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With an opportunity to ideate, innovate, inspire, induce and invest; the most awaited two day event of the year- i5 Summit started at IIM Indore on August 22, 2015. Aimed to promote entrepreneurial culture, the event is been held together by Student Activity Council (SAC)-IIM Indore and Student Entrepreneurship Support Cell (SESC)-IIT Indore. Day one of the event was marked with a number of elegant speakers from different sectors of the industry, with interesting workshops, panel discussions and guest lectures.
The event commenced with lamp lightening ceremony by keynote speaker Mr. Ganesh Natarajan, Vice Chairman and CEO of Zensar Technologies. Talking about entrepreneurship specific to Indian context, he noted that India adds 800 new startups every year and now is at 4th position in the world in terms of number of Tech startups. He gave three tips for a successful startup: ‘Don’t underfund your company; Don’t assume that you will make profits immediately and Don’t think that being a startup, customers will forgive you for any substandard products or services.
A panel discussion was held with Mr. Raghunandan G, Co-Founder-TaxiForSure, Mr. Neeraj Singhal, Head of Expansion-Uber, Mr. Rohit Chadda, Co-Founder- Foodpanda and Mr. Gagan Arora of Print Venue as the panelists, on the topic ‘M-commerce v/s E-Commerce’. The discussion revolved around how to go about choosing the right platform to operate for upcoming start ups and current entrepreneurial ventures.
The next session was an interesting Tech-Talk on ‘Growth Hacking’ by Mr. Chirag Kulkarni, Co-Founder, Insightfully, a predictive analytics and cross-platform search company. ‘The person, who reaches from A to B fastest, is a growth hacker. This technique is especially important in the initial stages of an enterprise, where time and money, both are scarce’, Mr. Kulkarni noted. He mentioned that developing a product that people love is the first step towards successful marketing.
Another workshop was about Digital Media Marketing, with Mr. Sreeraman Thiagarajan, VP(Digital), Publicis Beehive, as the guest speaker. Discussing about the flexibility provided and attractive content used for marketing by digital media, he said ‘Binge watching’ and ‘On demand’ content is what audience like today and this has made digital media phenomenal, targeting people of all age. In today’s scenario, only the quality of content affects your customers, concluded Mr. Thiagarajan.
The event also marked the presence of Mr. Kris Gopalakrishnan, Co-Founder, Infosys. Talking about back office computing, personal productivity and knowledge economy, he said that a computer plays a major role in today’s economy. The goal of an entrepreneur should be to study what people are doing and make it faster, cheaper and better, he mentioned. Mr. Gopalakrishnan motivated the future entrepreneurs to be relentlessly resourceful, optimistic and firm decision maker.
The next session was by Mr. Ronnie Screwvala, Founder-UTV. Sharing his personal experiences, he suggested that introspection and looking back in time is a waste of time, instead one should have the ability to dream big and aspire high. He talked about being a good listener in life and being passionate about your business. He concluded his speech mentioning the 8 C’s namely, clarity, conviction, confidence in communication, curiosity, change, collaboration, culture and choices.
NASSCOM Panel Discussion was also held today on the topic ‘Acquiring Enterprise Customers’. The panel featured Mr. Ganapathy Nathan, CTO-Wipro, Pradeep Pillai, Amazon Web Services, Radhesh Kanumury, Country Lead- IBM and Dr. S. Sundararajan, VC-Helion Venture Partners. Panelists kept their views about the kind of perspective needed to successfully reach out to customer and the philosophies that will help stick to the target. Overall, the discussion was enlightening about the various aspects of market identification.
Day One of the event was a huge success with student, faculty and staff from IIM and IIT Indore. Tomorrow’s session apart from panel discussions and workshop will also include the most coveted event of i5 Summit- Venture-I. It is a one of a kind platform where entrepreneurs can raise 15 lakh rupees of investment JUST by selling a minority stake (i.e. 5%) of their start-ups.