Team Epsilon collaborates with ISB, Hyderabad
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Well the unthinkable has finally happened. After more than a year of negotiations and discussions, the deal between CEL and ISB Hyderabad has finally been struck. According to it, the winners of Epsilon along with a couple of CEL members get a once in a lifetime opportunity to visit ISB and attend the very prestigious Global Social Ventures Competition there. This collaboration not only gives participants another incentive to participate in Epsilon but it also broadens their outlook and helps them achieve their dream of starting up successfully. Moreover, it is also being planned that an ISB Faculty member may be visiting BITS, Pilani in the near future to further induce the spirit of entrepreneurship amongst bitsians and to tell them about ISB in detail. In the coming years there is even a possibility of ISB conducting Video Conferencing Lectures on campus. So all in all this is a development that would go a long way in promoting exchanges and collaboration between the two institutes!!
The Sparks Course
When I stepped into a new semester earlier this year, with apprehensions and fears of a tough and grueling academic year ahead, little was I aware of what was in store for the entrepreneurial part of me. Amidst a lot of skepticism and doubt, a new program was launched by BITSAA in collaboration with CEL, a program set to revolutionize the way BITSians approached technology based startups. Half way down the maiden version, the program has already garnered enough accolades and appreciation and is now arguably one of the best initiatives ever on campus to support budding new entrepreneurs.
My journey began this summer with a simple idea striking me under a circumstance of necessity. I spent quite some time thinking about how my life would be greatly simplified and much more cooler if I could get my solution implemented. I dreamed and had a fairly clear picture of the final product. And at once I thought, maybe I should take the plunge and get it implemented myself. I needed to start-up with the idea. But how?
That was exactly what Sparks New Ventures, a program jointly coordinated by Mr. Abhinav Khushraj and Prof. Arya Kumar and supported by several eminent personalities and alumni around the world, addressed. The graded course with a 3-unit weight chose 4-5 bright teams through a tough evaluation process, and mentored these teams extensively to develop their business plans. The deliverable of the course included a complete business plan, a well-crafted elevator pitch for our use as well as a full length pitch deck.
The course began with an introduction on the basic art of business plan writing by our very own beloved Abhinav. In the course of time, several eminent persons from across the world delivered lectures that helped us develop different sections of our plan and learn other issues related to startups. These included:
"Market Analysis & Segmentation" by Miss Prasanna Krishnan,
" Building the Startup Team" by Mr. Nickhil Jakatdar
" Competition" by Mr. Bob Meese
"Lean Startups" by Seph Skerritt
"Product Development" by Ajay Kulkani
"Business Models" by VT Bharadwaj
The major USP of the entire program is the individual mentoring each of the teams receive from able mentors allotted to them. The mentors work closely with team helping them work on different sections of the plan and ensure that the team works in the right direction. Our team personally benefited largely from these quality mentor talks and our relationship has certainly worked wonders in building up our plan.
With half a semester left in the program, several talks to happen and more mentor meets, we are certain our business plan would take on a more solid, concrete shape. At the end of the program, based on our performance, we may also be entitled to a seed fund amount funded by BITSAA that could serve as a great boost into launching our startup.
On the whole, this program has certainly set off to a great start, and shows great prospects for the future. It may well be responsible for churning out several successful technology startups from BITS Pilani in the near future. We all hope this happens and BITS Pilani becomes the next Stanford or MIT of India.
By Nikhil R
Naren Dubey talks on “Now that you have a Business Plan, What next?” at Conquest 2009
About the Speaker:
Naren is an accomplished executive in building organizations and has extensively conducted business in the US and India. Most recently, he co-founded ScanCafe Inc; headquartered in the San Francisco bay area. Naren built ScanCafe from his garage with the objective of enabling people to relive their photographic and video based memories (past and present) by providing products and services that are powered by a creative workforce that serve as the customer's personal digital studio. ScanCafe won the CNN Money 2007 award for best quality and price in the US market and has been featured in the Oprah magazine and The Wall Street Journal. The company is well-funded and backed by venture capital from Sigma Partners in the silicon valley. ScanCafe has a 700 person creative fulfillment center in Whitefield, Bangalore.
Prior to founding ScanCafe, Naren spent a decade in various management roles in the microchip and solar panel industries. During his tenure in microelectronics, he worked at industry leaders like Applied Materials in Silicon Valley and at Moser Baer in New Delhi. Raised in Goa, India, Naren holds a B.E. from BITS, Pilani-Rajasthan, an MBA from the Wharton School of Business and a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, where he completed his dissertation in bio-artificial tissues and image processing of biopolymers using confocal laser scanning microscopy. He has been awarded patents in the areas of remote plasma generation and the magnetic shielding of plasmas. When he is not patenting things, Naren likes to paint mostly oil on canvas.
Description of the Talk:
He charted out the growth of ScanCafe right from its birth, exposing all the opportunities and challenges they encountered.
He spoke on customer needs and how ScanCafe met them. He was quite frank in admitting that his company could not meet certain needs, like fast delivery of scanned photos.
He then explained to the audience how he used optimization to pinpoint the ideal price for the services being offered by ScanCafe. Low Prices are the biggest USP of ScanCafe now as it offers its services at prices which are a fourth of the prices being charged by its competitors.
He revealed that the biggest risk had to take was outsourcing to India. Even though surveys indicated that customers were not ready to have their photographs shipped all the way to India to have them scanned, the founders of ScanCafe decided to go ahead with India, due to the superior quality of manpower and lower wages. The gamble paid off and ScanCafe is growing at a very rapid pace now, all set to break even in a few months.
Speaking on another interesting problems he had to overcome, he said that ScanCafe initially had to Airlift photos in big cartons, which were mostly empty, just to ensure that not even one photograph is lost. "The devil is in the details." "You have to be paranoid about all the small details."
He concluded by advising the students that the best sources of market information are surveys conducted among friends and family. Inexpensive and modestly accurate.
Mahesh Murthy talks on "The Fundas of Starting Up" at Conquest 2009
About the Speaker:
Mahesh is the Founder and CEO of Pinstorm. Mahesh has 24 years of marketing and communications experience of which over 14 years are in online marketing. After dropping out of college, Mahesh sold vacuum cleaners from door to door, worked with Grey in India and Ogilvy in Hong Kong, where he won notoriety and awards as a creative director on HP, The Economist, Pepsi and MTV - for whom he wrote and directed a spot voted Asia's best commercial of the decade. He then moved to a Silicon Valley firm, CKS Partners as Creative Director, General Manager and Partner where he helped launch the first commercial version of Yahoo in 1995 and the Earth's Biggest Bookstore campaign for Amazon.com in 1997. After a successful NASDAQ IPO, Mahesh moved to head marketing at iCat, an e-commerce firm in Seattle subsequently acquired by Intel. Mahesh then returned to India to run Channel V, a rival to MTV, till its sale to Newscorp in 2000 and then founded Passionfund to invest in startups. Some of his investees include Geodesic, Compassbox acquired by Careerlauncher, Cypherix, Indiaproperties, EBS and Webdunia. Mahesh penned a reasonably infamous column in Business Today and Businessworld, and played the Donald Trump-equivalent role in Business Baazigar, a game show similar to The Apprentice, involving entrepreneurs and business plans. While running search marketing campaigns for his favourite charity in 2003, Mahesh believed there was a need for a pay-for-performance online marketing company - and set up Pinstorm in Bombay. With over 120 people across 7 offices in India, Singapore, Malaysia, China, Europe and the US, Pinstorm is today among the worlds leading digital marketing firms. Mahesh has a passion for early-stage investing and teamed up with Pravin Gandhi and Bharati Jacob in 2006 to set up Seedfund, today a leading early-stage venture capital fund in India. Seedfund already has 10 investments, including Carwale.com, Printo, RedBus.in, AFAQs.com and Vaatsalya.
Description of the Talk:
“An entrepreneur is a person who realizes at a very early age that he or she is different. I don’t have to be like anyone else. Entrepreneurship is about living your DNA. I’m as different from you as my fingerprint is from yours.” He said while emphasizing on the uniqueness of each of those in the lecture hall, which was filled to capacity by then.
Through examples, he then proved that the location of a start-up doenst really matter anymore. He claimed that a world class company can be built in Pilani itself, the crowd broke into a huge round of applause to convey their agreement.
He then pointed out that world leading companies such as Google, Ferrari, YouTube and EBay never advertise. “The trick is to get your customer so thrilled, that he/she cannot stop talking about your service or product.”
While encouraging students to start-up early he said,” You don’t need to learn what it is like to be an employee to know what it is like to be an employer.”
He then downplayed the role of Venture Capital funding by pointing out that most of the world’s greatest entrepreneurs never received any such funds. The ultimate source of funds is the revenue developed from the customers, develop a good enough revenue model and your job is half done.
He concluded by stating that an entrepreneur leads a lonely life. It is emotionally very tough to be an entrepreneur because you might have to oppose your parents, your friends and almost everyone you know. He advised the students to have friends who share the same dream so they can get through the whole experience together. "A shared illusion"
Gayatri Rath talks on "Intrapreneurship and Women" at Conquest 2009
About the Speaker:
Gayatri Rath is Vice President Communications at GE Capital and has been in this role since January 2009. In this role, Gayatri develops and implements internal and external communications strategies to increase brand awareness of GE Capital brand in India. Apart from being the communications leader, Gayatri is also the head of GE Women's Network at GE Capital India. Started in 1997, the GE Women's Network operates through 125 hubs in 39 countries and has a membership in excess of 100,000. It is a voluntary membership platform within GE that helps women employees deliver on their personal career goals and drive GE's business growth.
Gayatri has 14 years of experience in the public relations and corporate communications industry. In her previous assignment, Gayatri was Director - Corporate Communications at Oracle. During her 6-year stint at Oracle she worked closely with several managing directors and senior executives across many Asian countries.
Gayatri is a science graduate and a post graduate diploma holder in Journalism from Indian Institute of Mass Communications.
Description of the Talk:
She informed that after studying two companies, one with no women employees and the other with a significant number of women employees, the following statistics came to light, with regards to the company with women employees:
· 35 % higher return on market equity
· 34% higher return to shareholders
She then compared women and men employees, exploring both the positives and the negatives of both the sexes. It is this very critical understanding which enables GE to handle its employees in the best possible manner.
She then spoke about importance of mentors, stating “You should spend 70% of your time doing your present job and the other 30 % preparing for the next. It is the mentor who will help you make that shift.”
She concluded by stating how being from a small town background helped her bring more diversity to her company and diversity is good. :)
Shashikanth Khandelwal talks on "Starting up after College" at Conquest 2009
About the Speaker:
Shashikant is a Founding Member and Chief Architect at TheFind Inc, a startup in shopping search with more than 15 million visitors per month. At TheFind, Shashikant has been involved in venture funding, product innovation (5 patents pending), and building a scalable search engine. He recruited a team to solve hard problems in information extraction using machine learning, and has played a crucial role in traffic growth and revenue optimization.
Shashikant also co-founded BITSEmbryo along with his 1997 batch BITSian classmates, and led the team from idea inception to building an Embryo Club on campus to run this project. In 2 years, Embryo has conducted 80 lectures via video-conferencing, some of them simultaneously across Pilani, Goa and Dubai campuses with an attendance of over 500 students.
Prior to TheFind, Shashikant worked at INSEAD France for a year. Shashikant has a BE(Hons) Computers Science from BITS Pilani and an MS in Computer Science from Stanford University. He is an active member of BITSAA.
Description of The Talk:
Shasikanth, speaking from the United States, in a online lecture setup by the embryo group of BITS Pilani, started off by speaking about dreams. “Dream and dream big” he said, while illustrating how he started his first big venture. He smoothly shifted to talking about the importance of knowledge, “Knowledge is Power.”, he quoted the slogan of BITS Pilani. He also informed the audience that knowledge could also be dangerous sometimes, as knowing how hard it is to do something , could dissuade one from even trying- “Ignorance is bliss”.
He revealed to the audience that the best way to learn entrepreneurship is to “Just do it.”Experience counts and entrepreneurs need to be bold enough to “Just do it.”
He then spoke about the need for mentors in our lives. The mentors could be anybody, our teachers, our friends, our seniors or just anybody who does something we want to do.
“You can be sure that there are many others who are as smart as you. However, if you work for one hour more everyday, it equals thirthy hours in a month and that is a lot of time. Hard work is the only thing which can make you stand out.” He quoted his mentor, Chandra Bhople.
He ended the talk by stressing on the importance of friends. He revealed that most of the people he is working with have been his friends for years. “A group of people will know a lot more people and have a lot more experience than one person could ever hope to have”, he said.
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