Mentoring India’s Starfleeters with experts in the industry

The Starfleet India Genesis Week was a seven-day-long boot camp where the 13 shortlisted startups went through multiple mentoring sessions from carefully curated experts in the industry to help them perfect their projects. Genesis Week concluded with an internal demo day where seven startups were chosen to move on to the second phase of the accelerator.

Building a startup with a valuable and scalable product is not an easy task and to help the 13 startups, we invited experts from various verticals in the industry with a penchant for working with startups and building successful products

Genesis Week: The Experience

We kickstarted Genesis week with a warm welcome from Luca Sucic and Nikola Stojanov from the AE ventures leadership team and with the startups geared up for a week packed with exercises that would invite them to look at their startups with a fresh perspective.

Genesis Week began with a gripping and energetic session by Ravi Vyas — CEO and Co-founder of NextStep — a lead nurturing platform for businesses. His session covered the Lean Startup Methodology to scale blockchain-based startups.

Srinath V is a veteran in the startup realm with proven expertise in building business strategies and leadership at Nokia, MapmyIndia & Motorola where he led product & marketing teams across multiple countries. On Day 2 of Genesis Week, Srinath conducted a workshop on value proposition design and customer design.

Day 3 of Genesis Week started on a high note as the blockchain community in India secured a huge win with the Supreme court’s ruling in favour of cryptocurrency in India.

In keeping with the spirit, we had two exceptional individuals with expertise in Product Management conduct two workshops on building business models and on product development — Shivhari Shankar -VP Product,SpringRole and Anand Hariharan — Product Management, HackerEarth.

Day 4 of the Genesis week focused on the financial aspects of the startups with engaging workshops on raising investments as a startup by Prashant Swaminathan — CEO, Tandem, and budgeting by Swati Biswas — a veteran in the finance realm with proven expertise as a chartered accountant.

The motive behind the Starfleet India Accelerator program was to empower entrepreneurs solving real-world problems with blockchain technology, and in keeping with this goal, Milen Radkov — Founder and CEO of Hack, and Valentin Alexiev — Product Manager, AE Ventures conducted a full-day workshop on writing smart contracts on Sophia ( Aeternity’s programming language) on Day 5 of Genesis Week.

With the final day of Genesis week nearing, the startups were in the last phase of polishing their projects and all that was left was to pitch them. On Day 6 of the Genesis Week, we invited Ajay Chakravarthy- Partner, Stargate and an exceptional individual with an acumen for executing and creating strategies to scale businesses from the ground up, to conduct a workshop on how to pitch a startup the right way.

Internal Demo Day

On the seventh and final day of Genesis Week, each startup came prepared with the best version of their product and their pitches that were broken down, re-structured and polished during the intensive boot camp period. During the course of the Genesis Week, the founders were urged to revisit the foundations of their startups and thereby identify and rectify any shortcomings.

The 13 startups that were chosen to participate in Genesis Week all showed huge potential which made the decision even more difficult, but nonetheless seven of these startups were selected based on their performance during Genesis Week as well as their pitches on selection day.

The Starfleeters’ journey does not end there! For the concluding chapter of Starfleet India watch these seven unique and innovative startups pitch for funding on the final Demo Day.

Join us on the 8th of May at 5:30 PM and watch these extraordinary startups in the final phase of the Starfleet India program.

RSVP here : https://www.eventbrite.com/e/demo-day-starfleet-india-tickets-102674207318