Was in IIT on Thursday.

I had a month's dose of fresh, bright faces all in 1 hour! I was in IIT Madras last thursday to address the 4th year Computer science students. It was part of their Industrial Lecture series and I talked about the "essential questions to ask when embarking on a technology startup". Basically, I wanted the students to see the startup in its native environment, namely the business world.

Quite often, as technology people, we tend to look more at the innards of the technological nucleus of the startup and, as they say, miss the woods for the trees, linked lists, arrays and other data structures. This talk was an attempt to see how the startup would need to interact, adjust and live with the outside world entities such as clients, partners, competitors, friends, guides, and VCs, in order to be successful.

The session was fairly interactive and one could see that the students were all a lot more savvy already, than I was until my second startup was spiralling down the drain. I am fairly convinced that the next inflection point in the tech. space will be driven by tech. plays initiated by some of these guys.

I kept the speech short, to about 45 minutes and then had a 15 minute Q&A session and promptly wrapped it up within the stipulated 1 hour - though I wanted to talk on for another hour or so, at least. Anyway, if it was interesting, they will call me again to talk to them and that would give me another chance.

As always, I found the experience of talking to students exhilarating. Thanks Nari, for the opportunity.