In the summer of 2011, a bunch of Chennai-based engineering students came up with a quirky idea for a web service. They planned to scan the ‘class notes' of all department toppers and put them up online so that they would become a common resource.
“Most students start studying only a day before the exam,” says V. Maheshwar, a third-year Electronics Engineering student and co-founder of ‘Benchmate.' “We wasted a lot of time just trying to find the right notes.”
The idea might sound wicked, but initially that is all they had — an idea. The turning point came when Maheswar attended a weekend hackathon organised by The Startup Centre, the mother of all start-ups, literally.
The Startup Centre has been active in Chennai for the past nine months, in the business of making other tech-based businesses work. Its chief executive officer Vijay Anand started his first company when he was 16.
“We were newbies,” recollects Maheshwar. “We knew nothing about how to set up a business. We met a lot of interesting people through The Startup Centre and drowned them with tech and management queries.”
The larger narrative behind all this is the curious case of post-liberalised India. Entrepreneurship is no longer something you have to inherit. In Chennai, for example, nearly 600 start-ups are coming up every quarter, according to the Registrar of Companies. And, most of them are working out of their homes.
But India is no Silicon Valley. There are a lot of things that fledgling businesses still don't understand. This is where people like Mr. Anand come in. “We have been organising an open coffee club meet for aspiring technology entrepreneurs for the past three years. It happens on the first Sunday of every month. Pretty much anyone is welcome to attend, and it is a good place for people to start thinking about entrepreneurship.”
‘How to pay my bills' is a genuine question that comes up often, he says. The answers are mostly sincere because they come from peers who have been through similar troubles. “People romanticise the image of the starving artist. But it is no fun at all when you are the artist,” Mr. Anand adds.
Every three months the Centre organises a weekend hackathon, ‘In 50 hours,' wherein technologists and designers form teams and build a product — in just 50 hours. “Most of the time, budding entrepreneurs need validation. There has to be at least a reasonably good prototype before you can go home and declare ‘Honey, I'm quitting my job',” Mr. Anand says. The Centre also offers a paid, six-month resident programme and an accelerated programme.
Mr. Anand says the future of innovation and entrepreneurship is bright as the cost of the learning process has come down. Cloud computing and open source technologies have empowered start-up ventures to a great extent. The Centre plans to expand to four other cities in the next two years.
“Some pretty interesting stuff is already happening,” he says, citing the example of ‘Interview Street.' “They struggled so much. At one point, they had just Rs. 500 left in the bank. And today, this scrawny little start-up team from Chennai powers the hiring process of giants such as Facebook and Zynga. They are now making $4 million a year. It is phenomenal. In the end, to use Steve Jobs' words, entrepreneurship is all about following your dream and making a dent in the universe.”
