Endeavour '08 at SIBM
Jumping on the bandwagon like many others, Symbiosis Institute of Business Management caught the entrepreneurship fever last week. The institute hosted Endeavour ’08 on the 14th and 15th, its second year in the running now.
While promoting the spirit of entrepreneurship, the event boasted of big names on the panels for various discussions varying from Private Equity to Young Guns. We did assume that there would be younger people on the panel for the second one but, in vain, we found the likes of Rashmi Bansal (JAM magazine) and Jay Gupta (The LOOT) that are pretty much into the industries for the past 10 years. Guess we need to redefine how India refers to young entrepreneurs and their age groups.
The few of the audience, who seemed interested in the whole concept of risking their careers and running their own business, did get some valuable information and advice from the experienced hands. The panel spoke about working out a scalable plan, building and managing teams, and managing funds. On an individual basis, they described their journeys giving insight to their respective businesses.
The business plan competition for students attracted 430 entries from not only India, but also from Dubai and Singapore. Ten teams finally presented their plans in front of the judges, competing for a prize money of Rs. 2 lacs and a chance of getting funded for Rs. 1 cr. Implementations of health care systems and new green product technologies were displayed. Finally, students of S.P. Jain were announced as the winners.
Raj Nair of Avalon Consulting and Ganesh Natarajan of Zensar (also Chairman, NASSCOM) were present at the event as keynote speakers. Natarajan spoke about emerging trends and opportunities in the information and communication technologies. He went ahead comparing traditional and technology entrepreneurs. Coming out of the NASSCOM Chairman’s mouth, gaming, animation and media are unexplored fields in India and have a lot of potential in the coming years. Natarajan also launched the SIBM Knowledge Portal, where one can find corporate articles, information from the research team and guest interviews. A nice initiative, but the IT team can definitely improve on quality of work, especially when they provide web consultancy as a service to the outside world.
A special address by Chandubhai Virani, Founder, Balaji Wafers, along with a distribution of free samples came as a surprise to the audience, as he continued the talk in Hindi.
PitchPerfect-480, a business plan presentation by 13 existing start-ups, gave a chance for the teams to pitch their ideas to top Venture Capitalists like SeedFund, Capital18 and Canaan Partners. 4 teams got shortlisted by the panel, which were the asked to join them in the lounge. Onion Technologies, dealing with a new implementation of video tagging, and EnTrip, a one-stop portal for organizing trips, getting your tickets done, etc. were declared the winner and runners-up respectively. Though there was no prize money, they might have a chance to get Rs. 5 cr as funding from one of the VC’s.
For people who missed the event, and are looking forward to starting up a business- capital efficiency, differentiation and scalability should be your motto.
Sahil Khan
(2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
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