The HeadStart Network is a not-for-profit organization run by volunteers and full time professionals to create and promote the innovation ecosystem in India. We define the innovation ecosystem as consisting of entrepreneurs and startups, researchers in academia and industry, adopters of new technology and products, and investors.

The HeadStart Network carries out a number of activities including

- organizing the annual HeadStart and Compute conference that showcases the best and most innovative products coming out of India and enables various innovation ecosystem stakeholders to exchange views and network

- organizing the monthly Startup Saturdays that provide continuous engagement with entrepreneurs and startups with new product adopters, investors and prospective employees

- working with entrepreneurs and investors to refine business plans, raise funding and make introductions to prospective customers

- working with mainstream media to highlight and promote entrepreneurship and startups, new products and technology

- partnering with various organizations to promote entrepreneurs, incubate companies and showcase innovation

Headquartered in Bangalore but carrying out activities in Mumbai, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad and Delhi (with Pune, Kolkata, Chennai to be added in 2009), the HeadStart Network is led by a team of 16 founders who are a mix of entrepreneurs, academics and industry professionals.

Kallol Borah is a serial entrepreneur with extensive experience of leading product teams, implementing products, and selling products in Asia and Europe. He has had a successful exit from e-procurement startup he founded in year 2000. After working  on a wireless software infrastructure startup for a couple of years, he is now working on a new consumer product called Lukup where he is involved with product management and sales to early adopters.

Kallol is a Director of the HeadStart Foundation and is also a co-founder and a very active member of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) Bangalore

Aditya Mishra is a Co-founder & Director of Headstart Network Foundation. Headstart is a not- for-profit company that promotes entrepreneurship. Aditya advises several early stage start ups in the areas of starting up, product/service development, business planning, sales and marketing. He is an Entrepreneur in Residence at TCS.

Aditya is also an organizer at Mobile Monday Mumbai. In addition he also leads the Mumbai chapter of IIM Bangalore Alumni Association. In past, he has organized several Barcamps across India.

Aditya can be reached at aditya AT headstart DOT in

Ramesh Loganathan leads HeadStart at Hyderabad. Ramesh has had a long history of involvement with startups and early stage companies and was more recently heading the engineering function at Pramati before joining Progress Software India as its Managing Director.

Ramesh also organises Barcamps in Hyderabad and is an active member of the Hyderabad Software Exporters Association (HYSEA).

Aashish Solanki is the founder/designer at NetBramha Studios (a web & brand design startup). He was earlier co-founder at Yulop and Genius Dreams. You can also see him un-plan barcamps and talk about his love for Design endlessly.  

He works tirelessly to present HeadStart to the world. Aashish is responsible for all things creative, web & communications. He also wishes to see more & more students take onto entrepreneurship.

Amit Singh, HeadStart’s leader for promoting entrepreneurship in universities and coordinating access to media for startups. Amit is building his entrepreneurial skills by working with startups in different domains and has recently started his own company.

He has been a key driver behind the Barcamps at Bangalore.

Kesava Reddy, our dashing and dynamic co-founder and the driver behind the Barcamps in Bangalore. Kesava is also a co-founder of Bangalore MOMO chapter.

Kesava is an entrepreneur who is bootstrapping his start up Numo and assisting fellow entrepreneurs at the same time cope with the same problems he has gone through.

Vinayak Hegde, is our very committed, hard working, somewhat quiet super achiever. Vinayak manages Startup Saturday setups in Bangalore, manages startup reviews and interactions at HeadStart as well and also is Secretary of ACM Bangalore.
Vinayak has a day job at Akamai where he does very interesting work on performance of sites with heavy traffic and does research on networks, scalability and performance.

Pankaj Jain, is the most recent entrant to the HeadStart Founding team. Pankaj manages Startup Saturdays in Delhi. He is also one of the co-founders of Teknatus Solutions which is an IT solutions firm based out of New Delhi.

Pankaj is also an organiser of Barcamps in Delhi.

Netra Parikh, is an energetic Pinstormer (she works in Pinstorm on her day job) who manages Startup Saturdays in Mumbai. Netra also does a myriad number of related things such as Tweetups (Twitter meet ups) and Barcamps in Mumbai.

Mansi Baranwal, is HeadStart’s youngest co-founder and is very interested in encouraging entrepreneurship among students. Mansi works at Yahoo Bangalore and uses her creative talents to formulate HeadStart plans.

Puneeth Rajanna, is HeadStart’s rock. Puneeth works very hard, meets schedules and keeps a tab of everything that is important. Puneeth is on a sabbatical from HeadStart studying for his MS in Norway. Puneeth used to work at Verisign, which brought out the start up ‘LightSurf’ he was working at.

Suresh Bhagavatula, our in house guru, he teaches at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore. Suresh understands entrepreneurship, knows the challenges that entrepreneurs face and is responsible to sew up HeadStart into the existing entrepreneurial ecosystem in India.

Harinath Pudipeddi, is HeadStart’s sounding board. A keen observer and a great thinker, Hari keeps HeadStart on track. Hari runs his not for profit society ‘Dazasya’ and has written several articles and books in the Software testing domain.

Hari is also the chairman of the Bangalore chapter of OWASP.

Akash Mahajan, is a consultant focusing on computer security. He imparts training on network security products and developing secure web applications. Before this Akash worked with StillSecure as their India technical lead.

Also has been a planner for barcamps in Bangalore and Ahmedadad. Now actively involved with the info-sec community in India.

Arpit Agarwal, after Aditya is HeadStart’s second non-resident policy maker and executioner. Arpit is a genius at planning and coordination. Currently doing his MBA at IIT Bombay, Arpit has been a driver of Barcamps at Bangalore and now at Mumbai. Also worked at Ittiam Systems while he was at Bangalore.

Rohit Begwani, is our man Friday in Hyderabad. Helping with logistical support in Hyderabad, Rohit helps Ramesh organise Startup Saturdays in Hyderabad. Rohit runs his own firm RdX AdVentures which is into managing events, organising tradeshows and running marketing campaigns.

If you want to become a promoter of the HeadStart Network, do write to Amit Singh at amit@headstart.in; promoters of the HeadStart Network are involved in the daily execution of the network’s activities and form the decision making body of the organization.