When I started the Pune Open Coffee Club in March 2008 on the suggestion of a friend, Vijay Anand (Founder, Proto.in), little did I know that in a short span of three months, the Club would attract over 200 members.
Anjali and I used to brainstorm ways of marketing POCC, and one of the ideas that really helped was coinciding our first major POCC meeting with the VC Circle conference in Pune in April. Since the conference was filled with investment bankers, the VCs who wanted to meet entrepreneurs came to the POCC event 🙂
It’s exciting for us to see new members joining the Club every week, especially with all the action they’re bringing with them.
Here are some of highlights of June and July in case you’ve missed something.
POCC will be meeting again on July 3rd to interact with Footprint Ventures, an early stage venture fund based out of Bangalore. Footprint Ventures will be there to interact with Entrepreneurs and speak to them about seed stage Series A funding. Thanks to Hemant Joshi for putting this one together.
Our last meeting was at the Law College Road Barista with over 40 members in attendance. Special guests from the last meeting included Hemant Joshi and Freeman Murray. Freeman is working to start an incubator along the lines of YCombinator. Hemant Joshi is the Founder of nFactorial, an incubator aimed at nurturing startups from the idea stage to seed stage. Both Freeman and Hemant spoke about the need for incubators and the value that they add.
The POCC has also been featured in the Pune Mirror.
The POCC has also spawned a high-frequency mailing list on Google Groups for Pune Startups.