As millennials want a social space, co-working is the way forward, says Circle CEO

Put people together and they start feeding off each other. It’s such a thought that drove Karan Pal Singh to establish ‘The Circle’, a collaborative co-working space which opened its doors last April. “I want to make sure that everybody in this ecosystem shares and grows — that’s what makes us different,” said Singh, founder of Hunch Ventures (the venture-capital outfit behind the facility). Centrally located in Huda City Centre metro station (offering a handy way out of that perennial urban conundrum, last-mile connectivity), ‘The Circle’ is currently home to 19 firms. Last month, it entered into a collaboration with WEPLUS Europe of Helsinki, Finland (a wholly owned subsidiary of WEPLUS Shanghai Technology Company Ltd), to help ease access for Indian startups into Europe (and vice-versa).
The tech economy

We want to attract entrepreneurs in the technology space, create an ecosystem where startups and scaleups — whoever wants to come here — benefit from the ecosystem, where the support system helps you be productive. Where we do find a lot of resonance is when we have done events, whether it is with Facebook, or with Unity Technologies, with whom we launched a gaming & VR centre of excellence here. And, we’ve done events around gaming, we’re looking at getting into e-sports — a lot to do around the entire tech space.

Incubating innovation

We recently signed an agreement with the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) for an accelerator programme in which startups identified by CII in technology will be housed out of here, and provided an ecosystem. Because, one of the biggest needs in India is innovation, and that’s really what we want to bring in. Plus, there are synergies here, like a healthcare company working with Artificial Intelligence guys. They find that, ‘Hey, there are things we can do together’. Now, they didn’t come proactively looking for it, they just happened to meet and figure out they can work together.

Evolution of the workplace

Every office today has become sort of a shared working space. The way I see it growing, I think there’s going to be a divide between real-estate companies and companies that are here to incubate and add value — I think we’re the latter. Having said that, kids don’t necessarily want to have an office, what they want is to have a decent workspace. And they want to be socially active at the same time. Co-working is the way forward, at least for the millennials. If my staff are happy being in such an office space, that makes me get better work out of them.

For an organic growth

Maybe a year or so later, we’ll look at using the same model and possibly look at other centres, either in NCR or outside. We’re starting smaller incubators in Tier-II cities, which will then create a pipeline of opportunity into here. But we’re not looking at this as a real-estate business — we don’t sell square feet. Also, I’m not going to be making hundreds of these. I’d much rather have the right people, so that people get to know who the other guy is.