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At the recently held event at Gurgaon the atmosphere and format encouraged participants to bond in an informal, open, interactive culture that enabled them to share and collaborate, helped them learn from experience and create new ideas.

The conference started with a power breakfast in which leading CEOs met budding entrepreneurs and shared their insights about the industry. The session was kicked of by Sanjeev Bikhchandani, President, TiE Delhi-NCR, who spoke about the contributions TiE Delhi had made to the ecosystem and why being a member of TiE made a lot of sense. Another representative of TiE, PK Agarwal, CEO, TiE Global laid out the importance of a chapter like Delhi, which is one of the largest in the world, and changes he has seen in Indian start up ecosystem.

Chaired by PK Agarwal, the Keynote Panel which followed delved in the Founder’s Dilemma Gautam Gandhi, New Business Development, Google, Subu Kota, Chairman and CEO, The Boston Group and Raman Roy, Managing Director, Quatrro each spoke at length about the joys and pains of starting up, when to take the plunge, importance of having a co founder and mentor amongst others.

In today’s world marketing, branding and advertising your start up is vital and the session on “StartUP! Marketing: Conjuring a Zero Budget Mega Marketing Campaign” saw very animated discussion between the panelist and also good participation from the audience. Chaired by Dhruv Shringi of Yatra.com, Amit Jain, MD, Cardekho.com, and Rahul Singh, Managing Director, Golfworx ran the audience through inexpensive methods of reaching out to target customers, importance of social media and how to leverage it.

Equally interesting was the session on “StartUP! Culture: Superglue that Attracts, Binds and Motivates High Performance Teams” where speaker like Prashant Bhasker, CEO and Founder, PlugHR, Rajiv Kumar, CEO & Founder, Rocketalk and Varun Aggarwal, Co Founder and Director, Aspiring Minds talked of ways to retain employees, hire employees and benefits and ways to use instruments like ESOPs.

Throughout the day there were different sessions where entrepreneurs recounted their early days of poverty, multitasking, ‘jugaad’ and everything in between and also by start ups making a presentation to the audience on their business.

From the benefits of incubating, its usefulness to the session on “StartUP! Funding” which saw angels and VCs share tips and where they will put their money in 2012, the final sessions of the day dispelled a lot of myth for start ups and helped them get a clearer picture on how to go about there business.

Tags:
funding, gurgaon, marketing, Sanjeev Bikhchandani, Tie Smashup