What does it take to empower every aspiring youth with an opportunity to start and grow an enterprise of their own?
I started my entrepreneurial journey as a 21 year old final year student of mechanical engineering in Manipal, in early 2011. It was an education venture geared towards imbibing important skills such as creativity, critical thinking and problem solving among school-going children. In hindsight, the start of that journey was a scary and lonely period for me. There were many questions I had, about the wisdom of starting up. From being inspired everyday myself , to inspiring the team (largely unpaid interns), to building a real product that people would want to pay for, to finding my mentors, investors and more were all things that kept me up at nights. But, I got support from my parents as well as a small seed funding, a highly driven team and mentors from my vast Manipal network and most especially my first paying customers.
I believe I was lucky to have got far more resources in those early days than the average Indian youth -most of them are perhaps not so fortunate, making entrepreneurship a riskier proposition. How do we change this? How do we make this the norm rather than the exception? This is what I have embarked on to find and implement at GAME through a model called AntarPrerana. You will hear more about this in the near future and if you believe your work could significantly contribute to this goal, I would love to hear from you. I am excited, are you?