Ideas sparkle as Murali Karthik, educators and VCs reign

In all honesty, cricketer Murali Karthik admitted that he knew nothing about technology and had no money to invest. But he could still capture the attention of most startup entrepreneurs at TechSparks 2015 here on Saturday, since he had proved that an idea could be realised even if it meant changing course mid-way.

Karthik was only 12 when his father sent him to a cricket coaching camp. That itself was the result of an idea that militated against the family’s expectation of Karthik as a doctor or an engineer. “I did harbour a dream to be a genetic engineer. That did not happen. But even after joining the cricket camp, there was a course correction. I was thin and only 5’2” tall, and knew I couldn’t be a good medium pacer,” recalled the cricketer, who retired after 26.5 years as a player.

That was when Karthik’s idea proved its dynamism. He turned a left-arm spinner and eventually landed in the national team. “I knew I was not physically strong enough to be a good seam bowler. I had to unlearn and learn, spending hours and hours,” he said as the entrepreneurs drew parallels between his cricket grounds and their ambitious startups.

Minutes before Karthik’s entry, Byju Raveendran from Think & Learn had shown the startups just how innovatively an idea could transform learning through the right mix of ‘rockstar’ educators, interactive media and cutting edge technology. He demonstrated how such crisp, clear educational movies helped students learn even complex mathematical concepts on their own.

The spark for Byju’s ideas and eventual success came from traditional classrooms that were not personalised, were exam-focussed and ran at a unified speed that left most students high and dry. Personalisation was thus high on the list in Byju’s Classes. He explained, “We focussed on how the does student learn, how much does he learn, what, how fast and how frequently he/she learns.”

Interest, capability and academic score. Byju saw zero overlap between these three in the classrooms. “It cannot be this way. The stress should be on visual learning and not on memorising, which the students are now forced to go through.” He wanted the entrepreneurs to explore opportunities of technology intervention among the 270 million K12 students and 5.5 million taking up entrance exams across the country.

For Mu Sigma founder and CEO Dhiraj Rajaram, it was understandable that startups placed a big premium on originality. But he wanted that to be part of an interplay with inter-disciplinary innovation. “Let ideas make love with other ideas and create new ideas. Funding is not equal to success. Our ideas, brains make the money, not the funds,” he said.

Tech30 List

The sixth edition of TechSparks, themed ‘Tech for a Billion’ concluded with the announcement of the 30 companies that made it to the Tech30 list. Among the list was Capacloud’s Ecotop, a 2×2 feet floor tile that can grow any plant on any horizontal or vertical surface without a lot of maintenance; Cyclops MedTech, a medtech startup working on surgical and eye-tracking solutions; and Daily Rounds, a network of doctors with over 180,000 practicing doctors on the platform.