REPORT ON VISITS AROUND SANFRANCISCO
WITH FICCI-EPSI DELEGATION
Submitted by
Dr.M.K.Badrinarayanan,
Professor – School of Management & Coordinator – HTBI & HEIC,
Hindustan University
DETAILS OF VISITS DONE IN SANFRANCISCO
The FICCI – EPSI organized for the following visits in San Francisco for a
select delegation from NAFSA India Pavilion.
The aim of the visits was to provide an exposure to the various initiatives
taken up at the Silicon Valley to promote entrepreneurship and understand
how the stakeholders in the eco-system work with each other.
Date Places visited
June 1, 2017 1. Tandem Capital
2. TiE Silicon Valley
3. Edcast
June 2, 2017 1. Stanford University – Shriram
Engineering Centre & D-Studio
2. Uber Research Centre
This report is a summary of excerpts from the interactions with the
dignitaries in each location.
In every interaction there were some discussions regarding the role of higher
education institutions in nurturing entrepreneurship.
A colour coding of the text has been adopted to facilitate an easy recognition
of some key aspects and save the time for readers.
Colour Codes in Text:
Text in Blue For follow up
Text in Red For attention
Text in Green We are already doing this
June 1, 2016
Meeting with Mr.Sunil Bhargava, Partner, Tandem Capital
An IIT Madras Graduate settled in Silicon Valley since 1986
Passionate about product development
Has more than 25 years of deep technology and marketing, including
Xerox PARC, HP, Oracle, Webvan and Business Signatures.
Tandem Capital is his fourth venture
Tandem works with Angel Prime and Sama Capital in India. But is not
looking to invest in Indian startups directly.
Tandem feels, Indian investors have better judging capabilities of the
local scenario.
Key excerpts from the interactions with Mr.Sunil
“Channel innovation” is getting more important than “Product
Innovation”. Channel is absolutely important.
Steps to build a startup: Build Brand first, Channel next and then build
product
Investors would want to invest in businesses which have the potential to
“become big” and move fast.
They invest in the thesis, not the product. Hence follow the steps said
above.
Have a credible proof of your business
Understand who is your customer and why do they buy from you? Many
startups do not have answers for this fundamental question. They are
more obsessed with their product innovation.
‘You can never SELL! People only BUY what they want!’
What works in US market may not work in India. For example, Tial costs
USD 20. It is an impulse purchase here. It won’t be so in India. So,
understand your customer and ask “Why would they buy?”
Three keys to success of a startup – Timing, Team and Product (in the
sequence)
Startups must be interested in/attract/able to get – strong people
Universities should…..
1. Provide real inspiration by inviting entrepreneurs to the campus
2. Help student translate passion into real rules of thumb
3. Make them understand the importance of metrics
4. Get the students realize the importance of selling (infectious passion)
3 Businesses that will work in India…
1. Small money from a lot of people – A viral product; Zero cost of
servicing (eg.) Shareit
2. Infrastructure in a smaller bucket (eg) Reliance Jio (Requires extreme
entrepreneurial capabilities)
3. Serving more lucrative markets (developed nations) – (eg) AI assisted
by humans
Sunil’s Recommended Reads:
Founders @ Work
Paul Gram’s Essays on Startups
TiE Silicon Valley
Ms.Dipty Desai, Program Director, TiE Silicon Valley explained the
activities of TiE Silicon Valley in detail
The role of TiE in promoting entrepreneurship was discussed.
Mr.Sourab Tandon, Board Member TiE SV, observed that “Unlike the US,
which is a major B2B market, the Indian market is B2C. Hence, same
models for promoting entrepreneurship cannot be adopted to India.”
Mr.Vijay N Menon, Executive Director, TiE SV, appreciated the active
collaboration of Hindustan Group with TiE Chennai. He advised our
student startups to participate in the RISE Global Business Plan contest
organized by TiE.
Dr.Anuradha Basu, Professor & Director, Silicon Valley Centre for
Entrepreneurship and Dr.Harry Lee from San Jose State University
explained about the FDP (20 days) and student workshops – 5 weeks (on
entrepreneurship and cyber security) organized by them for faculty and
students across the globe. They have invited our faculty and students
team to take up those training programmes offered in their campus.
All of them endorsed the approach adopted by our TBIs in shaping up the
student innovators and entrepreneurs.
The following Startup founders present in the meeting expressed interest for
exploring business partnership in India:
1. Dr.Kailash Gupta, IIMA Fellow – International Emergency Management
Startup for Disaster
2. Mr.Avneesh Kumar, Founder CEO, Schoolze Inc.
3. Mr.Kumar Gopalakrishnan, CEO & Founder, 1Banyan Inc. – AI assistant
for college students in India.
4. Prof. Mohan Shah, Professor & Program Director, Engineering, Cogswell
College & a consultant to NASA – has expressed interest to work with us
for setting up a Research Centre in Aeronautics.
Meeting with Mr.Karl Mehta, Founder & CEO, Edcast
An investor turned entrepreneur working on digitalizing the learning
space.
He started with the gap between industry needs and knowledge provided
by the universities. “The relevance of their existence shall cease to exist
soon”, he said.
He explained in detail about the changing face of learning from
“Structured formal” learning to “Fluid Micro” learning.
Gave an overview of new experiments in digitalizing learning – African
Virtual University which offers all the degrees through digital learning
He explained about the Edcast’s attempt to adopt Disrupting Operational
Models which moves the approach from Traditional value chain to
Platform expressions.
He gave an overview of the proposed NASSCOM’s Edcast app
There was a discussion on the initiatives like NPTEL and SWAYAM
platforms. Mr.Karl termed them as boring, disengaging and less useful.
He said, abundant content is available today. The challenges lie in
encapsulating them into relevant modules and
provide a seamless learning experience.
He explained that how Edcast allows the faculty
to create courses without any great effort, and
the easy to use learning tool in ‘micro doses’ for
the learner.
He demonstrated that how Edcast can be used
for live streaming and making knowledge
available at ease for the target group
He also explained about the analytics of Edcast
and its uses to enhance the Teaching Learning
process.
Post Script:
Incidentally, the discussions at Stanford on Day 2 referred to the need for
segmenting the degrees into “micro doses” of skills required by the industry.
Sessions @ Stanford University
Excerpts from the Session by Prof. Sharique, Stanford Business School
He appealed that universities should understand the role that basic
research plays in developing a country’s higher education scenario and
creating an ecosystem for flourishing entrepreneurship.
For him, Stanford’s success/uniqueness lies in its ability to promote
basic research.
He said that China has become the second largest country in terms of
number of publications and listed a few key strategies to be learnt from
China in achieving this distinction.
1. There exists a global competition for talent. So the Indian universities
should “Pay Global” to attract and retain talent.
2. Intensive use of Exchange programmes to develop capabilities of
faculty
3. Doing basic research and publishing
Mr.Ankit Gupta, an alumnus of IIT-B and a Student Entrepreneur at
Stanford, has expressed interest to work with our students in the domain of
“Machine Learning”.
Excerpts from the session by Prof. Ronie Shilo, Vice Provost, Teaching
Learning, Stanford University:
Ms.Ronie was previously heading the Stanford Centre for Professional
Development
Stanford works towards producing leaders and people who shall make an
impact on this world. (http://globalimpact.stanford.edu)
Stanford’s success lies in the rigorous selection process and complete
autonomy provided to the teaching faculty in design and delivery of their
courses.
The outcome of teaching learning process is monitored through a proper
information system.
It has been observed that increasing numbers of faculty have been
practicing flipped class room methodology and the notion for building
industry relevant micro skills is gaining popularity.
Intensive research has been taken up at Stanford to assess the changing
face of higher education. This has been documented in a separate
website called www.stanford2025.com
It has been observed in such research that the present form of degrees
shall be changed to micro degrees by segmenting content.
Also universities shall have to acknowledge and amend their systems to
accommodate lifelong learning needs by modularizing the degrees and
providing flexible entry and exit.
Innovation Curriculum for UAE designed by Stanford
Stanford has worked with UAE government on developing a 15 week
curriculum on Entrepreneurship, Design Thinking and Leadership.
All the university teachers have been trained by Stanford team on this
new curriculum which shall be rolled out nationwide in UAE to promote
the thought of innovation and entrepreneurship across the nation among
the students.
EPSI has requested Dr.Ronie Shilo to work with them on conducting a
similar programme for its member institutions.
http://www.stanford2025.com/purpose-learning
From To
Students often declared a major without clear reason
Students pursued meaning and impact through studies and projects
Many alumni worked in the fields unrelated to their majors
Alumni Cited missions as the compass that guided their careers
Students deferred work on social issues until later in life
Global impact labs extended platform for faculty research
http://www.stanford2025.com/open-loop-university
From To
Students received four years of college education, front loaded at the beginning of adulthood
Students received a lifetime of learning opportunities
4 years during the ages 18-22 6 years over a life time
Formal learning occurred in the classroom only
Knowledge was obtained across classrooms and practical settings
Students needed to prove ability by
age 18 to be accepted
Students began studies of a range of
ages
Alumni returned to campus
occasionally for selected events
Populi returned as expert
practitioners and enriched campus life.
Session by Prof.Banny Bannerjee on
Fostering Innovation on a grand scale – the Stanford approach
Prof. Banny is the Director of Stanford ChangeLabs, and teaches Design
Innovation and Strategy at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design
He is one of the proponents of the concept of Design Thinking which is
now widely followed as a tool for innovation across the world.
There are different and sometimes very limited views on what innovation
means. Prof. Bannerjee offered a comprehensive definition of innovation:
“Innovation is outperforming normative modes, to drive new behaviors,
outcomes, value creation and system transformations at scale”.
The world’s biggest problems are the world’s biggest opportunities. We
need a brand new thinking regime.
Most innovation dies inside companies and bureaucracies if it’s anything
other than incremental, because it threatens them.
To deliver on innovation as a fundamental part of how companies
operate, they must have leaders who know how to foster and support
creative thinking, who enable and support the right kind of risk taking,
who understand the value of ideas and that know how to encourage and
let their teams innovate.
Key steps in innovation
Force yourself to think about the problem without thinking about solutions
Think of scaling since day one and find points of leverage
Look at each individual problem through a variety of lenses
Empathize with the users’ experience; define goals and motivations of the user; test solutions
“Scaled challenges must be met by scaled solutions, not incremental ones.”
– Prof.Banny Bannerjee
The world needs extremely powerful innovation techniques and
implementation systems that can tackle our grand challenges in relevant
time frames. And for that we need to start understanding how can we
encourage, foster and enable scaled innovation in our organizations and
in our own problem solving methodology.
It is first necessary to understand the ecosystem of the problem to be
addressed from different views: science, engineering, data, policy,
industry, business, behavior and innovation.
Phases of building an innovative solution for a real world problem
Phase 1: Scaled intervention strategy – to understand the driving
dynamics of the challenge. That is, to identify underlying phenomena and
the root causes of the challenge, and thus, identify powerful leverage
points to transform the system behavior. The expected outcome of this
initial step is to have clearly identified what to change and how to change
it.
Phase 2: Identify the intervention pathways – Having targeted the most
important set of driving dynamics and root causes, the result of this step
is to design strategic paths of action.
Phase 3: Brainstorm at scale (scale storm) - The scaled innovation work
and solutions can be directed through: positive feedback loops that
reinforce the behavior, resource multiplication, novel economic engines,
distributed systems and piggy backing on previous existing channels.
Hasso Plattner Institute of Design – D-School of Stanford
The d.school helps people develop their creative abilities.
The d.school is positioned as a place, a community, and a mindset.
It has been designed with a lot of fluid spaces which can be re-organized
as per the requirement.
It builds on methods from across the field of design to create learning
experiences that help people unlock their creative potential and apply it
to the world.
D-School promotes the idea that design can be applied to all kinds of
problems.
The d.school works with partners from non-profit, corporate, and
government organizations to develop projects that address real-world
challenges.
The d.school classes challenge the students to tackle problems that are
happening right now, not the ones from a textbook page.
To inspire creative thinking, the d.school brings together students,
faculty, and practitioners from all disciplines, perspectives, and
backgrounds.
The d.school functions on a 100% opt-in culture. The people who are
here want to be here. No student or faculty member at Stanford is forced
to participate.
8 Core Capabilities built at d.School
Navigate Ambiguity Move between Concrete and Abstract
Learn from Others (People & Context)
Build and Craft Intentionally
Synthesize Information Communicate Deliberately
Experiment Rapidly Design your design work
The Walls of d.school with the pictures of students working their with their
discipline details
A d-studio class with completely fluid workspace design
The bay that leads to the BAE studio and studio 2
The BAE studio which addresses the learning of cognition and meta-
cognition
The 3-side movable boards set up for problem based learning. The boards
are portable and can be picked up later by the same team for the next
discussion
A clasroom discussion in progress at D-studio
VISIT TO UBER, SAN FRANCISCO
Meeting with Mr.Akshay, Co-founder, Uber
Mr.Akshay explained the journey of Uber to the visiting delegation
He explained that the Value proposition of Uber was to give back the
valuable time to their customers.
He explained how Uber evolved its business model by working on the
pain points, and how did they go about targeting the taxi market
dominated by an oligopolistic license holders.
He explained how the team has grown from a coffee shop venture to
operations in 70 countries at present.
He explained about the proposed project of Intra-city flying cars and the
pilot operation to be tested in Dallas and Dubai in 2020.
He also shared his views on the proposed Uber food in 80 cities of
Canada.
He explained about the power of data analytics at the Uber Research labs
where countrywise desks are handling data and supporting their
respective country teams.
He spoke about the usage of pricing algorithms in fixing the dynamic
pricing of uber.
He also narrated the importance of working with multi-ethnic and multi-
skills team.
He also shared his views about the various issues in running the
business in different countries and contexts.
He shared a few motivating stories of his successful drivers in the Uber
Driving Community.
The visits around San Francisco have helped a lot to gain a good exposure to
the entrepreneurial ecosystem of Silicon Valley and the active role played by
the Stanford University.
It was a pleasure to receive a strong endorsement from the stakeholders of
Silicon Valley for our approach to encourage the spirit of innovation and
entrepreneurship among our students.
With some minor course corrections and scaled up involvement by more
like-minded faculty, our initiatives shall certainly reach greater heights.
I thank the management of Hindustan Group of Institutions for providing
this great learning opportunity.