Pune, September 25, 2008: Computer Society of India (CSI), Pune Division, organized a seminar on “Entrepreneurship” at the MCCIA seminar hall in ICC Towers, Pune. The seminar was co-sponsored by MCCIA and supported by TiE and NEN (National Entrepreneurship Network).

nFactorial Software suggested the seminar concept to CSI and helped set the agenda and invited the speakers. The seminar was aimed at providing entrepreneurs with valuable advice regarding the challenges and approaches for early stage companies, inputs regarding financing - whether bootstrapping or by raising venture capital, and the current efforts under way to build an entrepreneurial ecosystem in Pune.

The agenda included a keynote address by Anand Deshpande (MD and CEO of Persistent Systems), Manik Arora (MD and Founder, IDG Ventures India) who spoke on “Approaching VCs - what they look for when they fund companies” and Harsh Barve (Vice-Chairman, Sungard India) who shared his experience on “scaling a company successfully”.

Madhukar Bhatia, who recently joined nFactorial Software as Managing Partner after his previous stint as Vice-President at Symphony Services (a global OPD services company), hosted the panel discussion on “Building successful software product companies and the kind of entrepreneurial ecosystem that they need”. The panel included Manik Arora, Vishwas Mahajan (CEO, Compulink Systems), Yoshima Somwanshi (NEN), Ajay Phatak (MD, Jopasana), Rajeevlochan Phadke (CEO, Image Point Technologies) and Sandeep Kumar (MD, ProductDossier). The last two companies, Image Point and ProductDossier, are amongst nFactorial’s portfolio companies.

At the event, CSI also released a special edition of its newsletter (DeskTalk) focused on Entrepreneurship which is available online at http://www.csi-pune.org/web/csi/csi-pune.