Visit to the NYU Poly Incubator

My very first interaction with established entrepreneurs in the media industry, was nothing less than inspiring.  For a beginner like me, listening to their experiences, their advice and the stories of their individual journeys gives a great perspective into the industry that I plan to be a part of in the near future.

Steven introduced us to the Poly incubator and the companies within. He described the pros and cons of beginning a startup as compared to a comfortable lifestyle working as an MNC employee. Having worked with an MNC, I understand the comfort offered by a steady but boring job very well. However, the joy of working on ones own terms and reaping the benefits of ones own efforts, is something that fascinates me. The fact that every employee plays more than one role, elaborates the level of experience one can gain working in a startup. He also stated the 3 criteria applied while filtering startups for the incubator - commercial viability, scalability and potential for job creation.

Baba Apps, a mobile apps development startup founded by Sai, is now a 5 people strong company. Sai, an MIT graduate, talked about his background and walked us through his journey till date of setting up his own company. Based on his mistakes and successes, he offered valuable insights about business strategies and planning. I completely agree with his opinion, that product based industries are always better as compared to service based ones since the employee has the complete authority over the output of his/her efforts; having worked for a service based IT company myself, I have experienced it first-hand. Sai highlighted the importance of performing a thorough market research before jumping into anything because one needs to think of making profits from day one itself.

Amanda from Brainscape told us about the eLearning software company which mainly offers test-prep material on its website brain-scape.com. Since she is in charge of the marketing aspect of the startup, she described her contributions towards advertising strategies and using free promos to increase their popularity, was one of them. The idea for this startup started off as an excel macro, and now they offer a wide collection of study materials ranging from GRE prep to languages.

Philip, the CEO of LocalUncle, introduced us to his perspective on the media industry. He believes that an entrepreneur has to be prepared to face ups and downs throughout his/her career, a chaotic lifestyle as compared to that of an employee working for an established MNC. The best advice he put forth was, 'look around you, you might find the partner for your own startup within this classroom'. Finding people with similar passions to work with definitely creates better chances of success.

I would say that the key take-aways from this discussion were 'looking for partners with similar interests, to manage ones funds such that one is not at a loss putting in ones own money, finding and optimizing the right market for ones product and most importantly, to have passion for what you are working on'.