Ramkumar Shankar is the President of nuStart. He and his team has just launched their flagship entrepreneurial event in Stockholm Sweden called “Hej!2007." Read more about this initiative entrepreneur at his blog.

How did nuStart come to be and why the name?

The organization was set up before we came to Stockholm by the first and second batch of students. We're the third batch.

"nu" means “now” in Swedish so it's also something to say "start now,” to take initiatives and get things done.

What is the goal behind Hej!2007?

The initial idea behind Hej!2007 was to bring together the most exciting and promising web2.0 entrepreneurs and startups together in an informal sharing session.

The goal I'd say was to identify opportunities and trends in the development of the web and personally for us, to learn as much as possible from these people.

It was also interesting because as we organized this, we found the "web2.0" community here very closely knit.

How did you and your team manage to find the time to organize this event given your academic responsibilities?

Frankly, I don't know how we found time but everyone was really self-driven. It helped a lot that we all had the common interest - that we wanted to meet and learn from these people - and even the people who might not have been very enthusiastic about this event soon grew to like it.

How many people were on the nuStart team to organize this event?

Initially, there were 9 people in the team including myself but soon the next batch of students came and on the day there were 18 of us.

How did you advertise and promote the event? What kind of channels did you use?

We primarily used the web, not adwords but mainly just blogs.

nuStart was not very well known before this event. In fact, people hardly knew us at all and when we had the idea of organizing this event.

The first thing we started to do was look for speakers and again, we did not know very many web entrepreneurs and startups then so we first approached one of our Professors, Alf Rehn, here at the Royal Institute of Technology University. He recommended Eric Wahlforss. Eric was the web entrepreneur I told you about who’s working on "trust in the internet" project.

Eric was really enthusiastic about the idea and he recommended another guy, Henrik Torstensson. Henrik is one of the pioneer bloggers in Sweden, and he liked the idea as well . Shortly after, he made an entry on his blog saying, "'I've met the guys behind this upcoming conference Hej!2007, and I think it's going to be good.”

I'd say that's when it really took off. Our website started getting hits from all parts of the world and the word started spreading. And soon enough, other people tracked back to that entry or even made entries of their own.

In the meantime, our Professor wrote on his blog, and Eric posted on his as well. All of a sudden, we were under pressure to deliver on the promise of a good event. I think it was a really good decision to have an event blog, which was also good publicity so people could follow the whole development process.

Why do you think there's a shortage of women in entrepreneurship and what can we do to change this?

The first thing I could think is that they, fortunately or unfortunately, have to juggle with additional responsibilities as well.

But this question also reminds me of the time when I met one highly successful female angel investor here who said it can be an advantage to be a female entrepreneur. She said, "it depends on how you look at it.”

She mentioned it can be advantageous to be fewer in number. You can get invited to conferences and it could possibly be easier to strike deals. So depending on how you look at it, it’s a really great time for women to venture into entrepreneurship!