my hand. The reason why it made me so upset was I hate to be late, 4 PM should always means 4 PM and I should had relied on more real world knowledge about the place rather then relying on google maps.

So here are some tips/suggestions from my experience if you are ever gong to meet any angel investor/VC

1. always call the VC office about the location of their office and nearest landmark. Also confirm if the meeting is ON or not and give them your number in case of any changes in plan.

2. Never go late, infact I feels it is better of going 15 minutes earlier, sit in office, may be drink a cup of coffee (for free!)

3. Do take your ppt or any doc in a flash drive (which doesn’t have a virus). I also keep all the business material on my mobile too as well always keep multiple printouts of your presentation.

4. Speak slowly and Clearly (something which I don’t do). By speaking slowly,you also give yourself time to “direct” the conversation.