Headstart joined hands with St. Xavier’s College, Jaipur this month for it first collaboration event “The Launch: X-START”. The event, which was hosted by Headstart’s Jaipur team on 6th Febrary 2016, was a massive launch receiving a whopping 300+ registrations within a week of announcement of the event. Our city lead Paresh Gupta decided to focus the event on entrepreneurship and the startup community.
X-start was an open event for all startup enthusiasts. The event witnessed some mind-boggling speakers from various fields, divided by their occupations, but united by their unwillingness to quit. The speakers consisted of C.A Paresh Gupta (Country Lead at HeadStart Network Foundation, SRCC Topper, MBA from London School of Business and Finance, Ex-Investment banker and TEDx speaker); India’s ace cyclist Chirag Singhal who added a bunch of achievements to his pocket by completing a journey of 13,000 km visiting 7 Countries in 7 months on a cycle; and Gopalakrishnan Chandramouli ( Director of products , goibibo).
To break the tradition of regular patterned formal event, we started with a flashmob dance taking Headstarters and Xavierites to the stage. Further adding to the element of fun, we had a ‘Startup Quiz’ organized by Headstart for the participants. The first round of the quiz was a pen and paper round, aimed at finding the top 15 startup enthusiasts from the crowd. Following this first round was the first talk of the day by Paresh. This was followed by an innovative second round of the quiz that involved questions being fired at the contestants using a whatsapp group and answers being received through it.
After additional talks by the other speakers, the third round of the Startup quiz was a bidding round that involved contestants bidding actual X-Start currency, and trying to increase it by bidding on various audio visual questions. This was followed by a buzzer round that gave us the two best teams that proved to be the most knowledgeable amongst all. The last round was a rapid fire. It was a close call, and the two teams put up a tough competition. The final winners were felicitated with awards by REDD FITNESS BAND for their incredible effort and enthusiasm. All the top 15 participants were gifted with coupons from URBAN DHOBI , a laundry startup.
The X-start event was one of its own kind, building enthusiasm among the students about entrepreneurship and startups, and leaving the college faculty, participants and Headstarters with a sense of satisfaction.
Written by: Vyomini Katta