By the time engineering students pass out of college, they will be ready to start up their business ventures, as they get valuable tips in entrepreneurship at their institute itself

Posted On Sunday, March 14, 2010 at 11:22:47 PM

Instead of becoming job seekers, engineering students in the city are dreaming to become job creators. National Entrepreneurship Network is guiding them to start their own business ventures.

Recently, an Entrepreneurship Awareness Camp, supported and sponsored by Department of Science & Technology (DST) and Entrepreneurship Development Institute of India (EDI), was organised by Maharashtra Centre for Entrepreneurship Development (MCED) at the Pimpri-Chinchwad College of Engineering (PCCOE).

Seventeen first-year engineering students of PCCOE are currently working as eLeaders (entrepreneurship leaders) and creating awareness among students about entrepreneurship. They also organised an eWeek at their college.

Rohan Dighe, a 24-year-old engineer and director of the start-up Social Web Factory, is a role model for students aspiring to be job creators. He had initially started a service-based company. Now, along with providing services, his venture is also developing web products.

Dighe spoke to Mirror  on his business venture.  “I passed out of college in 2007. When I was a student, we hardly thought of entrepreneurship.

But after the recession, the efforts of MCED and EDI are more noticed. Initially, I worked for six months in a company and earned some money to start  a small venture. Within a year, we earned a profit of Rs 15 lakh.

Then I even employed six people to work with me. We got few international clients too. Initially my company was into web applications for community social games on networking sites. Now we are also into product development.”

Diwakar Keskar, Regional Head of MCED said, “We want to promote entrepreneurship among students  through such events. We also arrange industrial visits for students to know the processes in business. We also invite industrialists to talk about their experience and encourage students.”

Prof Shitalkumar Rawandale of PCCOE who is co-ordinating the entrepreneurship programme, said “We have to create more opportunities and a conducive environment for fresh engineers who want to opt for a career in entrepreneurship.

The students who want to become entrepreneurs after working for a couple of years, should consider jobs in small-scale industries where they will get exposure to work  in all areas like finance, marketing, operations, HR etc.”

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Here are the twitter handle of the attendees of tweetup (Pls let me know if i am missing anyone)
@rkj007 @s3630 @vishalgangawane @_god @theravishankar @trakin @sahilk @bosky101 @ravishmody @joesat @rkartha @prateekgupta @shrutijakhete @saurabhshah @krity_deb @vishalgadkari @mcurie @shardulmohite @rrdasgupta @dipaliekbote @sridharo @aseemjakhar @vipulk @nishanth23 @links4u @d7y @dnene @vaibhavkamble @ketankhaimar @irohan @iamsb @sumitshah @purvapar @thecancerus @freegeek @illuminatus @prashant3535 @freespiritjain @abhijeetpatil @paragr @nimmo

Posted On Wednesday, June 10, 2009 at 04:07:00 AM

While the rest of us struggle with the intensely personal effects of the downturn — paycuts, no TVPs, job losses, pissed-off, high-maintenance girlfriends etc — a bunch of city youngsters are blazing a whole new trail.

Fuelled by ambition and independence, these guys, most of them below 25, are running their own companies here in the city, growing quickly and listen to this — hiring people when most companies are looking for an excuse to fire.

Running enterprises from open source technology to social media application development to trekking solutions to editorial content development to web development to delivering veggies to the doorstep, these youngsters are taking the downturn in their stride with style.

Every one of them has a unique story to tell. For instance, Paarth decided it was time to go solo after he had a tiff with the management at the job he got on campus.

Anup Tapadia is Pune’s own child prodigy. At 23, he has a masters degree, is working on a Ph.D and is already running his own startup which develops interactive media products for the global market.

For Tarun Markose and Ashwin Chandran, both 21, setting up shop was just an extension of pulling day-nighters on college projects. Rohan Dighe, 24, founder, CEO, Social Web Factory, began his venture in February 2008.

His company now employs eight people and has already won the “Best Social Application in Asia” award for a competition organised by MySpace for an application they developed for a client.

Other competitors were Korea, Japan and China. Shardul Mohite, founder, Webonise Labs, said his company is a product of the recession.

Saurabh Jain, 25, founder, Thinking Space Technologies Pvt Ltd has had his venture ranked at #84 out of 600+ companies from all over India at the recently concluded TATA NEN Hottest Startups Contest.

“This January, we grew from a three-people company to a six-people company and last month, we hired our first sales in-charge. So currently, we’re a seven-people company and growing strongly.”

Sahil Khan, 20, has just earned his grad degree and already runs a popular online lifestyle magazine (Khan likes to call it ‘lifestyle activism’ with an aim to “understand how people interact with lifestyle.”).

Also on the way is Three November Designs which will be into web, print and corporate identity designs.

Sahadev Yadav, 26, runs a service which home delivers packed fruits and vegetables at no extra cost and below shop prices. Best of all, he got seed funding from his college, Tasmac, where he was studying management.

But while starting up early may not be that uncommon, the bigger story is how these young companies are leveraging the benefits of being small.

This amounts to low burn, leanness, the ability to change directions quickly, value for money services and good old fashioned optimism. Check out what these people had to say about dealing with the recession.

Ashwin Date of Tekdi said, “We’re definitely in the expansion mode and business looks good in spite of the recession”.

He added, “We seem largely unaffected due to the downturn, probably because we are in the Open Source software domain, and I’m expecting more firms to turn their heads towards it.”

Paath Lawate, also of Tekdi, had more to say, “Due to the smaller size of our company, we haven’t been affected hugely, it made us think out-of-the-box and expand our base.”

Sahil Khan’s company was only marginally affected. “The economic downturn only hurt us when we wanted event sponsors, not otherwise.”

Anup Tapadia had more than just good news from his venture. “Our company recently did a campaign for a big shoe brand.

We have seen a double growth each month for the last 5 months!” For him, the recession came as good news. “The recession is working in our favour.

Brands are looking for cost-effective methods to gather eyeballs. Due to the US slowdown, customers there are looking for low cost alternatives to existing products.”

Rohan Dighe’s Social Web Factory can’t get enough talent to work for them.

“We expanded our company from one person to eight, moved to a bigger office and managed to get 15 top Indian clients in the very first year.

The current situation is that we have so much work on our hands and can’t find people with the expertise.”

Saurabh Jain of Thinking Space says, “This was the first time we hired people and it was exciting and  tiring.

The 3 developers we hired — after interviewing 60+ candidates (and testing 150+) have turned out to be true gems and we are lucky to have them.

We took our time, had stringent tests and the team we have now is amazing”. Jain adds, “The recession has worked in our favour —  it became easier for us to find talent.”

But it has had it’s effect, “Some of our payments from international clients are pending because they are suffering , so it has hit us marginally. We just need to be more careful  about our projects from now on.”

Sahadev Yadav’s Vijaya Enterprises (whom he partners with friend Gorbinder Pal Kaur) too is growing. “There is a good response to the service.

Personal touch with customers is the positive aspect of our business. We experimented with 25 direct contacts and within a week we were referred to four new customers on an average. Our customer base has moved to nearly 350.

We started with two and in four months we are seven. We have a unique model and hope to replicate it in other parts of the city and later, the state and the nation.”

Tarun Makrose said his company was looking to hire too, but having trouble finding the right people.

“We are looking for capable people who will take risks and share our passion  for our goals.

A lot of students from technical backgrounds (who were willing to take risks) didn’t even know the basics! But we are still looking, and  we will gladly take the right people.”

Makrose  mentioned the people he credits for showing him the way — Dr Bhama Venkataramani, Head, Symbiosis Centre for Management Studies and Prof Gilbi John. Khan too mentioned his mentor from NEN.

Article on punemirror.in

http://www.punemirror.in/index.aspx?page=article&sectid=62&contentid=2009061020090610040700868bbc4e7a5&sectxslt=

Listen to my interview here…

A very good friend of mine Sahil Khan who runs the online lifestyle magazine also got featured on radio here is his discussion with the RJ.

It was 1:46 seconds of fame, i loved it totally!!!

The S-FM Interview on GenXellence to hear Click Me!

Name: Rohan Suhas Dighe
Age: 24
Education: BE Computer Engineering, 2007
Company Name: Social Web Factory
Founded: 1st Feb 2008

Company Description/What does your company do?
Social web factory is a Pune based company focusing on delivering strategy and solutions for the emerging social application platforms. We provide our clients with a complete end-to-end solution from strategy formation to design, development, monetization and launch. Social Web Factory’s service offerings allows our clients to engage their brand/ideas with an ever increasing audience who are increasing on Facebook, Orkut, MySpace, LinkedIn as means to be in touch with friends, families and colleagues.

Short Description:
We build applications on social platforms like (orkut, facebook, myspace,iphone etc.)

Write the good news about your company. As in how well your company is doing, your better experiences with being a part of business, if you are hiring. If you have just begun, write about how exciting (or unexciting) it is…

We had 2 success stories in the lifetime of the company.
1)We worked for our client company on a project which won the “Best Social Application in Asia” for a competition organized by MySpace. Some of the other competitors were Korea, Japan, China.

2)Another success story is our own product called Housie on Orkut which we managed to bootstrap which has a traction of more than 11k users in less than 5months.

Also, we expanded our company from 1 person (just me working) to 8 people, moved to a bigger office and managed to get more 15 Top Indian clients in the very first year.

We have had all this bad news economically (the downturn here and recession in the west) it was said that startups would suffer the most. Tell us how has your company tackled the downturn. What are you doing differently and how. Do you feel dispirited, do you sometimes regret taking up entreprenuership so early in life. Or is it just another challenge that you have to deal with.

Well, the economic downturn was sudden and since our work depends totally on marketing budgets of client companies it was really difficult at start but the fact that indian people have a tendency to save money in case anything happens in the future and that is what saved us. We have not just managed to run the company but have implemented expansion plans during recession since the labour costs were cut down and we could hire more people.

The only thing we have observed during this phase “the economic slowdown” is sometimes the indian clients get too overprotective and too concerned about their budgets even if they are not necessarily affected by it.

Another strategy that i am using is “cut down all costs by 10% and all corrective measures will happen” – this line was said by Kishore Biyani in one of his interviews. I guess an idea in this stage to be competitive and to “sell your goods at 10% less amount”, if everyone starts to do this we will see the economy automatically correcting.

If you are just starting off as an entrepreneur, explain the thoughtprocess behind starting off during these times.
For a young entrepreneur who is starting now i would say “There is no correct time to start your business, jump in and things should fall in place, do not worry about recession since you are not the only one who is going through it”

Help from the city:

Well, i would like to mention Pune Open Coffee Club here who’s role has been quite influential in connecting startups like ours with experienced/seasoned entrepreneurs and giving us a platform to allow collaboration between companies in Pune.

A brief about me & my startup,

I am Rohan Dighe, Founder & CEO, Social Web Factory. We are a part service-part product based company. My startup is still in a very early stage (5 month old) still operating from a “garage” office. Team size 6.

Please find answers to your questions as below: -

1. Do power cuts affect startups more than larger companies?
Yes, the fact that during the pre-funding stage all financials are generally organic in nature, hence the cash flow is limited. Larger companies have larger budgets and hence can choose to opt for external backup methods thus avoiding power cut issues totally.
Also, during startup many can choose to operate at less margins (to get more business) thereby neglecting costs to buy/rent backup systems.

Also larger companies have the option to be located in technology parks which in cases may guarantee uninterrupted power supplies whose costs can be shared across all the companies in the park all of which is not available to essentially “garage” based start ups. with 5-10 employees.

2. How is your company handling the power cuts?
Initially when the duration of load shedding was small (approx 3hrs) we decided to got for an inverter based backup but then the problem got worse and the load shedding increased to (6+ hours) and that too at prime working times (9:30 to 1:30) & (4:30 to 7:30), so we realized that no backup would work for so long. We evaluated several options.

Diesel Generator – Left out because of diesel shortage, also initial cost too high.
Gas Generator – Cheaper than a diesel one but even gas is a limited resource and we would have ended up using a cylinder every 3 days.

So, finally the only choice left with us was to work night shifts to cope up with the issues of power cut in our area.

It was really difficult convincing employees since during a startup the salary offered is also less as compared to the big companies and it is very difficult to keep them motivated. We had to give each one a salary rise to convince them. Luckily we did not have any female employees but now the power cuts are keeping us away from hiring any.

3. Do you think that if the power cuts were to continue you would consider moving your business to a different city?
Yes, absolutely without a thought, if this problem gets worst we are out of here. A lot of our clients have suggested and are giving us a helping hand by inviting us to operate out of their offices. (This would mean we would have to cut costs but there is not other option)

Moving to a different city (where the problem is less severe) is an option but then as the business grows costs would be considerably higher. Also, the fact that it would again mean hiring for new talent and setting up base where operating costs could be much higher than current scenarios.

4. Do you think that a start-up especially could become less competitive if it does not access to public power?
Yes, this is very true, because power is such an issue that just cannot be coped up with, especially for service-based startup it could mean delayed deliveries thereby loosing very important business very crucial for startup.

Clients could just walk off by saying “we are surprised to hear that you have issues which you cannot solve” – and we have lost clients due to this recently. The client’s side on this is absolutely correct because they could choose from other options who could deliver on time and who don’t have these issues.

Furthermore , loss of electricity is not a problem international clients are accustomed too. so the reason that work could not be completed on time because of a power cut is completely unacceptable and makes us look unprofessional.

5. Would you pay more for unrestricted power access?
I would say No – why should one have to pay for unrestricted access its a basic public service necessity and duty of the government to ensure proper planning is in place to provide electricity, it is like saying would you pay more to have water 24 hours or would you pay more to have all roads paved or would you pay more to have the phone lines working all the time – absolutely not. If the cost of the electricity rises as a whole for everyone its fine but no one should be expected to be charged more for the privilege of getting unrestricted power access. Electricity, Water, Internet is a public necessity its not a privilege.

Thank you!

Firstly, I am honored being given a chance to come here and talk in front of all you energetic and enthusiastic crowd!
The chance my dear friend is all that I ever wanted and it’s sadly the last day where I am able to voice my opinion.

Well, my dear friends I still remember the first day of my college where everyone was so excited, so nervous, everyone’s eyes filled with hope their minds and souls so focused to a single goal, the goal my friends of “being an engineer”.

The word engineer seems so simple and yet so complex, it’s only after years of dedication & struggle have I known the real definition of being an engineer. Let me put forth the definition so that all you people realize that it’s just not an ordinary English word.

“Engineers are the people who use their creativity, technology, and scientific knowledge to solve practical problems.” All of you for a second just think of yourself and remember any past problem that you have solved that has changed the way the things are…. My dear people being a B.E graduate or getting a masters degree is not an achievement anymore and neither is attending 75% of the theory classes and 100% of the practical classes. What is important and what you are forgetting is the reason “why all of you are here?” You are here to gain knowledge and not marks. Marks are a side effect my dear friends, when you have knowledge you get marks.

Is getting 70% marks with no knowledge is what you dream??
Do you even know how it feels like to know 70% of the topic? People spend their entire lives just for a single algorithm and you enjoy so much having got 70% of the marks… ask yourself is it what you desire.
Is the same reason you came here for?? Is it the same reason why you are attending classes?? There is no wrong time to do the right thing. Even the reason that I am talking in front of you is because I feel this is the right time…

The place where we stand my friends is the same place our seniors stood and you probably are at the same place where I was a year ago right on that chair. A lot of things have changed, the people have changed, the buildings have changed, and most importantly the thing that has changed is “THE TIME”… The destiny has called upon us and we all have had our time…now’s it’s time for all you young people to make a mark for yourself.

When we walk out of this college all that will remain are individuals, each one creeping for their own goals, the scenario can be easily compared to The sailing ships wondering in search of a destiny, a destiny so unexplored so unknown yet so real. Some ships having conquered their home waters and ready to get the taste of the foreign lands while some set out on a destination so unknown that only when they enter the waters they know how deep it really is! My friends, the ships are safer when anchored at the shores but they are not meant for that!

For young enlightened minds I just want to say,

Talk to people whom you have never talked to before and actually listen. Let yourself fall in love, break free, and set your sights high. Hold your head up because you have every right to. Tell yourself you’re a great individual and believe in yourself, no on else will believe in you. Create your own life and then go out and live it.

It’s a different world outside…….You will only realize how big the world is when you walk alone in search of a destination so unknown to you. A world where only 1 rule pertains “survival of the fittest”. A world so fluctuating where you get lost in your own thoughts, the only thing that remains with you my dear friends in “HOPE”.
Well, I will leave you all with two words which can give a new meaning to your lives, a new direction to sail, a hint of the unexplored territories, the final words my friends “Stay Hungry! Stay Foolish”!
“Stay Hungry! Stay Foolish!”

Sometimes people come into your life and you know right away they were meant to be there…to serve some sort of purpose, teach you a lesson, or to figure out who you are or who you want to become. You never know who these people may be but you lock eyes with them and you know that very moment that they will affect your life in some profound way.

And sometimes things happen to you at the time that may seem horrible, painful, and unfair, but in reflection of you realize that without overcoming those obstacles you would never would realize your potential, strength, will power, or heart.

Everything happens for a reason. Nothing happens by chance or by means of luck. Illness, love, and lost moments of true greatness and sheer stupidity all acure to test limits of your soul. Without these small tests, life would be like a smoothly paved, straight, flat road to know where safe and comfortable but dull and otterly pointless.

The people you meet affect your life. The successes and the downfalls that you experience can create whom you are and the bad experiences can be learned from. In fact they are probably the most poignant and important ones. If someone hurts you, betrays you, or breaks your heart, forgive them because they have helped you learn about trust and the importance of being cautious to whom you open your heart to.

If someone loves you, love them back unconditionally, not only because they love you, but also because they are teaching you to love and open your heart and eyes to little things. Make everything count. Appreciate everything you possibly can, for you may never experience it again.

Talk to people whom you have never talked to before and actually listen. Let yourself fall in love, break free, and set your sights high. Hold your head up because you have ever right to. Tell yourself you’re a great individual and believe in yourself, no on else will believe in you. Create your own life and then go out and live it.