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+NEW YOUTUBE SOURCE: Excerpts from the transcript of the video "IIT Bombay to Founding Adapt Ideations & Brokenatom | ft. Prashanth Dharawath | SES-1 | GUESSS India" uploaded on the YouTube channel "GUESSS India"
+hello everyone and welcome to the guest India cloud experts and entrepreneurs dialogue series i am Dr apan Naro and on behalf of guest India I am talking to you about yet another entrepreneur a young entrepreneur somebody who started up as a student so today we navigate with Prashant Darat the various questions at the heart of student entrepreneurship let me introduce Prashant to you our guest for today prashant was formally um I mean Prashant started off as a student at IIT Bombay and uh took all the courses from the first batch of the Desaieti school of entrepreneurship and from then I have seen Prashant very closely constantly in entrepreneurial mode if I may call it so um and because I've had this opportunity to witness his journey so closely I thought uh we should explore what went on when Prashant started up so welcome Prashant thank you so much for joining us today thanks for having me ma'am yes I'm glad to be part of this series fantastic thank you so much so Prashant uh I know you were a former co-founder of a robotics company and then a co-founder of Adapt Ideations which was a futuristic IoT devices company you worked very closely during COVID for um this project um and you are now on to yet another exciting journey so talk to us about the about your journey first and then we'll take it from there yes so uh thank you once again ma'am i'm glad to be part of this series i started as a a student entrepreneur but let's not call it a student entrepreneur i'm glad that I gave the opportunity to do two electives out of the department so I said uh which which are these two courses that I would do and get away easily that's how it started uh for me but then what has happened is as I started exploring into the entrepreneurship with these courses the first one being uh technology venture creation right so we are only this side of technology and then venture creation has given it it's kind of a simulation on how the venture can scale in in the sheets I think um professors did a really wonderful job including you ma'am in that course uh back in 2015 16 so that's where it started what what it gave is it doesn't stop at technology but there is more to it to convert it as an enterprise and uh that was the triggering
+point that okay let's take this as serious uh thing rather than going for conventional placements and all and uh that's where the journey has begun so I um along with um a senior u immediate senior from IIT Bombay and with a batchmate we started um a robotics company and initially to solve the problem of uh uh IED devices inside the land inside in light affected areas in the country that's how it started so how do we scan the area and say that you know this area is out of this out of danger and it is good to explore for our CRPF and Javans that's how it started and uh we um I Bombay uh center for entrepreneurship and um all of all of these entities helped us with initially the fund office and all of that uh to build this robot that can crawl that that navigates um yeah so what has happened is while doing that journey and the help helped us to build a proof of concept then the CRPF was interested so what uh what has happened is we the the cycles that we were going and building was too quick to build it as a scalable product and hence we said okay let's uh then I said you know this is not the mindset we would build a company with then I said okay uh to my other co-founders that you know I would want to leave and start something where uh where we can sell the product quickly because robot is it had it was it was a big platform a moving platform then 6 do robotic arm so they said I came out uh then partnered with uh one more uh um um batchmate uh to form this company called adapt ideations um to solve the problem of uh wastages happening in gold chain logistics and pharma industry so and this this wastage is not only in pharma but this wastage is in the food sector also everything started with the problem statement that about onethird of uh pharma that is produced and uh 1/4 of food that is produced gets wasted simply thrown out the reason being uh these the food that is stored uh is not monitored right there is no alerts that says that hey the food is stored here and nobody it's not put in right temperature right conditions and as as a result the food gets get wasted in couple of hours of time so and in pharma you cannot put vaccine um outside uh temperature ranges for not more than an hour and the efficacy is si
+mply low you'll feel that the vaccine got administered but there are no effects to it because vaccine in itself is a microorganism out there and it would die at other temperature so um that was the problem statement we uh worked with um uh ma'am is that fine i'm going little in detail no no no this is this is completely about this no problem please continue yeah yeah so the problems that was the problem statement then we started working on a solution and we said okay there should be an IoT connected device uh that would monitor the stationary uh cold rooms then monitor the vaccine in transit then monitor vaccine in distribution and everything and then all of this would send data to the cloud we would build an intelligent layer uh in the cloud and it would send notifications alerts and many a times pre-alert saying that hey here is how your distribution going on here are the roots right so and we got the solution out there um then what has happened is covid hit then we said okay everything is going down let's um we said let's let's only survive let's see what would happen okay So um I told my team guys you know I could only pay half or less than that if it is okay let's continue if it is not uh then you know that is how it is you know that's why the situation is fortunate that most of my team remained um uh intact so prior to co uh I happened to travel to Australia a couple of times work with a major uh supply chain company over there trying to understand this problem in detail so uh once we have the problem once when when when we were putting the solution together I traveled extensively met at least 50 customers what are the older products that are currently used and where the technology is going right now how can we solve so the current products that are being used is they use a offline monitoring recorder that would say that this vaccine has come in so and so temperature Instead of that you know we we said why don't we build an intelligent device that would send data always connected and all so during co you were building the product or did you have any prototype ready we had couple of versions precoid already all right all right yes yes so we did the product was already there we could have gone for mass prod
+uction but the co hit we stopped it there so extensive uh customer visits only gave then we listed all the functionalities okay here are these kinds of customers these needs the these functionality so we used to do it on big uh uh A2 A3 size papers and then map the functionality and say that okay here is our product going to look like and we built the product then the COVID hit and um and then what has happened is uh the the major logistics jo giant in D uh in Australia uh said that we partnered with government of Australia to distribute vaccine across the continent and then and then D um and then um New Zealand government also said the same thing so they asked us you will be our monitoring partners across the supply chain um so these countries Australia and New Zealand were importing vaccine from from different country uh and then the vaccine was stored in one major hub in um uh in Australia and from there the distribution would start and that is where we start monitoring the vaccine and um but we got the order but it means preparation met opportunity your timing must have been very strong was very strong yeah the timing was very strong we played completely in our um favor yeah uh yeah but what has happened is um uh the chip market has completely went down so the the chips that we used in our designs were no more available and my team was put in various parts of the country so um it it was impossible to pull that order we got a major u uh major order from this uh logistics giant but then how do we um how do we fulfill the order that was the question we had so yeah so luckily you know the team was so supportive um I'm I'm fortunate to have built that team again uh you know thanks to because building the team the emphasis came from uh my uh lectures at um my classes at school of entrepreneurship of uh you used to always ask where is your team you know are you lone team member why don't you find a team so we fortunate that we built that team and then the team was intact so we said okay let's build a new product with what is available in the market so I'm here I'm here yes yes so we uh we said okay we we scrapped everything we had we had done like six seven iterations by then we said let's scrap everything um soft
+ware is software was easy to scrap and rebuild so we said okay all the firmware code all the I think 18 to 24 months of testing and development we scrapped everything and then we kind of built everything in next two weeks of time and you have only two weeks so um and um between uh the two covid covids there was some gap so I asked everybody to come to Hyderabad one city and then we said let's go to office in the morning us because that's when the there was a you can move around the city so we would go to office build a product entirely in two weeks of time and then we sent out designs for manufacturing and um that's how we kind of fulfilled that order and um you know that triggered a major investment uh into the company and that triggered a geographical we were then only you know we were we had an office in Australia then then that triggered a office in uh um um um US Atlanta uh we we were triing with a lot of customers over there right and um yeah so yeah that was the journey and then uh then my board said you know we need somebody who's experienced to run the company and then I said well that is good then the thought was the thought that was inside my mind was okay how what should I do so that you know pay was not the problem what should I do so that I would create 100 million value in next two years of time so that would not come if I if I join some other company uh if I go and work in US right so I would be working for somebody in right so that's when uh my current co-founder Ash said okay there is a problem statement uh if played well uh we can revolutionize the software development uh way um how we can quickly bring up the applications out there so and then uh I kind of fell in line because while I was building my previous uh product the cycles of development has impacted a lot so the the entire thought was how to bring um prototypes and POC's to faster deployable code scalable code right scalable products and that was the thought we start started with once again I start restarted everything from zero and uh in again again then when you restart there is no guarantee that your product would be hit in the first go right it together product new industry you have to understand the problem problem statement
+people and all of that so in here also we are going through multiple cycles once again that's how we started broken atom right recover covered most of it man right right so um Prashant u one uh question because you are one person who started up as a student and then you continue to be in startup mode again meaning I'll use the same uh phrase in the sense that you you now know how you want to build from a scratch and you can build from a concept to to uh scale and then you have the strength and uh the capability to take a call when you need to exit and then also make a new effort correct yes so Prashant uh tell us about the key drivers for your decisions meaning you uh when we look at the guest survey for example one of the findings was that most of the stu most of the students excuse me most of the students expect to take up employment first and then go into entrepreneurship almost uh 38% if my numbers uh serve my memory serves me right are interested in starting up but they want to do it after 5 years of employment in your it was you have decided consciously not to take up employment um tell us about these the key drivers for this decision um yes so entrepreneurship started for me as a you know exploratory act act activity as first um I used to always think that you know so many smart um ITNs uh or nits major institute graduate PhDs graduate and I used to always think where are all they going okay so um then I felt okay once you are out of IIT you would work for couple of years um or we go for masters do it two year master cycle over there um or you work couple of years in India and uh you get married and you fall into the cycle of life and you're not free until you are 40 or 45 until your kid leaves your home right uh that was one one thought uh and second my sister and family lives in US and uh I was looking at the seniors from my college um what happens is when you go for masters you need to retain your visa over there so you fe you'll have to keep trapped yourself for every twoear cycle you know someone has to sponsor you you have to work very well for them right I would otherwise no one would want you to be there right so and then you fall in that trap and I mean there's good trap of course there's good
+standard of living over there good life and in fact it here also you get paid well and then you get married and it's a it's a it's a trap in a way I mean this it's a good trap to have right so in both ways it is same I mean you you fall into the cycle of life so the thought was when is the time to explore and learn fast and do things quickly right so that is as soon as you graduate because the moment you go for masters uh if you're uh then you'll have to take a loan or there is a financial burden there is a comparison right um or you go for a job then you always compare your salary with your friend salary or next job better job so I said okay the right time to explore is now couple of years now and uh right time to do understand fasten your cycle is now and then as I started that I as I started entrepreneurship then I realized okay let's look at the list of entrepreneurs and what it took them to make an impact in the market so let's not look at um few people who had made an impact in very few years of time they started entrepreneurship but the average um average uh span they make an impact is no less than a decade I mean you would right I mean half a decade for sure right so half a decade for any startup to have it any name on the market so so well when I started I figured out how to survive first right you by doing entrepreneurship you can survive too so once I've survived okay how would I build the consistency and build the company and then you know reach that time where I make the impact so yeah so so you a first generation entrepreneur right yeah I'm a first generation entrepreneur in my family what was your family outlook like towards this kind of a decision it must have been disruptive circle at least so I made some rules yeah definitely i come from a farming uh family um so we said because I made some rules like I would not take a penny from home so that would stop half a half a noise coming from there and whenever I can I'll contribute back home so that would stop most of it right uh so and then they were always saying why don't you take up a job and all I said you know um how does it matter I I started to earn after two years of my entrepreneurship journey so that two years was where I said I'll not ta
+ke money from home and yeah so they were supportive initially they were suggesting me and uh given that you know nobody is as educated as I was in the family i mean yeah so immediate family was fairly educated but I think they were okay for me to try couple of years but in that time I figured out a way to make money and so yeah that's right that's right my father want me to do government job though yet right exactly exactly so navigating through that is uh is not easy especially family expectations so you did have a conversation with yourself right to identify how you want to navigate through the family pressure about your decision right tell us about the so uh I mean that was so much uh to unpack in whatever you shared so far um three companies broken atom is the third company right um you have also shared how you got into an entrepreneurship course and option the option was that it'll help me get off easily so today as you look back on your journey are there any regrets do you think you would have done things differently anything there there are no regrets as such uh ma'am um right now there are no regrets in the journey i would say it's been like 9 8 n years since I graduated but I uh unpack I feel that I've gained the knowledge of 30 years uh working in India navigating navigating through various parts of the country um so there are no regrets i know how would how a Delhiite would uh behave how would Mumbai behave how a South Indian behave um in a team culture I mean in a when you are talking to uh people from who who do you who customers who want to genuinely support you customers who uh want to squeeze as much as out of you so I could unpack um learn all that experience a conventional person a MBA graduate would learn in 10 12 years of their career post all these so that way learning wise um I have no regrets at all in terms of money I guess I made what more than what I my friends could make so there are no regrets that way as well yeah absolutely absolutely so that is great so Prashant let me give you another statistic from the guest survey okay so one one of the findings was that 4.8% of the students who responded to our survey are already running a business venture the global figure for this is 11% oka
+y uh what do you think should Sorry ma'am can I get the question once again yes yes so the guest uh in the guest survey the students who responded to us we found that 4.8% of these students are already running their own business ventures right 4 4.8% 8% of the students right we got students from across the country right now now the global average of student entrepreneurship is 11% okay how what do you think should be done to improve this number the percentage of students entering entrepreneurship as a student first of all do you think it should be a goal that we encourage more and more students to take up entrepreneurship secondly what can change yeah so how I'm looking at that ma'am is introduction to entrepreneurship um for me was done by choice right but imagine introduction to entrepreneurship was done by force just a pun but yeah so I think it should be done like early um early in um graduate schools uh by not by choice but by you know we do we do introduction to humanities we do introduction to biosciences why not introduction to entrepreneurship right that would so what will happen is I took uh introduction to entrepreneurship by choice you know when you say by choice I think 10 20% of people would only want to you know look at that right and then I did it my third I in third year second semester also um or early fourth year so um so it came out as a lot of one it came out as a choice right and it came in the third or fourth year of my bachelors and then it came out of multiple options that I have you know I could go for an MBA I could go for uh a um job or I could go for masters or PhD right uh so but what if this is made as a a compulsory course in uh um in all the graduate schools right and to be done in you know second year or later second year I I don't know I don't know when is the right time but then what would happen is um the thinking would change for a lot of students the number would sharply rise you know if what if there was a course on registering a company doing transactions right handling customers making Excel sheets right filing GST and then how to run a basic company so I think that numbers will not I can't say it will double but quadruple uh if these activities are done that's right th
+at's right because it's you know it it it'll not it's a theor can be a theoretical course where students or you know for me I used to we used to do MA like MA courses and we are second order differential equation courses somebody who's doing all these um introduction to entrepreneurship should be an easy course right you know there can be case studies there can be so what would happen is that would take away all the fear of starting up um and entrepreneurs can you know students can be entrepreneurs while doing their bachelors and um and can get out much more confident um that's how I believe yeah right right so Brandant since you mentioned the course introduction to entrepreneurship in your case the person who took it was an entrepreneur himself somebody who'been there done that and when you heard straight from the horse's mouths so to say there is a certain impact uh how would students accept it from an academician somebody who's an educator and who's interested in entrepreneurship of course and taking this course teaching this course would students be as accepting as lessons from an entrepreneur directly i think um there has to be a strong attractor to uh these courses initially um because uh um it it it happens by crowd itself you know when you know when I was uh there used to come seniors who would be like I keep seeing uh the post from uh uh LinkedIn that you know Bavi Shagarwal went to IIT Bombay and then the lecture hall is full of students so yeah what would happen is initially it it can't be the entrepreneurs teaching these courses because their learning will be only limited to some sectors there has to academicians has to come uh put out case studies and put out a theoretical plan because they are the researchers behind all these entrepreneurs so it has to be a combination a combination well curated so that you pull the crowd initially that's how I'm looking it interesting very interesting uh what else would you add to this uh formula of classroom classroom course on entrepreneurship do you think factors like mentoring funding team formation incubation will they uh play a role at such an early stage yeah so in my case all the credit goes to goes to uh the city center for entrepreneurship all like you
+were there I met you over there and all the credit goes to the staff over there the city center um so no doubt um there was a layer protecting us there was a layer curating environment uh that would um bring out the crazy thoughts in our brains and validate and you know so the incubation centers entrepreneurship schools definitely play a much much bigger role when I when I think right and uh because you need to have somebody who would listen to your crazy ideas right you know otherwise they are only then they only remain crazy ideas so So me and my friend um from bachelors we had we were working on an idea similar to practto back in 2014 so uh and we went to uh sign center for entrepreneurship and then we said can we do it and they said why not you know you guys just come down we will help you in registering the company we'll help you unfortunately we did not perceive that idea but what I'm saying is uh you know whenever we meet we always ask oursel oh we should have done that right okay so that's it yeah I think they play a major role because um students are like often um are clueless correct correct so at an institutional uh so let let's uh close this one segment about your student entrepreneurship what pitfalls do students face when they have all these ideas that you were talking about what is it that stops them from taking that one step in experimenting or starting up i think uh it's it's to do more with uh competition within friends competition within departments of uh securing a job securing uh uh securing a seat in masters um all right so um they are competing uh to do what is next best thing amongst friends so the entire thought process of dealing with uncertaintity is not taught anywhere right i think that I think that plays a major role correct correct that plays a big role right yes that's such a strong insight prashant you in your first venture that you were experimenting with you were doing it as a part of your course you mentioned right technology venture creation yes so you got in touch with the defense you said the CRPF came in and all how did you manage that being a student so we were a team of uh then we were a team of four people uh one of us on the communication side uh working with IIT Bom
+bay had made the introduction through their um I think there's a center called uh um center for which which connects to the industry and industrial bodies okay so they made the introduction and uh we met the defense uh they work with defense yes they work with defense as well so they made the introduction and then uh uh then CRPF had an open problem statement of somebody solving this and we said we would want to do something in robotics and why don't we pick this as problem statement so correct so let's go to the next part uh here what kind of uh so the next segment will be related to institutional level or policy level interventions that Yeah so what kind of interventions do you think will bridge this gap which will and encourage more students to explore entrepreneurship yeah so first the point number one should be um um should we should the the the educational institutes institutions should introduce entrepreneurship and that is not happening like you know that is happening as a choice now you have bunch of 100 courses to take you pick one or two and then the chances are you know two three percentage so right um the introduction can happen much earlier um the second one is um I don't know how this is to be done but you know the students mindset should be changed in such a way that it is okay to have a couple of years of your life to be in exploratory life you know postgraduation right um you know when I look at the history and statistics of my the people that I know right it's not that everybody who has gone for PhD in a um you know ranked number one university had done you know so great a job right so um there is no standard formula so the standard formula can be somehow I don't know you know teaching students that they can explore things uh a year or two postgraduation trying to solve some problem statements right so um that has to be brought down that that would be my second point okay yeah third yeah i think I think these are the two points uh somehow yes sorry it's complete somehow if these two things um gets uh into the students mind early it would be yeah number of entrepreneurs coming out can be quadrupled correct correct correct so there is uh yet another guess finding that I would like to share with
+you according According to this report 63% of student entrepreneurs have access to university support for developing ventures but only 26% of these student ventures get incubation uh what are the gaps that you have observed in the incubation ecosystems in educational institutions yeah so there are I mean in fact this comes from experience itself um the incubation ecosystem has to um own the entrepreneurship entrepreneurs in the early stage like sometimes what would happen is um for example um um like in in in in IIT the I think there was a the ecosystem was definitely there you have to apply for um you have to apply for some schemes so that you know they would put some money um uh there has to be a groundwork that has to be done uh right um then present it to the committee and then uh so what would happen is all of this is done as a all of this has to be done as an extra activity apart from your academics correct exactly from my from my experience um academics was too intensive uh at at IIT Bombay uh it was quite consuming uh then you have extracurriculars then you have friends right so when all of us has to be part of your life over there and uh then you have to do entrepreneurship that means you have to pull all together one or two courses apart from what you're doing right so um one incentive for the students could be you know just like there was an elective for me that enabled me to to take a course on entrepreneurship Uh there can be electives that says that hey you work on an entrepreneurship idea equivalent to some quotes equivalent to some credits and credit credits come together for a degree right so that can be an so students literally going to these entrepreneurship buildings and then sitting there and working um trying building a cult out of entrepreneurship uh can be one incentive for students right so that they're at least visiting they're trying to do something just like I would visit um lecture halls for my lectures but they are just lecture halls so but what if lot of teams working over there in dedicated buildings and and these are considered in the grading system in the point and then these are attached to uh I mean these schools are attached to incubation centers and then right if if there
+is a if there is a journey that can be curated correct that that would help a lot I guess a pathway within the institution as a pathway within the institution a fail safe entrepreneurial journey yes right right now all of that is coming out of a narrow choice to you Right right so you mentioned I Bombay and definitely facilities at IIT Bombay meaning resources uh is not a constraint in that in IITB but what about tier 2 and tier three cities or what about institutions within Mumbai who do not have access to the same kind of ecosystem support what they will really have to pull out budgets and build on this what is the for them to take it forward for universities or institutions i think in that would come as a major um educational policy change uh uh uh where uh these institutes should be incentivized in some way through grading so I see that these institutions get graded on some metrics but why shouldn't that metric be entrepreneurship as a major metric right uh that would change the economy I I I some way so um yes yes yes true so what about the private sector Brashant we've spoken about the educational sector Uh sorry ma'am I missed something yeah yes no no no problem we spoke about the educational sector we spoke about uh what can be done for incubation what kind of uh free funding ideas can be implemented and all of that what do you think corporations VCs and accelerators can do in this space to incentivize um either students in educational institutions or institutions themselves to encourage venture venture creation i think even in tier two tire three cities um there are lot of industries uh if if these education institutions are somehow able to connect with these uh industries and get them on board there so that these these people will bring out problem statements to the institutions that's right okay so the industry will provide the problem statement you meant yeah so because what is happening is a student like me would never understand uh you know for me it is a frustrating world but we would never know what the problem out there is the problem that could pay right that's the basis for entrepreneurship a problem that is worth solving that has a market to it that has a scalability to it so um at any tire
+city there can be a a combination of incubators educational institutions and industry out there right uh uh so everybody incubation center education is bringing entrepreneurs or students incubation is an environment they get um they get nurtured But uh industry can bring the problem statement government can have a little bit of early um some funding or some way to support this and if this is part of uh a policy or part of educational rethinking I believe it can do wonders absolutely absolutely so Prashant one last question and uh uh before I close I would like to kind of uh also speak to you mention that we will come back to you for any more further insights because there are so many things that have come out in whatever you said that when our team analyzes it there will be more uh questions we would like to come back to you absolutely no I'm always available man yes one one last uh question what would be one bold hack to uh that you would share for aspiring student entrepreneurs how can they start and how can they overcome the fear of failure i think I've uh repeat yes is there one hack for it or are there more than one hack what you can ask me i think there has to be the habit of um I mean uh you know a year going or year or two going waste shouldn't matter in early stages of um building a career career so um I think you it should be okay to explore new things uh the journey don't have to be super perfect uh I graduated then I got into masters then I got into job then I got it don't have to be super perfect right you know I somehow feel uncertainity is the uh root for creation and then creation of any kind or innovation of any kind so that would start with the uncertaint uncertaintity uh the students would want to take at the and it would have high reverse hurts later on um right so yeah yeah that's what I said it is okay to you know try something new for a year or two there's nothing wrong you start you want to be an entrepreneur in the fourth year because that's a deciding year do you want to do MBA masters or take up a job but why not entrepreneurship and pursue it for couple of years and there's nothing wrong as as as soon as this thing goes into the heads of student entrepreneurs um the retainership in t
+he student entrepreneurship would increase drastically correct and and uh supposing they don't start up but they have developed the mindset I think even the problem solving mindset like you mentioned identifying problem statements solving problems even if they've developed the mindset towards that I think it's a job well done yes because you once you become a micro entrepreneur then you would always when you join a fairly larger organization you would want to always the problem finder and solver um to this day I look it way only um um even today's day I align my team in what is the problem and how do we solve this you know how do we put aside all um hierarchal egos aside and get to the problem solve it in time that is the mindset I guess that would help in any profession they take absolutely on that note thank you so much Brashant this was very rich uh interview with so many inputs because it's rare that we get to talk to entrepreneurs who start off as students and build three companies like you have and share so much along the way thank you so much for this thank you very much ma'am glad to be part of this yes happy to be part of any conversations in the future yeah do let me know fantastic thank you so much Brashan thank you

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+NEW YOUTUBE SOURCE: Excerpts from the transcript of the video "IIT Bombay to founding Edgistify | ft. Kamal Kishore Kumawat | SES-2 | GUESSS India" uploaded on the YouTube channel "GUESSS India"
+welcome to the guest area cloud experts and entrepreneurs dialogue series guest stands for global university entrepreneurial spirit students survey and it's one of the largest entrepreneurship research projects in the world with the main research focus on students entrepreneurial intentions and activities including the topic of family firm succession i am Dr raaro speaking on behalf of guest India and today I'm thrilled to host a conversation that dives deeper into the heart of student entrepreneurship it's my pleasure to welcome our guest today Kamal Kishor Kumawat co-founder at Justify a next generation warehousing and fulfillment company that specializes in building highly optimized supply chain solutions and executing them on the ground kamill is also the co-h former co-founder with an affiliate marketing platform called deal with us being an IIT Bombay alumnus Kamill took almost all the entrepreneurship courses offered by DS School of Entrepreneurship and today he continues his engagement as a mentor we will explore this more in our conversation so let's go so Kamill my first uh set of questions to you is related to the entrepreneurial spirit in academia okay uh you have been a student of entrepreneurship meaning you've been a student of IIT Bombay of course you did engineering and uh you also took courses in entrepreneurship can you give us a quick uh brief about that yes so I would just start with the basics so I joined IT Bombay back in 2011 and while there like with all the great minds there was one thing which was missing was how to build those products there were lot of teams who were building robots participating in international national competitions those students were not recognized for their courses or that value was not there i started my entrepreneurial journey back in 2011 when these courses were introduced i guess in 2014 2015 these courses were introduced what what helped me was structuring out all the things which we did while building robots also or while building companies so which things are needed structurally like when we are starting a company it's more about passion about building or solving a problem but while building a company there are n number of things which also takes up your
+time so while doing those redundant things which are needed to run a company and also ensuring that you are able to follow your passion or you are building that thing remains more important was driven by the courses which I was able to take from identification what all skill sets would be needed to even start a new company that two you can fail on paper first while executing on ground so those things were quite constructive and helped me scale a company so before that it was more gutdriven and like we were more like though we were earning good revenue but we were missing out on compliances or things which we were not knowing that these are also mandatory to run a business while in college so you you if I had to summarize what you said we you would say you would say that the courses did give you a direction to something that you were already doing is that right yes not just the direction part like there were pieces which we were missing out like when you start a company it's more sort of a gut feel and you just want to break the door and things should start falling in place but there are easier methods you don't need to take always a harder route right like just from a simple BMC that things which I can do by partnering with other firms what all skill sets are needed in my co-founders or even in like it shouldn't happen that I am I have to spend almost one or two or even three decades with the company so I shouldn't miss out on the crucial things which are necessary or needed to build any exactly so that helps to know that is it worth my time to devote next two three decades in this particular domain so that is when you go via like academics though you have to devote more time but still it helps you fail fast right right so that takes me to the next question Kamill can what's your opinion about nature versus nurture can entrepreneurship education make entrepreneurs or is entrepreneurship education more about identifying and nurturing those who are already inclined towards entrepreneurship okay so there are two takes on this part there is a misconception that by learning something you will be able to execute entrepreneurship courses are needed even for the people who are joining the companies because ultimately
+around us there are thousands and millions of companies which are there and people are needed so through entrepreneurship that mindset building is needed so that you would be able to do more impactful work wherever you are joining it's not that you need to start a new company from scratch you could act in similar way in even in larger organizations so companies which are surviving or thriving even traditional companies are now acquiring startups because their traditional teams can't reach at that scale they need to have smaller scrum teams even for a new product launch in the traditional organizations so that mindset would develop them how to deal with the new work environment where each day because of AI and different things are changing even through geopolitical situations you have to evolve you have to identify that mindset building is needed which these entrepreneurship courses are helping though engineering is again a structural approach to doing things correct but ultimately even for Indian market I would say engineers are more sort of managers they know ultimately if I want to execute any project I also need to understand people management skill sets i also need to understand P&L handling right so while building that entrepreneur mindset you are aware about these words which are not being taught at early stage if you are entering real core research PhD and all again the PhD mindset helps you build on that research failing thousands of time to identify that mindset is being inculcated for PhD people but now for bachelor's degree how you want to evolve those people to run businesses or do activities these entrepreneurship courses helped from day one itself that boss you have to identify like if you are doing a job if you screw Do it up you can choose to change your company your growth might not be exponential but owning to your own mistakes that you are the sole decision maker whatever actions you are taking you have to back it and find a solution that solution approach is needed so which through courses also we can try i won't say that it is 100% proof but at least 1% improvement is a big impact in a person's journey for next two three decades correct so uh thanks for that uh elaborate response Kamill i w
+ill come back to some of the points you raised here let me uh give you a short statistic small statistic from the guest India report it shows a major a shift in career aspirations and 31% of students aspire to become entrepreneurs after 5 years that is up up by 14% at graduation right do you think entrepreneurship education is a major driver of this shift or are there other factors at play so actually lot of other factors are there not just the courses part But because of the digital infrastructure now India has so more reach is there even tier 2 tier three cities people are able like they have been running but now that data is available with them too so multiple business models are there and through even Tik Tok or Instagram deals or YouTubers that's again a business opportunity for them people are able to know that they can earn through different different sources that data because of the digital part data is available with lot of people and now current generations are born with phones in their hand they know what things are going out across the world and no one knows which thing would become viral or which model could work out so people have more access and through education the success rate is increasing the enthusiasm the passion to build something is something which we are inheriting from our previous generations like for my example I am able to take risk because of my father or my family support like I don't I know you also need to ensure that you have a like roof over your head that is needed then only I have that confidence to jump into entrepreneurship so but that mindset would help a person to reach that financial independence to take that risk calculated risk then it doesn't become that risk so that you are ensuring that your family also thrives and you are able to start your own journey it reduces the time span so there are multiple factors from digitization from data availability and like growth stories with Indian markets for sure like the action is happening here right so right time to be in India okay this will increase more like even the shows like Shark Tank right that is making it more famous and people try to attract like even in early 2000 cricket started broadcasting on channel like TV TV
+s were available to people so people wanted to become cricketers right now because of Shark Tank and and other people are becoming famous or India have now 100 plus unicorns those people are being celebrated so now people also want to become that it is a cool thing also to become an independent so there are multiple factors correct so since you mentioned Shark Tank I'm going to bring up a question which I had uh sort of wanted to talk about later but I will sort of bring that up right now m do you think entrepreneurship education should focus on creating entrepreneurs or should it look at mindset generation mindset uh orientation so first part I would always say the mindset part because if that confidence is built the problem solving attitude that what all resources would be needed you would go and identify because you are the sole person sole decision maker who need to ensure that that mindset will help even in developing our traditional organizations even people enter government organizations that would be a great skill set to help okay so first part is mindset second that mindset would lead to eventually more entrepreneurs right right okay so actually you answered another question so I'll now move to the next stage in this uh uh interview um classroom to startup and I think you uh you're one supreme example of how you have been uh tinkering working experimenting with venture creation from the time you joined you said that you joined in 2011 and you started up also in 2011 right yes and so so this journey from the idea to venture what are the common pathways that students follow from ideiation to venture creation so again uh like if you had that skill set that boss you want to work on something so people in IIT is also ultimate aim with even the coaching institutes have created a gaga world that boss if you're entering in IIT you would get kes of packages that theory is there and for those you need to build your great resume you need to take lot of Ps you need to understand that that's a set path but early on when I joined IIT I had seen the movie three idiots Ashish word heard about him met him also in my first year those sort of experiences gave me another perspective that boss if I put that time in buildin
+g something more jobs can be created and wealth can also be built so that was a ticking point that I started taking actions which would result in revenue generation or even help me understand the market also so similar steps I've followed for multiple ventures like when you want to ensure that boss you want to do something one no bra thing which I did was start building documenting everything start doing customer jour discovery part writing out about them that how that industry is working so documentation becomes the first part then for seriousness part you have to purchase the domain you have to do basics so that it is seen by the world that you are building something uh am I audible yes yes I can hear you okay you're clear so I started taking actions like each day if there is no delta movement that becomes a problematic part so for again if you are running something of your own you need to have small wins also each day each day swings from low to high you try to meet someone you send 10 invite like 10 people messages you just get one response at least one meeting that's a win for you so that you have to evolve or mature also that boss you are able to take different 10 different hits try to have one closer enjoy that moment also so Those things have helped me build businesses right multiple times so would you say this say that uh you were an outlier in your batch in the way you kept putting in efforts to build startups or would you say that there are multiple people so luckily when I was in college there were multiple startups which were coming up because Ola was becoming famous flipkart got funding was struggling in 2011 12 Snapd so I was at the time when startups were booming even in my wing there were 10 or 12 different companies being started okay so that ecosystem was there luckily right right yes plays a big role that means for sure like you need like-minded people you need people who are also enjoying the failures and ultimately small wins need to be there absolutely so what does it take a student to move from intention to action so one part which I feel like again the passion part or the action part they need to meet lot of customers the thesis need to be there on paper also it should win once you have
+a business model or not to articulate business model is a big word when you start thinking about that boss okay this might work in this way let me try and speak with people and when you're speaking with people don't forcefitit your solution understand the market first is it needed or not the major problem with engineering students which I have seen is we try to build something first sitting in a room then go to market then because of uh VC funding or some lucky breaks we try to see think that this is a PMF and now I should be able to scale that becomes a problematic partial aim is building real revenue also correct so for that you need to meet and understand the market so people who go in the market start understanding showing early revenue sign or something more active users people start using those things whatever you are building that gives you more confidence that's right that's right in fact uh with a justify I remember um you explained your concept to many people and it it's it's a pretty at least when you started up it was futuristic today we know the shape form service and everything and we know what's happening but when you started you had nothing what difficulties did you face in explaining your concept to people okay so again when we started knowing about the market uh we were pretty young like 23 24 year of old people going to people and saying that boss your thousands of cr of inventory will be handled by us we didn't even have that much capital or even we don't have capital but still we are better to execute your operations guide you with better solutions that was our random confidence but in that journey for closing one customer we spoke with more than 300 plus customers we documented that understood that read lot of research report met with people who have executed operations like we met lot of executives of DHL APL different differential companies we started like dreaming about it earlier when I used to see a good train we used to get bored but when I started building a 5y even seeing those trains like it could be my customer even the trucks which are moving when we are in traffic now I just think that those might be my customer what they are moving so you start hallucinating that boss everyth
+ing any product which I can touch was needing some sort of warehousing or was placed at some place even it's in their manufacturing plant or their distributor or even the retail outlet is a space that's how we built the journey like we started understanding the market then we were able to close a customer after that we got funded right thank you so uh Just to build on this continuous conversation a little bit more there there are many so for every one student who chooses to start up there are so many who choose not to right and there is interest there is excitement but there are certain barriers that prevent them from taking that one step that one action what are these bar barriers according to you that prevent students from acting on their entrepreneurial aspirations so first part is again I would always say that family comes first you need to first uh thrive you need to have a roof over your head and your like you should be able to eat good meals you shouldn't struggle for those things like you have that passion for building something but you are forgetting the basics because you can focus on like companies like your baby you want to provide your entire time to that so that becomes a first barrier second part now I guess because of the digital world has become easier that network part to meet people now there are digital roots which have reduced that barrier earlier people didn't have information so businesses which were built in 2000 2010 were more related with information asymmetry like people were charging for the information now after Google or even Chad GPT now information is available evidently so those barriers have reduced but people who have high paying salaries that becomes a big barrier because when you start you're starting with zero so I've seen lot of successful entrepreneurs who started at 40 45 having 1 2 3 cr of wealth then they started but student entrepreneurship is totally different it mighted by your batchmates supported by your friends or have at least that base like base money to survive correct who are your initial helpers exactly so you mentioned family does this mean that the economic stability of a family is important for students to want to start up so if you see most of the companies toda
+y which are larger enterprises they had this basic proof and basic family stability there would be outliners for sure we like stories those stories become famous but 99% people who are making wealth are not famous right those are people again according to balar if I take about successful companies we don't know about 90% of the companies who are in the back end running the businesses built a small plug-in selling just small products also even Eli those people are the ones who are running the ecosystem but we don't know about those people we always study or hear about outliner stories right so what about institutional interventions or policy level interventions do you think some of these can help to bridge this gap yes so again if you have that mindset built then you try to look at these are the easier tools policy level changes you are tracking that boss look EV is getting benefits or wind energy is get so those are the easier spots to identify opportunities and jump on all right all right even a small opportunity of I would take say the route from say China to or Russia to China to other Ukraine or European countries is blocked because of the war there was big opportunity how to move those inventory or goods because those goods are manufactured and needed so people build our businesses around that too so short these are short opportunities but again you have to think long term yes so such things are needed you need so again that skill set of research is needed a lot um let's look at uh incubation centers in university ecosystems so there is a guess finding that 63% of student entrepreneurs currently access university support but only 26% of student ventures are being incubated with some of the top universities scoring a 4.7 out of seven one of the highest globally that is for fostering a positive entrepreneurship climate what do you think are the key factors that would have contributed to this success so there are two questions here uh like I would take like according to my understanding what I feel first part is the incubation centers are there like lot of universities have started having that but you also need good mentor support in those who come from diverse background like otherwise if we take a talk abou
+t engineering colleges they their focus would be more on engineering products if you talk about management colleges is they would be focusing more on fintech or that sort of products which they understand so while setting up an incubation center even in larger organizations who want to have entrepreneurial mindset they want to build ventures or fastmoving companies inside that so that they can also survive they need to have that open mindset and have diverse people supporting that so that no startup opportunities missed so providing basic infrastructure but now highly skilled infrastructure is also needed because digital have reduced the barriers you can know about thing you can know even the documentation part initially when incubation centers were there they were more focusing on providing other supports from CA to legalities and which is needed but now those things are more democratized now you need that industry experience also to improve this score further So there are different incubation centers who provide that diverse infrastructure also but if it is provided across all the institutes at similar level it would help a lot okay so in your case in the case of justify especially or even I think deal with us you chose not to go for incubation is that right yes so luckily because I started early I had built that network and connections and about documentation process so I wasn't needing that support okay which generally other people might need we had built those thesis in place otherwise we would have gone through institute incubation center so have you observed any gaps in incubation ecosystems and educational institutions yes so again because so any company or any incubation center would be great depending upon the kind of expert experts they're able to bring in every instit like if you want to run even a company you need to institution institutionalize certain things that acts as a good part for the long term but on short-term period you also miss out on some things because the team who is running would look at startups who are more fitting to their thesis or their understandings of the ecosystem so either incubation center should also be run by entrepreneurs or that mindset that would help them evolve yo
+u can find similar thing in VC ecosystem also in India also VC funds who are run by entrepreneurs are able to take better bets compared to the financial VC funds okay and like everyone is doing great i'm not like saying that they are some belt or something wrong is there those have their own thesis but for incubation centers I feel more openness is needed more support is needed so that any idea could get better feedback better opportunities so can you throw some more light on what you mean by openness is needed so when so in college you can't define that boss i we would take only engineering startups or manufacturing startups or we won't take service based startups that shouldn't be the role of a college incubation center they should be open about any idea and they should have that network to connect them with ideal incubation center okay or ideal support because if those people are from that college they should get those other support too so um right in the beginning you had spoken about how um startups built by engineers also need to integrate business understanding design and service orientation understand customers understand P&L and all of that right so that means obviously venture creation and the journey of a startup is interdisciplinary correct yeah So do you think uh institutions provide these kind of interdisciplinary opportunities in venture creation for students yes so I guess entrepreneurship courses and venture creation courses are helping that we are able to meet like again because of that college mindset people are not able to respect the professor ecosystem but because of entrepreneurship courses they see the tag of company also our professors are even better than the CEOs of most of the companies but we are not able to value them that school mindset is there or we are not taught in a right manner that we can also utilize their expertise of industry too right because they have done research they have done PhD like they have that mindset also they also know how to build something unique we are not able to take those benefits but through these courses more importance that thinking is built even for the people who are not going for masters or PhDs true true so would you say that students in tier t
+wo and three cities are also getting access to the same kind of ecosystem support not right now i feel that even tier one colleges are still struggling so that support is needed to be extended that would give us even better team members like for me being a founder or running a great project in my company I feel those are again everyone who's working with us is an entrepreneur that mindset that how they run particular department how they are building those even smaller solutions we need people who have that mindset right right so let's now segue to a very tantalizing question employment first entrepreneurship later yes so the guess India report offers one unique insight into this the evolving aspirations of Indian students right and there is this shift that we are seeing 70% students aim for jobs immediately after graduation and this number falls to 52% over 5 years and entrepreneurial aspirations uh which were 14% immediately after graduation are now going to 31% after 5 years so why is there this shift why do people want to take up a job work for 5 years and then jump into entrepreneurship so two things in India the education is again becoming expensive all people can't like the family how their families have been so first they need to support their family that becomes a big factor so everyone wants to have that financial independence then only they can also learn about the market in again colleges we learn about say electrical engineering or mechanical engineering core one to two we are 5% people would be there who would be choosing PhD or research part going exactly or building on that but most of the people would want to go to jobs in jobs they require totally different skill set limited one or two profiles coding profiles who might be using their learnings but these engineering courses just build the basic behavior that boss you can try to incorporate engineering in different things also like setting a chemical plant you have are a chemical engineer so you know different things but you also need to understand the costing part of material involved so that where you want to build pipes and all those things so for that part the learning going to the market becomes a necessary thing like You want to build some
+thing but before understanding the market you are being taught certain things you have to pass that also so that becomes a problematic part so in first year itself if that mindset is being taught I guess more people would start exploring because as you see Indian ecosystem in last 70 years our forefathers from agriculture to they have built something now I guess most of the people have that roof over their head so more people can take that entrepreneurship bet but for that to happen we need to start building on early on right like from first year itself people would can start looking at things from an entrepreneur mindset that what problems we can solve true true and it can happen across India it is not needed tier one colleges only if we start doing this I guess percentage would so tier one college might have 5% success rate in tier 2 college would or tier three college would start having at least 1% or.5% impact okay so so what do you think should be the first step to ensure that this thrust happens so I guess that like I guess from first year like in colleges we have NSS NSO In government colleges these are the mandatory things which happen i guess basics of entrepreneurship should also be part of this which should be mandatory just for like how we know about mathematics basics like for me till 10th I guess everyone should have 10th level education so you are aware about all different courses which is beauty for Indian market that we know about even Sanskrit even different different languages which are being taught till 10th class mathematics social science all the we are like we have that basic access to all the things similarly I feel entrepreneurship is needed to fit in that criteria even financial education I feel those things will help people more to build something early Okay okay uh let's uh so you we've spoken about educational institutions incubation ecosystems in educational institutions entrepreneurship education you've also spoken a little bit about the government let's look at the private sector what can private stakeholders what can private players do like corporations VC funds NOS's accelerator groups how can they engage students better so I guess again VC funds are again startups so they have
+to prove the numbers for them i guess it would be difficult to build something on because they are a startup they have to be profitable they have to show highest returns that's how they are also making money those are startups for me but if I talk about traditional larger corporates businesses who have thrived for two three decades who are profitable sitting on great pile they could also imagine about building new companies but for that they have to have those like teams dedicated teams in corporates the problem part is they have that management structure in place and if they try to start something new in the venture and try to incorporate different different resources that could result in failure also so people will think that how my promotion would be impacted so they have to remove those barriers provide a open ecosystem that boss if you are able to at least build some thesis build something in these lines and they should have a separate team like even co-founders for that particular incubation can have a code tag in that who are building in that if that fails also they should be promoted in their existing jobs so they need to have more teams who can build on businesses that's right that's right so that culture need to be there separate teams building separate of even a separate dedicated teams would be needed it it's not a part-time job where you imagine if I take example of say Reliance and Reliance want to build something similar to Zomemetto and they just give a additional responsibility that becomes a confusing task you need to have dedicated teams inside corporates allow them to fail also right so um there are uh several private startup support systems mushrooming right student and they're inviting students to participate but somehow like it look it's a business model like you said uh how can these support systems be more studententric and how can they be more tangibly supportive in addition to the openness and the appetite for failure that you spoke about are there anything any other factors so I guess education part is already covered that if we start imparting basics of entrepreneurship from start and try to identify the problem statements which new generations are now seeing they can build better
+solutions imagine if I take a simple example people are who are born in 2020 or 2024 would your voice broke off come on for a moment sorry so I was talking about we need newer generation to build on product so how people who are born in 2020 or even in 2024 would be requiring totally different games altogether right so there are several uh you still audible yes you are audible am I audible uh you're audible now you're audible now just one uh meaning we're to towards the end and I have just a couple of questions more one of them one of them is about um the institution industry ac uh interface there are several collaborations there are several partnerships do you think something should be added to these partnerships to strengthen the entrepreneurship aspect or do you think the partnerships are not working at all we feel again it totally depends upon even while telling people that boss we have built this partnership it's depends upon the person who should be able to utilize the features of it so that those partnerships need to be marketed in that way that I'm able to understand that boss if I'm coming here I would be able to reach out to these universities or these people these props or even these additional benefits I can get those benefits need to be highlighted ed by a person not from corporate but who have that entrepreneurial mindset right right take example of even like the courses which we run in DSSE or ideas program students if they are able to access great industry mentors or write customer support we are trying to build a community people who are with corporates also should come for those pitches so that those products can get loi or a pilot opportunity true so everyone can be it's a like startups will thrive when corporates start using them too true that's true that's true in fact customers yeah yes yes i I think this is uh the right time to give you an idea of a project an experiment that I tried uh here at NM i speak to uh I'm on the uh like there is this it's not really a startup right now maybe it's in the transition going uh to going public okay and uh they build insurance technology solutions the the way we worked it the way the partnership worked was we ran a startup in here and the problem stat
+ements came in from the company students tried solutions and the objective was to come out with a startup idea around those problem statements and then the company would support them in developing those problems those solutions for the winning teams of course and that would be termed as an internship so it became a very attractive uh invitation for students to join participate and now in their summer break uh uh an opportunity for them to experiment with their startup development and and the prizes of course they sponsored some small money 50,000 rupees but the company also gets multiple uh perspectives and solutions you know so they they did do that um effectively Um but but then these kind of partnerships I'm finding are very few and far between not every large company comes forward with this kind of a thought process and sometime most of the companies who want to thrive for longer period need to do that because now age is not a number to judge on like someone who is 49 or 50 or someone whose age is 25 or 29 or even 18 we don't know the information they have accumulated in last one decade because of digitization so we don't know who would be great in terms of execution or understandings right totally depends upon what sort of impact they can bring out corporates could be running behind different different programs to understand how they would be able to provide things for the next generation absolutely they become their consumers they become they don't get bored even Netflix YouTube are experimenting what sort of they're trying to bring YouTubers to these OTD platforms so that their engagement can increase so you can imagine things which we calling as cringe is now becoming mainstream right more value than the traditional actors true this is just the entertainment industry now imagine the products which we are building for the next generation when I say products even the consumables the biscuits everything would change right to innovate even the supply chains would be no waiting like instamart blanket they are selling that 10-minut path flip card failed multiple times but now they have again launched minutes Amazon has launched the phone pay with their pin code so people who were calling that that won't work
+out are now running behind this at least in metro cities it can become profitable model right right so one last question from you Kamill because um uh you are uh an inspirational young entrepreneur who started off as a student and today many people would look up to you as a role model so what would be your message for aspiring student entrepreneurs if you had to give them one message so instead of one I would say two three things which are needed first of all start talking about ideas also early on try to identify people whom you're meeting identify learning about their journeys we keep diving in our phones so have that physical connect have that networking opportunities earlier we used to call that as dragon knowing about our seniors mhm but imagine that basic culture of knowing 20 30 things about our people they wanted to pursue do I is or they wanted to have the financial role they wanted to become consultant understanding their journeys so having that physical connect understanding that part is I feel that is started missing out but that connect would help people to build new organizations which can thrive longer and get honest so for students my first thing is start knowing about people who are around you know knowing about their backgrounds how they raised at those places what experiences were there and reading about general knowledge which is around us that would give like you rightly said about policy changes or government interventions you might have seen the defense talks going up because of the war then they're coming down because of ceasefire these things are happening around us so that common sense is built based on our environment how we are seeing the news or how we are interacting with people around us so have that common sense have those interactions and have empathy too okay because people are who have been successful one common trait which I found is empathy yes fantastic true Kamill that was very insightful and now if I had to ask you one last question before we close if you had to implement one bold idea to transform student entrepreneurship in India what would it be if you had to drive a change the thing which I told you so I wanted to bring lot of corporate guys on weekends to college
+and student just pitch their random ideas that uh one or two hour part where you can have snacks and all corporate people are coming just to interact with their college students and they can give them opportunities and ideas that's a like if a institute can sponsor that or a corporation or even a VC fund can do that that would be a great thing where after imagine like you are living in Friday afternoon uh Friday evening instead of going to your home you go to such place where startups are just pitching failing badly also but in just 2 to 5 minutes they are pitching and going away now it's up to corporate people to reach out to those so that gives them excitement ment also for both the sides people who want to build people who are with corporates who want to incorporate new solutions yes thank you so much so I'll be in touch with you thank you Kamill thank

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+Here are the transcripts, organized video by video, as requested:
+NEW YOUTUBE SOURCE: Excerpts from the transcript of the video "Did Lucky get Lucky? | ft. Lucky and Dr. Puran Singh | IIT Mandi | Special Ep.1 SES-3 | GUESSS India" uploaded on the YouTube channel "GUESSS India"
+my name is Puran Singh and I'm bringing to you student entrepreneurship stories i have with me Lucky who is a student of IMBA program at I Mandi i met him last year and he has recently completed one year uh the first year of this program and recently during the semester break he started a venture which is what intrigued me and uh I've invited Lucky to uh talk to us about why would he do such a crazy thing one year into um undergraduation program right first year right after plus two so I mandi he's from Hana and we see that by by the time the semester closes lucky announced venture which he calls IMBA beacon and we were intrigued uh the faculty group at I Monday we were intrigued saying what happening what is lucky doing and then over the next month or so we saw him do a lot of things which were interesting and I thought let Let's talk to Lucky and ask him more about why did he start this little venture lucky this is your first venture let's call this first venture okay so welcome Lucky to this interaction please tell us about what is IMBA beacon first of all and then I'll ask you the question why I do such a crazy thing go ahead so first of all thank you so much for the opportunity so IMBA beacon is a initiative that I took to mentor students who are aspiring to join IMBA program at IIT Mandi so at IMBA beacon me along with four or five batchmates we just guide students how they can ace the interview strategies and tips so that they can uh drive interview in their favor and things like that and one important thing that I missed out is we are also spreading awareness about this program many students didn't know this okay this type of thing also exists and now they knew it and I hope they okay and we also recently concluded the interview round for this but I want to know is when you started this IMBA weekend okay uh initially I confused it with maybe this is an initiative that we have taken and I'm aware of it as a school that we started some IMBA beacon to tell students uh about you to help them prepare and then I realized uh and you reached out to me as well sir I want to discuss about IV week and I thought maybe you have been deployed by or appointed by the admissions committee to spread awareness and when we
+had an interaction I figured out no this this is a this is a startup this is a small startup project that you're trying to do u so where did this begin uh when did you get the idea idea and what was that uh context where you thought I could do this so let us start from the very start so until my 12th class I was very much involved in sports from past six seven years so I'm a three times national medalist in fencing and by mid 12th I realized that okay if I put this hard work in studies I'll get more output maybe in terms of money and time freedom and all that so I just shifted my career then I got interested into NDA and I gave the exam qualified the written exam all the times and in total I gave four attempts two before getting into IIT Mundi and two after getting into IIT Mundi so I cleared the written exam cleared the stage one but couldn't clear the stage two that is the conference round so then I decided okay uh let me look for alternatives as my J was J score was also not very high so I looked for alternatives as I was not really interested into BTE but then I started looking for opportunities then IP and it was really interesting and as I got to know about IPMAT I also got to know about IIT Mundy's integrated MBA and this was even more interesting technology and management so I applied for it and I got in and then too I was thinking okay after a semester or so I'll just leave the institute and join national defense academy but all is in front of you so I didn't get selected and I didn't even appear for my last attempt because this business thing was more interesting to me now and I started to look for opportunities and I was so much interested in entrepreneurship okay I want to start my own venture and all then I saw this opportunity okay although this is not a full-time and so-called big venture but I just took it as a small project so that I have an entrepreneurship experience how to build team how to lead people how to deal with customers marketing strategies and all that stuff so I got to know so many things that will for sure help me if I start another venture that is full-time and I'm actively looking for that so that is it i saw the opportunity and I just picked it up so let us tell u uh the view
+ers about the venture a little bit more so far we've only called it IMBA beacon and we've said you know you are spreading awareness or you're guiding let's talk more in business terminology who is a customer is someone who appeared for J this year and is looking for colleges okay what is the problem that they have problem is they are mostly going in PCM they don't know what are the alternatives and different opportunities after 12 okay what is the problem that you are solving for them first thing is awareness second one is guiding through the interview process okay and uh uh what what is it that you offer this uh service to them what what is the modality what is the that you offer okay so initially we started with just one pack that is for 1,500 rupees and in that pack we have three mock interviews with detailed feedback and all and along with that based on the previous year interview patterns we had some important questions okay these are some questions that are repeatedly asking asked by almost everyone so we made some small exercises out of that okay so why imba is an important question so read the brochure carefully because you'll get so many terminologies and ideas to frame your answer why imba because there are so many features out there written on the brochure so if you go through the brochure then it will be very helpful to frame this answer so exercises like these we had four or five exercises and we had these mock interviews along with that if someone is facing some issues with answer framing and if someone is not able to guide their interview in their favor so we just tell them okay use only those words and things that you are aware of and that you can explain everything so things like that we offered initially but as uh it was a last time I mean just a one week before the interviews we offered two more packs in that we didn't had any exercises and all we just had 600 for one mock interview and 1,000 for two mock interviews okay uh you're looking at people who are applying for any program or only the IMB program since you call it IMB vehicle our uh main problem solving is guiding students who are applying for it but also there are many students who are not aware of this so we are spreading awareness
+and the students who are getting aware we are taking them into IMBA and so that they purchase our course right so my next question is uh if we uh go back in time when when is it you did explain that uh interest in NDA of you were you know you played nationals uh in fencing u but um all of that motivate you how did that motivate you to become an entrepreneur or try an entrepreneurial venture what was the trigger exactly how does this background in sporting and interest in NDA uh did that lead you to this or because that didn't happen you got interested in business or that wasn't happening you picked this so what exactly happened it was you can say a mix of both of them it was not happening and I was a little interested in this because I have developed so many skills like leading team uh and working with people collaboration as a fencing was also a team game along with individual games so yes I learned so many things and those things also helped me in this venture and also things were not happening so I looked for alternatives and I found this more interesting and as as far as IMB is concerned at what time did it hit you that you could do this venture in the last one year you may have gone through the courses in school of management here and would have uh been introduced to business but um at what point did you think that I will do this project this startup okay so it was during our mids in second semester it was uh February last week I guess so me and Yupta were sitting in library and I just told Yukta okay hey uh can't we do this then she said okay it's a great idea we can start working on that and as uh I proceed with it so Yukta was like okay I can't do this uh uh maybe some personal reasons but uh then I started alone and recorded my first video with the help of my roommate and Yukta but she was not really into this initially we decided a 50/50 but now I was just alone she was just helping me in recording videos and all but later on she joined me back as a mentor for mock interviews that is a different story but yes initially we started as two then she got out i was alone when we actually actually started and actually working on it but we discussed the idea at the same time in Jul uh February February and Fe
+bruary tell us more about this video why what is this video business you had to record the video okay so most of the JS parents use YouTube as for watching videos and with YouTube we started on Instagram and now we are also on LinkedIn so if some professionals kid is also appearing for J so they can also look in for their daughters and so initially we started with YouTube and Instagram because most of the youth is on Instagram and many students are using YouTube so for spreading awareness about the course in first video we didn't mention anything about our mentorship course we just told okay hey this is IMBA beacon oh I mean this is IMBA at IIT Mundi if you are not aware of this okay have a look in this okay so that's why the videos uh were were required okay great but didn't you think that you know you're just a student and you are just completing your second semester first year into the program at IIT Maldi uh starting a venture of you know asking people to pay you did it not sound crazy to you why would they come to you it was and initially before starting when the idea was in ideation stage so I was like okay I'll get so many registration I'll get six figures and all that stuff but when I actually started it I got only one registration in first 15 days 10 15 days so I was like okay I didn't expect that but as soon as the dates approached and I worked hard on marketing and spreading awareness then we grew very fast and there were some days in which we had 8 9,000 revenue per day but initially there were 10 15 days when we had zero revenue and I was like okay I just got one aspirant and that too his uh like he didn't get more than 75% marks in board exams so I had to refund his money so So it was really heartbreaking okay so uh let's uh drill down a little bit more you said Feb okay i'm writing down here on my piece of paper feb 2025 you get this idea during midsams okay and then you said you had to record videos you started recording videos so tell us a little bit more about uh what is what what are the steps that you followed uh you mentioned several words you said 1,500 rupees you said uh JES parents you said video record awareness let's talk step by step if if any student has to start u you know small min
+i startup project startup idea uh what are the first few steps so with your example I want to say what did you what did you do first you recorded a YouTube video then how did you decide you of course said that it should be on YouTube because people watch YouTube but then what content to put how to advertise so let's go step by step so that you know other students who are listening in they can get an idea of how can you build a mini startup uh in the first place so first of all look for an opportunity there was a huge opportunity that was lying and I explored it and get into this so I'll explain it in my case so I thought okay we can do I can do this and this so for that first thing is awareness because I was also not aware of this program but I saw a video on YouTube from some random coaching so if someone who is studying in the program he tells about the program it's even more reliable so in first video we didn't market anything see if you are marketing anything in your first video itself they'll be like okay so initially in the first video it was just for information and from the second video onwards we started talking about our mentorship course that two in the end of the video so first thing is information the second thing is grabbing their attention okay so if you want to get an edge over others because we told okay we are offering this and this nobody else in the market is offering this we had a unique thing that is the data data of the last year's student so I personally sat with almost all of my batchmates and asked questions okay what were what were some questions that were asked by you and where do you think you lagged where do you think you performed really well so we had some patterns okay this is where students are stuck or this is how you can drive interview in your favor okay and these are some most important questions that are really asked in the interview repeatedly so then we found the pattern the data that is our USP see there was one one competitor and he started one year back although there were some trust issues with some students okay you you you don't have any experience for taking interviews how do how can we trust you and pay 1,500 rupees and 1,500 rupees was just taken as a reference
+because last year as I'm talking about the competitor he put the price as 1,500 and we just wanted to start with the base year as it is our first year so we just tried to put it kind of equivalent but this year he changed a strategy and he just gave two packages one for,000 and one for 1500 and we just started with 1500 and later on we shifted to 600 and 1,000 packs too so initially we started uh for a base 1500 and next year we let's see what happens and what is good to go so you said you start with uh identifying an opportunity and uh because you had faced this process and you had access to your fellow batchmates you could also collect the data on was asked in the interview and therefore you could pitch this as your USB okay but operationally did you have a piece of paper on which you do did some number crunchy wrote your strategy what channels to use date by date plan did you do any of that or was it all let's see what what to do tomorrow no actually if you're asking about numbers uh I didn't get to your question can you please how did you strategize this did you write a plan on the piece of paper tomorrow we going to do this and then day after tomorrow this is the task to be done or you know we will take it as it comes every day we will see what do we have to do so how did you strategize not actually on a piece of paper but mostly I use my phone and there is the option to send message to ourself so I just send any important uh ideas questions that I need to look on or think upon so all the important stuffs I just put it there send a message to myself on WhatsApp and I did it all there because I don't really have a piece of paper every time but ideas are every time everywhere so okay all right and you did mention you know the USP because you were a student here you said the first fellow batchmate backed out and then joined later again how hard was it to convince other people you had five people with you uh initially you were just two of you or did the others did not want to join uh so how hard was it to find people to work with you okay so actually I just approached them to no I didn't even approach they told me okay hey I want to join if you want I can help you with this and all but at that point in time it
+was very organized everything was very clear we started getting registrations then only they approached okay hey we can help you with this so there was no as the challenges because everything was well established I just needed some people who can help me because I can't handle so many interviews and all that alone and also we did one more thing that okay there were three mock interviews so we gave three mock interviews with three different panelists and I was common in all the panels and the other person was changing so that students have more exposure to different type of questions interview environment and all okay okay great so um lucky my next question is about uh the mindset of students as a student um starting seems like too too difficult a task did you think you were starting a venture did you think it's an experiment did you think you are going to become an entrepreneur so what exactly did you believe would happen after this project did you think about that so my mindset before starting this was okay this is kind of a entrepreneurship journey only so in a long run I am definitely looking for a full-time venture and for that it will be a good hands-on experience and that is how I started like I want to do a full-time venture and for that it will be a good experience because obviously this is a seasonal business one time in a year so there are some limitations in this I can't really just get into this thing so I'm just looking for a full-time venture and this is a very good experience so many learnings for starting that one yesterday I was talking to a bunch of students about uh starting up and um some some of the questions that they have is sir I'm just a how can I start a company right so did you think of starting a company did did you think that oh startup means I have to register a private limited company and uh then I can start this not one thing I checked out was okay if uh I am doing some legal thing because I saw okay when do I need to pay tax then I found out okay if my annual revenue is more than 2.5 lakhs then I have to uh give tax okay then I was like okay it's fine now that thing I said but yes uh I saw many people on internet who are saying okay I'll do an MBA then I'll do two years of job
+so that I have uh recovered the payment that I did to the college for MBA and then I'll start my venture okay there will not be any golden day okay after two years jadu mantra and I have idea okay I'll start my venture now so when you you have ideas now you can start now while waiting for an MBA for 2 years and then two years to recover that payment of loan so it is a good idea to start as soon as you have ideas but then uh you started after the semester break or during this seme because you have courses to take care of you have to study for exams you may be engaged in other co-curricular activities or other administrative club level responsibilities doing a startup would you know how much time do you think a mini startup would take like you did and can you really do it parallelly with your studies was hard because uh in the last 1 month especially we had more than 6 to 8 hours classes almost every day and taking time out even when NSMs are approaching it was really difficult my brother was saying okay hey don't upload the second video first one is done do whatever you have the people now but I was like okay this is the peak time if I'll not do now it will be really difficult to uh catch up with the audience later so I just talked to him and I secretly recorded video and he got to know about it when I uploaded that video and he scolded me okay you didn't focus on your studies and all why you wasting I don't want this IMBA beacon I just want you to study you can start these ventures later on but I like okay I'll manage all the things so so do you think u yeah let's talk about uh brother your brother your family parents friends how did they react to it your brother of course wanted you to uh study and focus on what were some other people in your close circle like parents uh siblings other relatives who knew about this and how did they so my father is in CRPF actually so he don't have much idea about all this but he knew okay I'm just teaching some students and all that and he knows that okay CGPA is important but my CGPA is not really good as of now so he just focus in his studies don't give too much time on that and your main focus should be your college and exams and CGPA and all that okay yeah yes and my mom d
+idn't really react okay she says okay do whatever you want and a similar idea okay focus on your exams It must not be ruined because of all this so that you regret later and you are not able to catch up and yes one of my one of my cousins who is a master's graduate from triple triple it Bangalore he told me okay you're doing great and just stick with it okay so not everyone is in in support and when you come to uh an educational program u typically initial mindset is that I have to get a job and then trying to start a venture can actually go crazy right so what kind of support would you expect would you expect your parents or your relatives to be more supportive of you in future or do you think they won't change and you just have to go your you how how are you calibrating that in your mind no what I believe is when money comes they always become supportive as soon as my exams were over and I started getting money although I didn't tell them the complete amount that I earned from this all but I told okay hey mom I just earned 4,000 today today or I just earned 7,000 today so she was like okay good when money comes nobody is like everybody is with you okay but it can so this was a different kind of startup project you got the money you didn't require an initial investment but then there can be uh startup initiatives where you need to invest from your pocket you may need to be borrow steal whatever right in the beginning uh with hardware based startups where you have to build a product Uh so in such cases it could be difficult how do you think if you have to you still have to figure out a long startup idea uh you have made some money and if you want you can share with the viewers how much is that maybe other students will feel inspired and make uh you know this much amount of money in about a month in a short mini startup project but I'm saying if you have to do another project which requires investment money uh how do you think you're going to handle handle that okay firstly I work on a startup which I'm 100% or at least 98 99% on confident on the startup and and looking to the investment also so I'm looking for a venture in which there is not so much of investment like in this one I initially before I started ea
+rning I just paid my editor nothing else so it was kind of small investment that I can take out from my pocket money too so initial investment should be low and the returns should be high i'm looking for that one and even if it's the case that we need high investment so we obviously pitch our ideas and if it is like idea we'll definitely get investors uh another question that students have is you know early in the first year you haven't learned a lot of technology right and usually startups are technology based uh and this idea that you uh have experimented with this again does not involve a lot of you know technology there's no product as such but it's it's a service that you're providing to them so did at any point in time you feel like you know it's not going to be a very attractive uh you know startup if I have to tell someone it's just coaching people for interviews so it won't look as uh interesting or as uh you know it's not an AI venture which is the uh thing of the dayto-day right so did you think about these it was never like I want to impress people okay hey I am startup founder and all I just wanted to do it firstly for the experience as a startup owner and secondly for money so it was never about okay impressing people hey I am a starter founder and all it was about me it was about and the learnings that are more important okay at least for for this startup so tell us the outcome and then tell us the learnings what is the outcome u I'm asking the question again tell us give us some of how much money have you made I'm not really comfortable sharing this so let's skip this question all right a mystery okay so coming to learnings firstly is marketing and especially the social media marketing through various channels like LinkedIn YouTube Instagram and we also had a community of more than 135 members on Telegram so where they discuss their doubts and all that stuff so firstly it's it's the marketing secondly handling the audience or our customers in a peak time I received more than 15 20 calls every day for queries about our course and from students who are already enrolled but they have doubts and all like it was a really hectic schedule and I was actually enjoying it i was not like yeah I'm working 1
+0 hours a day what the hell is this but I was actually enjoying working 14 15 hours every day for that duration of 8 10 days that was the peak time for a startup so it was really worth investing my time and obviously I was also getting money that was a second thing but I was actually enjoying what I was doing so this is one more thing as I discussed with you previously why are we all doing this why are we earning money so it was just for fun whatever we are doing are we really interested in that so yes I was very interesting and I was enjoying it all and the third thing was is uh building a team and working with them so we had conflicts in our team okay the there was a x amount that I was paying to our mentors per interview it like it is very less so we had so many discussions and we just concluded on the decided amount this year but obviously I'll have to increase it significantly next year okay okay so a lot of learnings and money is uh what is the outcome uh and we'll keep the viewers guessing as to how much amount but I based on our previous discussions it's it's to uh you know take a nice vacation in Himatel and outside which was your plan which you told me earlier okay great uh what were some some areas or you know some days when you felt like oh I failed here this this just did not work can you recall any such moments initially when we started and we were not getting registrations for the first 15 20 days so it was like very heartbreaking i was expecting okay I'll get so many registration I'll earn lacks of rupees and all that stuff but I just got one registration and that too I had to refund the amount so I was like okay will I even get five registrations will it work or I have started this but people are not joining is it really worth spending my time on this and all that stuff but I thought of this okay the registrations for IM are not even open why will people register for my course from now itself it is a long journey so I just waited for the right time and on the peak time we just hit and we got so many registrations okay can you also you know when you have to make decisions as an entrepreneur be it u uh around the pricing be it around which channels should I use uh or what strategy to use what wer
+e some interesting decision points that I have to decide this and based on this decision the course this startup is going to change right can you what were you know maybe one or two favorite moments which you maybe enjoyed you were really scared or you were very confident whatever are the highlights for you okay so for registrations when I didn't had any idea okay how websites are made and all that so I just talked to one of my friends okay hey can you make a website for me he said okay if we are register registering it or buying the website name or all that stuff we'll need some money and all that but then I said okay I don't think we'll get so many registrations that we need a website for it so I just tried Google form and that was the first time in life when I made my first Google form for my startup and it was really impressive considering it was the first time so for registrations we kept it on the Google form and at some point in time our registrations were almost zero in the end I'm talking about so I decided to launch two new plans that was 600 for one mock interview and 1,000 for two mock interviews for last minute and that was a successful one we earned thousands of rupees because of that only so at some point in time our revenue was just stagnant and then I introduced a new thing and it went up again so continuous innovation you had to do yeah how did you uh how did you celebrate when you had so many registrations you know maybe there was one day where you got so many registrations and you were like "Okay this is going in my bank account you're happy." How did you celebrate did you call a friend did you uh celebrate with your team members uh did you pray to God or what did you do how did you acknowledge that yeah things are working out okay so generally I just talked to my brother and my cousin who I just previously mentioned from triple it Bangalore so most of the things are discussed with these two so yeah I just told them okay I got this many registrations we hit this much revenue and I'm very happy so many learnings and all that they were like okay good you are doing great did they ask for a sh did they ask you for a party not really but yes we can have it anytime it's not an issue okay so u anot
+her question which I wanted to ask earlier was you said after you came to this program in the first year you got introduced to the business world you got introduced you know through the courses in management and business can you again pick some highlights from these courses try to recall where is it where you know in in the class some moments where in a subject something was being taught and helped you shape uh that gave you more confidence that yeah let me try entrepreneurship I want to do this do you have any such moments when your thinking got for entrepreneurships no but in the process yes I would like to highlight written and verbal communication course so I had to write emails and for verbal communication it's the content creation so it helped me in the written part mostly because I was not very confident obviously I use chat GPD but it gave me uh more little more confidence in framing those things and giving prompt to chat GPD and improvising it so I also tried uh this influencer marketing but it was really out of our budget at that point in time so we skipped it i just cold mailed uh almost 15 16 influencers who have their audience as Jes parents i got reply from 78 of them and we talked on call and things really didn't work out we were planning for an affiliate based thing but they were like okay we want some fixed amount we will not work on affiliate basis so we just skipped that part let's build our brand okay but um uh again u that question same question back in the courses you said nothing but during the process uh is when you had this feeling that you you want to do this right okay because in uh initial two semesters there was no such course related to entrepreneurship there was a course that helped me in this is foundations in business management and the second one is problem solving and decision making so these two were some management courses that I found some things really helped me in the process okay okay and over the last one year what skills you know compare yourself to you back what skills have you developed and which skills have helped you build this venture so that you know other students who are uh do this can also sort of pick some of those skills and start working towards that i thin
+k so there is not any so-called skill that I have learned through any online channel or anywhere it it was just a part of the process and I can't concretely mentioned okay I learned this skill that skill but there were some things like leadership and all which I learned through sports as in college too I'm part of the basketball team so yes teamwork leadership and all that stuff from there and critical thinking analysis and all that from some courses that I mentioned problem solving and decision- making so yeah it was a mix of so many things until I would say uh the end of my first semester i was like I have to leave this college and all that but then I am at Praguya and things really take a turn so it was a life-changing moment can say for college actually I was just okay playing video games and not even studying for an hour just studying 2 hours before the exam and all that stuff just having fun okay I have to leave this college what's the point of getting good grades in exam and all that stuff but when I meet him uh I realized that okay if I proceed with this thing this minds set and these actions things are not really be going great so I just told him this okay this is what I'm doing this is what the problem I'm facing and this is what I want to do so then we had a long discussion multiple discussions and he initially he gave me some task okay update me every day whenever you're done with this and this and all that stuff then things came back on track and I really really worked hard on my communication skills i uploaded a YouTube video or YouTube short every day for more than 110 straight days consistently not even a single day missing and that really really helped me in improving my communication skills great great thanks i think that's that's quite inspiring 110 days uh day on day recording yourself and putting content on the YouTube not to show to others but you're saying only for yourself to practice that's great so I think uh yeah that's an interesting idea uh you need to have people around you a support system uh whom you go to when you are in trouble or you need guidance uh were there some other people other than Pak uh who where you bounced off your ideas or you spoke to you know some other family m
+ember of course we've had some discussions uh as well just went to you sometimes uh in last few days but uh no such mentor he's the only one with whom I discuss my ideas apart from my family okay great great so thanks so much for giving all these details I think uh some ideas which stand out uh especially for the students who are thinking of start thinking hey I need to stumble upon a big idea you don't have to wait you can start you can you know work with the first idea build your first I have this theory of third venture where I believe the students need to reach their third venture which is where uh the real juice lies so I'm I'm so happy that you have done your first venture uh in this imba beacon initiative that we took u secondly student mostly they believe that they don't have the money they don't have the resources so how can the startup they don't have the credibility so it's it's all mindset if you change it a little bit you will find a USB uh now what lucky did was I went through this process so I know what questions are asked and I you know 40 other students uh who got who have gone through the same process so he goes to them and collects the question bank and there you go you have a real asset which is worth selling right and then you are you are part of this program already you've gone through this process so you have the credibility so like that everyone just needs to wants to start something they should just think about what is it you know who they are and what do they know and based on that you know a business proposition uh can be created and starting small is is very important for students especially uh it will be difficult with the studies with the exams and other things and of course the support from families friends starting up is now gradually becoming uh you know a common word part of the jargon and even in the households or rural it is becoming a you know word which is more popular uh but having support from all these people um around you your your support system important it doesn't come automatically but when they see the success uh when they see that you are moving you're taking action then they will support you so action is most important and lucky had a short time window to execute
+this idea u there was only about a month within which the interviews were held and he had to get people on board and honestly I was skeptical in the beginning thinking how are you going to get people how will you reach out to them um and I'm having discussions on which channel LinkedIn versus Instagram versus YouTube how will you find those people uh we can of course not share with you the details of applicants how will you uh catch them but I'm glad that you did u I think you had about 30 people 40 people who registered with you which which a great uh lucky does not want to disclose at all okay but these are great insights for any student who is watching and who start the the idea is to start quick take action and seize the opportunity don't wait for a big idea to come your way don't uh for an innovative tech based AI enabled idea just start with what you can do right now and that will give you so much confidence and learning and support from around your ecosystem and help you develop into a very different kind of person who thinks entrepreneurally all of those contribute to you becoming a better person every day right lucky thank you so much for helping us derive all these learnings and I'm sure you will inspire many other students from IIT Mundi and around the country to start up quick start up small and start up fast thank you thank you so much sir and you all can reach me out anytime i'm always up for ideas to discuss new ideas explore new ideas so yes all the best thank you Lucky

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+The sources you provided are excerpts from the transcript of the video "Entrepreneurship, Mindset & Meaning | Ft. Deepa Soman | GUESSS India | IIT Mandi". I will provide the translated transcript of these excerpts, as the original text was in Hindi.
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+Transcript of the Video "Entrepreneurship, Mindset & Meaning | Ft. Deepa Soman | GUESSS India | IIT Mandi" (Excerpts)
+Translated from Hindi:
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+Entrepreneurship education should look at mindset or should it look at venture creation? When I say mindset, mindset is also about resilience, about patience. Mindset is about making that decision to do the right thing because that is what I understand and I can align. Did you have to relearn things when you were setting up your [business]? Parents today are not all deriving their sense of success and validation through their child's professional achievement alone. Do you think entrepreneurship education is a major driver for the shift or are there other factors at play? Everything in entrepreneurship then can get a bad name. It is very important to have a pragmatic and a realistic approach. I had a mindset: I have nothing to lose, this is something that I want to do and I need to do for myself. Hello everyone and welcome to the GUESSS India Cloud Experts and Entrepreneurs Dialogue Series. GUESSS stands for Global University Entrepreneurial Spirit Students Survey. It's one of the largest entrepreneurship research projects in the world with the main research focus on students' entrepreneurial intentions and activities, including the topic of family firm succession. I am Dr. Aparna Rao on behalf of GUESSS India and today I am thrilled to host a conversation that dives deep into the heart of entrepreneurship in India. Before we begin, let me set the stage by introducing you to the platform behind that conversation. GUESSS India Cloud, an initiative of GUESSS India, is created as a dedicated knowledge hub to fuel entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial spirit among students across the country. There are four pillars: the first is Insights, which are blogs unpacking trends; then there are Perspectives, where we are looking at expert opinion, and this interview is part of the Perspectives section; Stories, where we capture student journeys; and Cases, where we talk about real-world startup experiences. In GUESSS India Experts and Entrepreneurs Dialogue Series, we bring you conversations with leaders, thinkers, change-makers, and entrepreneurs who are shaping the future of entrepreneurship in India. Their experiences and insights are here to inform, inspire our generation of entrepreneurs, and in this inaugural edition of the dialogue series, we unpack the data, decode trends, and delve into what it truly takes to nurture student entrepreneurs from shifting mindsets.
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+...to institutional missions. This is where insights meet impact. Let's get started. My pleasure today to welcome a close friend and our guest today, Deepa Soman, founder of Lumiere Business Solutions Private Limited, a pioneering social enterprise in Mumbai. With an Economics degree from St. Xavier's and a Business Management degree from S.P. Jain Institute of Management & Research, Deepa began her career as a management trainee at Hindustan Lever Private Limited in 1996. Deepa founded Lumiere Business Solutions with a mission to empower women professionals to re-enter the workforce. You can read the Lumiere story in Rashmi Bansal's book "Follow Every Rainbow". Today, our interview with Deepa Soman explores themes of flexible entrepreneurship, gender roles, and systemic innovation. It aligns with GUESSS India Cloud's goals of linking academic insights with real-world entrepreneurial narratives. Deepa, thank you so much for accepting our invitation and welcome today to this session, to this meeting. I dive right into you. So Deepa, I have heard you, I have read you talking, and you often describe yourself as an "accidental entrepreneur". How did your academic background influence your entrepreneurial journey or was there a clash with your entrepreneurial journey? No, I, I think thanks for asking Aparna. What I have noticed is whatever experiences we have gleaned personally and professionally, academically, the subjects we study at that point in time, they may seem, "Is this even making sense?" But in my case and in many other cases, I have noticed that there is a connection between what one will do, what one is good at, what one feels passionate about, and what one is meant to do to really serve. So what we have seen as Ikigai, I have seen that come together for me in multiple times, multiple ways. I was very interested in psychology even as an undergraduate student in St. Xavier's College. I was very interested in sociology, in economics, in history, and it was very difficult at a point in time when there was a choice between philosophy and logic, which of course was discontinued, but we had an option when I was entering my application form and I thought I needed to learn both. So somewhere the curiosity to learn multiple subjects, the desire to go deeply into doing certain projects and do my own readings in the reference library of St. Xavier's College, do a lot of reading, borrowing books from British Council.
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+...Council, when USIS and our own reference library. The foundation that I will be a researcher was laid through not just the pursuits of paying a lot of attention in class, because I was that kind of a student, but when I say pay attention, it was also wanting to "double click" on certain things. So I remember in 11th and 12th, when I didn't need to do what the first years and the second years and third years in Psychology did, I was doing that because the subject fascinated me. And as you know, much of my work centers around both. Sociology is really the societal, the human, the connections, the teams, the groups, the families that we work within in cultural contexts. So therefore, different cultures, because Lumiere works not just in India but in other parts of the world. So being able to understand and interpret cultures comes from that subject. And the domain of Economics sort of serves as the bedrock because it at least brings a perspective into how the process of money exchange – what is it that is value and how are things valued? It becomes very important also for entrepreneurs to say it's not about a brilliant idea, but how is it going to make commercial sense? How do we work the economics of it, and so forth? And Psychology, because understanding needs, motivations, what drives people to behave in a certain way, how do people make choices, how do we cognitively process this information? So, somewhere I think a lot of curiosity. So if as educators, or as... and today all of the media available, if we can sort of not just stay as they say in the shallows or just skim at the surface, but we are willing to let's say pick a couple of things that make us go deep, those are... that's really where the education, as you asked me, has helped and fueled and continues to do, because as a lifelong learner and Lumiere as a learning organization, learning is never done. I think it's never done until one is dead and gone, because that's really the whole purpose of life. I mean, when I talk about this, all of our experiences are nothing but for us to learn about, starting with ourselves, how to refine ourselves to become better versions of ourselves. So it is all of it coming together, which not just then 29 years ago, but even up till now continues to fuel this and make every day interesting in the entrepreneurial journey. You put it so well, you know, I, I wish students were listening in to you today where they will and.
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+...that even if something that they are studying today doesn't make immediate sense to them, there are dots which will get connected later. They have to work on that page. Thank you so much. Absolutely, absolutely. So Deepa, did you, so you have, you are a topper in one sense, you are a topper, right? You have been academically excellent and everything. Did this mindset have any impact on Lumiere or did you have to relearn things when you were setting up Lumiere, your journey? Uh, so I think there are two aspects to it. When I say topper, it was more about making all of the efforts one can, but to do one's best. It may or may not translate always into marks, like I know there were my friends who didn't study as much or at least they did claim to study as much, but I was, I used to really slog. So I had this mindset, Aparna, and I think I have carried it through a long part, that I have never, I never get anything easy. I have to really work for it. So this, you know, this strong belief that to get anything, you really need to do your best and then expect the rest. I think that is what I have done and which has continued even at Lumiere. What I have definitely needed to work hard is to inculcate this culture that no matter what, we have to, a lot of times outcomes may not be in our hands. And there are, particularly when you have multiple partners, associates, clients, the things that you cannot determine. So like the Serenity Prayer, what are the things that I know I can change? And I think that's really the attitude that becomes very important of driving and working towards excellence. Yes, I used to be a perfectionist, I can say definitely. Well, well, until the first 15-20 years, it did make me, how shall I say, perpetually unhappy. And I think that that little, you know, that little creative discontent is very good, but I don't think you need to be unhappy. So you just need to be knowing that I want to channelize all those attention, that attention to making sure that I do my best. Just I have clarity about it and I am working in a way that is in harmony with who I am as a person, Aparna. That's very important because if my entrepreneurial self is very different from my personal self, if I am not able to marry the two, I will be in a tremendous state of tension and mental, physical strain. Something it's not going to sit right with me because fundamentally, and this is whether I am doing a, working as an employee.
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+...I am working in an organization or I am working for myself, I think the fund or I am working to raise a family, the fundamentals of who we are do not change. And as in the several years of doing a lot of work, mentoring, talking to people within our teams, within being a sounding board for a lot of people that have found value in talking to me at any point in time in their journey, I have seen that the moment we integrate and harmonize who we are with what we do, what we say, and things align automatically, it's like you have a force multiplier that comes in. That's right, that's right. So Deepa, there is a major shift in the generation today, right? Many, the approach, the attitude. Let me give you some numbers, okay? The GUESSS India report reveals a major shift in career aspirations where 31% of students are aspiring to become entrepreneurs after five years. That is up and this number is up from 40% at graduation. Do you think entrepreneurship education is a major driver for the shift or are there other factors at play? Uh, one of the factors, so there are, I think, multiple factors. One is today, just the vast number of opportunities that become available as opposed to very limited tracks of career that were available some years ago, right? So the fact that you can be a solopreneur and you can make your passion into, instead of a hobby, you can actually make it a wider proposition that can add value and for which you can get a commercial appreciation and you can actually have a business out of it, is become a possibility. Parents today are willing to back that dream. Parents today do not, are not all deriving their sense of success and validation through their child's professional achievement alone. So they are fulfilled. And I'm talking maybe of a certain class, Aparna, because we are many Indias, and we, you see things on a spectrum, and as we go along, we can see, and the people that we speak with, we will see a wide variety of parental anxiety. I think what parents want is their parents want their children to use their time wisely and at the end of it be happy. I think that's like a fundamental requirement. They, in that, they sometimes try to be very over-engineering certain things that the child needs to do, and maybe their own fears manifest in not giving any freedom, but asking what are some of the things that have enabled. Definitely, on the one hand, it is this part which is internal. Environmentally also, you see there.
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+...there are, let's say, a lot of discourse around, you know, support, incubators, things which are part of the ecosystem of entrepreneurship which have also grown from schools, whether it's the engineering colleges, and some have always done it, like William talked about how BIT Mesra in those days, maybe 35 years ago, they also had an incubator. So maybe schools who were already doing it, they have a lab, they had a shed, they would actually provide a seed grant in BIT Mesra for entrepreneurs that were starting. And I have actually been to the campus and seen that space which was very, very early support. So the governmental support, and that's really where a force multiplier comes in. When government gets into anything, then you have popular media, you have shows of people who have gone and even think something like MasterChef. You know, when, when, 15-20 years ago, you see a MasterChef and you see someone gaining proficiency, and that proficiency leading to money and fame, suddenly says, "Oh, even this is a path, I can send my child to culinary. Oh, they can go into culinary." So it's been an organic process. Oh, theater, cinema, you know, sunny, modeling, things which were professions, and this gradually, the stigmatization and the broadening of dimensions of success have started. The external mark. The part that I am a little afraid of is where you have shows like Shark Tank, which are, or you have conversations which are about an X multiplier or very early stage funding or very, or the whole conversation about my business in the context of investment and exit. Now those are conversations which are probably like those billboard ads which talk about these classes which had these are the seven toppers and they all got 100%. So everybody is sending their child to that particular class to get those marks. That's for me is the equivalence of a Shark Tank and that's the trap of saying you don't see the ground work, you don't see that, I'm not saying that they are not, what is highlighted is that one success. What we miss is that there will be 20 failures for one success or 40 failures for one success depending upon the time that we live, times that we live in and the business cycles that will determine how well we will do existing businesses and entrepreneurs also how different, how distinctive is the idea. So those are reality checks because I could be very much in a bubble believing so fiercely in what I want.
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+...to do, and I might end up, uh, you know, everything in entrepreneurship then can get a bad name. So we, we have to, it is very important to have a pragmatic and a realistic approach. Of course, the whole idea of entrepreneurship is resting on dreaming and the ability to envision a certain future that didn't exist before, but balancing heart with head at every juncture is very, very important from that point of view. And it will continue because individual expression particularly in our country was always clamped because of all these expectations, which, so the moment you kind of open that lid a bit and you let go of that steam, so much can flourish. That's true. So Deepa, in one sense of the term, Lumiere was futuristic because you actually carved out a space for women on family breaks. You carved out a work environment which allowed flexi-work, flexi-hours, work from home, and all of that, all these options. How did you take the decisions in developing the business model for Lumiere? Was it a clear thing? It must have been challenging in those days, right? Yeah, so, uh, a lot of times, you know, when you look at hindsight, you just think as an entrepreneur, you are about taking opportunities. Yeah, and you are taking that opportunity with a certain level of gradation of risk and risk appetite. In my case, I had a mindset that I have nothing to lose. I also had a mindset, and I will tell you where I am coming from, a deep belief that, uh, this is something that I want to do and I need to do for myself. So when it comes from a personal experience and a personal need space, you are moved actually from belief to faith. I have faith that this is something that, uh, the world needs. This is something that is a biological need for a woman and a psychological and an intellectual need. So it, the need to have a, an a professional expression path, uh, if it's not allowed, can make this professional woman who is on an interrupted career not very good in her roles as mother because she is going to be angry, irritated, frustrated, resentful. She will go through those cycles of coming to a place of acceptance at a point in time. I also want to say that not all women have this journey at this track, but like I have experienced, there will be women professionals who experience these at different levels, at different stages, whether the first six months is different, up to 2 years is different, two to four years, and because we, the early days, it was organic.
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+...organic, because the more work I got, the more people that I needed to also add. So it didn't, it didn't happen that I had an end point that I'm going to do this. But what were the enablers? There was home computing. There was the fact that people had laptops at that time. They had, you know, home, not even laptops, the desktops had started coming to home. And the work which is consumer, the research, which is what I have focused on at that time, uh, the initial does was being able to, uh, interpret the, read the quantitative data, uh, from a market research report, which I did for my, for the client, and to write research reports. Then organically one day, I got a task of saying, "We have, you know, a whole library of these reports on the past, from the past. Can you create management summaries of each of these reports because we are now looking to have a digital structure where we want to access these reports but we want to have summaries so people know?" So it was a kind of knowledge management. So it was solutioning. So here again, I had somebody who came up and said, "God, there is so much that you are doing, maybe I can help you on the weekend and help write the report." Okay, then I, I trained her and say, "Okay, she's, she's a business analyst. She works with the financial markets, but she understands the fundamentals of being able to analyze information, read information, summarize it." So you understand the, from a systems approach, what is the fundamental skills that this person has and how might it get translated into the task at hand, the project at hand, and what are the activities she needs to do to support me in that, which meant I needed to be able to break it down. First of all, the right person, knowing that they will work very sincerely the way I would. And then I have from one to two people who obviously can divide that role. When I said two people, two people because she was available on the weekend. Hmm, hmm. So every time there was a need, and then there was also a word of mouth that started. I would also actively, whether I went to drop my children to school or whether I went to the gym, I was looking, listening on conversations of those mothers with small children or what I had conversations for them over, "Are you working at an XYZ place? Okay, what is it that you are doing now? How much time do you feel sometimes that you want to work?" So I was also researching to understand whether they had.
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+...the inclination and they could do different tasks. Like there was somebody who I'd say, "I'm going for client meetings. Do you want to come and man my office and phone?" Office was typically one room. "And do you want to spend the time between when your child is not there, answering my phones because I will be gone for client meetings?" So it was, I was approaching people and I was asking them according to their skill sets, "Oh, but I have done this before." "Okay, so here's a script, this is how you speak, this is what you say." So there was a strong developer in me which was willing to break it down and I was not fazed about all their past experience or I wasn't taking one dimension alone. I was taking multiple dimensions: proximity, time availability. But what I did not compromise on was integrity, sincerity, the willingness to learn, the willingness to work hard, the diligence. Right now, those become the responsibility, the transparency, the little proactiveness. Now those sort of, we early on, we knew what is it that we are really hiring for, what values, what qualities. And then organically you will say, "Oh, okay, you are a techie, you want to do this. Why don't we just build a library system here?" "Okay, you know, maybe this quantitative, can we write a macro here and do these things?" So you, you, you sort of just know what the other person could possibly bring. Give them a nudge, give them the confidence and say, "We are doing this together, you are not alone." So you are also giving a lot of reassurance because women with interrupted careers will also have compromised self-confidence, eroded sense of self-worth. So you are bolstering them up as leaders, as professionals again. So you play that role of a mentor. I can't say that I was, I am also guilty of being impatient at times. But I would, I think they also learned that I was not coming, I was not attacking the person, I was attacking the task or I was demanding a certain quality. Like I am a, I am a grammar Nazi, so I would sometimes, and we didn't have auto-correct and all of those things, we just had undo. But I would like, you know, and, and if some, if I, if somebody was not learning like, you know, I corrected you twice but if the mistake persists then I could get a very sharp tongue. So I have had people melt into a pool of tears several times because I was demanding. Today these people who are professionals in their own right, thank me for it. I don't think they liked it very much at that time. Are like me.
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+...very much at that time. But it was all keeping the project deliverable and the quality at the center that would make me be very demanding. And I always knew that if they brought a 70, I needed to bring that 30. So you cannot just rely on what the team is bringing. So it calls for, I think, a huge ability to also work with a whole spectrum of people. When you ask me, "How did I change?" I changed from saying that what I can demand of myself and may not be able to get from the other, primarily because they are not there, either in experience or capability or what they were, they were not ready for it. And I also knew that what they brought, probably I could not bring. So I was able to see the diversity and the force multiplier. I have used the word three times, but I really believe that it is two and two makes five if you can bring the right chemistry into a project team, which is what we have done time and again, project after project. True. Thanks for breaking that part down because this is so... How would you advise students who are exploring the option for remote work? Would you think this can also bridge an urban-rural gap? It, if it is, if you, if we can break down, it is a very systems approach, Aparna. It is design thinking. After all, it is about being able to break the components of the part, but also build it up again and then to see what are the supports that we need. You definitely needed process, you needed technology, you needed understanding the human psychology. You needed to understand re-skilling, upskilling. You needed to understand how do you do a, you know, what are the processes involved in that person being able to bring their best to the, the, you know, what do they need to work together? What people need to work together? So in the years, the after the first, the first 10 years or so, 8 to 10 years or so, it was me and maybe this one or two other people who completed a project. And it was still a lot of, it was very individual based. The need to move to cloud, the need to raise, you know, bring even further capability to do much more, more work, happened as we, when I say much more work, we did a lot of work, but we worked. See, there will be, there is a whole dimension of attrition. So when, let's say, the person has moved, how do I quickly bring people up to steam? So you need to have a tremendous amount of agility and also the ability to manage a bench for some time. So you do, there is going to be a learning curve. So knowing that.
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+...that when you are working with people remotely or working anywhere else, there must be checks and balances. There needs to be ways of building accountability, and also what is your tolerance for that kind of margin of error that you can live with? It's also about how you can anticipate. It starts with being able to fundamentally understand, "Who am I? How do I work? How does this business work?" So it's a lot of, I think, an activity of and some amount of building that perspective which doesn't come on day one. But it is also about trusting your instincts. You will know that sometimes you will fail, but if two times out of 100 if I have failed, then I don't, you know, throw the baby out with the bathwater. You will say, "This is where I, you know, we probably got it wrong," or "you know, this is what is that we probably did not anticipate." Today, with a lot of people post-COVID, this phenomenon has been, a lot of people have moved to their hometowns, they are working remotely now. Right now, I'm in the US, I see so many people who have moved their towns, and they have moved because both husband and wife are working remote. They have found a better community to work with or better weather to work. They probably have, you know, they had some other aspirations that they are willing to explore. So times have changed. Workplaces have got used to working with people remotely. But how do you engage them beyond just a task? How do you get them to show them a path if that's what they want? And how do you make them feel that entrepreneurial spirit? Okay, large organizations also need to do that. So what is that entrepreneurial spirit? Nobody knows it better than an entrepreneur. So when you have your teams working wherever they work, if you can fuel or you can connect with that entrepreneur in, then you can, you can, but be willing to train, be willing to demand, but be willing as much to be a servant leader because they will need the support at that point in time. Exactly, exactly. Uh, so Deepa, we are veering towards the close. I have three, two or three more questions. Just one related to what you said earlier about how Shark Tank is not our model. One quick question that stems from there, would you say that entrepreneurship education should look at mindset or should it look at venture creation? I think it was hand in hand, Aparna. I think it's, it's very, you can't do one without the other. Again, this comes to the approach of the interconnectedness of things. The mindset will drive what are.
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+...the yearnings of that entrepreneur in terms of what they want to do, and nothing is wrong with that. I have seen very, you know, very focused towards profits and towards numbers. We have to bring them back to say that, "You know, what about keeping a focus on quality, listening to the consumer's need, listening to what is the long arc of that one customer's need so you have a customer built for life?" So those are, it's not just about the farming, how do you marry both the right, yeah, uh, the getting of new customers alongside repeat business that you will get, and what drives that repeat business? Business is a satisfied customer. How it will lead to positive word of mouth. So when I say mindset, mindset is also about resilience, about patience. Mindset is about the, uh, the making that decision to do the right thing by the right, because that is what I understand and I can align. Right? And so the stuff that takes longer to do, stuff that is probably in the short term seems, um, uh, you know, "Why am I even doing this?" But I think being aligned with who you are and your values and being committed to doing that over the long run is what defines who I am. That satisfies my metric of success, which may be different from somebody else's metric of success. Yeah. So if I, if there is a certain impact definition, the impact definitions would be different for different people. Right? The ability to tell your story, the ability to believe in your story, the ability for others to seeing you as authentically looking to add value and making a difference in some manner to whatever it is that you are looking to do. So the courage of conviction and I think a relentless interest in your people, growing them to do their best work. Yeah. So I think those are the mindset parts. Then of course is the whole skill set part of, which is very, very important. How well do you understand what it is that you are doing? Uh, the idea, what is the, how does the landscape look like today? What are the adjacencies in terms of the competitors that are possible? Who is doing something that are? So again, it comes from the quest, the curiosity, the openness to ask questions, to listen, to learn continuously, to be able to drop things that don't work. So rather than being fixated with something, being able to fail fast. Yeah, hmm, hmm. Right, right. So let's look at some interesting data again. GUESSS the GUESSS survey of 2023 threw up this one statistic: 38% of students report that they have started ventures. Okay, but we see that.
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+...that only 4.8% reach the revenue stage. That means there's a massive execution gap, right? How do you think the ecosystem, not just incubators, how can the ecosystem help the students to actually walk the complete path? Do you think we can simulate real-world complexity? What do you think can be done in this? One of the things that to, to have a, to be successful, yeah, is, is really when, when you say that only 4.8% reach that path of taking something to market, a lot of times the, uh, taking, you know, being perfect on something. I think their curiosity to go out and actually try to put money to, to fail. So of course, you need some seed capital to go into that market. It's very, you know, "How will I, first of all, how well do I know all my stakeholders? How well have I, what is the work have I done both in terms of working to build the product, working to know the consumer? How do I then look at the competitive context?" All of that comes. And then knowing what is my pathway? How am I going to acquire these customers? How am I going to make a commercial venture out of it? So whether I'm a home bakery, I have to go out there and I have to ideate and say, "Okay, what, how am I going to then put my, what Instagram content am I developing?" So I, and who am I working? Who is doing what? Who is going to make this for me? Who is going to the initial investment that I need to get my kitchen up and going? Yeah, what is the kind of support I require to begin with? And then how long is it going to be for me to actually become, you know, what is the kind of burn that I'm going to allow for some time? So the concept of burn is a very new concept, right? And, and for me, uh, money is not about burning. We come from a culture, "Money is Lakshmi, you don't burn money." So what is the, how can I be frugal in whatever I test? A lot of times the ideas are to be very, very grand. And we have seen some startups with that, you know, very massive investments. "Why do you need?" So those are the questions. And, "No, no, this is the bare minimum I require." I, we contest those to say, "Maybe you think there, there's a shame to say that I have only, you know, five and not 75 of something, but that's the proof that I made." That's also being right by my investor to say, "First let me see how this works and then." So I come from a philosophy which says that, "Don't wait for something to be a 100. Start with a five and then build it to 25. You will learn some.
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+...thing in the journey of zero to five. You will learn something in the journey of five to 25. Then you move from 25 to 50, and then you move to 200. Because work with innovation pipelines of even large companies who have lots of investor money, I would say they are even more answerable to their shareholders. So I have seen them to be even more careful and conservative about getting this zero to five and five to 25 right. And that is the part of doing the qualitative research, working with small samples, knowing yourself, knowing, you know, how you and your co-founders are going to work together, bringing that together, working very hard to understand beyond the idea, the context in which, and the relevance of this idea into the lives of people who are going to actually put their money where their mouth is. That part doesn't get taught, doesn't get understood. And that's the part where when we also work with like the startups where we there people even to prioritize and say, "Okay, these are the three things I can do. How do I systematically go about and say, 'Okay, what is the low-hanging fruit? What is it? How does this align with who I really?'" And not all the answers, Aparna, one is going to have initially, but having that mindset or the curiosity to be patient and to do the hard work and the rigorous work it takes to test and try out. It's not just, uh, and not everybody is cut for entrepreneurship, no. Even to know that, "Yes, this is something I, if I don't have a risk appetite, if I have sleepless nights, you know, there is something that I am compromising to my health." So it all starts with knowing self, which is why we actually work with the individual, as you know, we do the leadership coaching piece first, uh, for everybody in the team because to say, "Okay, how am I going to work?" If everybody thinks they have to eat like this, but actually somebody should be eating like this, maybe let them. So it is very important to be realistic. So mindset as well as that ecosystem needs to understand that. I had somebody tell me, "Oh, you know, my daughter is in Class 9, and I, what does your daughter want to do?" "No, we want her to become an entrepreneur." "Hello, you parents cannot want a child to become an entrepreneur." So that's as bad as saying, "Oh, you know, I worked with the company 40 years, I don't even understand what you are doing with a successful, you know, with this startup, what you call successful." So you have parents also at both ends of the spectrum that we have seen. And some who say, "My God, you know, we are doctors." "This person has started this from his third year in his college, but we don't understand the thing." So actually at that point in time, to say, "Who are the people that your child could even talk to, you know, to professors?" And "How do you take them, build their own confidence? How do you skill them?" So being afraid is natural for parents. Being, but at the same time, how do you balance it out and say, "Okay, we have had someone who said, 'Okay, my parents have given me three years,' but three years may not be enough." I mean, that person today, the two other people have continued in that venture, but the third person, that person has opted out of it also because it's the appetite of, you know, what's the family context? What is that person expected to do? Do they, you know, freedom is also a luxury in some cases, economically also, if there are certain dependencies. So it's also to not to say that therefore somebody succeeded and somebody failed. It's everybody's path is unique. Everybody's entrepreneurial journey, journey as is anybody's life journey, is to be very unique. And therefore it's very important to be secure and to co-opt people who believe within your idea and define what does success look like for you. If I'm a very large conglomerate and I say, "Every startup, you know, I can only think of something which can be a 100 crore idea," that may be works well for them. But for somebody else, that's not their definition of success. Right, right, right, right. Last question, Deepa. This is, this is maybe something for students, policymakers, and educators. If you could launch a GUESSS India Policy Hackathon, what barrier would you ask students or policymakers or educators to solve? I would definitely start that hackathon by helping the person understand themselves first. I would, you know, find a way to say, "Okay, who am I? How do I, what is my natural operating system in terms of the way I think, feel, and behave? Okay, what is it that and then being able to look at this part of understanding the self, which is very important, saying, 'Okay, when I grow my business, am I going to be, you know, do I have a mindset that only looks at revenue and customer? Is it something which is more developmental and therefore, you know, do I, should I, what is the role that I will also play in my bench?' Also learning how do I tell my story, learning about consumer and customer and ways to observe, listen, and dialogue with customers. So these become, I would say, like the alphabets of building your story. You will.
+________________________________________
+...build your words, you will build your sentences, you will know where to punctuate, provided you know these things. If I not learned it, I only understand some, you know, only by practice. I have to, you know, take a long time, maybe 10-15 years before I even discover these things by serendipity. Because otherwise I might, to know if my style is through relationships, I must thrive on that. I must know what it means to nurture those relationships. It is very different from saying, "I will do networking." Nurturing is very different from network. Are an outcome? They don't. Young people today want to go and build networks. Those not, they are so sometimes mixing the "how" with the "outcomes." So all of those things. So a very systems approach to understanding the domain as much as understanding the very critical ingredient in the success of that enterprise, which is the end person, the human person, and their ability to work with other human persons who build that enterprise. I think that be completely absent. How do I, uh, you know, I know the science and the technology, but if I'm so comfortable in this thing of just getting a grant and doing more research and more research and being very comfortable in that comfort zone, but "Oh, I don't understand that part of business," "Oh, I don't understand marketing." Today, we have no business to say, "I don't understand this, I don't understand that." If you are not, if you don't enjoy it, if you feel you don't add value to it, work with someone who can. But in, in today, and I don't think that happens today, young people are, you know, they, they want to know everything. But also to what are the physical limits? How do I also balance and prioritize my health and well-being? Those are also very, very important because a lot of times I could be, you know, because I have taken some funding, I'm completely at the mercy of, you know, I'm doing 18-hour days and I'm sleep compromised and I'm surviving on coffee and, you know. So I think sustainable entrepreneurship is also very important. When I mean sustainable from a health point of view. And I, I, I think I would also prioritize that part very much. Uh, relationships. I mean, I, uh, I have something which is successful at, but I, I, I just have a failed marriage. Now that's impacting my life and my sense of well-being. Now how can I have a balanced approach? Not just skill is what I would really, really focus on, Aparna. Right, right. Yes, that brings us to the end of this interview.
+________________________________________
+Thank you so much, Deepa, and this has been insightful. You brought to this entire discussion an approach that included obviously all your experience as a practitioner, your research outlook, your learner outlook, and the mindset that you are talking about, the entrepreneurship mindset. I'm sure students who are listening to this will have a lot of takeaways for them to first, first, and start looking at self-discovery and the thing to look, feel, that the operating system that you spoke about. So thank you so much for putting all this and taking time out from your personal schedule on a holiday. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you to the GUESSS team also, and I think it's a fantastic resource that you are building, and I wish everybody the very best still whatever they want to do as they become on their journey to building their ventures and doing what it is that is their calling and their purpose for this world. So thank you so much. Fantastic. Thank you.
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+Please note: The provided sources are excerpts from the video transcript, not the complete transcript of the entire video. Therefore, this response provides the translation of only the available excerpts.

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+NEW YOUTUBE SOURCE: Excerpts from the transcript of the video "It's Fire Inside You that Builds Startups! | 3x Venture Founder, Professor - IIT| Prof. Rajen Jaswa" uploaded on the YouTube channel "GUESSS India"
+entrepreneurship is so much driven by kind of what is inside a person spiring student look at product development or should they look at trends if you don't have a product or something of value in a service then it's hard to build a company around without having these two what's your philosophy that drives you shaping the destiny of young people who will become entrepreneurs and change the world in their way entrepreneur is not the genius who can creates a company but the entrepreneur is the person with the skill set to bring the resources needed to make his idea come alive good morning everyone and welcome to this session of guest cloud experts dialogue we have with us today a stalwart who has been there done that and comes with a wealth of corporate entrepreneurship as well as teaching experience on the international stage as well as back home in India and when I say back home in India I just discovered that it's not restricted to the premier institutes like IIT Bombay and IIT Gandhiad and uh the other IITs it also encompasses universities in tier 2 cities so yes our guest is Rajin Jesua and it's a real privilege to hear from him raj is a serial entrepreneur he's a Thai co-founder thai is the Indis entrepreneurs so Silicon Valley when he he's one of the earliest founders of the Thai organization and like I said earlier he is an educator at IIT as well as other universities in India in and Stanford also if I'm not wrong right Raj yeah correct so welcome Raj and thank you so much for taking time from your mad schedule for this conversation and let's explore the world of entrepreneurship from a global lens Let's dive right into it uh so thank you Herna for that generous introduction and uh I'm really gratified to get this opportunity to share you know my experiences knowledge and uh you know about entrepreneurship in any form doing it as well as teaching it because that's my passion entrepreneurship is my passion yeah absolutely absolutely so that's that's that's uh that's what uh actually drives us to passion and I would love to have you meet our entire team at a good time whenever you're in India more than welcome i'll be very happy yeah to do that so Raj uh let's dive in and I'd like to start with uh your phi
+losophy what's your philosophy uh that drives you whether it is entrepreneurship teaching whether it is people management whether it is team management your own ventures what what is it that drove you yeah I mean that's a pretty deep question uh but you know if I think back as to you know the things that I've done like whether it is starting companies or teaching entrepreneurship etc i think it's not driven by things like you know fame or earning a lot of making a lot of money or uh uh you know or some or something like that it's actually driven by a sense of you know I want to make something that results in either people enjoying a new product that I bring to market or you know uh shaping the destiny of young people who will become you know entrepreneurs and you know change the world in their way so you know this my I if if I look at the drivers of my my passion or my uh desire to or my work it is really driven by trying to give back something you know it's like uh if you look at and you know we'll go through some examples of you know how I how this passion kind of ends up revealing itself so but you know I think it's more like hey we've only got this one life and you know how do we make the most of it and how do we you know end up uh having positive benefit and value to everybody that we connect with or touch or or or relate to right so it's like trying to give something back you know uh in a positive way it's uh so and entrepreneurship requires that because as you know Dr entrepreneur entrepreneurship is very hard work you know it's a very total it's a total commitment 7 by 24 every minute they there's no vacation you know you don't even think of vacation but it is something that you know kind of takes over your life right so um you better be somebody who is passionate and feels that it's adding real value to your life Because time is ultimately the one thing that we don't get one extra second in life you know so uh so time is you know we all want to use our time to you know give the maximum value to whatever we do and that is what uh drives me right thank you so Raj you you were pivotal in the way the center for entrepreneurship was set up and then it is it is now a school uh you were teaching entrepreneurs
+hip and today you're a professor of practice you're consulting you're guiding you're advising uh you taught at IIT Gandhi these are all trivial institutions and then you are also teaching in universities with limited resources limited access what's difference that you have observed and how can this gap be bridged well the thing is that you know unlike uh other professions you know entrepreneurship is so much driven by um by kind of what is inside a person right it's not and um and so you know it's not a question of you know whether you can pass J or not um it's it's more a question of you How driven are you by something that motivates you right some spark or some lightning has hit you and now how driven are you to make something happen from that sudden vision or intuition that you had and I can tell you that u you know I've had excellent entrepreneurs come out of uh VNIT Nagpur I've got uh excellent entrepreneurs that I have met at uh MIT Pune at Lucky University so you know entrepreneurship you'll soon see is not about how intelligent you are and how knowledgeable you are but can you bring together the knowledge and the resources that are needed to make the vision or idea that you have come to life right so it's about bringing together like you know uh the companies that I've started you know semiconductor company then a video streaming company then a uh enterprise software company with artificial intelligence um way before AI's time and uh you know I was not the expert I was a good IT engineer a good uh technology wise but not the expert in any of these three industries but you know given the passion that I had for what we were trying to deliver whether it was a semiconductor company or a video streaming company or or a AI enterprise software company u the vision of what we wanted to deliver is something that I could bring the resources together i could bring the right engineers the right uh managers the right money the right customers the right salespeople the right marketing people i could bring together the resources needed to take the idea that was there or the germ of the idea that we had and bring it to life so entrepreneur is not the genius who can creates a company but the entrepreneur is the person w
+ith the skill set to bring the resources needed to make his idea come alive right and take life right so uh there was a question which I had planned for later down but I'll bring it up now should a student entrepreneur and aspire Spiring student look at product development or should they look at a global view and look at trends and look at organizational development first well uh you know if you don't have a product or something of value in a service then it's hard to build a company around without having these two right so a product or a service that you know changes or makes people happy or makes customers happy or makes their lives easier that is the starting point you know whatever you do has to make the customer right delighted right the customer needs to get some benefit of what you're trying to do uh whether it's with a product or a service so the first thing is to understand the needs of the customer and if the customer has a need that he's you know upset about or he you know says I wish I had this fun capability and you can be alive and alert to recognize that wow he's telling me what his need is and from whatever he's doing right now it is a need that's not satisfied if you can get that insight then you can think of putting together a product or a system or a process or a business model that will address that particular need and that's what the entrepreneur does right he puts together a concept or a vision of a product or a service or a system or a business model that'll make that customer satisfied or happy that you know and then once he's happy entrepreneur has to figure out will the customer pay for this is it something that people will pay money for is it something that they can deliver for a reasonable cost so that you know there is some profit because if the business idea does not result in a profitable transaction it's not going to be easy to scale it up then it becomes a charity right so we are not bu an entrepreneur does not do charity he builds companies that you know can live off the profit profits and grow off the profits that are generated from every transaction right and entrepreneurs need to put future entrepreneurs or potential entrepreneurs need to understand this fundamental concept
+correct so let me uh throw up some interesting data from the guest survey guess India survey only 14% of students want to start ventures after graduation according to the survey but 1% plan to start up after 5 years now looking at your own uh journey you you graduated from IIT Bombay moved to the US worked with a company like Cisco Cisco right uh Intel GE many companies almost 17 years I was an employee of some company or the other or a manager or something yeah and then you took the plunge for entrepreneurship then I took the plunge yes so this data s kind of kind of validates what you did so many years ago right you chose to study work and then take up entrepreneurship and here we have uh 31% of students looking at entrepreneurship in five years of professional experience i I think that is in my opinion you know that is probably a very good way to uh understand statistically you know the opportunity for entrepreneurship for students i mean to be an entrepreneur you need to have an idea or a spark or something that you become passionate about and that requires as I said an understanding of a customer's or a users's needs you know and it also requires conceptualizing some sort of a solution that would help make the customer happy you or delighted and uh you know I would say that uh you need some industry experience in whatever industry you're if you're chemical electrical you know whatever industry medical health whatever so it almost entrepreneurship opportunities are there in every industry so there's no such thing as an industry where there's no entrepreneurship opportunity so any human activity there are entrepreneurship opportunities so uh basically unless you understand at least at a certain depth uh a particular field of interest to to you it's hard to really understand what customers are thinking what they're missing in their lives or in their jobs or in their functional in the things that they do and it's difficult for them to for anyone to conceptualize a solution for this so I would say that 5 10 even 10 10 years is probably a good amount of hands-on experience um is would be nice to have now you know some areas um which are at the cutting edge like AI etc uh you know schools are a are a hotbed of en
+trepreneurship and the reason it's a hotbed of entrepreneurship in areas like AI etc or or technologydriven or the cutting edge disruptive technologydriven industries is because the industry just doesn't get it doesn't understand when the internet came along industry did not understand what internet was when cloud came along they didn't understand what cloud or blockchain so you know the cutting edge disruptive technologies are good areas for u straight out of college entrepreneurs but uh if you want to develop an industrial product or a consumer product or a consumer service um in any field then you need to know then you need to have understanding of how that industry works how that business works right right and and I would say that 90% plus are startups in those fields not in cutting edge disruptive technology fields right right so um from your experience can you give us an idea of how you identified a problem and uh started one of your companies what what insights did you gain from the industry yeah so basically three companies right so three companies I've been involved with as a founder so the first one was a semiconductor company and I had worked in the semiconductor industry for probably 10 or 12 years and um me and my co-founders three co three engineers we found that you know nobody was doing a chip development in the way we conceptualized it the four of us con conceptualized it and we felt that you know this would be a breakthrough and price performance functionality cost we thought it would be a breakthrough and um you know so we quit our jobs and we started OPI because you know we knew the industry for a dozen years we knew what the big companies like Intel and BLSI and Texas Instruments and others were not doing and as a consequence that that we felt that we could do and uh we quit and then started the company and that became very successful and four or five years we had hundreds of millions of dollars in sales and you know could to take the company public and all these things because we knew the industry we knew the customers We knew the market we knew the technology we knew where the gap was and we rushed into to the gap uh when we came when if I move to selectica there my co-founder was a guru
+in artificial intelligence way before anybody else and uh he had a hunch that that this AI technology could be deployed on the internet platform especially with Java coming along in the 1996 time frame so it was just a hunch uh nobody knew if the market would accept it customers would accept it but he felt that you know this thing could become something that people would really benefit from and uh you know uh I teamed up with this AI guru and uh you know we my job was to help him take this technology vision that he had and make it into a product that would generate value that people would be confident to buy getting people to accept this cutting edge technology was my value ad my value ad was how to make something that was palatable right you know to the CIOS of Fortune 500 companies you know because they were all accustomed to doing things with databases and software and things like that and you're saying no we can do use AI in order to do rules and create a rules engine and so on and then uh basically it becomes a more maintainable and uh more reliable system and so on and uh it could be deployed on the internet and you know you sales people can uh uh quickly take orders and things like that so we had to make the pro make the technology into a product that was palatable for the buyer which was the CIO of these big Fortune 500 companies and so essentially you know uh I would say that in the second case it was more a question of great technology but technology by itself nobody buys only when it delivers something valuable of service to them and them saying okay I'll I'm willing to put my business processes on your platform or your techn technology u and give you a chance right to show me how to do that it's so value so so so basically like you know um it's it's a startup happens in many different ways and um sometimes it's technologydriven which becomes a disruptive force and sometimes it is uh just a brilliant new idea that I can do And if you move fast enough and quickly enough you make it happen uh so many many ways um and a good way is if you talk to dozens of customers in any industry you might start seeing a pattern maybe we say you know I would like to have something like this and this guy says "Yeah I w
+ould like to have you know a car like Elon Elon Musk saw that you know I would like to have a car which you know doesn't generate so much pollution." And somebody says you know a car that accelerates very fast and and then Elon Musk comes up with his EV car right so 25 years ago so yeah many many different ways but it all boils down to finding something where not you but the customer gets the benefit right it's not about you entrepreneurship is not about you at all and and not about you know you're this it's all about how does it how can you be of service to somebody else right correct correct correct yes yeah so there is this eternal conflict between uh a question whether entrepreneurs are born or entrepreneurs are made can you demystify this based on your experience with entrepreneurship teaching so when you teach entrepreneurship what kind of outcomes do you expect do you expect a shift in mindset do you accept do you expect uh venture creation what kind of outcomes are you do you look at yeah so so you know people have two career paths and traditionally all our teaching all our academia was focused at making us employees which is the idea is the boss's idea the manager tells you what to do and you are the grunt who does the work right so we are taught to be good employees you know who can that's that is what we it doesn't matter which school whether it's IIT or whether whatever it school teaches us to be a good employee follow orders you know and what happened is that about 30 40 maybe 50 years ago in Silicon Valley um we you So ordinary engineers started coming up with ideas and then some investors said hey if you got such a good idea why don't you create a start a company and they started giving stock options to everybody and what ended up happening is that the 20 30 40 years later the top 10 companies in the world are all entrepreneurial startups not a single top 10 company in the world is an old company that you know was that just makes more and more stuff it's like entrepreneurial companies that you know uh disrupt how people live their lives how they spend their time how they entertain themselves how they uh enjoy food how they get medical treatment all entrepreneurial companies and all the richest pe
+ople in the world are not the Rockefellers anymore the richest people in the world are people like Elon Musk that nobody had heard of or Bill Gates nobody had heard of or you know so all suddenly like the world changed because of the fact that some engineers came up with bright ideas they met some people who said hey why don't you start a company based on your idea and and now when the disruptive force of entrepreneurship on the wealth of nations the wealth of nations is determined by your entrepreneurial aptitude of your of your workforce you know how many do you have enough people that can do things in a new way use the latest technology to create great services etc and create great companies which will have great value i mean if you just think about it companies like Nvidia and so on in 3 four years have generated market capitalization from 100 billion to3.5 trillion dollars cool that is equal to India's GDP guys right one company and there are hundreds of such companies right so if the wealth of the US or the wealth of China or the wealth of India with all its unicorns etc is coming from entrepreneurs all of a sudden right so so basically you know the whole idea is that that you know when you teach entrepreneurship can we change the mindset so that people don't have even when they have their idea they don't let that idea just die everybody I used to tell in my classes that everybody in his life will get at least five good ideas which are all worth a unicorn But 99.999% never used to do anything about those ideas maybe it's impossible it's too difficult you know I don't think I can do it you know when am I going to raise the money you know all kinds of negative feelings right about because you're trained to be an employee you know you're not trained to you know uh uh do things that uh that that'll that change people's lives you know so based on your on your own drive and uh with entrepreneurship teaching the whole goal is to say that look entrepreneurship is not just for people who are born who are Bill Gates children who've got billions of dollars at their hand most likely they won't even become entrepreneurs it's actually people who don't have any resources are the ones that are going to be the millionaire
+s billionaires trillionaires 10 years from now the people who don't have the money and the why because in entrepreneurship it's a question of attracting resources it's not a question of using whatever resources you have so big companies use resources that they have in order to get a job done to get a project done to build a new uh factory or whatever but entrepreneurs when they have the vision of something fantastic people throw money at them so the risk money resource comes engineers give up their jobs at big companies like Reliance and so on and quit to join somebody and uh on and on and on it's like uh somebody was telling me today about uh a company that was started called um uh in in the health industries and u he said that you know this uh entrepreneur came up with the idea and then he convinced or his when he talked about his idea to the CEO of one of the biggest hospitals in the Bay Area Yeah um essentially that guy gave up his job as CEO of the hospital to join him to make this idea into a big company and uh what was the name of the company it's uh uh I'll think of it before we finish this interview but I I I'll give you the name of the company but this company has now raised $110 million and is valued at $6 billion and the company was started in 2023 oh young company yes young company exactly but but you know that's that's what entrepreneurs do uh they basically have this amazing idea about how to do something and um and essentially it attracts you know this the smartest and the best competent you know manager in the health services business it attracts $110 million from different venture capitalists it attracts engineers it attracts AI gurus it attracts everybody and all of a sudden this company two years later is already worth $6 billion obviously they've not gone public but that's the market capitalization of the funding for this company so um yeah I'll send you the name of the company upon right right that's that's magical almost it is it's magical when you when it happens right and it's happening all the time everywhere in the world right now it's not a magic that only happens in Silicon Valley and so on it's happening everywhere and it is the real wealth of a nation to have you know entrepreneur
+s who are problem solvers that result in a business being formed so you got to be a if you are problem solver that works in a cor corporate company you're an employee but if you're a problem solver that results in a new company being formed you're an entrepreneur same problem but if you start a company around that problem that you solved you became an entrepreneur and then you know the sky is the limit in terms of your success in terms of your fame in terms of the value in terms of the money that you'll make exactly yes yes so coming back that that was there was so much wealth in just this one answer Raj you know I I'm really absolutely students the perspective that students need to bring to the journey of entrepreneurship and this concept of understanding that you you attract resources by identifying a problem that you can solve rather than dip into existing resources that is so powerful yes yes that is that is the essense of being an employee and entrepreneur same problem all right exactly exactly exactly exactly uh coming to entrepreneurship educators would you focus on the curriculum or the pedagogy for this particular area like obviously you cannot teach entrepreneurship the way we teach maths you know on a board and solve problems you've got to go out there and solve problems so when uh so there are there are multiple questions here one is should an educator look at the curriculum design only or should they bring in pedagogy and what kind of innovation can they bring into their classroom to make students alive to the entire world of entrepreneurship yeah so that's a very good question so I think the curriculum has to be there in my opinion you know they there is such a thing as learning right they have to learn something new and there's enough new things to learn in entrepreneurship and uh the main thing that they are learning is how they can form a company around an idea so there's a whole bunch of skill sets that are needed to build a company around an idea you know you got to know a little bit of finance you know got to know a little bit of product development you got to know about marketing you got to know about sales you got to know about negotiating you got to you know there's a whole bunch that has
+to be is something that students are not going to be aware of and not even have a clue and not even have a personality uh you know of high EQ and things like that and how to network and how to uh you know convince people about anything so in my opinion curriculum is a must you know there has to be an organized way that you know we teach them the skills that they will need to build a company around an idea right so how to choose the right idea how to find a how to develop a business model comp uh canvas which will help them choose the right idea to put that uh valuable time behind and so on so all that you know there is no option but through a systematic curriculum um but entrepreneurship you know will never be understood if you don't actually do it the lessons of life come that will help you actually actually create a company comes by doing right so there needs to be some methodology to get students to do things right so uh you know uh for product development very important that the student learns to get their hands dirty to build a proof of concept you know so uh to do experimentation then uh to do the marketing they have to go and do their surveys and customer inquesting and so there needs to be a methodology by which students have to put together uh hands-on experience of what it'll take to understand uh at a very deep level within them you know the needs of a customer or how a product would work or how it would solve a problem or how to communicate it to the customer when you're selling you know how to discuss price how to convince uh investors that you know you have the ability to build this great company so unless you have the hands-on experience that supplement and reinforce the curriculum that they're being taught uh it'll just be an academic exercise right and and you know uh these days with AI tools like Chad GBD they can write a business plan they can write a marketing plan they can write a sales plan they can write everything uh in seconds right but that's not going to make you an entrepreneur they can make you they can build a satellite to the moon using yeah exactly they can there's so much they can do but that won't create a business it won't create a company you know to create a company you nee
+d to go at least 10 levels deeper in every element of or every facet of your company right you got to really understand how do I reach this customer base who's my market for my customer for my product you know who's what will stimulate them to actually buy it what so in every area you need to develop your intuitive understanding which Chad GBD will never get because it's an AI tool so it'll that intuitive understanding of your technology of your product of of your technology of your product of your u marketing of your market of your sales uh capability etc all that comes that intuitive understanding only comes through hands-on experience so we've got to mesh the two right yeah so so when we look at entrepreneurship programs in an academic setting you know um it it becomes challenging for students to actually take up this fieldwork or and get into the world outside for customer discovery or problem identification so how can this become more meaningful how a more meaningful experience for students yeah so that that's a problem that you know I've struggled with and we've struggled it with with at IIT for you know years and years and uh other universities like Stanford University the Stanford technology venture program with whom we are very well coupled and who worked with us very closely they also struggle with you know uh helping students get this knowledge and u there's a a lot of uh different approaches that have been put to work and now there's enough uh success sto success uh paths to providing this uh deep understanding so one of the things that uh we did is to go ahead and um have the university or the college actually focus on bringing together the uh industry players to interact with the students so if you remember at IIT we have this uh the biolab right the the bolab and in the bolab they have access to like you know 50 or 100 doctors cardiologist hematologist renologist this every kind of doctor nurse hospital everybody is art and connected with this lab or this this center for biomedical entrepreneurship and betic right and and you know since uh they're connected the students who are interested in doing a biomed startup you know the hard work of doing introductions and providing uh access to people who
+understand a problem or understand a need that access is provided So um you know it would be very hard for somebody to a student to have access to a worldass cardiologist or a world class and somebody says you know I think there's some new material that has been discovered which can make the next generation of stances now how if they cannot get access to a cardiologist and a cardiac surgeon how are they going to develop this stent Right even though there is some new material there is some new technology there is some new uh whatever uh science that that uh you know this student has got access has figured out you know or had a vision about or whatever so the in my opinion the university has to do a fair amount of work to decide that we are going to focus our entrepreneurial industry experience for the students who want to get entrepreneurial do entrepreneurial startups in that particular area we are going to do the work of getting them to connect with the ecosystem of that industry right if you remember we did the rural project right right at with IIT Bombay and we took all our students and connected them with the farmers and villagers and the panchiats and the everybody in this advasi village you know near Gujarat in Gujarat and the students would have never connected with these farmers but they came up with 20 brilliant startup ideas right absolutely i remember that but but you know if I through its alumni organization wheels had not done the introduction and the logistics to make that connection happen so my viewpoint is that it's none of this is very impossible thing to do or very expensive it's more a question of uh recognizing that students are not going to have a good set of connections into the industry ecosystem where they are trying to do it even so they might be brilliant electrical engineers but if they don't have access to the lassim tub bro leadership and managers and GE and so on how are they going to come up with any breakthrough idea uh breakthrough products and services for that electrical industry and the same thing with rural or health care or whatever so I think the university has to and the university has the ability to also do it right but to open up access to a particular ecosystem so ho
+w do what is the gap that you find in the incubation and institutional uh academic entrepreneurship education systems there are two ecosystems already present in many universities they have incubators they have entrepreneurship teachers they have an EC cell and yet there are some gaps right yeah so I would say that because you know I'm also familiar with all the incubators in the US right and I've seen examples of things like Alchemist Accelerator you know u uh and and other um incubators in Silicon Valley and I've seen obviously incubators like sign and I Bombay etc right and so on and I would say that the main uh the main difference that I see between the ones in Silicon Valley and the ones in India is that the ones in Silicon Valley provide connection with industry experts so besides providing you know the the workbench and the access to internet or whatever it is or cloud or whatever uh and in and a little bit of money etc they provide access to people who are leaders in the industry that the entrepreneur is that that they are supporting so if somebody is you know interested in the let's take an example u uh some crypto industry or whatever you know because he's got some new crypto algorithms or whatever and he gets accepted by Alchemist Accelerator or one of these Silicon Valley X then the incubation center will reach reach out to the top you know kind of business leaders um finance leaders uh marketing and sales people in the crypto industry which might be banking insurance whatever and connect them with this uh crypto entrepreneur and and then when they connect they basically you know there's a uh basically there's a contract where the crypto entrepreneur has to give.1% or.5% of his stock to these industry leaders you know and and so both sides you created a benefit for the industry expert helping this brilliant crypto researcher and the crypto researcher having access to this talent in areas that they obviously don't have so so basically um basically uh I would say that um it's the industry connection with people leadership people in leadership positions that these incubators provide for their budding entrepreneurs and I don't see that kind of uh you know activist approach to making connections and um y
+ou know I I think I don't know why but uh as yet I haven't seen that level of of uh activist networking or connections that I that incubate incubation uh incubator does in order to help the future entrepreneur Right and and and I think that's I think the missing gap among everything else okay right that that is that is valuable that's that is so apt the network and and the right the appropriate network that an entrepreneur needs for building his or her unique uh concept absolutely we cannot predict what a young entrepreneur would want uh you know and we need to be ready to be able to facilitate those connections for them facilitating those connections and doing it in an activist way true true active yeah you have to somebody has to actively make the phone call somebody of some person who's influential reputable like the director of IIT calling you know somebody at his uh the CEO of Lass and Tubu and saying you know I would like your director of engineering in this high-powered area to talk to my uh you know that level of desire to help the entrepreneurs succeed needs to be there in an organ organization in in a university absolutely you're that that is that is you hit the nail on the head with that let's let's let's uh look at the student uh point of view so according to the case data we see that 58% of students have mentioned that the main hiccup the main factor influencing their decision to start up is u identified as familiar pleas family pressure how can students navigate through this and experiment with startups as a student well I think you know um in India at least in India that I know of parents sacrifice everything for their students education you know all their life savings etc people invest in their students education whether at IIT or medical school or anywhere else right I mean education India still cost money and for four five years they're they're basically student is spending their parents' hard-earned saved money right so you know I can understand why parents and family would love their children to take a conservative next step forward Because entrepreneurship is a high-risk highreward activity and you know the failure rate of entrepreneurs is significant and uh uh by definition it it's never g
+oing to go down that failure rate will stay where it is and uh and the question is but is you know um families are not going to be happy with their student essentially graduating and then turning down an Infosys offer for 50 lakh rupees a year they're just not going to be happy uh and and and basically you know uh try to start a company and need more angel funding from their parents etc so you know it's a realistic problem there's no no two ways around it um and by the way that's true in Silicon Valley also it's like even Silicon Valley parents are not ha if they've spent quart million or half a million dollars to put their students through Stanford or Harvard or Princeton or whatever want them to get a good job at the end of it and not become you know poor entrepreneur uh but uh you know there's a lot more uh there's a lot more safety nets in in in the west compared to a developing economy like India so I I would say that you know um I would say that you know as a professor of entrepreneurship you know we should be happy if if you know maybe just uh I would say 1% of our students one out of 100 students actually you know decides to start a company right off the bat you know um if you're lucky maybe two will start but but you know if if two start it's it's pretty good because we have planted the seed and it's just a matter of you know time when the students are you know reasonably secure financially know something about the industry have network into uh into the team that is going to be needed to p make the idea happen and be rep credible and reputable with investors like venture capitalists and angels etc that you know their company has a fair shot at succeeding so it and so I'm not basically somebody who would push students to start companies right out of school my attitude is if something comes along and it's a brilliant idea and it starts attracting resources great you know uh do start your company because you can feel the magnetic pull that your idea has got and uh then you go for it but if not you know um you've learned everything about entrepreneurship you know how to do it you've got all the skills uh and now you know understand an industry really well become financially reasonably fin stabl
+e financially etc so that you have a little bit of runway on your own to build your company you know you can go without a paycheck for a year or so and uh run and create something of value before you know to run create a company successful company which is what I did i you know it took me 17 years before I could pull together the courage to jump and start my first company yeah correct in fact Raj while you were speaking I was thinking this whatever you're saying there are so many gems out there i wish every entrepreneur every student was listening into this today um it's it's like a toolkit for entrepreneurs if I may put it that way you you actually Well I' I've experienced it so and you know Yeah that's the main thing exactly exactly and so so if if I had to ask you for one resource hack one mind shift mindset shift and one personal failure story to close this interview you know u I think there will be so much more and like I said earlier we will come back for some more uh insights from your experience so yeah so mindset mindset shift that you would advise students who face fear of starting up like you said earlier or family pressure let's start with that yeah so my attitude is that you know um entrepreneurs need to develop a eye to understand and be empathetic of what others are facing that's the first skill of an entrepreneur that they have empathetic eyes that's what I say you you can put you can see yourself in the shoes of of a housewife who's struggling with with something or the other or a student who's suffering you know struggling with something or a farmer who's struggling with something you have got to have empathetic eyes you know it can't be you know somebody who just brushes away you know other people's needs uh expectations desires you know you got to be able to put yourself in in their shoes right so and and and really get it so empathetic eyes is what I call you know um is something that an entrepreneur needs to develop which in my opinion we just don't teach our academia academia does not teach us to be empathetic about anything in life you know you can't you're only looking at everything from your own eyes and that's a very selfish way and a selfish per a selfish person can never be an entre
+preneur just to be point blank think about uh you know uh about that thing so uh so the first thing is that you know an entrepreneur needs to have the mindset of wanting to be empathetic right caring and uh so on so so that is the mindset shift from me oriented to you oriented kind of mindset empathetic right exactly exactly and then eyes to understand you know oh if this person has a problem then so so many people should have a problem so so many people will buy the product so so much money can be made so so many people can be hired so you know so eyes is what is the vision right it's a vision that that empathy and understanding that that empathy gave will give you a vision of what is possible for your company right and um so that is in my opinion the mindset change for you know any any collegegoing student that we need that's that's number one right so what is the next question one resource hack for student entrepreneurs or or any entrepreneur for that matter because not easy so my as I said you know to succeed as an entrepreneur you got to be somebody who attracts resources you know I said that is how an entrepreneur basically you know makes brings his company to life right because he attracts resources right so so so my viewpoint is that you U how do you make yourself attractive somebody that attracts resources right what is it that'll make you not somebody who repels resources but attracts resources right a lot of uh VC's will run from 90% of the entrepreneurs that go to meet them but then they meet this one entrepreneur and all the VCs want to throw money at him right right what is it how do you go from being somebody who repels VCs to somebody who attracts VCs right right uh how same thing with how do you attract customers versus repelling customers the guy says I'm so busy don't try to sell me another toothbrush or toothpaste or whatever and and then Baba Ramdev comes along and all of a sudden everybody wants his ayurveic toothpaste right so so the point is that uh you know how do we go ahead and change a personality from being a repeller to somebody who attracts and to me you know people who attract are people who are not all about themselves okay so it comes that kind of empathy it comes back to empat
+hy and then developing the personality correct correct that you are not about yourself right it's it's like somebody who's you know goes ahead and um and does a major project within within uh uh at UN at the campus or whatever uh you know runs E cell or something like that you know these are all developing the personality of attracting uh resources and attracting and being of interest to people rather than somebody who just you know pushes away the very people that they're going to need if they're ever going to succeed right so so in my opinion it is university is a great place to uh learn the skills that will make you an attractive human being right so that that is what students need to if they learn anything in in universities they got to learn how to be attractive to all the resources they're going to need who are going to help them succeed in life right so so that is what uh and that means you know good communication skills u uh basically being disciplined uh being on time you know following up with uh with people when you know you've made any commitments keeping your commitments there's a whole bunch of personality traits that need to be developed if you're going to become an a person who attracts resources versus somebody who repels resources right right right yeah like who wants to work with who wants to work with somebody that comes late to a meeting or comes unprepared to a meeting or who comes you know uh you know just doesn't you know uh have everything done in a nice proper way you know you know with a nice little well well digested you know how to put put together a package of collateral properly and so on so basically you know you have to develop the skills to uh and and traits and personality traits that'll make you attractive to you know the resources that you want because if you have these traits you know things will just start happening for you and that's what we want right right one one story of failure from where you took lessons and uh what what what how how do you how would you advise an entrepreneur to separate their failure uh the failure of a startup from personal failure yeah so basically like you know an entrepreneur's life is all about failures every every day uh there are failures y
+ou you lost this uh sales opportunity your your product did not work as well uh you lost this engineer that you wanted that you could that decided not to join your company i mean an entrepreneur faces failures every day forget one failure and you know an entrepreneur that loses their optimism is the real failure yes the the person that is not so confident and positive and optimistic and you know uh and and you know gives in to you know the set daily setbacks is the biggest failure and and and you know to me that is probably the number one most important important thing that uh entrepreneur needs to learn about failure which is every failure is actually just a step or of learning it's a learning step it's not anything about you being bad or whatever uh you being a disappointment it's all about hey that's an important lesson that I learned today about you know this person did not join my company but the next person that I interview I'll be to convince him to join my company or this customer didn't buy my product this is why he decided not to buy my product next time I will make him buy it this way or you know this VC did not invest my money I'm going to have to change my messaging or my product positioning or my or my or the way I've written my deck or or or you know how I pitch or you know it's a learning opportunity so basically there's no such thing as failure it's actually more a question of you know how many how can you stay in learning mode through the journey of entrepreneurship that's what it's all about so the magic word here is next like exactly what what what next so all right this didn't work what next what next what next and you know what do I need to do to self-improvement correct interesting yeah you have to improve you have to make it better you can't you know you can't just use the same idea it failed it failed it failed it failed it failed you know you have to keep changing your PPT deck with every VC you got to change the way you answer questions you got to change the way you approach the VC you the you know you to keep evolving and becoming becoming you know better and better at every task that has to be done till you become unbeatable right you see no choice but to invest in your company yeah
+and all the time you keep your ear to the market demand market needs customer experience totally totally yeah you have to okay so just one last question because you were talking about VCs attracting funds versus repelling uh VCs one of the talks that came up Shark Tank uh and programs like this have really grown in popularity and today students think that success is equal to fundraising through a VC can you yes just if you could well I would say that you know less than.1% of entrepreneurs successfully get VC funding It's minuscule it's virtually 99% of entrepreneurs essentially bootstrap angel fund organically uh fund customer funds you know that is the way 99% of startups happen and we see come in much later when there is much more you know what we used to call you know product market fit you know once the product market fit happens then you know professional money's etc will see the light of your vision and you know want to invest in your company right but there needs to be enough validation of the product market fit which you know uh is hard work that has to be done and it has to be funded one way or the other through bootstrapping angel funding paying customer funding etc right so uh my viewpoint is that u you know u there's a time for VC funding and the VC funding should be attempted only after you have a good validatable product market fit if till you have that you're just wasting your time in my opinion because the chance of getting VC funding is so low that that's not where it's worth spending your time spend your time on the product market fit absolutely so yes and uh I want to close this interview with one last question um what's one bold prediction that you would make about India's startup ecosystem by 2030 particularly student startup ecosystem well I I think you know um you see the world is moving to a very uh knowledged driven or uh knowledge knowledge driven and AIdriven kind of u future you know the world is uh changing very rapidly and all our students are going to live in a world that is so different than what we thought that you know we lived through a very tumultuous 40 50 years after graduating but our students are going to have even a much more tumultuous life because you know it's going
+to be a world of robots humanoid drones uh AI And uh all kinds of intelligent uh agents and uh uh um basically where everything around you is doing and delivering things that you know uh that disrupt you know anything any concept of a steady job that you know you could have for 40 years that concept itself is is is now becoming totally obsolete that I can be a CA for 40 years or I can be a doctor for 40 years or I can be a nurse for 40 years because you thought you could be a nurse for 40 years but then suddenly you know all the things that you were doing is done by a humanoid robot who will do it 24 hours a day for onetenth amount of money without making a single mistake take and so on uh and the same thing for doctors same thing for for CAS etc right so so the thing is that you know no industry is safe but you know India with its focus on education being so fundamental to the futures of our students etc um these educated students from India are the ones who are going to actually make this future that is so scary for everybody happen so so that is so basically in my opinion you know India has to do whatever is necessary in order to see this vision where India is the change agent right for the new world that is going to emerge whether whether we we we want it or not right so we have to become the people that embrace the future the new world that is going to be on us within 5 10 15 years and uh and and and and be the drivers and uh our education system our mindset of our students everything that we talked of today in terms of being empathetic eyes in terms of driven uh to uh help rather than to uh want to get something you know it's like all these things are going to be fundamental traits of what Indians are capable of in terms of helping change and make the future happen absolutely in fact a Swedish entrepreneur was saying that India would lead the change for the world into the next uh Yeah because India is just got the intelligence here and the awareness as to and our leadership from Prime Minister Modi down is there to go ahead and u make this uh vision of India driving the futures future of the world right to happen yeah wonderful so that's such a positive note for students to know that they are going to be
+driving the change and we look at the world wanting to come to India and lining up for Indian visas and passports awesome okay wonderful aerna Dr aerna thank you very much thank you so much uh Raj this was a wealth of learning for educators as well as students and I'm really looking forward to some more uh work on this and I look forward to being in touch with you for this yes thank you so much yeah thank you for this opportunity you know I think we I think brought a lot of important ideas together right and that and that's what this conversation is all about you know the it's it's what it's the brilliance is in the dialectic between our conversation rather than you know your knowledge or my knowledge independently right exactly exactly and and I think um we should work on that toolkit from you okay so let's talk about it sometime great absolutely okay
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+NEW YOUTUBE SOURCE: Excerpts from the transcript of the video "What is GUESSS India Cloud - Introduction by Dr Puran Singh || #GuesssIndiaCloud" uploaded on the YouTube channel "GUESSS India"
+so what is guest India cloud guest India cloud is a platform which will answer the questions in the mind of a typical aspiring student entrepreneur so what are the questions in the mind of a student who wants to become an entrepreneur when to start the venture which idea to pursue what is the art of building a new venture am I suited to be an entrepreneur where do you find answers to all these questions guess India cloud will answer all these questions by bringing in the expert advice from the entrepreneurship enablers it will also bring the entrepreneurial journeys of student entrepreneurs from across the country and it will also bring the insights from entrepreneurship literature therefore guest India cloud promises to be a knowledge hub where student entrepreneurs can find answers to all the questions that they have in mind and empower their student venture journeys