Ratan Tata's assistant Shantanu Naidu brushes up aspiring entrepreneur minds
In his last Instagram poll, the doyen of Tata group Ratan Tata had asked in a poll whether his followers would like him to put together a basic startup pitch deck template. To which he received a resounding 97% vote from his one million followers.
Besides the important aspects that should be covered in any pitch by a first-time entrepreneur, Ratan Tata’s startup pitch deck also included his personal advice on developing a startup mindset.
Nearly seven months down the road, Tata’s office continues to receive hundreds and thousands of queries and calls for help from eager young entrepreneurs on how to navigate the entrepreneurial path.
Twenty-seven-year-old Shantanu Naidu, who has been working closely with the 81-year-old czar of the Tata group in Ratan Tata’s Office for the past two years, has been at the forefront helping Ratan Tata address all the queries. One of his assignments in Ratan Tata’s Office is to help out with startup proposals that come to him for funding requests.
Since 2016, Ratan Tata’s private investment company RNT Associates and the University of California’s Office of the Regents (UC Investments) have been funding startups, new companies, and other enterprises in India as ‘UC-RNT funds’.
“After looking at startup proposals for two years in Mr Tata’s office, I realised that most of them have never received a proper introduction to the spirit, values, and basics of being an entrepreneur,” Shantanu says.
In this lockdown, he started On Your Sparks, an online talk based on his life’s lessons that he converts into entrepreneurial lessons.He further thanks his mentor Ratan Tata to inspire him for such an initiative.
The audience comes to his webinar for myth-busting and to develop an entrepreneurial spirit and mindset. Shantanu says that the age bar for students wanting to become entrepreneurs is reducing. “The most asked question I get in my webinar is, ‘how do I become an entrepreneur without an MBA degree’,” he adds.
The more he interacts with these young potential entrepreneurs through his webinar, the more he realises that the problem is much deeper.
On Your Sparks is held every Sunday, LIVE on his Instagram handle, and Shantanu takes care to have a minimum number of 30 attendees so that he can address everyone’s queries.
Emphasising that this is proof of the need for such an initiative, Shantanu says he is not looking at crowding his sessions as that would take away from the real purpose of the initiative.
In the future, Shantanu hopes to tie up with schools and universities, and take these lessons to a larger audience.
According to him, if this were a profit-making startup, its USP would be the storytelling aspect of it. And its tagline would read: ‘Introduction to this beast called entrepreneurship’.
“The idea is to get rid of their fears and inspire them. I am not pulling this out of thin air or from a Cornell University course,” says Shantanu, emphasising that the reason these talks have worked with his audience is that they are from lived experiences.
He also maintains a WhatsApp group with all participants where he assigns tasks to them to stay invested. “It is easy to get inspired but then what? One of the most-asked questions is how do we look for ideas. So I tell them to maintain an Excel sheet and by the end of the month have at least 100 problems that they have observed around them. Ninety-nine of them could be worthless, but when they start thinking that way, it becomes a part of a mindset,” he says.
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