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Deep in the hills of South India, an ex-Cisco engineer helps fuel an emerging IoT hub

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Lalit

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Wow!

[h=1]Deep in the hills of South India, an ex-Cisco engineer helps fuel an emerging IoT hub[/h]
Somewhere between the hilly Western Ghats of South India sits the city of Coimbatore. There, an accelerator wants to help build startups that connect everyday objects to the internet.
Known as the internet of things (IoT), it’s a huge market to tap. Gartner predicts that there will be 6.4 billion things – everything from pants to lightbulbs to motion detectors – connected to the internet by 2020.
Don’t be fooled by the big numbers – in no way is that market open for the taking. Large corporates are huge competitors. If they decide to invest in IoT, their expertise, established market shares, and distribution arms give them a clear advantage. And, while the fast-moving world of startups has the power of innovation on its side, IoT support, funding, and expertise are mostly reserved for those in Silicon Valley.
If there is support for IoT startups anywhere else, it’s definitely not in Coimbatore.
That doesn’t dissuade Vishwanathan Sahasranamam, though. He helps run the accelerator, Forge, and thinks Coimbatore is the perfect spot for India’s IoT scene to flower. With its many private industries, factories, and engineering colleges, he describes it as a perfect storm of factors that will contribute to an IoT hub.
“Private industries here would love to buy and help out with IoT products,” he says. “Six out of eight of the top ten engineering institutions in the state of Tamil Nadu are based here, but we’re exporting our students. How do we activate them to become entrepreneurs?”
[h=2]Changing small town mindsets[/h]After graduating with an engineering degree from Guindy, Chennai, and an MBA from IIM-Bangalore, Vishwanathan traveled across the world, working with Ericsson in Sweden and Cisco in California.
And yet, the boy from Tamil Nadu couldn’t escape the state. “I’m from a town known as Salem, but my wife is from Coimbatore so I decided to move back here,” he says.
While stories about moving back to idyllic little towns in India are romantic, Vishwanathan entertains none of that. Instead, he’s steadfast and realistic about the circumstances that come with working out of Coimbatore.
“The question is: do we wait for it to bloom in its own sweet time? Or do we take a different approach?”
internet-750x511.jpg
Photo credit: Julian Burgess.

Take Onebee. It’s a fifteen-year-old company based out of Coimbatore that’s always worked with corporates. But in the past few years, it has decided that it wants to get into building IoT products specifically for Indian homes.
When it needed support to develop wifi systems and other network controls, though, it found that there was barely any support available in its part of the country – so it reached out to Forge.
“Otherwise, we don’t have any infrastructure in and around Coimbatore,” managing director Aranga says. “There are barely any designers or experts.”
For NilaTech, Forge’s resources were a way to access tech that would otherwise be expensive to buy and cumbersome to store. “We are bootstrapped and this had a huge limitation on the speed of how things were built. We were moving at a snail’s pace,” explains founder Raju Kandaswamy. “Forge let us prototype instantly with access to electronic boards, components, and a sizable 3D printer.”
Vishwanathan describes several situations that have happened in Forge. Once, two entrepreneurs met and completed a merger and acquisition right inside the premises.
[h=2]Beginnings of an enabling ecosystem[/h]Forge takes both hardware and software IoT startups – think the difference between creating sensors for warehouses and installing an update on a device – but Vishwanathan explains that the former is always more difficult.
“Hardware startups are much tougher than software startups, and it’s the same with hardware accelerators,” he says. “There aren’t many takers, and there’s a much higher level of risk perception.”
“A startup is an experiment. We’re here to help you try.”​
But it’s necessary to start somewhere, and Vishwanathan compares his vision of the future to the way that Amazon Web Services has managed to democratize website development.
“You don’t even need to learn any programming languages or computer architecture theory,” he says. “We need to work together to get there for hardware startups – meaning more tools, more resources, and more awareness of what’s going on.”
It’s a challenge to hire, but Vishwanathan claims that things are changing. “Just two weeks ago, a student from UPenn Wharton decided to spend her summer working with us,” he says resolutely. “That was really heartening.”
Coimbatore has other IoT startups, so while it may not be a hub yet, it’s at least a spoke. One is Kalycito, a company that creates IoT products for managing energy. It created its first IoT product in 2010.
In the meanwhile, Vishwanathan visits Bangalore almost weekly and tries to get the word out about his accelerator everywhere he can.
[h=2]Where weird things take shape[/h]“A startup is an experiment,” he tells me in an air-conditioned Starbucks in central Bangalore. “Entrepreneurs are scientists building out theories. You’re working toward building proof – proof of your product and proof of business. We’re here to help you try.”
While investments aren’t everything, Vishwanathan is focused on building startups that are strong enough to gain investor confidence. “If I have three PhDs and I’m working on a new medicine to cure a disease, you have reason to fund me based on my skills,” he says. “Similarly, we have to think: how can we prove to people that we have the skills to implement the experiment successfully?”
“We want to be most meaningful for an entrepreneur who is doing this for the first time in his life.”​
On the television show Silicon Valley, there’s an episode where the main character, a nervous first-time entrepreneur, struggles to describe his business before a board meeting.
“It’s like trying to sell someone how to get somewhere even though you don’t really know the exact address,” he says. “So you have to say, you know, go straight down the big road and take a right at that weird thing. But you can’t describe what the weird thing is because you just know it as a weird thing, you know, in your head. You always have. ”
That scenario with the “weird thing” is exactly what Vishwanathan is trying to prevent. Plenty of entrepreneurs have phenomenal ideas, he explains – but instead of relying on half-baked concepts, it’s necessary to build out a structure first.
“IoT startups need entrepreneurs that want to work on them full-time and have real business aspirations,” says Vishwanathan. “For this, you need to built out solid confidence in the beginning.”
That happens during “activation”, the first part of the Forge accelerator program. Startups are first put through a three-day bootcamp where they conceptualize tangibles like their actual product, go-to market strategies, target segments, revenues, and unit economics.
“For first time entrepreneurs, there’s lots of intuition and anecdotal evidence – but we help them put structure into their thinking and rigor into planning,” says Vishwanathan.
“Getting an entrepreneur to think like that gets a certain discipline going,” he adds.
During the bootcamp, they’re taught how to create a “minimum viable business” – a basic concept that has the highest chance of working.
They start by figuring out who will be their first customer and whether that person will buy it – what Vishwanathan calls the “proof of product”.
“As an entrepreneur, your first target customer is that guy who absolutely can’t wait to have his problem solved,” he says. “We call that the minimum critical problem. Any problem that has a scope below that is not really worth doing.”
The second is the “proof of business” – whether or not the startup has potential to sell and scale once it gets to market.
As they work through the nuances of the two, tangibles are either proven or disproven. If they’re proven, entrepreneurs move forward with their business plan. If it’s the latter, they have to start back where they came from.
[h=2]Building out an IoT community[/h]
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Photo credit: Mano Ranjan M.

Once the bootcamp is over, startups are offered a stipend to work out of the accelerator for six months. During that time, they can use Forge’s building and technology as often as they want.
“If there are problems, we help you work through changing the idea, changing your customers, or changing a version of the product,” says Vishwanathan. “We want to be most meaningful for an entrepreneur who is doing this for the first time in his life.”
Forge has partnered with early stage venture capital funds like Unitus Seed Fund and coworking spaces like 91Springboard to work with early-stage startups and fine-tune their businesses.
The next step is Forge’s accelerator program. It’s six months away from launching, but Vishwanathan stresses that the start date has been set purposely. “We didn’t want to have anything that wasn’t IoT-related,” he says. “We’re only launching when we’re ready to give our entrepreneurs what they deserve.”
Once it launches, it will charge startups around US$100 to enroll. At the end, incubated entrepreneurs are promised seed capital, as well as a network of mentors and potential go-to customers.
“The worst thing that can happen is that you can’t kickoff your startup,” Vishwanathan says. “You’ve picked up skills, and your resume will speak volumes for what you’ve learned. We take care of your creature comforts in the interim. Give it a chance.”

https://www.techinasia.com/coimbatore-forge-accelerator-iot-hub
 
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