The last decade in the Indian start-up ecosystem saw the rise of several unicorns – start-ups that reached a value worth a billion dollars. An integral part of this ecosystem and the culture of entrepreneurship in the country has been the list of IIT alumni, with firms building software to establishing household brands. The pandemic saw the rise of some of the more innovative startups from IIT Kanpur, like The Ventilator Project and E-spin Nanotech, that were in the headlines. Urban Company and Sharechat have grown to become names synonymous with the start-up space in the country, both being led by founders from IIT Kanpur. In this article that follows, the Vox team aims to de-construct and investigate the start-up ‘culture’ on campus and bring forth an idea about what it takes to build from scratch, and scale up, whilst being an IIT Kanpur student.
Starting a venture as a student is one of those unpredictable roads that always brings forth a sense of excitement as well as uncertainty. In our efforts to investigate the start-up space at our campus, we reached out to the Startup Incubation and Innovation Centre(SIIC). We interviewed budding entrepreneurs and faculty administration to discuss the institute’s policies and what lies ahead for the student entrepreneurs.
The journey for each entrepreneur on campus has been different, but the struggles shape a generalised pattern. One such entrepreneur we interviewed was Kshitiz, a third-year undergraduate, who has been trying to find like-minded people to form a team for his startup idea but remarked about the lack of help from the administration and the academic load having put this idea on a halt. He mentions that some help was provided through Student Mentorship Program (SMP) conducted by E-Cell. Still, the inability to get proper direction or a team has led him to push away this idea for further pursuit after graduation.
Vox interviewed another student of IITK who has successfully registered his company, Arun (founder of Pnapaao). He has always wanted to develop a business of his own, and so the main purpose for his joining IITK was to avail access to more resources and easy availability of financial support, but he too had to experience plenty of hurdles to establish his company. The lack of primal necessities to build up a team and the constant juggling between academics and entrepreneurship made him suffer academically. Eventually, he did form a team through personal contacts and built his company in Noida instead of incubating at SIIC. To ease the process of starting up a company (deriving the motivation from his own journey), he developed Pnapaao, a company that helps budding startups in all ways possible- team formation, marketing, and consulting. Pnapaao has grown to be a steady venture and is on its way to becoming a successful startup now.
A few entrepreneurs at IITK do get on the path to success and realize their ambitions. We also talked to Tanmay Yadav, an IITK alumnus and a successful entrepreneur to know more about his struggles as well as his journey to establish CRUBN.
As a freshman, Tanmay was fascinated by the idea of blockchains, which came with its own set of challenges. Being a student from a non-CSE background, pursuing software engineering was a cumbersome task, meanwhile, there were no courses on blockchain technology being offered at that time. After some self-learning through online courses, Tanmay approached Prof. Sandeep Shukla for a project where he learned more about the various aspects of blockchains and how they could create an impact on society. Joined by Mukul,(Co-founder and Managing Director, CRUBN) who was also working under Prof Shukla at the time, he participated in a Microsoft Hackathon and devised a solution to the given problem statement, which eventually won the competition. This is how the journey of CRUBN began. The next task on hand was funding for which they went to Google and a few other places that also included some government organizations. They finally got funding from the National Security Council, providing them with a good corpus for their initiative. However, it wasn’t always smooth sailing, there were some roadblocks as well in his startup journey. One of the incidents that Tanmay vaguely recollects was when their team was working on a land records management problem using blockchain. They worked on the technology and spent nearly two years trying to pitch their idea to various state governments but it didn’t lead to fruition as the state administrations weren’t fully aware of the notion of blockchain back then. Continuing their research, they refined their model, looking at instances of the domain worldwide, and gave a final presentation to one of IITK’s alumni bureaucrats in Karnataka. However, soon after, covid hit the world. The company was founded on the 13th, and on the 21st of March 2020, a nationwide lockdown was unexpectedly declared. Suddenly, the whole world was battling covid, and everything else got sidelined. After a long halt for the company and the team, in December, they finally got a call from the same bureaucrat, discussing the possibility of them giving the presentation again. Thrilled, they prepared for the presentation which was scheduled for the very next day. Surprisingly, an hour before the meeting, it was declared in all the newspapers throughout Karnataka that IITK’s blockchain team would be doing land records management in Karnataka. And this was how CRUBN got its first project. Tanmay also mentions support from IITK as one of the building blocks to his success. He feels that SIIC and E-Cell are some of the bodies that do help budding startups but there is much more scope within policies and other domains that can be provided to help entrepreneurs.
To know more about these provisions and policies as well as get a temperament of startup spirit and enthusiasm on campus, we interviewed Prof. Amitabha Bandyopadhyay, Professor-In-Charge (Incubation and Innovation). According to Prof. Bandhopadhyay, SIIC is the startup incubation center that helps budding entrepreneurs and provides them with the offices, mentors, and resources to get a headstart. The acceptance is based on the evaluation of the proposal submitted and an interview round held by a committee that also includes an expert faculty in the subject matter of the startup. A company is declared successful if it has been sustainable till five years of formation. The success rate of the startups incubated at SIIC is stated to be 59%.
Despite this, many students do not incubate their companies at SIIC. Some of them had an issue with the equity demanded, which is vaguely stated in the contract as “mandatory 5% and extra”, the extra being decided by the committee on various criteria. Prof. Bandhopadhyay, in this regard, stated that “ If the student is taking advantage of the university by spending its resources or nurturing that company, it is fair that IIT Kanpur gets some share in the company hence it is well deserving”. On being asked about the lacking effort from the students’ end, Prof Bandhopadhyay highlighted that among students, the motivation for owning a business is more than that of solving a problem. Hence they tend to formulate a solution without identifying the problem and not the other way around.
Despite the existence of SIIC, E-Cell, and multiple policies in place to support entrepreneurship, throughout the interview process, the issues that were raised by entrepreneurs were:
- Lack of a team and inability to form one: Finding people with similar interests in entrepreneurship and then further interest in the idea is a difficult task and narrows down the pool of people, along with the fear of the idea being stolen.
- Coping with Academics: A major part of college is academics which is also needed as a safety net. It often becomes very tough for a student to juggle between courses, exams, and starting a company.
- Unawareness about programs and policies: Many policies like DPP, SEP, and SUEP targeted to foster entrepreneurship are not known to the general student community and hence remain unused.
Tanmay, commenting on these highlighted problems, recollects finding a team through the project he took up for blockchains. While for the academic load, he mentions that he had to complete his graduation in 7 semesters so that he could give more time to the company. Handling academics under such circumstances was not easy, and his CPI got affected as well. He focuses on the fact that handling academics and working on a startup simultaneously can be difficult. He advises entrepreneurial enthusiasts – “Going past the ideation phase is the most significant step for many people who are starting up. People should not hesitate to discuss their ideas with colleagues. You’ll find excellent people on campus who can give you very pragmatic criticism of your idea. The journey is not easy, but it’s very rewarding. KEEP FIGHTING AND KEEP THINKING. “
Written by: Shreyash Kumar, Khush Khandelwal, Tanuja Kaleli, Shreya Verma
Edited by: Rose Agarwal
Design credits: Manasvi Jain
