What you should look out for in a start up: Product: Will the company's product be alive in the next five years? Promoters: Who are the promoters of the company? What companies have they funded in the last five years and have they made a market impact Directors: Who heads the company? What is their background and experience? Revenue model: Does the company have a sound revenue model, a continuous flow of funds? Marketing team: What is the company's marketing strategies? Will it be able to beat the established branded players?

he Year 2000 has claimed its tech victims, and can now, with a modicum of sentiment, be formally declared the year of the dotgones. VC funding proved to be a rather weak crutch for dandyish netpreneurs who swayed by the magic of clicks forgot the reality of bricks, and expected advertisements to underwrite the cost of services and operations. Well, the bubble burst but the industry is still      keeping the faith. Instead of writing the last line, it is still penning the first principle: "In the beginning was the idea." Masochism, misplaced hope or eternal optimism neophytes may wonder, but a recent Nasscom survey predicts an explosive growth of $ 87 billion for the industry by 2008.

To ensure that the figure does not remain a mere statistic, the industry is heralding the birth of hi-technology start-ups, which by aligning bricks and clicks and focusing on niche technology areas are likely to grow at a healthy pace. According to a recent Nasscom study, last year 700 players opened shop, in the hope of becoming the Infosys of tomorrow. The rules of business have changed, hi-tech and availability of angel funding has democratized entrepreneual space and has shown that ideas take precedence over size. For instance Juniper Networks tenaciously took on Cisco and successfully dented its network market and Transmeta's Crusoe Chips delighted analysts by taking on giant Intel. Back home Sify made a splash on Nasdaq and Aztec's IPO was heavily oversubscribed. The euphoria generated by their success does not counter the fact that the very nature of these start-ups spells RISK in capital letters. The stakes, as in the case of dotcoms, are high, the markets skittish, the climate heady but unstable and given the greenness of the industry, there are no predetermined guidelines or instant recipes to transform today's start-ups into tomorrow technology bellwethers. 

But these odds pale in front of another pitfall. In order to make it to the winner's circle, a start-up needs innovative and intrepid techies confident of their capability to do path-breaking work, who thrive on working long hours in an unstructured and informal youthful environment. Shaken by the demise of dotcoms, manpower, one of the most vital components of organisational productivity, is refusing to bite the bait. The overriding concern among many candidates is that start-ups will not be able to survive the shakeout. "It takes twice as much time to convince candidates to join a start-up despite the high salaries and e-sops," says Anu Matthew, a Resourcing Specialist with a recruitment company. Bottomline: high-tech start-ups even those with angel funding, face an uphill task of convincing candidates to throw the gauntlet in their favour.

S. Nagendra country manager of Accelerated Networks admits that candidates' apprehensions are not entirely misplaced, as only one out of five start-ups reach the IPO stage. He, however, feels that the advantage start-ups offer candidates far outweigh considerations of its eventual success. "Start-ups are lean organisation and offer candidates a challenging work environment, an opportunity to make their presence felt. Techies working in a start-up are involved in the entire lifecycle of a product, their experience base is wide, their exposure is wide and they gets a real taste of responsibility," he says. His views are shared by a senior executive at Winphoria: "Start-ups offer candidates an opportunity to break new ground and spread across a wide variety of roles."

The ability to develop new products as against merely servicing for multinational companies is not the sole USP of start-ups. The start-up cognoscenti swears that unlike large hierarchy-ridden organisations where candidates are rendered invisible, start-ups offer candidates potential for delirious growth and opportunities galore to learn and hone their skills." S Nagendra, vouches: "A one year employee in a start-up is as good as a three-year employee in a large organisation. It's the difference between being a small fish in a big pond and a large fish in a small pond." And if you dismissed this as mere sales talk consider this: Anup, a former employee with Accelerated Network, with Accelerated Networks says "A person who's starting a career and is looking for rapid growth must join a start-up. I got to handle a wide variety of responsibilities and have learned a great deal in the last one ear. In a start-up you get instant recognition. Everybody knows you have done it and there is no manager to steal the thunder from your work."

The work-environment is further energised by the reluctance of most start-ups to brook any compromise with the quality of manpower. The efflorescence of ideas and skills coupled with brilliant professional make start-ups exciting and creative work environments. Start-ups need candidates who are mentally agile and capable of handling responsibility and working without supervision. According to managing director, Mandala Data Solutions, "The candidate must not only possess the necessary skills but must be completely confident and assured of his ability to lead the team and pitch in wherever is services are required. The candidates I recruit are required to be partners in business. The contribution of each makes a vital difference." S Nagendra concurs: The difference between working for a start-up and a large organisation is the difference between working for a public sector and the private sector. Only if a candidate is confident of his abilities, and has the guts to work at a rapid pace, should a candidate join a start-up.

Skeptics may dismiss this as marketing blather of executives, especially when the possibilities of VCs backing out, the company failing to effectively market its products or the company not being able to match economies of scale of larger organisations are real. In today's market scenario, where mergers, acquisitions and closures are the norm, and job surfing an assertion of skill, recruiters feel that candidates who have worked in core technology start-ups possess high marketability "Most candidates who migrate from core technology start-ups can command higher salaries, provided they checklist on the following: Is the company involved in the development of high-tech products? Will these products be valid for the next five years? Who are the promoters of the company? What is the experience of senior executives running the company," says Anu Matthew. In today's world organisational performance is not the sole parameter for measuring individual candidates' skill sets. If the candidate is skilled, and has been working on high-end technology products, the candidate need not fear low marketability in the long-term," says CEO of Mandala Data Solutions.

In a market where job security is myth and lead companies like Lucent, Novell and Unisys axed jobs last year, joining start-ups may not be as risky as conventional wisdom dictates it to be. So keep the faith, and if the right start-up comes knocking do not dismiss it as an upstart.
 

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