‘The age is just a number' and ‘talent has no age’, both the saying fits perfectly in the Indian startup ecosystem. India is witnessing many startups that are trying the change the innovational landscape at a very fast pace. To find out, how it is like to build things from scratch, the panel had Gautam Madhavan, Founder & CEO, Mad influence; Girish Ananthanarayanan, COO & Director, Peepul; Yashas Khoday, CTO, FYERS Securities. The panel was moderated by Dr. Miniya Chatterji, CEO, Sustain Labs.
Explaining the importance of failure at initial phases, Yashas expressed, “After getting rejected by one of the largest global fintech companies, I was quite dejected, very upset and that actually helped me quite a bit because it motivated me to sharpen my skill sets more. I took up the course and algorithmic trading which deepen my knowledge of technology and finance even more and Because of that failure actually allowed me to look back. So I really believe that failing is a part of the journey and it's a very important step for us to grow as a person.”
“It’s important to know that it's okay to do mistakes, as long as you're learning from it. And, as long as you have your mind that the right space. Some things will not work but as long as you learn from it and pass on that learning to the rest of your team, it will be advantageous” he added.
Expressing the significance of a team, Gautam explained, “I learned from my past that team building is a very important aspect of any startup. Back in 2015, when I started a crowdfunding platform, it was too early for a country like India. Although, we managed to get some business but the profit was just around 1 per cent. Due to no-profitability, we sold the Idea to get back some part of the investment.”
”Even after Mad Influence, the biggest factor that makes me work even harder was my team. They believed in me, left some good companies and joined us. The only thing that keeps me going is that I have to add value to the team.” he added.
Elucidating the problems in the education system, Girish remarked that “I had a great start with a leading company, but one project made things worse for me and at the last I had to quit the job. So that was a failure and in all its glory it was difficult but there's a lot to learn from it.
“After joining Peepul, We had the challenge to recalibrate the world's largest education system. It's been exponential non-linear growth for people. we wanted to go deeper into the system as it would take decades if not centuries to improve education. There are lakhs of micro innovations that are getting created. So we are trying to codify that and making it available for other nonprofits, other organizations are the governments so that they can learn from the work.” he added.