iSPIRT to Mentor 200 Indian Startup Founders on Infosys Campus in Mysuru

The programme is being funded by the researchers through their university grants amounting to $57,000.

About 200 founders of Indian startups will get together at the Infosys campus in Mysuru in January 2016 for a three-day retreat and conference. The session will commence with yoga, and end late night with brainstorming on strategies to push their companies to the next level. Design-thinking methodologies will be employed by the startup founders to identify and resolve certain problems such as: What emotions would their company want to invoke from customers? What would make the company obsolete in three years? etc.

On the second day, founders will be asked to come up with possible solutions to the problems. On the last day, those solutions would be critically examined by about 15 mentors including Freshdesk’s Girish Mathrubootham, Pallav Nadhani of FusionCharts and Aneesh Reddy of Capillary Technology.

Adding a comment on the programme, Aneesh Reddy said, “We made a lot of mistakes in growth and scaling than we did as a nimble startup. It is different flywheels that work at different stages. As an ecosystem, it is very important that everyone does not make the same mistakes.”

Similarly, Sharad Sharma, Co-founder of iSPIRT said, “We want them to become category leaders by making them think about future problems today because for a category leader, conversion rates are much higher than the number 2 or 3 players.”

Despite being the fastest growing startup ecosystem in the world, few Indian companies could bag the position of global leaders in all these years. The factors deterring these startups from becoming international icons are- dearth of original ideas, lack of infrastructure and lack of proper mentorship coupled with the fact that the country is a highly un-orchestrated and unpredictable market. While there are accelerators and incubators that nurture early-stage startups, there is little support for rapidly growing firms. Hence, an initiative like this could come up as a propeller for startups with hyper growth rate.

Infosys Technologies Limited