The most important: Pictures for such an event say more than a thousand words. Hence, here we are with the set "Bangalore Oktoberfest 2008" on my Flickr-account. Today I got the question by a journalist: "Is there a difference between the real Oktoberfest in Munich and the one in Bangalore?" - Well, I started with a lengthy intellectual answer on history, culture and tradition of the event, a bit like Barack Obama would do. Then I decided to swap for John McCain and the short answer was: "Imagine Germans in a dance school hopping to modern Indian music and try to compare that to Bollywood." 

The crowd was very diverse, with a variety of nations each of then expressing their own interpretation of Bavarian culture, well, at least in South India. Yo, yo, here are the Ladies in da House:

In terms of representation of nation, the event was an official invitation of the Consul General of the Federal Republic of Germany in Bangalore, Mr. Stefan Graf. (I just looked up out of general interest on Wikipedia, what the official address to a consul general would be. It's in German language "Herr Generalkonsul".) The consulate and Mr. Graf in particular are doing a great job here in South India being visible with their services, caring for the fellow citizens and always having an open ear in case of questions or issues. Hence, I put on my finest Oktoberfest-smile having the honour of a joint picture with the "Herr Generalkonsul" :-)

Ein Prosit (Cheers).

We had an inspiring peer-2-peer exchange with respect to best practises on the entire value chain of creating deal-flow to closing a deal. In the context of funding I understood that some angel investors have become a bit hesitant since their stock-portfolios in India got destroyed whilst uncertainty has started to cover the entire economy. At the same time, as Google-founder Sergey Brin put it recently, "Scarcity creates Clarity. In my interpretation also in the sense that certain business ideas will thrive in a rather downturn economy as they help companies consolidate their act through cost savings when management attention is not just obsessively concerned with hyper-growth.

In the afternoon, like a year and two ago, I joined an invitation by INSEAD for its "globalization course" for a Danish Business School. The participants were all senior executives in Denmark who are undergoing an MBA-training. Three groups of companies presented to us their "India Business Concept" and we were supposed to give constructive feedback and share our experience on "founding and running a business in India".

Between the breaks, us panelists exchanged our current state of affairs when it's no point denying that we are in a recession:

1. One young entrepreneur told the story from above from the MumbaiAngels from her perspective (unrelated to MumbaiAngels, yet to investors in general): In spite of a signed MoU, the investors backed out in the last minute.
2. The head of a globally active petrol retail company lost a higher double digit figure of his revenues when the oil price hit US$ 140 per barrel a few months ago. Reason: His company is privately run and therefore fully exposed to the price fluctuations it has to pass on to the customers while the majority of petrol-retail in India is state-run and heavily subsidized. In the meanwhile the price has dropped and the company's revenue recovered. 
3. The India-responsible for a luxury clothing brand reported that two months ago, customer inflow into his stores has become incredibly lame. Understood that this sector gets hit first, as it is certainly not somebody's primary concern in uncertainty to spend EUR 1.800 on a new suit.

All in all quite eye-opening stories I wanted to share here, especially as they come from so many different angles: investment, consumption, government-spending where everything is related/looped to everything and we practically have the entire macroeconomic equation in front of us. Although one where the maths have recently become a bit shaky. 

Previously, due to the reason mentioned above, the entire nightlife was entirely fragmented across the various locations in Bangalore. No doubt, that there is nothing more boring that going to a bar or a club and having the impression to be almost the only guest. So today 23-year old Entrepreneur Viren Khanna seized the opportunity of aggregating the dispersed crowd. He made a deal with existing clubs and started to send out text messages to people of his address book on the mobile phone which he systematically grew with every event; a typical example of "building momentum". Since then, the so called "Viren-Parties" have become a synonym for "something is happening" at least two times a week in Bangalore.

In a not surprising quest to grow his business, he went on to organize fashion shows. What is more, the platforms of communication got enhanced as well, getting into the Web 2.0, an environment that the mentioned target group is very familiar with. For one, a group called "Viren's Nightlife Group - Blitzkrieg" on Facebook with 789 members at the time of my writing. For second, in order to provide a higher level of proprietary branding, a social network of its own, "The Ives Club". 

Positioned as a club for interns, trainees and expats in Bangalore, I was astonished in the first place about the technological sophistication of it and wondered what huge effort it would have taken it to engineer this monster. When I digged deeper into the souce code, it dawned on me that the platform entirely uses Ning, which allows you to "create a social network for anything". Co-Founded by Marc Andreessen, the founder of Netscape in the 90s, Ning is an amazing example of the Über-Plattform, as Marc elaborately explains in his blog-post on "The three kinds of platforms you meet on the internet". When I asked Viren how long it took to build The Ives Club based on Ning , he replied "It did not take me much long to stitch this thing together, but it did take me an extremely long time and a lot of fidgeting with CRM softwares, phpBB and 3 versions of it to find out about Ning and use it."

As the fundamentals of Web 2.0 go, these services become better the more people use them. So besides just having a distibution channel to annouce further events, the members among each other begin to interact before and after the events. So the shy ones for instance get the opportunity to address a girl onlline which they have failed to do while seeing her "in da club". Subject to some positive response he will be able catch up during the next party and prove that is is not that shy, though … 

His major focus, however, is his current involvement into Microventures, a for-profit fund in the space of microfinance. The sector has recently gained strong public awareness after Mohammed Yunus' got awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his Grameen Bank, a micro-finance institution from Bangladesh. Indeed, the beautiful thing about micro-finance is three-fold: One, it is ideally suited to raise people out of (absolute) poverty in a sustainable way. Second, giving these people a sense of dignity as the improvement of their lives is the immediate result of the empowerment towards entrepreneurship. And third, yet another confirmation that profit is good - both for the new entrepreneurs, the bank as the mediator in between and ultimately the investor on the financial supply side. Microfinance proves to be a perfect example for the "Bottom of the Pyramid"-principle, where  "the poor" are not just considered from a philanthropic perspective, but as equal participants in a vivid economy: As entrepreneurs and customers.   

Anal's role for Microventures is an advisor for directing the incoming funds from the European headquarter of Microventures into prospective channels in India. The exiting thing is to understand how the company tackles this challenge in probably the most unsystematic, fragmented, long-tail market that lacks any supportive eco-system so far. Clearly, the opportunity in the aggregate is huge with 70 % of India's 1.1  bn population living in the rural areas being potential customer for micro-finance. My key insights:

1. As it is entirely impossible to reach out to each and every of the few hundred million potential customer directly, one has to rely on existing structures of microfinance-institutions which - again - are structurally fragmented and widespread all over the country. Microventures acts as a "fund in fund", i.e. like a meta-layer on top of these existing institutions by taking an equity share in exchange for a cash-injection.

2. This cash will be supplemented by bank-loans and then dispersed down to the village level by local employees of the same institution. There the employee will invest into a group of women. Why women? It has proved - reality bites - that men against all promises tend to spend any incoming money at the bar around the corner while women prove to use it for the purpose of their small enterprise. Why groups? Addressing a little community seems to provide a joint sense of ownership, better performance and a lower default rate.

3. On average, one loan will amount to Rs. 5,000/- (app. EUR 80.-) which is repayable within one year in 50 instalments where the credit-employee will show up for weekly collection. In the absence of formalized agreements, not to mention their legal enforcement, the personal rapport between the bank's local representative and the recipients is essential. Ultimately, you don't want to either fool or disappoint someone whom you consider a friend by defaulting on your debt.

4. Interest rate is usually a reflection of two factors: risk and cost of capital deployment. By nature the risk of such a loan without any collateral is high. Astonishingly, the default rate is relatively low due to the measures explained above. On the other hand, as one can easily fathom, the cost of deployment along these various cascades of intermediaries as well a logistic issues of transporting money back and forth is painstakingly high. Therefore, the annual interest comes at a price around 20 percent.

5. Mircoventures' role, besides the allocation the funds in the investments phase, consists in the governance of the investee companies. The model to earn its money back could be either a trade sale of the stake to some strategic investor or possibly an IPO which would create a liquid event for the limited investors. The fund itself makes its money in the typical two-fold model of a fee as the share of funds under management plus some carry in case of disproportionate returns. 

Anal being a seasoned businessman was very candid that "if you are looking for pure economic profit, then there are easier industries to go into than microfinance in India". That's why the limited partners of Mircoventures are predominantly wealthy individuals who want to invest and do some good at the same time. Who are seeking for both a return on capital gains and a return on social benefit. In the microfinance industry the term coined for that aspiration is called "double bottom line".

I really like that expression. Maybe we should all look for whatever we do, a bit more for that "double bottom line". 

In the middle of the city, having a rest. Then I sneaked like a paparazzo around the corner onto my balcony to get a shot from the front. Gotcha. And the owl, like a good photo model, knew how to make a good facial expression into the camera. 

Then I sneaked silently away and the let the owl continue her rest. Come back soon, always welcome. 

The association has been set up one year ago, spearheaded by my friend Sasha Mirchandani who is a seasoned entrepreneur and currently the Head of India for BlueRun Ventures. How MumbaiAngels works is easily explained: We meet every 6 weeks in Bombay and three to five pre-selected companies would pitch in front of us: 15 minutes sharp followed by a friendly but critical Q&A-session by the potential investors. Each angel is entirely free to express independently interest in a particular company through a feedback form. At the end all the forms get aggregated internally whereby the level of interest in a particular company could (and maybe should) also help as an indicator of attractiveness from the “wisdom-of-crowds” perspective.

In the next step, say if 9 people have interest in a particular company, they would go along for a joint due diligence, deal structure into which each individual would invest the amount of money he or she wants to commit. Overall, from my experience of building up an incubator, I am quite impress about the level of maturity for the processes which are critical to come to terms from filtering interesting investment targets to having the investment in place.

The sectors we are looking at have not been defined too narrow, and right so. Ultimately, it should be something that scales well, because it either organizes and unstructured industry in India with its huge market potential behind, addresses a clear need or something which contains a technology-driven nucleus whose economics are prone to disproportionately fast distribution and foreseeable revenues. (My personal investment-appetite goes very much to the latter, certainly because I have some sort of expertise in the tech, media, internet and mobile-space.)

The advantage for entrepreneurs seeking for investments to address Mumbai Angels is manifold: The investors involved bring extensive experience in building and growing business to the table, where the Q&A session during the pitch alone can ask the right questions to tweak and turn something in the plan or model. Moreover, MumbaiAngels are far beyond just throwing “dumb money” at you, then sitting on our hands and waiting what returns we’ll receive. What we are looking for is an active role via ongoing mentoring, door-opening to customers or partners and access to capital for the subsequent rounds of funding.

I am glad to be part of that fine group. If you are an entrepreneur seeking start-up capital for a venture in the Indian market, feel free to address me. I will see what I can do for you and what I can do for us - the MumbaiAngels.

The event “Hear the World” has been touring around various cities in the world for quite a while and is an initiative of Phonak, a Swiss manufacturer of hearing aids. From my own 15-year old experience in media, this concept definitely hails in the upper range of PR-formats. What most companies get wrong in PR is a too aggressive push of their company name or worse, its products. Phonak did well to put the emphasis on an issue which allegedly affects 15-20 % of global population: hearing problems, along with the stigma not really admitting to the problem or worse, not doing something about it.

As I write these lines, I realize how well this event platform was crafted: I never thought about the problem before, I even doubt that these numbers are in their severity as high or that this is one of the most daunting problems of this world today, but nevertheless the event left some sort of impact on me thinking and even blogging about the issue. That’s what you call successful agenda-setting which deserves at least professional respect.

The ingredients for the event could hardly be hand-picked any better:

1. Take an issue worth alleviating (see paragraph above).

2. Engage a VIP who is unsuspicious of being a sponsor-whore for everything: In this case Bryan Adams, a world-famous rock star who builds bridged between continents and generations alike and who – for his age of 48 years – looks extremely juvenile. Furthermore, what I was not aware of, Bryan Adams is also a highly talented photographer which brings us to the next point.

   

3. Make the issue tangible: Connect with the VIP, whereby keeping the message subtle: Bryan Adams has taken a series of pictures with musicians where he asked them if they would pose for something which reflects them hearing or listening. Apart from one (name undisclosed) all agreed and there you go with an exhibition of artistic big-sized black-and white photographs.

   

4. Deliver immediate remedy: As these photographs are unique, they are or have been already auctioned off with the income going directly to several schools and institutions in the third world dealing with children who have hearing problems.

5. Create an event-platform: The exhibition is open till Sunday, yet the gala-opening was clearly a highlight where Bryan Adams showed up himself, albeit with app. 10 minutes only very briefly, stating “no interview” and buggering off to his concert. Yet, if you have Bryan Adams for such an event, all the VIPs and wannabe VIPs will come all by themselves. Apparently, the hall must have been full with Swiss actors, models and celebrities (which I admittedly did not recognize). Food and drinks were excellent, too.

6. Roll out the red carpet, literally: The presence of these VIPs will in turn attract the press which will thankfully cover such an event with many, many nice pictures its audience wants to see. (No wonder, the day after 2 major Zurich tabloids had the event and Bryan Adams on the front-page).

   

7. Keep a low profile as the initiator: Phonak knows pretty well that 80 % of the people in this world long for its products as much as they long for Malaria. Yet, when they need it, they will notably improve their lives. Hence, the CEO of the company on stage was quite up-front to admit: “We want to create awareness for a problem that nobody wants to hear and talk about.”

That’s it. Good event, nice motives for pictures also from my side here on the Flickr-Set and myself last but not least looking at Amy and Amy looking at me.

And what I now do hear very loud and clear is my friends calling for another round of Oktoberfest :-)

Saturday, Arnd, Maks and I headed to the Napa Valley, had a nice lunch in Bouchon, then a vine tour trough Rubincon Wine Estate, where the cellar in the mountain was litterally cool, likewise the tasting of its content.

Yesterday, after a phenomenal steak-dinner at Morton's and an after-hour at the Redwood Room in our Clift Hotel, we took our friend Heiko on board and headed South on Highway Number 1 towards Half Moon Bay. Climate in the Bay Area is crazy: We started in OK-conditions from downtown, it got foggy and cold all along the coast so that it was pointless to head to the beach, and driving inland into the Silicon Valley, we were surprised by dry heat with temperatures well above the 30s (Celsius scale). As for a inventive Sunday afternoon activity, we made a brief stop at the Stanford Mall with coffee and a few purchases (also for our wives and girl friends at home :-)

More pics from the weekend as well as from the conference can be found here on my Flickr-Account. 

But today, I realized that this was only half of the story. At least equally important, if not even more critical, is the existence of the “Flugröserl”. It is a composed word of the German term “Flug” which means “flight” and “Röserl” which is the Bavarian noun for the High-German term “Rose” which means, well, rose. So it means kind of “flight rosy”, but I prefer “Flugröserl” much more, so let’s stick to it.

The “Flugröserl” is the out-of-reach-object-of-desire for every Economy Class-passenger with risk of thrombosis during a long-haul flight due to special scarcity which condemns him to regress into an embryonic position over 12 hours. But the “Flugröserl” is also the object of desire for the Business Class passenger who finds the presence of so many other passengers around him utterly vulgar and who is yearning for more and still more in life. Because, the Flugröserl, is an exclusive piece of decoration on your seat of Lufthansa First Class which indicates you that you made it to the top, that on 39,000 feet above sea level you can add another 4 meters in the upper deck of the Boing 747 Jumbo Jet. Wow - how awesome is that?!

Well, to transcend back to some literally grounded reason, the “Flugröserl” was the major theme and amusement for my friend Arnd and me today during our flight on LH 454 from Frankfurt to San Francisco. From my constants flight from and to India, I had so many Lufthansa "Miles & More" that I thought I’ll do us a favour with a “once in a lifetime experience” and get us an upgrade into First Class. Yep, it was cool. You get attention from the cabin staff as if you were a 3-months old baby with the only difference that fine alcoholic drinks are the main liquid to sedate you.

And of course to show you her unconditional love, Mum (=the flight attendant) would bring you approximately one hour after take-off the “Flugröserl” whose bottom is embedded in a water-filled plastic cylinder which gets stuck in a specially engineered hole in your First Class seat. And there it sits peacefully and beautifully, the “Flugröserl”. Arnd and me found so much of a likening for it, that we asked Mum to take a picture of us holding the “Flugröserl” as a sign of our achievement, friendship and imbecility.

And so today, I am happy to share my epiphany with you that it’s all about the “Flugröserl” where the “Flugröserl” is a fundamental enabler and catalyst in the history of aviation and mankind alike.

I fell in love with this city in 2002 when I spent three weeks here to learn Russian and stay with my Russian family. Now coming back for our EO European/African Conference, I realized that a lot had changed (the Church of the Saviour on Blood was fortunately still in place :-)

Apart from that, most remarkably, while in 2002 you could still have dinner with the cosy feeling of paying "Eastern prices", you would now have an Eastern dinner paying entirely Western prices. Not to mention property, where the going rate for the square meter in the centre ranges from US-$ 30,000 to 40,000. Overall, the magnificence of the city stands in even better splendour as it was refurbished for its 300 year celebration after being founded in 1703 by Peter the Great.

Our hosts from EO St. Petersburg under the leadership of Steve Caron, Sergey Vykhodtsev, Christian Courbois, Dmitry Agarunov (Moscow) together with the event-expertise from the EO staff brought together a real "Once in a Lifetime Experience", something EO is rigorously dedicated to. The event was a perfect mix of learning sessions, dine-arounds, social events and came - thanks to a compact group of around 50 people from 26 chapters - with strong personal bonding. Our Grand Hotel Europe as the venue in itself was a living piece of Russian history. 

From the learning side, the first day started with a panel of our St. Petersburg chapter sharing their stories how they started off in the "Wild East" 15 years ago getting kidnapped, held for ransom, smuggling US-$ 1.5 mn in an old car with their head of security carrying a machine gun, smuggling valuable dogs in the plane to Beijing etc. (I thought I had seen and heard a lot in India, but these stories are all petty-theft against the environment when the Soviet Union transformed itself a sort of "kiosk capitalism"). We had a fantastic session with marketing guru Thomas Gad, author of 4D-Branding where the 4 dimensions stand for functional, mental, social and spiritual, like here exemplified on the world famous brand "Red Bull":

What I always perceive particularly inspiring is when we have senior EO members sharing their experience like Mark Moses did on "Overcoming Adversity in Business and Life". His story carried enormous "goose pimple"-factor with his best friend severely betraying him in business, the office getting on fire, his child suffering from a brain tumour, yet Mark still keeping head above the mud, growing even bigger and condensing his experience in tangible learnings with great take-home value for others.

On the event side, our friends in the "Venice of the North" were able to pull some magic strings which allowed us to do something which is usually completely out of reach: a private tour in the incomparable Hermitage in the night hours when the museum was already closed to the public. It was a very memorable opportunity to immerse in the beauty of the art collection comprising reminiscence of Russian history and Western artists like Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt or Van Gogh whose last picture before his suicide at the age of 37, "Thatched Cottages" is part of the collection. 

Ah, and there was Vodka, and even more Vodka. As a good rule, keep drinking only Vodka, it will have its certain effect, but you won't have a headache the next day. By contrast, a very bad idea is mixing champagne with beer and Vodka. (I was oblivious of the latter and had to pay a bitter price after the first night out). So repeat after me: Vodka alone = good, Vodka in da mix = bad.

And last but not least, I met my family again, it was a warm-hearted reunion from the very first moment, as if I had departed 6 days ago and not 6 years ago. As the habit goes, Igor (=the father) and I had put a "a few" kilogram on, Ira (=the mother) is still as elegant as she always used to be and little Ksusha (=the sister) was a baby and will have her first school day on September 1st. Especially Ksusha overtook me big time: 6 years ago I was much better in Russian than her, and now the scenario has entirely reversed. 

And, yes, of course, there was Vodka again. (Only Vodka = good.) And as the Russian bear had been on our plate in the shape of sausage in the restaurant Zver, we felt obliged to toast him in a respectful way, too.

The entire picture set of the journey, by the way, is here on my Flickr-Account. St. Petersburg is one of these place you have to see before you die. Even more as there are two opportunities to see two totally different faces of the city. In summer with the white nights where the sun sets at 1 am and rises at 4 am, where the skirts of the girls parading on Nevsky Prospect are pretty short, and in winter when the sun rises at 11 am and sets at 3 pm, when the temperature drops to minus 30° C, where thick furs are covering those same girls, theatres as well as operas are in full swing and Vodka is the fuel to provide both warmth and happiness.

Spasibo (=thank you), to EO St. Petersburg of having us and giving us the truthful hospitality which only a Slavic heart can convey.