SPJIMR’s Beta Start Connects Some Of India’s Young Innovative Startups To The Right Investors

The Beta Start is SPJIMR’s marquee event was dedicated to ideas and possibilities that different startup founders dream of and hope to build one day, someday but this cannot be done without the help of investors, mentors and industry partners who are the representative of their field of expertise.

Vikal Kapoor, CEO- Dapps Inc, while addressing to participants and students made an influential speech to drive the spirits of young entrepreneurs in the audience. 

He said, “Time spent in darkness, yields the patterns we see in the light. Constellations appear where none were before. The value of my comfort with darkness trumped the knowledge from any book on business. The life of an entrepreneur is in the dark  It’s not an option to turn on the lights but make your own light. And in that journey lies your strength and thru that strength, you make yourself. Find your light. And then share it with others who want to go into the light but need to understand the darkness first. India is the #1 market to be an entrepreneur right now. It will be the 3rd largest economy by 2030– slated to grow 7.4 per cent year on year until then. And it will be driven by you — the middle class. You know how to create value for yourself and the world around you better than I do. Don’t follow the US’s consumption model because it may not work. The air, land and sea cannot subsidize the growth as consumption by 1.2B. Don’t follow old or foreign models. Create new ones. But leverage your age, the obvious macro growth happening here and access to emerging technologies from the US like AI, clean energy, blockchain, IoT, 5G, bioinformatics, biotech to create a better, cleaner, safer, transparent, happier, healthier and wiser India”.

SPJIMR has been looking at this with great interest over the years and now hopes to make a difference in the next few years. The Beta Start is targeted towards dreamers and innovative people who believe that they not only have a great idea but also think that their idea has enough fire in it to serve India and maybe even the world. 

Dr Ranjan Banerjee, Dean, SPJIMR discussed the importance of the start-up culture and its influence on young minds and students from across the country. He discussed SPJIMR’s interests in hosting events like the Beta Start 2.0 every year. 

He said, “I think power points have brought in a lot of damage to the entrepreneurial spirit. The passion seems to have gone down with us only presenting our ideas on slides instead of expressing it more confidently. That is why we encourage everyone out there to always keep the thought of the business in mind and forget about slides while discussing their business strategies. If you have become an entrepreneur then you have already shown balance. Success and failure are the names society uses for outcomes, for the entrepreneurs it should only be feedback and nothing more”. 

The Beta Start is a platform built by SPJIMR that will help these startups pitch their dreams, their ideas to investors, mentors and industry experts. This year some of the entries included Credth Chain, J.S Solartech, Gamification Co, NextGen Agritech etc. 

Bhaktvatsal Sharma

BW Reporters The author is a journalist with BW Businessworld