Startup Village is playing a vital role in mentoring and creating young promising entrepreneurs
Words: FWD Media Images: Various sources
Sanjay Vijaykumar was just 22, when realised his entrepreneurial dream by setting up MObME Wireless which raised $500,000. He was also instrumental in coming up with Startup Village, an incubator as a joint partnership with the government through the department of science and technology’s Technopark TBI.
Today, known as Kochi Startup Village Chairman and Advisor to Rajasthan Startup Council, Sanjay Vijaykumar played a key role in setting up India’s first technology business incubator on the PPP Model in Kerala. Startup will has now expanded to include Vishakhapatnam in 2014.
“I think we are about 40 years behind Silicon Valley. The physical infrastructure, funding, cultural attitude towards entrepreneurship are all lagging at least 40 years compared to Silicon Valley. I would say even Bangalore is at least 20 years behind. So Kochi has miles to go to catch up with other startup locations,” said Sanjay Vijaykumar.
Startup Village offers a month-long basic massive open online course to learn the basics of starting up in college, a six-month intensive programme to learn how to come up with an idea, build prototypes and launch product and provides opportunity to spend a week in Silicon Valley.
“I think people who have ability for self-learning should be the ones to go for it. There is no teacher to guide you. If you consider yourself to be adventurous and are looking to gain experience from it then I think you should be an entrepreneur. Even the stuff you learn from failing on an experiment here can be used for the next one. When you do five experiments one might take off. But you will only be able to do the fifth with the experience you gained from four failures,” added Sanjay.
More than 500 startups are functioning smoothly and 25 have bagged external funding. Two batches have gone through the programme in the digital incubator and 33 teams are being incubated. 27 startups have raised funds Rs 37 crore through Startup Village, which now exclusively supports students. “Entrepreneurship is hard, if you can’t take failure and disappointment. Every day will bring a new challenge here as you are operating without an historical data. The ideas you are trying to do here should not be done by anyone before. So you can’t cross check what you are doing is right or not. You are operating in ambiguity. Nobody knows the future of your creation. So if you are adventurous go for it,” added Sanjay.