These are lectures and interactions from last year.
The first of the set was on 12th January, 2007 at Netaji Auditorium by Mr. Vinod Dham, who is well known as “The Father of Pentium”. Mr. Dham gave a brief account of the turning points of his life before the lecture was made open for questions. A few of the questions he answered are as follows:
Q1.Despite all the work you have done and the success you have attained, don’t you ever feel tired?
A. I don’t see the point of feeling tired. The idea of relaxing by watching a movie is foreign to me! You keep getting wiser as you age, and I see no reason to rest with all that knowledge.
Q2.If I have an idea and I want you to fund me, how can I be assured that you won’t steal the idea when I tell it to you?
A. You are absolutely right. There is a round-about way to go through this without telling me your idea. What you can do is talk to us and tell us everything about the idea without letting us know the key to it. After you have our attention, we can direct you to a lawyer in the technology field to whom you can reveal your idea. If he feels that you’ve got something worth funding, he will advise us to do so without telling us the idea himself.
Q3. Are you open to funding BTech student projects for students in the campus?
A.Yes, we are definitely open to the idea. In fact, starting this year we have decided to allocate a small part of our assets to funding the very kind of projects you are mentioning. You will get to know how to get in touch with us about this shortly.
The second lecture in the series was by Mr. Rohit Agarwal, CEO of techTribe. His talk was “How Innovators Connect” and was a real eye-opener in terms of making us rethink about our concepts on entrepreneurship. He emphasized the importance of building a sound team of individuals through networking as he believed that teams are built and not hired.
He shattered a lot of myths when he said that one doesn’t need a VC to fund a start-up justifying his statement by saying that acquiring large amounts of money will make you complacent and it is best to have money in small installments. He pointed out that humility is one of the best qualities in an entrepreneur. He believes that we are at a turning point in the history of our country when we can go forth and take risks for believing in ourselves and our ideas. In an institute like IIT, he pointed out that we already have a network of really capable, smart and like-minded individuals (if you can forget hall rivalry for a short while!). The most telling point of his lecture was “The only crime is not making a decision!” A few of the questions he answered are as follows:
Q. Why do entrepreneurs sell their companies to bigger brands? Don’t they have faith in their product?
A. For an entrepreneur, a start-up is like a child, and at one stage they feel it is necessary to let it go since it is best for its future. Because if you don’t sell out to the brand, then you are going to be competing with them. This will make life difficult for your employees and your brand. As far as having faith in your product goes, the very fact that the bigger brands thought that they should buy you out since you are giving them a better service or product than they thought of, is enough to tell you that your product is good.
Q. How does one make a brand in a non-IT sector?
A. There are lots of ways; one example could be, say, jewellery. Now in our country, only old women wear the old fashioned jewellery. But if you are targeting a younger set of women then you could use a simple technique. If you got male models to strut around wearing your jewellery, it will cause quite an uproar, so you have your publicity area covered. The shock value will ensure that the mothers won’t approve of the jewellery, which means that the daughters are sure to buy it!!
Mr. Agarwal shared his contact information with us so that any interested students could get in touch with him and techTribe.
