How I overcame all my fears and raised funding for my startup in my final year
Joining SV.CO helped me build a campus startup with my friends while in college. We are happy that we took that risk to do something on our own.
Hello, I am Ajay Zachariah, Founder of Virtual Deck. I am a final year engineering student from Kerala. We are proud student entrepreneurs currently incubated at SV.CO.
Here is my story for all students who wish to make use of their college time effectively.
Here is Why I started a startup and How I went on to raise funding while in college.
The first three years of our engineering life were quite as per the book with all the theory papers, assignments and attendance issues. We had become stagnant until that one day, when we came across a press coverage about SV.CO in the newspaper. It asked ‘Do you want to build a startup while in college?’.
The idea of creating a startup in college was new to us. We had lot of time after college and on weekends and so we decided to invest some time and money on ourselves and that’s how we joined the SV.CO programme.
How I formed my team ?
We were hostel mates from the beginning so we knew each other for a long time. Once we applied for SV.CO and started, we realized that we already had the team spirit and only had to gain technical knowledge and industry exposure.
What problem were we solving?
We decided to build a digital business card platform. We wanted to solve the hassle of carrying physical visiting cards for professionals. The product as such doesn’t take up a lot of money to be built; except for the cloud storage for which we have enough cloud hosting credits from SV.CO.
Our Startup Profile on sv.co/startups
How SV.CO Community helped me overcome my fears and raise funding in my final year of college.
I would never forget that day at Menlo College, the day we were to do our first pitch in Silicon Valley. I was so tensed that I almost thought I would have to skip it.
That’s when Vishnu and Suma from SV.CO called me for a trial pitch. I stammered and stopped midway, made a lot of errors but with the confidence which they gave me and the corrections Vishnu made, I pitched surprisingly quite well at both Silicon Valley Bank and Facebook.
This global exposure in America gave us lot of confidence to pitch to investors back in India. Now there is no question of tension, no matter how big the audience is.
When you do the same thing repeatedly and improve constantly by reflecting at your work. You become very good at it.
Our pitch at Kerala Startup Mission went really well and we were one of the 3 startups from SV.CO to receive seed funding to continue pursuing our dreams of building a startup.
We received the cheque from the Chief Minister of Kerala. It was indeed a proud moment for us and our parents too.
Is it worth doing a startup in college ?
Yes, college is the best time to take a risk in life.
If you are smart student, chances are that you will get a job or go for an MBA after engineering and will get a good salary in a large company. At that point, creating a startup is a big risk and the opportunity cost of saying no to salary for few years is very high.
If you ever want to do something on your own, college is the best time to do it as there is no risk.
Even if we fail to build a company, the experience will get us good jobs.
How my view of life has changed ?
Pre SV.CO: Down-hearted engineering students craving for a high package placement offer like everyone else.
Post SV.CO: Entrepreneurs with a genuine vision to create a change in the system, to address the problems that we used to ignore, to be employers and not employees.
Come be an Explorer at SV.CO :)
