 So, I'm extremely glad to introduce you to Love Sareen. Love Sareen is our consultant at the Desai City School of Entrepreneurship now at IIT Bombay. We have a School of Entrepreneurship now, a design journey to an entrepreneurship journey. There's a paradigm shift and that we're going to have a discussion today. And we have Avinash Prabhu, he left his job and, you know, has become a full-time entrepreneur now. He's on the ideas program for the oven. Dr. Love Sareen has set up various pre-incubation and mentoring programs of the Desai City School of Entrepreneurship, including IDEAS, YE, and Iincubate. He's an alumnus of IIT Bombay and has PhD from Brown University. After returning to India in 2012, he worked in reliance industries, innovation management, and entrepreneurial roles in emerging technologies. Before joining our Desai City School of Entrepreneurship in 2018, Love Liberages has rich experience in techno-commercial development and organization building for structuring the growth of these startups in the pre-incubation programs and mentoring aspiring entrepreneurs. I'm very fortunate that Love Sareen would come at very short notice and also help me in all my design management and product planning and marketing courses. And it has been really wonderful to work with Love Sareen on this paradigm shift business, which I'm talking about today. So all of you, Love Sareen, to start the session today. So thank you for the very nice introduction and for having me here to give this opportunity to me. Alright, so IDEAS program for entrepreneurship is part of the legacy project of Class of 1990. So we have a tradition at IIT Bombay here that every 25th year the class reunion happens and then in that year, the 25th year reunion, folks will contribute something for some different causes at the institute. And one of the causes that Class of 1990 picked up was to promote and nurture entrepreneurship through a program which comes in between the spaces where the gaps were existing at that time. So it was envisioned to fill those gaps and we have been in operation for three years now. The intent was to first give some structure to the program to provide the support to early stage entrepreneurs and rope in mentors from our alumni pool from the experienced entrepreneurs in the ecosystem from that pool to be able to give relevant advice to entrepreneurs who are moving through or navigating the early stage journey where you will find a lot of information which is out there. But when which information makes sense, that becomes very important and that is where experienced mentors who have gone through the journey, they can advise really well. They can help you make sense of what you are seeing or what you need to do. And to also bring in the network effect of having such a great alumni network that we have, just like Stanford has their program. So kind of following those kinds of models and also peer learning amongst the cohort members and alumni founders as people go on and launch their first startup, second startup. So as the peer network, peer cohorts that develop that come together, there's a lot of learning that can happen because many of them are going through similar challenges at the same time and a lot can be learned even if the ideas are different, even if the companies are different. But there will be many similar issues or concepts that they will be working on. So it helps a lot if you have a strong peer community and a way to engage them. So we wanted to create a platform where anyone who has that fire, that idea in their mind, they can get started. They will have something to help them at the stage where they are. And very importantly, we wanted to focus on the outside in thinking. We wanted, as I was talking about the inventor syndrome, being a technologist, being a designer, we all fall in love with our solution that we have invented and we invented it because we were passionate about the idea or we are passionate about the tech that, okay, I am interested in blockchain, so I'll go and do something really cool there. Maybe it's really innovative, it's really pushing the boundaries, but is the market ready? Is there someone out there who may have any problem where we can actually apply it and someone would be willing to pay? That is a major gap. So we wanted to bring in this outside in thinking where we will actually first focus on the customers. We will first focus on where there is a need where people actually want to solve a problem and then come back and develop the solution that will suit that need, that market. And actively, we want our content, our timely inputs to give a very directional guidance to these startups so that they are not confused where they are with multiple resources, multiple things available out there. They know exactly what is their next step, what is it that they need to do in the next six months, what it may become in a year. We wanted to bring in that focus so the programs are structured in such a way that that directional support will be given at the stage the team is, at the stage the entrepreneurs. So as I said, any IITN with fires in the belly is our target audience. You know, when we started our own journey, we did our own customer discovery, which you may have heard about previous sessions, and we figured out step by step what is working, what we need to do, how we can improve and all that. So at the very start, we came up with very unstructured programs. I say unstructured because they are like, you know, just walk in a startup clinic, discuss for 30 minutes, what you are doing. There is no application as such anyone can walk in, right? There is no structure to it that, okay, this is the only thing that we will follow or it's not like, you know, follow on or follow up later on. It's just that 30 minute. You come in, whatever is in your mind, we will discuss. Most of the teams that used to walk in in the first year when I was here and when we actually started this startup clinic, they used to come in, here is our team, here is our idea. Now we need investors. And 99 out of 100 were just sent back and they didn't make it directly to investors. Maybe they went through other programs and other work. Some of them didn't even complete the work or what was suggested to them. So they just dropped off immediately. But some actually came back, some participated in other programs and then they went through. There was one case where I actually thought that yes, they are ready and we can actually take them to investors. And then they did actually land some initial small funding from the alumni base. So we started with these kinds of very unstructured programs, mentor connecting with them, connecting with other alumni who may be able to help them in some specific areas, very functional advice or very domain specific advice insights that they can provide or mentor hours where we host alumni who will come and mentor for a day or some hours in a week and people will book appointments and interact with them, etc. Then obviously there is a lot of gap even at the idea generation stage. Many people who want to do something but they don't know what and how do they come up with idea. So we have those kinds of workshops, we have team mixers and all and then we have boot camps where okay, you may have an idea, but what next? Where do you start? What do you do? So that's where we cover all the lean startup concepts that again you guys may have seen in the previous sessions, the customer discovery and all that. Now, the knowledge is there. You can get started, but it's not that easy to implement that knowledge and we realize that that is going to be a big challenge for many teams and it becomes really important when there is a team. If it's just one person, then the first challenge is finding a team member. From my experience, I can tell you if you will ask me where you should start, I would say start with the team. Don't even start with the idea. Start with the team. If you have team, you will come up with good ideas. You will discard bad ideas. You will do everything together, but if you come up with an idea first, fitting a team member on that idea is a major, major challenge. I have seen many entrepreneurs go very far. They spend days, nights, they involve their families. They take so much pain, but still the funders, the investors will walk away because they don't see a strong team because they couldn't get that another team member to join them. So that becomes a very key area that you should focus on. If you can first find your team, you will come up with ideas. There is, you know, ideas are dime a dozen. It's mostly the execution that counts. So having the team is the most important part. Then we take you into level one program where we will ask and look at your idea from all different perspectives to implement all that you know about customer discovery and lean startups. And week on week, we will do very deeper handholding, very intense sessions of one-on-one feedback on, you know, going into the gruesome details of what did you ask this question? You know, how did they respond? What did you ask after it? Because it's so easy to be biased about your own idea and cherry-picking the data that may make you feel good initially, but will limit your growth later on. So doing it right is the focus in these three months and helping the teams learn that part, that okay, how to actually do it right, because then they can keep applying those skills to the same idea or to the next idea. The goal here is not to make this idea successful. The goal is to make the team successful in implementing how to do customer discovery, how to figure out whether this idea can be a big idea, whether there is a real market, whether there is a persona, how big this market is, the market sizing, and then you may either drop it or you may refine it or add more details or you may even pivot, which is all acceptable. Everything is a great success if it is based on data, if it is based on evidence. So you may have heard about the term evidence. So we are really looking for evidence for each and everything that you make a decision on. And then we move to level two, where now you have some idea that okay, these are the customers, this is what they need, and we have evidence, at least the basic level, the first level evidence. Now we start to actually build and test. We do the MVP. So although this is the intentional flow, many times it happens that many teams may already have the product that they have built, but they don't have the details about the market, the way they would need to grow it. So they may have to go to level one, but then their journey after it can be faster. They have actually developed the right product. And then we actually get them to present to investors and incubators. So so far, we have had six cohort currently is running six cohorts in level one and four cohorts in level two, fourth is currently running for that one. From the first two years itself, we have had 11 startups that have launched, three got selected into Y Combinator, two got incubated at IIT Kanpur Incubator. And you may have heard or seen or you can go and look up these six startups who came from the first cohort of level two program. The other three are still to conclude, they are still ongoing because of COVID, the second and third cohort took a little bit more time and fourth is has just started this summer. That's very nice.