‘Idea to $20M Startup’ Workshop by BV Jagadeesh (KAAJ Ventures, Silicon Valley)
The Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE) at PES University, Bangalore completed 2years in Jan 2020. Coinciding with this, CIE in association with Dept of Management Studies offered an experiential 5-day workshop for aspiring student entrepreneurs – ‘Building from $0 to $20M Startup’ – conducted by BV Jagadeesh (fondly known as BVJ), Managing Director for KAAJ Venture.
BV Jagadeesh is a Silicon Valley legend – serial entrepreneur, VC, Deep-Tech guru, philanthropist, educator all rolled into one. To list a few of his ventures: Exodus – first data center company to IPO in 1998, NetScaler (President/CEO) acquired by Citrix, scaled Nutanix to $1.2B, and took it public, took Yodlee public and more. BVJ is passionate about sharing his entrepreneurial experience and has conducted these sessions at several prestigious universities like Wharton, Univ of Michigan, IIT, and now, PES University!
The 5-day workshop was inaugurated on Jan 27th by PES University Pro-Chancellor, Prof. D Jawahar. This workshop took a select group of aspiring student entrepreneurs on the journey of converting an idea to a startup and covered various aspects of creating and running successful startups.
As a bonus, BVJ invited three successful entrepreneurs to talk about their ventures and who were candid in recounting not only their successes but their failures along the way. The entrepreneurs included Sriram, Co-Founder, Biofi Medical Healthcare, Shyamal, Co-Founder, Lavelle Networks, and Anjan Srinivas, Senior Director of Product Management, Nutanix who shared different aspects of their startup journey.
The 45 students who participated were a mix of B-Tech (30) and MBA (15) students.
The Grand Finale on Feb 13 saw 6 teams presenting their Final Pitches to an eminent 6-member Jury panel. All the judges were unanimous in applauding the creative and enthusiastic efforts of all the teams. PES University gave away cash prizes worth Rs.50,000 to the top 3 teams.
In the words of one of the student participants, Shreyanka, “Having B V Jagadeesh on our campus was one of the best opportunities PES gave me. This workshop gave me an insight into a dimension that we seldom get exposed to as a part of a regular academic curriculum. This incredibly inspirational person taught us about the importance of people and their role within an organization in a startup.”
We greatly appreciate BVJ spending quality time in CIE at PES University and can’t wait to have him again on the campus!