“Dreams Are Just Starting Points”

13th Startup Sathi Webinar organised by i-Hub dated 20th April, 2020

Speaker: Dr Kamal Sharma, Fellow of IIM-A, Former Vice Chancellor and Co-founder of Indiagro, Farmkart, Gramya

Moderator: Mr Hiranmay Mahanta, Director, GTU Innovation Council

Objective: How to lighten and live the dream of being an entrepreneur in the journey of start-up. 

Topics of discussion:

• There is a cost for thinking about dream and taking action on dream to make that happen.

• So what is the cost for an entrepreneur: Time, energy, stress, how do they take over the failure and how they create a network around 

• The road towards the dream is very long, changing and unexpected

• Secret: The experience of perusing your dream is often more rebounding, more enlightening than the achievement of dream themselves.

• Why 90 to 95 percent start-up fails:

• Able to prove proof of concept

• product and service in hand

• tasted it with the test audience

• have been able to sell few pieces

• now they are looking to scale up: scale up requires an organisation, more efforts, advertising, marketing, production and everything to get the customer 

• Failure: Not getting supporting investment in time, can cause failure to Start-up. An Entrepreneur can never fail, effort can fail. If something is not working out, there must be a plan B. A failed entrepreneur is a much richer and proven resource for business recruitment than a careerist.

• Importance of speed: it will win the competition in market, because everyone has opportunities. So the speed of work with sharpness is very important

• Ideas: dream births idea, bigger the dream stronger idea, Ex. You can create a platform like zoom with more function.

• Ur dream is not complete on the day when entire dream complete, it is incomplete every day, if you can break down your dreams in idea and activities, 

• we will have to step out from our comfort zone. you have to find comfort with yourself in order to let your dreams complete

• The ideas that cannot solves the problem, there is no space for such ideas anywhere.

• Investment:

• if you can explain your idea in a manner to how it can solve the problem and how easy will it be to create this product; you will get investments for sure.

• It is difficult that every idea will reach to a business stage. You will have to ask question to your idea. Technology driven business have maximum invest support.

• Atal Incubation centre promotes ideas of entrepreneurs

• To achieve confidence:  

• you will have to work on your weakness

• We can look for cofounder, partners, associates if needed. All can’t individually do everything. 

• When you go for asking a support to an incubator, they will ask many more questions to your idea. Your idea should be very clear and problem solving.

• Open universities in any state will allow you to graduate in any point of time of your career. So you can practice during your graduation and masters also.

• You will have to learn to live with uncertainty of business, if you want to become an entrepreneur.

• To be a good entrepreneur you don’t need to be very good studies student. Only you can push yourself.

• Conclusion: To light a dream is very important. We should have fire inside us for achieving new everyday with improvement. Dreams don’t have any value without action. That’s how we should bring this ecosystem together.

Zoom Link: https://tinyurl.com/yawjy4dh