Diverse interactions are indeed the heart of any large or a small scale startup event. But, they come with a one or two day timespan, often insufficient to get people bonding or to create a significant difference. “What if there’s a lesser crowd, a dream destination and a social impact in the making?” was the first thought that struck the ideators of The Beach House Project, Jaytirth Ahya and Charan. The project recently brought together 14 budding/established entrepreneurs of diverse arenas across the country for a week-long project at a 100 year-old Portuguese bungalow in Goa. This lot included Srijan Kumar from Hyderabad, founder of FairShuffle, a cryptography backed platform which enables online poker to be conducted in a transparent manner (the man did this after solving a 35 year old challenge in cryptography and filing a 51 page patent.)
From the 500-odd applicants, it was no easy task to choose the best. And the bigger challenge here was to go beyond the interactions. “What collective difference would they be making,” was their question as well. They did so, with sufficient background research on the diminishing manpower in the coconut-plucking industry within the union territory and how could there be a solution to it. A few days saw the entrepreneur lot hold discussions with many people of multiple scales in the coconut-plucking ecosystem, also making note of the subsidies that a farmer gets in the process. The entrepreneurs created a fact-file for future reference and research purposes, comprising problems and solutions.
The project brought together entrepreneurs face-to-face with their everyday problems in their industries. “Each of them talked of their immediate problems in the next three months, put them out openly and discussed what they could do to help each other,” the ideators say.
Another idea here was to share ‘hacks’ with each other. One of the members in the group was a fashion stylist, who instantly came up with an idea to look your best in one minute. These were followed by one-of-a-kind interactions with psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakad and a Goa-based Richard who took the global manufacturing industry by surprise with an algorithm predicting the requirement of spare-parts of automobile firms in the coming years.
While the event did boast of a structure, the founders were particular to allow a certain amount of spontaneity to ensure the best dividends of it. “60 per cent predefined and the rest was instinctive. Smaller experiences define the larger picture,” they state.From interactions to beachside fun to social change, the project brought forth a unique amalgamation of several aspects.
