Nexus Venture Partners Provide a Window To Pune Techies into The World of Startups

Last weekend in Pune, Nexus Venture Partners(NVP) alongwith Peepalsys, a recruiting firm from Pune, that specializes in building teams for early stage start-ups -- brought together founders of some of the best Indian startups to talk to the techie crowd in Pune about the opportunities that the startup world has to offer. Titled ‘Creating A Valley Like Work Culture’, the event saw a participation of about 100 techies all eager to listen to what the panelists had to share. Talking to the packed hall was Abinash Tripathy, founder & CEO of Helpshift; Jonah Stephen, co-founder, Indix; Gaurav Gupta, director of engineering, ScaleArc; Ankit Purthi, co-founder, Unicommerce and Atul Phadnis, founder & CEO WhatsOnIndia. The session was moderated by Jishnu Bhattacharjee, MD, NVP.

All the startups on stage spoke about the work culture they had back home. So if Helpshift compares itself to the Special Task Force, ScaleArc are the ants who want to shoulder responsibilities more than double their own weight. If you apply to Indix, then besides giving an interview yourself, you can interview the current team to understand about the work and culture of the company. Unicommerce are a lean mean team of developers who are looking for ethical hackers to join them in their startup. WhatsOnIndia are a team of highly motivated professionals who are charged up with the thought of world dominance in the area they operate in. From India to Jordan and beyond, the WhatsOnIndia team is working hard on its mission of world dominance.

Each panelist also had interesting insights to share on their journey from the corporate side to the startup world. The youngest of the lot was 26-year Ankit Purthi of Unicommerce. His venture handles more than 50,000 transactions daily for different clients across India and abroad. And while their business is growing by leaps and bounds, they are only a team of four developers handling all the development work at Unicommerce. Gaurav Gupta of ScaleArc has moved various cities and in some cases even countries to pursue his professional interests. His recent move was from US to India, when he took up the ScaleArc job.

Each panelists was assigned three-minutes to talk about his venture after which the session was opened to participants for Q&A. This was the opportunity everyone was waiting for. Because the questions from the audience didn’t relate to compensation or benefits, but was more from a long term career perspective. “How do early employees of the startup adjust to a new person put on top of the affairs at the startup? “How good are my chances in the outside corporate world, once I quit my job in the startup?” “We may get a good designation in a startup in a short period of time, but how do I re-align to the external world once I quit a startup?” “Is it a good idea to join a startup at the beginning of my career or in the later years of my career?” Those were some of the questions that the participants had for the panelists.

The Q&A went on for a longtime before the session had to be wound up for paucity of time. The networking session after the event provided more opportunities to the participants to get up, close and personal with the founders of startups and many were seen enthusiastically enquiry about actual employment options. The event provided a good platform for the startups to tell their story to a captive audience as well as get some good leads for prospective employees.

Do check out this up, close and personal video of Nexus MD Jishnu Bhattacharjee, where he talks about investments and more.