Conquest Top 50 Mentoring Sessions
At Conquest, we empathize with the challenges of building your own company. Building great companies requires a lot of counter-intuitive ideas. And rather than spending your time improving your instincts, having experienced mentors can accelerate your growth, especially in the beginning.
To best help our startups, we provide personalized one-on-one mentoring to each startup that made it to Top 50 in various verticals like Fundraising, Customer Acquisition, Scaling Up and Operations, Product Management and Tech (UI, UX and Development), and Legal.
The startups can choose to attend the session in either Delhi, Mumbai or Bangalore. The sessions were held on 20th May in all these three cities.
The Mumbai Mentoring Session was held in the Blume Ventures Office. The Bangalore Mentoring Session was held in BHIVE Workspace and the Delhi Session was held in Investopad Office, Gurgaon.
The Sessions were organised in the following manner:
- Morning Session: 10 AM to 1 PM
- Networking Lunch: 1 PM to 2 PM
- Afternoon Session: 2 PM to 5 PM
The startups started coming at around 9 AM. After briefing the startups about the mentoring session, requirements for the Summer Program and a few other formalities, we kicked off with the morning session at 10 AM. Some of the mentors who graced us with their presence were:
- Chirag Jain, Senior Operations Manager, Uber
- Ainara Kaur, Ex Head: Marketing Communication, Myntra
- Ashim Jolly, Ex COO, Haptik
- Harish Rawat, CMO, Zoomcar
- Ashish Khushu, CTO, L&T
All startups got the opportunity to interact with about 5–6 mentors, with startups gaining insights from mentors across various fields. The mentors also gave detailed feedback about the startups, with each one-on-one session going on for more than 30 mins.
We then had the Networking Lunch, with food packets from our food partner InnerChef. The lunch session was accompanied by an extensive discussion about the Conquest 2018 model, and how to optimize it to improve the startup experience. We got some great insights from mentors as well as startups about sessions that will connect early stage startups to the right personnel and this has definitely helped us in designing the Summer Program in a more effective manner.
We then moved onto the afternoon session, with more mentors joining us. We even had video conferencing to set up meetings between startups and mentors across the three geographies, and set up a few video calls for startups who could not attend the session physically.
We finally concluded the session at 5 PM, with highly encouraging testimonies from the mentors as well as the startups. Extensive feedback from the mentors will now be used for shortlisting the top 10, an extremely challenging task given the quality of the startups.
The Top 10 Finalist startups will be invited to the Conquest Summer Mentoring Program. They will be provided with free space to live and work along with weekly mentoring lunches with successful founders and investment workshops with leading investment firms.
The program will end with the Grand Finale which is scheduled to be held on June 30th at Sheraton Grand, Bangalore where the startups get to pitch themselves before India’s top investment firms and largest media houses.
