iSPIRT to groom 200 founders of Indian startups at Infosys’ Mysuru campus

BENGALURU: Few Indian startups can claim to be global category leaders. There's an Uber for Ola, an Amazon for Flipkart and a Xiaomi for Micromax.

To change this, software product think tank iSPIRT has come up with a one-of-a-kind course. Researchers from Stanford University and Duke University will take founders of hypergrowth companies through a programme, helping them to plan ahead and implement the learnings in their organisations.

"We want them to become category leaders by making them think about future problems today," said Sharad Sharma, cofounder of iSpirt. "Because for a category leader, conversion rates are much higher than the number 2 or 3 players."

About 200 founders of Indian startups will congregate at the Infosys campus in Mysuru in January for a three-day retreat and conference, starting their day with yoga and ending it late night with brainstorming on strategies to jumpstart their companies to the next level.

The researchers are funding this pr ogramme through grants amounting to $57,000 (about Rs 37 lakh) endowed by their universities.

While there are accelerators and incubatorsthat nurture early-stage startups, there is little support for rapidly growing firms. Microsoft Ventures most recently shifted its strategy to cater to late-stage firms.

"Anyone who sees the technology sector sees that the best pool of technical talent comes from India. But they are all working for American companies," said Sharique Hasan, associate professor of organisational behaviour at Stanford University. The goal of this programme, Hasan said, was to nail concepts of management, something that he found lacking in developing countries. So, for over a year, Hasan along with Rem Koning, a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, and Aaron Chatterji, associate professor at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, designed a curriculum for the same.

Through design-thinking methodologies, the startup founders will be taught to focus on broad as well as specific problems such as: What emotions would your company want to invoke from customers? What would make the company obsolete in three years? Who will make you obsolete?

On day two, the entrepreneurs will be asked to come up with specific solutions to the problems, after prioritising them. On the third day, the solutions will be vetted by about 15 mentors including Freshdesk's Girish Mathrubootham, Pallav Nadhani of FusionCharts and Aneesh Reddy of Capillary Technologies.

"We made a lot of mistakes in growth and scaling than we did as a nimble startup. It is different flywheels that work at different stages," said CEO Reddy of retail data analytics firm Capillary Technologies. "As an ecosystem, it is very important that everyone does not make the same mistakes."

Blogvault, a WordPress backup service, Albumizer, an album designer, Uninstall.io, an app analytics provider, and Zenatix, an energy hardware company, are a few firms that have been selected to enter the programme. The founders will also be taught to replicate and implement these learnings in their organisations.

Source: iSPIRT to groom 200 founders of Indian startups at Infosys' Mysuru campus