Educating startups every second Saturday of the month, Headstart India held its flagship event Startup Saturday for the month of October at CIIE Ahmedabad. Choosing, “Opportunities in education” as its theme for this october, a crowd involving students, budding entrepreneurs and startup enthusiasts was seen attending it in which Shri Sunil Handa of Eklavya Education society and a professor at IIM A, Deep Lodhari from mytestbuddy and Harish Iyer from Flinnt talked about how the education sector of India needed disruption and what opportunities are available to anyone interested in building a business in this sector.
Sunil Handa Sir talked on length about his experience and dished out stories from his personal life regarding the times he faced when he along with his brother started their own pharmaceutical company. He talked about how he came up with the idea of starting his own school along with 3 of his past students from IIM Ahmedabad, who left their high profile jobs in multinationals to start one of India’s most unique schools Eklavya Education Foundation. Enlightening the audience on the kind of ideas that his students have come up with and the way they have executed them, Handa sir motivated the audience to start something of their own in the education sector that has remained stagnant for so long.
Next, we had Deep Lodhari of mytestbuddy.com telling us of his journey from being an MBBS student to starting a website that dealt with various examinations and courses across the country. As a student preparing for medical post graduate entrance examinations, Deep realised lack of reliable preparatory material available out there. This led him to create a portal that would help students in preparing for their examinations and that the material would be crowd ranked by the community itself.
After Deep, Harish Iyer from Flinnt spoke about his experiences starting up. Starting in June of this year, Harish spoke about how his product can empower the teachers and students community and provide a way in which sharing of information between the two could happen effortlessly. His main idea was to disrupt the dedicated school hours and why should a teacher wait till the next lecture to share something they found interesting(for e.g. a video or an article). Flinnt has built a mobile based product which helps teachers share information with their students in real time.
Having an audience of more than 150, the event was quite a success as the visitors left motivated and confident about coming up with ideas to start something of their own.
Write up by
Harshal Gupta, Volunteer at SSAHM
