How an Academic became a Startup Founder

I finally got an approval for incubating my startup from IIT Delhi. 😀

The story behind it is interesting. It should be told. There are some lessons to be learned.

The story began around 3 years ago, when a colleague and I were applying for a research grant from the Ministry of IT (Meity). We wrote a reasonably large grant proposal for 3.28 crores (sizable funding in India). There were multiple levels of scrutiny. We were making good progress. Finally, we were told that we will have one last "big presentation". We went fully prepared to that "big" online meeting.

A very senior person on the other side posed a simple out-of-syllabus question, "Will you be able to commercialize your inventions in the first 1.5 years or not?" To be honest, we had not expected this question because nobody had ever asked such a question to us. We were not even aware of other faculty being asked such questions and thus did not have ready answers. Clearly after COVID, the nature of government funding had changed, and we were not aware of it. Even though I am the co-PI of the project, I somehow said "Yes". Now, it sounds ridiculous and crazy. Most likely, the PI of the project also thought so. He was just polite enough not to say so. From his mood after the presentation, I could make out that he surely thought that I was drunk. In fact, I also thought the same, even though all that I had was a glass of lime water, that too without salt and sugar !!! Since the commitment was made, we could not back out. The budget was reduced to 1.83 cr and we got the project. The requirement was that we need to sell the developed technology and get signatures on stamp paper: IIT-Delhi will sign and the company buying the technology will sign.

Then, the reality sunk in. What do we do? We didn't even know the "C" of commercialization. Acadmics are experts in convincing funding agencies that unless they fund the project, the world is doomed 🤫 All projects lead to "fundamental" inventions and the research paper is the ultimate deliverable. That was my thinking also, until I had a moment of brain fog and agreed to commercializing our inventions. Some of my other colleagues who were also applying for the same grant were slightly more candid. They told me that I had lost my mind, and they appeared to be right.

I remembered the Odia saying, which says that when the need arises, a person automatically learns. In line with this, we started contacting a lot of companies. I would say that the failure rate was about 99%. Deep-tech is very hard. We nevertheless made a guess about the nature of work that would most likely have good research and market value in our proposed area in cybersecurity, and proceeded. Finally, after a million mails, we got some traction.

We learnt our first big lesson: either create a full market-ready product (just plug it in and it works) or offer a service (half-done product + manpower). In both cases, the customer wants a complete plug-and-play product at the end that requires minimum effort from his side.

The process of negotiation took a fair amount of time, but we finally did it. The stamp paper that was required was finally created.

By this time, my students and I had gotten to know a lot of people. I had a lot of newfound friends. I met Aseem Mishra who is the founder of Prantae Solutions . He gave an idea. "Why not address the real pain points of Indian MSMEs? For creating any appliance, we require a PCB to house electronic components and the 3D model of its structure." The tools used to design, test, simulate and verify these things requires very expensive CAD tools. They cost a fortune, rely on proprietary formats, their learning curve is steep and are quite inflexible. This is where there is a need for innovation.

Even though the idea was good, we were not ready at that point of time. Later on, I heard instances of the same complaint from many other entrepreneurs. I also proactively spoke to a few and they all confirmed the same. Hence, we finally decided to do it.

Next, comes the second lesson: always respect your customer (knowingly and unknowingly).

This came up when there were discussions about funding. We had informal conversations with many large companies and people in the government. They weren't very impressed when we sold them a cost story. It is true that MSMEs find CAD tools to be very expensive, cannot afford support and need to spend a lot of resources in training engineers. However, the moment you tell someone that you are offering something that is cheaper than the market rate, they don't like it. It belittles them, and conveys the message that they don't have enough money. Unbeknownst to us, it actually sounded quite disrespectful. We were once told in a meeting that the customer has enough money to buy the CAD tool company, why would he care about the cost of a CAD tool's license? This is why Tata Nano failed -- it makes the customer aware of his relative poverty. We had fallen into the same trap, even though that was clearly not our intention. In this game, it is important to understand what the potential customer is thinking and not say something that is disrespectful even though the intentions are good.

Hence, there was a need to pivot. Instead of a negative story, sell a positive story. It is a wiser idea to mention about the value that one proposes to add: something new that is being proposed and something state-of-the-art that does not exist. We changed our strategy and added simulation of processors, HPC services, GenAI-based design, FEM analysis and physics-informed neural networks into our portfolio. This follows from the first lesson where a CAD tool should be bundled with services. Things suddenly appeared to look better. People started taking more interest in what we were doing and the expectation is that we will start out being profitable. The incubation should take 1-2 months more.

Had the Ministry of IT not insisted on commercialization, MSME founders like Aseem Mishra not given us a direction, and that instantaneous moment of brain fog not happened, our startup would not have come into fruition.