There’s something incredibly addictive about a blank slate, a brand new project, a platform that doesn’t exist and the challenge to bring it to life.
K. Srivatsava, Ch. V. Vikas, G. Siva Kumar and K. Jai Sekhar, students of V. R. Siddhartha Engineering College (IT stream) are upbeat and are raring to go. All set to put their career in high gear, the four boys represent a group that comprises core team of first-time founders of start-ups as part of a joint ‘Start-up Village’ initiative of the Government of Andhra Pradesh and the Kerala Government to promote entrepreneurship among students. When Start-up Village (SV.CO) invited applications to form a core group, it received 1,000 applications from Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat and Kerala. In the first round, a common engineering task was given to the applicants to design a real-time web application that extracts and compares product results.
“Since almost everybody else was using PHP.net, a popular general-purpose scripting language suited to web development, we opted for a different route by made use of Ruby on Rails. That was one of our USPs,” says Srivatsava, the team leader.
In round two, the 1,000 applicants were shortlisted to 30 based on the hacking and hustling skills of the teams and were called for an interview in Visakhapatnam. Further filtering yielded the final 10 teams selected for the Start-up Village programme. “The selections were made on the basis of engineering core knowledge, management skills and team playing,” say the boys.
The boys have been asked to sign an educational agreement to undergo a six- month training programme to develop professional skills. They have also been told to form a partnership firm and establish a legally-registered company which will be entitled for several perks and concessions by the State Government.
“We want to kindle innovation by involving students in development of public utility apps. We hope that the selected team’s ideas result in successful start-ups,” says the college Principal A.V. Ratna Prasad.
The boys are excited about being part of the Start-up Village drive that aims to bring the tools and resources to create great start-ups to every founder across the country. The idea behind the Start-up drive is that amazing technology startups should not be restricted to big cities and that everybody should be able to build products, even while one is still in college.
SV.CO is best known for its inclusive public-private partnership incubator based in Kochi that has won numerous awards and created stellar start-ups. The incubator was started in April 2012 as a joint partnership with the Government of India through the Department of Science and Technology, Technopark TBI and its host institute, MobME Wireless.
Building on its knowledge acquired from mentoring start-ups, it has now launched an online-first learning platform for first-time founders. SV.CO is the first learning platform for entrepreneurship that verifies results and rewards founders with a degree by partnering with recognised universities.
We want to kindle innovation by involving students in development of public utility apps
A.V. Ratna Prasad
College principal
