Priyank Verma

E-Summit is the flagship entrepreneurship event organized by IITB. The two-day annual summit promises to be an amazing meeting ground for industry experts, business leaders, investors and entrepreneurs and of course, students, many of whom are aspiring entrepreneurs.

I attended this event in its 2017 edition and had mixed feelings on how the whole thing turned out holistically. There were some good parts and some not so good parts, but as a whole the event was worth attending.

There were many small talks spread on a 2 day course. Obviously, you can not attend all the talks, you have to select few of them according to the schedule and feasibility.

I personally realized that choose a topic that you are not familiar with as talks are pretty basic and don’t go to great depths.

Following are the talks and keynotes that I attended.

Day 1 :

1. Keynote by Raj Jaswa :

First event of day 1 was keynote by Raj Jaswa. Most prominent thing he said in a nutshell was areas in which one should look for business opportunities.

Some being,

1. Cloning and localisation
2. Long tail business
3. Adapt an existing business model to a new sector.

2. Digital Marketing :

This talk was presented by founder of E2M, a digital media company. I found this talk too basic aa I had already taken a course online on digital marketing.

Some topics discussed were,

1. SEO
2. PPC
3. Social Media
4. Emergence of mobile platforms

3. Brembo Company Presentation :

Brembo is a breaking technology company and a dominant force in the market. A manager from Italy presented the company’s operations in India.

He quoted a quote from the founder of Brembo that I found very captivating,

“Anyone can do simple things, but only few can handle difficult ones. We have to do difficult ones”.

4. Chat with Rahul Yadav :

Next session I attended was a Q&A session with Rahul Yadav, the founder of Housing.com.

It was nice to see him talking about his mistakes and telling people not to repeat them.

5. Wealth creating through financial planning :

This was conducted by Reliance Mutual Funds. In a nutshell it was all about SIP.

6. Keynote by Rajat Sharma :

The day ended by keynote by Rajat Sharma. He discussed his journey and his humility and wisdom was notable and inspiring.

7. Stand up comedy by Vipul Goyal and Sapan Verma

Nice performances by both of them always.

Day 2 :

Day 2 of the event was more power packed. I found the speakers and the talk topics, both to of higher level.

1. Building a brand that indians love :

This was presented by an ISB professor. Basic point conveyed in the talk was that business customers have two currencies that they spend : time and money.

Thus, trigger point of all the businesses must be how customers are spending these two.

2. Protecting your brand : Trademarks, Copyrights and Patents :

I had no prior knowledge of patents and thus decided to attend this talk.

It nicely packed info on what, when and where to file the patent.

3. Startup Scaling : Overcoming key operational challenges :

Pressing issue of this talk was the resource visibility issues that startups face.

The speaker was from a company called OutThink LLC. They advocated that such challenges can be overcame by businesses collaborating and providing services to each other instead of doing things completely by themselves in isolation.

Here is where OutThink helps its customers by what they call at SRM : Strategic Resource Mapping.

4. Most Common Startup Budget Mistakes:

This talk was presented by a startup investor and mentor from Ireland.

The talk revolved around funding sources, funding advice and bootstrapping.

5. Final Keynote : By Bibop Gresta : COO Hyperlopp TT

The most exciting event of the summit was final keynote by COO of Hyperloop. He presented us with the overview of Hyperloop and how it is planning to carry its operations in India.

It was notable how fit and fun he was at the age of 40. Something that we can all learn from.

Conclusion :

To conclude, the summit was a thumbs up. It was not entirely the standard that I was expecting it to be, but still was Ok.

It was great if you have networking as the primary goal in your mind, not so good if you wanted hand on knowledge on topics.

Finally, it was nice to see other aspiring and existing entrepreneur facing the problems that you are also facing. Makes you feel that you are not alone and if that can pull it off, you can too.