Bhubaneswar, February 1: “Xavion 2016”, the Annual Entrepreneurship Summit organized by the Idea and Initiative cell of XIMB XSEED was held at Xavier Institute of Management here on Sunday.
The event aims at bringing out the talent, passion and challenges in the world of entrepreneurship. The speakers at the event included Co-founder Venture Foundry Jonathan Bill, CEO, Mindfire Solutions Chinmoy Panda and CEO, DogSpot.in Rana Atheya — all of whom are successful entrepreneurs.
Bill spoke about his professional journey and encouraged budding entrepreneurs to first do a job for a while before starting their own venture.
He also advised them to bootstrap for as long as possible and study liquidation preference options. “I believe there are massive opportunities in sectors that we really haven’t touched” he said, referring to entrepreneurship options apart from the regular IT and app software based ones.
He said that the top 4 reasons why 80% businesses fail are, making a product no one really wants, hiring badly, lack of focus and the inability to sell or market.
Panda emphasized on the fact that there are a lot of ventures that really don’t need a lot of capital. “If you do what you are interested in and you are helping people, somewhere, some way or the other things will come back” he said, talking about his personal experience in business.
He encouraged people to talk to others as that will lead to the opening of doors and said that when one is pushed against the wall, he begins to do things which is never expected. He spoke about his fashion start up, which he will soon launch from Bhubaneswar.
Rana Atheya motivated the students to dream and be obsessed about it. He cautioned the audience that “entrepreneurship is very very hard” and is all about holding on.
“Entrepreneurship is not about leaving jobs, it is not about leaving your MBA and starting something which puts you at an outlier side of the world” he stressed. He advised everyone to know what they are good at and what their true passions are, since as a founder, one needs to truly believe in something they are passionate about.
The speeches were followed by an interactive question and answer session with the audience.
