Completing one year at Ideas to Impacts
On 31st March 2017, I complete my first year at Ideas to Impacts (I2I). On 31st January 2017, I also completed 25 years of entrepreneurship. The choices I made and the opportunities that presented themselves have created a nice virtuous spiral – thoroughly enjoyable and fulfilling.
But future is the most exciting tense and I am thrilled to see the opportunities evolving at I2I. As per our tagline, our “small town model” is delivering solutions for tomorrow from non-metros. With our first small town centre in Rajgurunagar, our 3 practices – product engineering, software testing and technical helpdesk, deliver to marquee customers such as Bajaj Auto and Siemens PLM in India, the early adopters of our model; and even to customers in US and Europe, for whom it is the logical next step of Indian offshoring. We have plans of starting our new centres April 2017 onwards, esp. in towns with great colleges. But through partners, we have already started in Satara and Kolhapur. We are planning new practices such as mobile apps and security testing and even piloting a non-IT practice of local language based services. Any entrepreneur who would like to scale his / her business globally but delivering from small towns is most welcome to come on board and replicate what our current practice heads are achieving. Training is at the core of our model and we have started our own unique training programs at two colleges near Rajgurunagar, in Avasari and Kuran.
As a Director at I4C, I am part of the Smart India Hackathon, which is about to make history. On 1st and 2nd April, 10000+ students from 1200+ colleges in India will work for 36 hours non-stop at 26 centres developing solutions for close to 600 problem statement given by 29 Ministries of Government of India! Couldn’t be more aligned to our faith in the youngsters of India. I will be at BVB college as a coordinator for the Hubli nodal center.
Start-ups are the big buzz these days! We are in the process of starting an early stage fund in partnership with Wesley Clover in Canada. This will be the first fund headquartered in Pune and will partner with such excellent college cities such as Hubli and Nagpur. We intend to work very early stage with students and recent graduates. The technology focus will be on B2B-SaaS and B2B2C products on India Stack platform. Really excited about this!
I am part of TiE Pune and our annual TiECON (on 14th and 15th April) – the biggest gathering of entrepreneurs, mentors, investors in Pune. I am running a track titled TiE-Together, focused on collaboration between Pune and other cities. Nagpur and Hubli chapters are partners, but even Aurangabad and Satara who do not have TiE chapters are participating. Such big names as Shashi Chaudhary, Kirit Joshi from Nagpur, Vivek Pawar, Santosh Huralikoppi from Hubli, Prashant Deshpande from Aurangabad and Kailas Bhat from Satara are participating; not to mention start-ups from CIVN and CTIE in these cities. Mike Manson from Wesley Clover is also speaking. Be there!
I must thank all my colleagues, customers and partners for bringing us to this point. But we know this is just a start and lot of work lies ahead. Looking for your continued support in “Distributing the Future Evenly”!