On Stage At NIMHANS Bangalore 2011 — With TutorVista, FusionCharts And BharatMatrimony
In May 2011, one of India's biggest events of the year for start-ups returned to Bangalore — held at the NIMHANS Convention Centre — with a speaker line-up that read like a who's-who of Indian entrepreneurship. I was on the marquee.
The Line-Up
Alongside me, the event featured Krishnan Ganesh (Founder & Chairman, TutorVista — the serial entrepreneur with four successful startups to his credit), as well as the founders of FusionCharts and BharatMatrimony.
That was the shape of a marquee Indian startup stage in 2011. A handful of first-generation founders who had actually built something — no unicorns yet, no billion-dollar valuations, no Twitter threads. Just companies that had turned real revenues and served real customers, standing up in a Bangalore auditorium to tell the next generation how it had actually been done.
How I Was Introduced That Day
This is the exact language the organisers used in the event invitation. I am reproducing it because it is a good snapshot of how Su-Kam was being talked about in the industry at that point:
“The man behind Su-Kam: Kunwer Sachdev. From selling pens at an early age of 15 to building an Rs 700 crore in revenue company, Kunwer Sachdev, CEO, Su-Kam is known for his ability to innovate. Meet the man who believed that reliable power back-up solution is a necessity, not a luxury in a country like India — and set up one of India's first ever Real Indian MNCs.”
What Made 2011 Different
2011 was still an early moment for the modern Indian startup ecosystem. Founders who could talk credibly about scaling in India — not just raising capital — were rare. Most of the energy in the room, whenever conversations turned to advice for younger founders, was about product-market fit, distribution grit, and the discipline of running a company that had to fund itself from its own customers.
My session focused on exactly that — distribution, manufacturing discipline, and how to build a category from scratch in a market that had not been served before. The Bangalore audience that day was largely made of first-time founders and engineers thinking about their first company. It was the kind of room where a small piece of concrete operating advice was more useful than a big-picture inspirational thought.
Why This Circuit Mattered
Events like the 2011 NIMHANS gathering were the connective tissue of the Indian ecosystem at that time. There was no Y Combinator batch, no LinkedIn founder-mode, no podcast circuit. If you wanted to know how another Indian founder was actually thinking, you got on a plane and sat in the same room. Bangalore, Delhi, Chennai, Kolkata, Hyderabad — the same 30 or 40 people would show up again and again, on rotating stages, sharing what they had actually learned that quarter.
Those trips are how a whole generation of us got to know each other. Not through pitch decks and investor introductions, but through conference green rooms.
Sources
- → Google Groups / bangalore-best-jobs — Event invitation (25 May 2011) — the original invitation with the full speaker introduction.
Kunwer Sachdev
Founder, Su-Kam Power Systems · The Inverter Man of India · The Solar Man of India
Startup mentor, angel investor and serial entrepreneur. Built Su-Kam from a Delhi component-supply business into a ₹1,200+ crore power-electronics brand across 70+ countries. Now mentors India's next generation of founders. Based in Gurgaon, Haryana.