#UpStart Series 2 - Beer, Snacks and Bootstrapping.

Hosted by Citrus Pay and Supported by BHIVE and Explara.

You have an idea, maybe a prototype, and are willing to put in plenty of sweat equity but you need capital. Raising capital is one of the most difficult challenges that a company can undertake. Angel investors and venture capitalists typically will not fund an idea, let alone one from an unproven first-time entrepreneur, considering all of the other investment opportunities available to them. Additionally, outside investors might want to exercise more control than the company's founders prefer.

Many of the most successful entrepreneurs did not launch their business with outside funding. They bootstrapped their company from an idea into a scalable business.

Citrus Pay invites you to our second edition of UpStart series where we’ll be hearing how to grow a business without outside capital from three founders who bootstrapped their way to startup success.

Speakers:

1) Santosh Panda - Founder & CEO @ Explara (previously known as Ayojak) | Have worked with ebay, BBC and PSI Data. Santosh is known to be a thorough gentleman with exemplary business acumen.

2) Sunil Patro - Founder & CEO @ SignEasy. He has a decade of experience as a member of multiple early stage product teams at Cleartrip, Microsoft, Juniper Networks and TokBox, building enterprise communication apps to carrier grade routing systems to consumer-focused video conferencing software.

3) Pratyush Prasanna - Founder @ MagicTiger. Previously he was Vice President at Paytm and Founder of Plustxt - a privacy enabled text messaging system in 7 Indian languages - acquired by One97 / Paytm (2013) In the past, he has worked in identifying opportunities in Mobility for Xerox and at Microsoft. Was also a part of the team that started India's largest social network over SMS - SMSGupshup.

Agenda:

5pm to 5:15pm - Registrations

5:15pm to 5:30pm - Introduction about UpStart & Citrus

5:30pm to 6pm - Economy Downturn & Bootstrapping. Few practical case studies + Q&A | Santosh

6pm to 6:30pm - Bootstrapping vs Angel raise + Q&A | Pratyush

6.30pm to 7pm - Bootstrapping - Importance of Monetization and Globalized Product + Q&A | Sunil

7pm to 7:30pm - Networking over Beer & Snacks.

Directions: https://goo.gl/maps/bDnXYAoSr562

Bootstrapping is a way to do something about the problems you have without letting someone else give you permission to do them.

- Tom Preston-Werner (Founder @ GitHub)