‘In the US, every alternative success story gets created on campus’

By Suresh Narasimha

It was in the darkest days of Covid phase 1, when Jawahar Doraiswamy, pro-chancellor of PES University, who happened to be my teacher, inspired me to think like an entrepreneur. He called me and asked me - “What can be done to create start-ups on campus?” The result of that meeting was a bright light that created more than 15 start-ups.

In the US, every alternative success story gets created on campus. Facebook, Google, MS and many other start-ups we love were created when entrepreneurs were on campus. Meanwhile, India finds it challenging to help our brightest of youngsters to become entrepreneurs.

We must ensure that we pick great ideas or transform ideas presented to get better: picking great ideas is an art and a science. Deep research in focused areas helps us to own a thesis and spot ideas that are venture scale and venture capital ready. Our mentoring will ensure ideas are shaped to be the large global businesses.

We should provide funding to those great ideas to become products and then to generate initial traction: we feel for several ideas, it is not just enough to fund the prototype, but, all the way to initial market traction. Size and scale of funding is critical for the success of campus startups.

In India student entrepreneurs/faculty lack the necessary bandwidth to build a startup. Most early-stage startups under invest in critical functions like design, messaging and even deep tech. Venture studio provides actual resources to work alongside the entrepreneur:

A venture studio with dedicated experts from the industry working alongside some of the brightest students, with the passion to help startups, is a critical part of any venture lab. Having venture labs on the campus not only creates entrepreneurs but fosters a deep tech culture and an environment where all students start thinking innovation.

If one per cent of India turns to entrepreneurship we will be world leaders and 10-20 percent of our bright students should embrace Entrepreneurship. I feel that our students should think big, think radical and aim to become unicorns rather than settle for lifestyle entrepreneurship. We have all the necessary talent and the market.

We need the necessary infrastructure and make the process of creating entrepreneurs sustainable by generating more than the required capital to accelerate the efforts in the coming years.

What matters in entrepreneurship is the idea and the ability to execute well with the optimum amount of resources. Capital, while not cheap, should not be a constraint when chasing big dreams.

A support structure that will bring confidence to think bigger is what entrepreneurship requires today. When entrepreneurship blooms everyone wins, students, university, society and investors. The only thing that was required was to recognize the opportunity and provide the right platform.

While students chase crazy offers with a considerable component of ESOP, they need to understand that equity in the earlier stages of startups is more valuable. The icing on the cake will be from startups that are in the early stage and are funded. Being part of startups that their classmates are building is both an incentive to contribute and an opportunity to have a startup of their own in due course of time.

(The author is managing partner of CoCreate Ventures and PESU Venture Labs.)