ENTREPRENEURSHIP SUMMIT 2015

Today I made my way to the Entrepreneurship Summit 2015 organized by the Social Entrepreneurship and Consulting Cell at Symbiosis Institute of Business Management, Pune.

This is the annual event where SECC invites eminent entrepreneurs to chat with the students and inspire them. There are panel discussions, entrepreneur stories and SymbiHaat - the food festival organized by SIBM students.

The first speaker today was Mr. Paavan Nanda, who is the co-founder of ZOSTELS and ZO-ROOMS.  ZOSTELs are hostels for back-packers that offer affordable and comfortable hostel rooms. They are located on most visited backpacker routes such as Delhi-Jaipur-Jodhpur and Goa. They started off with the idea during their college days at IIM Calcutta and built the first ZOSTEL in Jaipur. They secured funding by participating in start-up competitions and ended up winning all the 14 competitions they participated in, which included the one at India-Wharton Business Summit. From hostels, they moved into budget hotels that are standardized in terms of the amenities and services they provide. ZO-ROOMS expanded rapidly and they operate primarily by converting existing not so well managed hotels into standardized format hotels. What I found inspiring about the talk is that they decided to build a business model around backpacking and signed up with MTV to help them create brand awareness for their hostels. 

The second speaker today was Mr. Milind Sharma, who is an alumnus of Symbiosis School of Economics. He is the co-founder of NuovoEx and PepperTap. Both these start ups operate in the hyper local business format providing logistics services in the business to customer link. NuovoEx provides reverse logistics for the goods the people return when they are bought online from stores such as Flipkart and Snapdeal. PepperTap provides home delivery of groceries from the local store to your home. Mr. Sharma started off with NuovoEx in Gurgaon, working off from a small store in a local market. NuovoEx saw rapid growth as the online retail space saw exponential growth over the last 5-6 years. PepperTap is a more recent venture and is currently operating in 14 hyper local market places across India. They sign up with retail stores and hyper markets and serve 4-5 km area around these stores. It is a promising business model as food retail through hyper markets has grown very rapidly with the development of stores such as MORE and Reliance Fresh. 

The Entrepreneurship Summit 2014 saw founders of Pinstorm (Mahesh Murthy), Goli Vada Pao (Venky Aiyer), Rolocule Games (Rohit Gupta), Doolally (Suketu Talekar), The Pint Room (Pradeep Gidwani) and CarIQ. These were inspiring talks and revealed first hand the life of an entrepreneur. Loved listening to them.