IIT AGNE hosts a panel discussion on Entrepreneurship

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On Saturday 24th February, at the Lexington community center in Lexington, MA, the IIT alumni association of greater new England (IIT AGNE), organized the first in a planned series of informal chats on entrepreneurship. The focus of the discussion was bootstrapping a new venture, the challenges faced, the path forward and experiences.

The panel comprised of three entrepreneurs: Rajesh Nair, Jayanthi Narasimhan and Nikhil Jain and was chaired and moderated by Durriya Doctor, President of IIT AGNE.

Following some delicious samosas and piping hot chai, the session got started. After the introductions, the panelists shared details about their individual journey. The focus was on the elements of very early stages, before attempting to secure venture capital.

Some key common themes were shared amongst all the entrepreneurs:

- The inclination to identify a real need, and then determine what innovation would be required. Each noted that being an entrepreneurial mindset was to constantly look for new problems.

- The willingness and ability to change direction quickly when it was clear that the current one was not panning out as expected.

- The importance of putting a team together

- To treat failure as simply a learning experience to be used in the next endeavor.

- That innovation and entrepreneurship need not be on the cutting edge of technology but could be used to address simple life improving needs for people at any socio-economic level. 

Both Rajesh and Jayanthi mentioned the triggers that led them to their ideas. Jayanthi was dealing with the challenge of ensuring that her elderly mother would take her medications on time and decided that an app to facilitate this with reminders would be of value to many.

Rajesh had a similar and amusing attempt at his first venture - which was triggered by the problem of determining when his few months old daughter needed a diaper change. He created a tiny device that would beep to inform the parents!

Nikhil talked about becoming an entrepreneur right after graduating from IIT-Bombay and the repeated trips to various prospective customers and the critical importance of getting the first paying customer. That shaped and provided direction to pursue, overriding all carefully thought out plans.

A very animated Q&A session followed, with a number of questions from the attendees. Among those was a high school student (Sid), who said that many of his generation were interested in innovation to address social problems. Also present was Janak Joshi, who worked for the state of Massachusetts and asked about the role that the state Government could play. This led to Rajesh sharing his research and current venture to facilitate and encourage young students to think like entrepreneurs and problem solvers. Rajesh has run maker labs in many locations around the world, with the primary goal being to dispel the fear of failure.

The allocated time ran out, and people continued to chat informally in small groups, exchanged contact information and planned to continue the conversation.

This was the first in a planned series on the entrepreneurship journey and IIT AGNE will be sharing the time, location and panel for the next one when decided.

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