Borrowed from SAMPADA old editions – for the 10th Anniversary Special Issue – Special Editorials section. This one is by Ravikiran Annaswamy
You We See Entrepreneurs
“Startup”, is the buzz word in the industry and more so impact it has on our daily lives and the numerous instances of wealth creation of unseen proportions. Much like the software and IT boom in the last century, many people find ‘Entrepreneurship’ a very attractive proposition to try their ideas and create wealth. Startups have captured the attention of every young engineer and many aspire to be one.
How do the budding engineers of UVCE look at entrepreneurship? Do they take any steps during their student life to explore? Have many UVCE Alumnus been successful in making a dent on the universe? How can we re-engineer the UVCE DNA to get successful entrepreneurs? I have been pondering on these and working on some of these myself.
It’s very interesting the team SAMPADA took up this theme to being visibility to all UVCE Entrepreneurs and showcase their successes. One of the main intents being to inspire several students and alumni to take this path. Please take your time to read the articles on the successful UVCE’ans and learn from their journey and make your plans.
Personally, I have been involved with several activities over the years at UVCE to trigger entrepreneurship. We started a student E-Cell which brought a lot of speakers and workshops to create a basic awareness, skills, tools and the network to foster ideas and innovations. Though there was an early success, I noticed that students preferred job safety with a secured placement offer over their innovations. Though this is not unique to UVCE, the mindset was more fixed. One of the main learning here was that most preferred the safety net than take the riskier path and the fear of failure loomed larger.
One of my advices to many students is to join Startups as interns to learn the skills and have an appreciation of the associated risks. Many students hesitate and look again towards the large corporations and the now attractive stipends. I still strongly urge all to be open and take this limited chance to get your mind open for ideas. I also see this challenge with alumnus working in large companies too, the same safety net denies our UVCE’ans a chance to build a Unicorn right in India.
As we move forward, the excellent work done by Vision UVCE and team Sampada will create a good repository of all success from alumnus and in turn provide a network of successful entrepreneurs to all UVCE’eans. I urge all readers to make the best of this information and network to get your confidence. I completely echo what Suri from Ideaspring Capital said, “ UVCE is the best place to learn and execute innovations , we learn to achieve so much with so little with best use of available resources”
Lets have a dream, of at least one UVCE Unicorn in the next decade.
Ravikiran Annaswamy is currently the CEO and Founder of Innohabit Technologies as well as the CEO of Numocity Technologies. He has over 23 years of business experience as Entrepreneur and as Business Leader at Nokia Siemens Networks and Siemens AG.
Team Sampada would like to sincerely thank Ravikiran Sir for accepting our request and being the Guest Editor for this edition on “Entrepreneurship”.
— Ravikiran Annaswamy, Batch of 1995 ECE (Sampada-112)
