Have an dea? Maybe its time has come

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Deepak Ravindran and his three classmates set up their first office in the college computer library.

Biz whiz Bill Gates began his amazing corporate journey while he was still a student at Harvard. Howard Dell's unlimited ambitions made him start PC's Limited, the precursor of Dell, while he was studying in the University of Texas. Mark Zuckerberg is another college entrepreneur who made it big. Other successful college startups include FedEx, started by Fred Smith, and Venus Swimwear by Daryle Scott.

In India, too, youngsters have woken up to the importance of giving concrete shape to their offbeat ideas early in life. Among those day-dreaming backbenchers of today could be the future leaders of India Inc.
Pratik Agarwal had his first brush with entrepreneurship when he was in his final year of graduation at IIT Delhi. When a senior approached him to help him out with his startup as a designer, he jumped at the offer and ended up co-founding Mentorpolis.com, which he continues to work for after college. Says Pratik: “The biggest challenge was to be comfortable with the new entrepreneurial lifestyle that had very busy and very empty days. Another challenge was to define success at every stage: starting up, getting traction, monthly revenue, and investor interest. It was sometimes difficult to believe that it will turn out okay. The only thing that kept me going was that I loved the experience of failing and learning,” he says.
Steve Jobs was a massive inspiration but Pratik was also lucky to find experienced entrepreneurs as mentors early on. “A mentor can help you refine your idea, choose the right experiments to test your idea, make the right observations, build a team, secure funds, and everything in the middle.”
Coincidentally, MentorPolis provided an online platform for students to reach out to highly qualified mentors and take academic and career advice over phone. “We got good traction: 3000 mentees, 150 mentors, national TV and print media coverage. But our business model depended on surplus time of highly qualified people and hence we found it difficult to scale. I decided it was too early to go non-profit in my life and decided to move on by January 2010,” he says.
The idea may have failed but he gained confidence in his ability to hire and inspire teammates, set meaningful goals and manage finances. So he started Becabo Media, India's first ISP value added services company that helps ISPs make 5-10 per cent extra profit by monetising their subscribers through advertisements and e-commerce transactions. “We reach around 500,000 households daily,” he says proudly.

A national phenomenon
Kasargod in Kerala is no intellectual hub and student startups were unheard of in 2008 but Deepak Ravindran and his three fifth semester friends who were pursuing IT at the Lal Bahadur Shastri College had heard and read about Jobs, Gates and Zuckerberg. “We run the largest offline search on mobile - 55444 (SMSGYAN) - it lets you get any information on the go by simply sending an SMS,” says Deepak about Innoz, which has been rated among the top 100 technology companies across the globe by the prestigious RED Herring magazine. They were lucky to find a few incubators and crucially, their college allowed them to have their first office in the computer library! “Every student follows the same rat race- get a job in an MNC, get married afterwards. But we were chasing big dreams, that of becoming job creators rather than job hunters,” says Deepak.
Deepak feels that the time is right in India for youngsters to embrace entrepreneurship and agreeing with him is Preksha Vaid, founder and creative director of Y-walls, a Delhi-based design firm. She had gone to London to study textile design at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design and came back convinced that she will start her own design company. She even named her future company while pursuing her MA. “I didn’t have any business plan but I was clear that I wanted to create something that I believed in,” says Preksha, who bagged the British Council's Young Creative Design Entrepreneur Award in 2010. “It was important not only to understand how to run a design business but also how to design a business.”
She was too young to understand the mechanics of a successful startup, but she followed her instincts and refused to get demoralised by failures. In the first year itself, the company that provides space design solutions with a focus on creating unique identities for public spaces, notched up revenues of Rs 4 million, and grew by 100 per cent in the following year. “There is no one way of doing things. Often, you may have to learn a particular skill or get someone who can help you. Or go for some other alternative.”

How’s the time for ideas?
Not all however think that the climate is right in India for young entrepreneurs. Says Sachin Agrawal of Inoxapps, a mobile apps & games company: “You do not find enough motivation and support, with most people aiming for high-paying consulting and banking jobs,” says Sachin, who pursued B Tech in textile technology from IIT Delhi and was bitten by the bug when he met similar minded people at an event organised by the E-Cell of IIT Delhi.
Himanshu Khatri, who runs www.mediashala.com which offers ‘interaction design’ solutions, recalls Infosys founder Narayana Murthy say in a speech in 2010 that when starting up one should be ready for 14 hours days for a hard 5-10 years and he couldn’t agree more.
Himanshu pursued his Master’s at the National Institute of Design after doing computer science for his degree. He had the opportunity to work at a design lab called FutureLab in Austria in 2006 while still at NID. “That exposure broadened my perspective and approach towards technology.”
Along with his three co-founders, Himanshu runs besides mediashala, gaatha.com which strives to bring Indian handicrafts onto the global stage by leveraging IT and mayavi.net, a telecom VAS venture that looks at ‘mass impact’ voice and data driven solutions custom built for the Indian context.
He talks about designing and architecting ‘fleet tracking’ solutions for India’s largest logistics players, solving the ‘inventory’ puzzle for offshore oil-rigs and helping brands like Flipkart find the perfect branding and identity for themselves. He is sure that there are many more “seemingly crazy possibilities”.
Agreeing with him is Sanjay Vijayakumar, the 26-year-old chairman of the newly-launched Startup Village at the KINFRA Park in Kochi, the first public-private telecom incubator in the country. “It is the 20-24 age group that can think out of the box. You can’t predict which idea will succeed but we need to create an eco-system where ideas can flourish,” says the man, who bunked classes while studying at the Engineering College, Thiruvananthapuram, in order to launch MobME Wireless, a mobile solutions company.