I5 Summit, Central India’s largest entrepreneurship summit organised by IIM Indore and IIT Indore, sponsored by SIDBI and Calipso, commenced today with a keynote address by Venktesh Shukla.
Shukla, ex-chairman of The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE), and currently General Partner at Monta Vista Capital and President of Foundation for Excellence, graced the opening ceremony and talked about entrepreneurship as the way forward in India. He began with a quote by Vinod Khosla, acclaimed billionaire businessman, who is also a TiE member - “An entrepreneur is someone who dares to dream and is foolish enough to try and make those dreams come true”.
Shukla went on to talk about how the time is right to be an entrepreneur in India, due to availability of capital and government push to entrepreneurship. He said that there are no real problems left to be solved in Silicon Valley, whereas India is bubbling with ideas and solutions to every real problem.
For entrepreneurs, he stressed upon finding out the one thing their company is best at, which people will ultimately pay for, and go all guns blazing with it. He ended his talk by saying that start-ups are inherently risky but at the same time, if entrepreneurs get that one ‘big idea’, they should not focus on granular B-plans and spreadsheets, but instead stick with it to bring it to fruition.
To help with that, a mentor or coach is essential, especially during the early stages of the start-up. lastly, his piece of advice to entrepreneurs was to ‘know your customer’ by interacting with them, understanding their problems, finding out their willingness to pay for its solution and then solving their problems through the products or services on offer. ‘Think Big’ was the mantra he asked budding entrepreneurs to imbibe, and good things will follow.
The next event to be held was Social Entrepreneur, the flagship event which witnessed social start-ups attempting to bring about a positive change in the society presenting their pitches to Anand Govind Alluri, Founder of Govind Capital, and Professor Subin Sudhir.
The event began with Food Bank ATM (Any Time Meal), an innovative idea to bridge the gap between wastage and hunger and was followed by ‘Janta Choupal’, a smart app for a smart city, essentially a political social media platform in order to create effective governance in the city of Indore. This was followed by Team Udaan, an initiative to provide low-cost sanitary napkins and further create a self-sustaining business model for rural women in the Kharsod Village of Madhya Pradesh. Impressed by their pitch, Alluri decided to give them an on-the-spot offer of Rs 5 lakh.