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Rip Empson is a writer and rabble-rouser at TechCrunch. He covers startups, music, social, mobile, health, and education. You can reach him at rip[at]techcrunch[dot]com ? Learn More “Silicon Valley doesn’t have a monopoly on brilliant entrepreneurs and founders,” Derek Andersen tells me over coffee, “so we want to find them wherever they live, give them a stage and an opportunity to share their hard-won experiences with those who need it and might benefit from it.” That mission statement sounds like it might have come from one of the founders or mentors of Y Combinator, 500 Startups, DreamIt, AngelPad or Seedcamp. But Andersen isn’t a venture capitalist, nor is he building yet another accelerator or incubator. He’s not even interested in equity. It sounds crazy, right? But Andersen is talking about Startup Grind, an events-based community for entrepreneurs he founded in 2010. For those unfamiliar, the company grew out the casual, episodic meetings Andersen had with friends and fell...

Editor’s Note: The following is a guest post by “entrepreneur around the world” Amir Wald. In this post, Wald explores some of the challenges of managing a start-up in a country where disorder is an integral part of the way the country runs. Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly attributed Nir Eyal as the author. Again, the essay was written by Amir Wald. “India is a woman”, so told us a young Indian a while ago in Goa. We were sitting in one of the countless restaurants scattered along the Goan beach and heard for the first time a phrasing of India in one sentence that actually explained something about it that we always had a hard time with. “You must understand, in India the female energy is the dominant one”. At first, considering the level to which Indian women have to cover themselves in public and the prevalent focus on wedding and children, it sounded a bit peculiar to us. But the young woman went on to explain: “What I mean by feminine energy is… as in...