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Photo credit: Francisco Osorio
Tech students from India’s premier engineering colleges are choosing to stay back in India instead of making a beeline for the US like they did in the past. Many of them want to be entrepreneurs or work with startups, where they can experiment and learn, instead of becoming cogs in the wheel of corporate jobs.
But it can take a few years after college to figure out the startup scene. What is it like to set your own agenda and align it with the needs of a fast-growing startup? How should you go about starting a company of your own? When should you take venture capital?
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Most of the top engineering colleges now have entrepreneurial cells to give students a window to the startup world. But their activities are too few and rarely hands-on.
Blume Ventures, an early stage VC firm based in Mumbai, wants to bridge this gap. It is starting a fellowship program for third year grad students in partnership with Venturesity, a Bangalore-based startup specialized in the hackathon mode of showcasing and finding tech talent.
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Venturesity will hold a hackathon to select 15 students from premier engineering colleges – the IITs, NITs, and BITS – for the first batch of the Blume fellowship program, Venturesity CEO and co-founder Subhendu Panigrahi tells Tech in Asia. The chosen students will be attached to 15 Blume portfolio startups. The three-month program, planned for the coming summer holiday season, will later be expanded, based on the experience of the first batch.
Each one of the students will be working with a different startup, but they will also get together and exchange notes in training meetups with Blume partners and startup mentors. It thus goes way beyond the scope of internships.
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Beyond internship
Short-term interns often find themselves at a loose end in companies because top execs have little incentive to invest their time in mentoring the newbies who will move on after their stint. The difference in the fellowship is that the Blume portfolio startups are committed to supporting the program, Subhendu points out.
Karthik Reddy, managing partner of Blume Ventures. Photo credit: Karthik Reddy.
The startups, too, get to choose from a highly curated set of students from the cream of engineering talent in the country. Research in the US shows a high correlation between a student’s choice of career after graduation and the support they received for their graduate studies. So the startups supporting the fellowship can expect to get a leg-up in attracting top talent, either directly or by word of mouth from the shared experiences of Blume fellows. This is important in an increasingly competitive environment for good tech talent.
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A couple of VCs in Silicon Valley run fellowship programs of a similar kind – FirstMark and KPCB (Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield, and Byers). But it’s a first for India.
BITS Pilani was the first premier engineering college in India to build a structured practice school program, where students are placed in partner corporations twice – a two-month stint during the summer holiday after the third year, followed by a full semester in the last year of the engineering course. This gives an exposure to real world work as well as mentorship from industry practitioners. The difference in the Blume fellowship, of course, is that the “practice school” will be with startups, not corporates or other large organizations.
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This is fitting in the new age of entrepreneurship, and probably more useful too, because students get so little exposure to the world of startups in their college courses.
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