3 reasons why a campus startup experience is helping me perform way better at my job
— Varghese George , SV.CO Leadership
Today, as I sit across my table compiling a complex piece of code just before a product feature launch at Clustr, my team and me have come a long way since we joined engineering. I faintly remember how lost we all were until we got hit with the campus startup bug.
2 years back: Recap to final year of engineering
We started off towards the final year of our B.Tech. At the beginning when we started off, we did not have a clear idea about what we wanted to achieve, we just knew we wanted to do something on our own. I’ve always loved the convenience of cards or other digital payment systems, but very few of the kinds of restaurants (mostly small roadside shops, I was on a college student budget after all :D) I used to frequent accepted card payments.
This led to building Z-pay. We joined SV.CO to build our first startup. After one year my team and me got acquihired by Tally(One of India’s first Product startup) in bangalore.
Either you Win or Learn. Our failure was the biggest learning we could have in college
Time to pull the cord
The reason we had to finally wind down the startup was not technical. Because of the strict regulations and compliance laws in the fintech space, we found out after multiple iterations of our business model that we unfortunately would not be able to create a product with enough of a differentiating factor as we’d like.
Reflecting on failure helps you go a long way in life
We realised that we needed some more exposure on aspects such as conceptualising a product, market validation, engineering at scale etc. We landed in our first Job at Tally but we were certainly not freshers, we had one year of startup experience. We joined Tally together as a team.
Tally has a big data analytics startup called Clustr incubated within it. I work with the data science team at Clustr, trying to bring the power of big data analytics to the SME space!
The THREE REASONS you have been waiting for
- Deadlines in colleges vs Deadlines in real life is very different : When a project deadline in college comes, you often try to get away with hacks that are designed just to fool the professors (well at least that’s what I used to do ;) ) but when you’re dealing with a real product that is just not possible. You know that if you want to ship out a product to a customer you need so much stuff, and there is no way around it. This teaches you to learn to manage priorities and actually get shit done, no matter what it takes. This is an incredibly valuable trait to learn while in college.
- Exposure: When you’re in college the stuff you learn are mostly from a theoretical perspective, often having little to no connection to what is currently happening in the industry. When you do your own startup, you become familiar with what is actually happening in the industry right now (coz you kinda have to). This means you’re able to start having meaningful discussions and actually start understanding the company from day 1. I’ve clearly noticed this difference in people who come from a regular college background vs startup background.
- Customer focus and vision: In college the aim of projects or assignments is pretty much just to prove your knowledge or skill. To translate your skills into a real product requires a different kind of mind set. You need to be able to start thinking with the end user in mind and understand where your work fits in into the larger vision of the company. These kind of thought processes come naturally to someone who has done this before. This allows you to easily prioritise work and maximise the impact you make.
I believe my senior management folks at Tally are happy, and not just with my work but with the work of everyone who joined here from SV.CO. This is clearly indicated by the eagerness with which they wanted to hire from SV.CO this year too!
Best incoming employee award. eeee :D
Two of my team mates were awarded a team excellence award and I was given an award for the best incoming employee. These were really proud moments for all of us and I truly believe that it is our startup experience that allowed us to do this.
Usually skills and information you learn in colleges are far removed from what is actually required at the work place. The mindset also is significantly different. This means that for a typical graduate fresh out of college, it takes some amount of getting used to, to be able to perform at capacity.
By doing a startup while in college, I feel that you pick up a lot of these skills and mindset allowing you to be productive from day 1 and hence get the most out of your work experience.
Entrepreneurial skills are the need of the hour for organisations too. The best way to adopt this mindset and the skills is through SV.CO. It is certainly a life changing experience.
GIVEAWAY :
I wanted a lot of students should benefit with the mission of SV.CO. If I can do that while in college , you also could it easily.Why don’t you just check if this program suits your ambitions.
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Click here to start your startup journey or speak to the right people from SV.CO
