20+ exclusive masterclasses you can’t miss at TechSparks 2021, India’s largest startup-tech conference
Listen and learn from those at the top of their game to analyse your own entrepreneurial goals. Let mentors like PayU India’s Manas Mishra, and Cashfree’s Manmeet Singh among others reshape your vision for the future
Meha Agarwal
Thursday October 21, 2021 , 11 min Read
With three days left for TechSparks 2021, we are excited to bring you the best of the sessions from industry stalwarts. The six-day event will host more than 300 roundtables, panel discussions, fireside chats and more, serving as a forum to listen directly from 300+ speakers.
At the helm of the event are 30+ curated masterclasses from industry experts across all domains. From understanding cloud to product building strategies and from conversational commerce technology to investor-entrepreneur playbook, we have got every opportunity covered for tech enthusiasts to improve efficiency. Share the challenges in your entrepreneurial journey to realign the road ahead. .
Here are the must-attend masterclasses at TechSparks 2021:
- What investors want by Sanjay Mehta, Founder & Partner, 100X.VC
- An entrepreneur's playbook for building defensible, habit-forming products by Punit Singh Soni, Founder & CEO, Suki
- How to build, grow and stand out in a crowded market by Co-founder Vamsi Krishna
- How to build a digital-first brand taking on big incumbents by Amit Khatri, Co-founder of consumer electronics brand
- 'Eye'ing the tomorrow of the SaaS ecosystem by Gaurav Srivastava, Co-founder and CTO,
That’s not all. Here are 20+ more masterclasses that would broaden your startup horizon.
Data cloud for business: Why it matters
Cloud storage is rapidly gaining popularity as an efficient business solution across all stages. The global cloud computing market size is projected to reach $791.48 billion by 2028, exhibiting a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 17.9 percent during the forecast period. The value of the market stood at $219.00 billion in 2020. To take a deep dive into how one can leverage this opportunity, Sumeet Tandure, Sales Engineer, will take you through his experiences and learnings at TechSparks 2021. He is an expert on modern data architectures for data warehousing, data lakes and data science.
Building effective ML pipelines on Google Cloud
In this session with Vipin Nair, Customer Engineer, Machine Learning Specialist, Google Cloud India, you will get an understanding of machine learning (ML) pipelines, capabilities and an overview on how to implement ML pipelines at scale. If you are an application developer, mobile developer, software engineer, backend developer, systems administrator, or network engineer, this session is a must-attend.
Payments beyond processing transactions
In this session by Manas Mishra, CPO, PayU India, you will learn how the finance sector in India is reimagining the payments landscape. With interventions such as contactless payments and increased digital awareness among users, look forward to this session to know more about the new trends redefining the payments industry in India.
Building India's first-ever homegrown microblogging platform
Koo is the first social media platform to be built from scratch in India. Phaneesh Gururaj, Head of Tech, , leads the engineering and innovation team at the company. In this session, Phaneesh will delve into his experience of leading the technology platform’s innovation arm and mapping its rising opportunities.
How we built a profitable B2B fintech startup In India
Buoyed by the rapid adoption of ecommerce and online payments in India in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, payments processing startup Cashfree saw a 150 percent increase in the number of total active and transacting merchants on its platform over the last year. The number of merchant sign-ups on its platform rose from around 70,000 in July 2020 to over 1.30 lakh by July 2021 — up by 95 percent across sectors including ecommerce, digital goods, and edtech, as both businesses and consumers went online to shop in a safe and secure space. Manmeet Singh, Director, Growth, Cashfree Payments will join us at TechSparks 2021 to take the audience through his phenomenal journey of building a successful payments processing platform.
Decoding Captables, ESOPs and Termsheets
Managing equity for private companies, especially startups, should be simple. Every early and growth-stage startup faces the issue of managing captable and equity plans in a transparent and lightweight manner. This becomes even more important during the fundraising process as founders often face the challenge of multiple term sheets besides other documents, making the process intimidating. This session by Vikram Sivaraman, Country Head – India at Fintech will try to simplify these complex jargons and help founders gain an insight into better equity management.
All about NFT: The brand new way to monetise your creations
From cricketers and fashion designers to Bollywood actors, everyone seems to be jumping on the NFT (non-fungible tokens) bandwagon to monetise creations. NFTs have become a buzzword of late, particularly in creative and gaming communities. What exactly is NFT, why is it shaking up the music and art world and how can you monetise your business with it? Tune into this session as Sai Krishna VK, Founder, and Raj Shamani, Founder, Shamani Industries, Digital Content Creator and Investor guide India’s creators on how to cash in on the chance and sell their wares on a host of local and international exchanges.
How to create relatable content that cuts through the noise
There are over three billion people active on social media today. Chances are high your customers are there. Research shows that interactions with your customers on social media can encourage them to purchase from you. Which means that if you’re not present on social media platforms, and your competitors are, then you’re at a disadvantage! Niharika NM, Digital Creator and Influencer BeYouNick will tell you how to create social media content that truly cuts through that noise in this session. The tips will help you get more people talking about your content and your business, increase awareness, engagement, and word of mouth referrals.
Growth 101: Lessons from scaling India's first crypto unicorn
Even amid regulatory uncertainty over cryptocurrency assets, India got its first crypto unicorn— — in 2021. The growth story of the startup is incredible given the fact that crypto exchanges in India have not had it easy. From developing and implementing a 7M framework, to launching an edtech platform DCX Learn, to introducing apps like CoinDCX Go to target mass adoption among beginner investors in crypto, how did CoinDCX get it right? Hear it from the strategist himself - Minal Thukral, Executive VP - Growth & Strategy, CoinDCX.
Startups: Learn to protect, secure, and maximise your innovations
Lock the stable doors before the horses bolt! It's a fiercely competitive business world and hence imperative for startups to protect their key intellectual property (IP) and innovations. Internet behemoth Google was barred from using the name Gmail (its email portal) in Germany for nearly a decade because German entrepreneur Daniel Giersch had already registered the ‘G-mail’ trademark (short for Giersch mail) in Germany way back in 2000. The issue was eventually resolved, but it took Google nine years to settle the matter. This incident just goes to show that IP issues can haunt anybody, irrespective of how big or small they are. This session by Dr Hemang Shah, India Engineering Lead (Startups, Innovation), Qualcomm Technology Licensing, will help entrepreneurs in building a strong IP protection strategy, understanding patents and technical innovations, copyrights and much more.
How to launch an American startup from India
Serial entrepreneur and business leader Stefan Nagey, Co-founder, Capbase will talk about democratising tech startups. He will guide entrepreneurs, students, and first-time founders on the route to launching a startup in non-domestic territories through his own experience at Capbase, which is spread across six time zones in three continents, including countries like the US, Canada and India.
Accelerate performance, time-to-market with Intel Software Solutions
Time-to-market (TTM) has become an increasingly discussed concept today. Startups are working at blazing speed right from ideation to MVP to launching the product and turning a unicorn! If your TTM is too long, competitors are likely to pull ahead of you and present an equivalent product/solution. We have curated a special workshop with Intel India and SimYog (accelerated by Intel India Startup Program) for founders to understand how they can leverage technology to ensure innovations reach consumers quickly. The session will be led by Ashok Chandavarkar, Director - Strategic Initiatives, Intel India, Lakshminarasimhan Ranganathan, Manager – Technical Consulting – Intel Software, Intel India, Dipanjan Gope, CEO, SimYog and Anant Devi, Co-founder, SimYog.
How we addressed conundrums in our rapidly growing startups
The life of a startup entrepreneur is filled with conundrums at every stage. Whether it is operations, team management, finances or tech — making the right decisions at the right time is absolutely necessary to tap on the right opportunities. But how can one solve the problems the right way? To delve deeper here, at TechSparks 2021 we have Ramkumar M Venkatesan, SVP, Engineering, Cashfree. He joined the company earlier in August this year and is responsible for scaling the engineering team to enable innovation and customer delight at Cashfree.
Cracking the digital marketing and influencer economy
Monk Entertainment - the team behind one of the fastest-growing influencer marketing agencies in India and behind the campaigns of brands like Nykaa Man, , Skillshare, , and will help you understand influencer marketing and build the correct strategy for your brand. The workshop will be led by Viraj Sheth, Co-founder & CEO, Monk Entertainment, and Aayush Tiwari, VP of Talent Management & Music Business, Monk Entertainment, who will explore the fundamentals of influencer marketing and provide you with strategies for ways to find influencers, work with them, run campaigns, measure your results and much more.
Building a partner-driven go-to-market strategy
You might have an amazing product but without a Go-to-Market (GTM) strategy to match you won’t get far. Gaurang Sinha, Director of Go-to-Market at Flock & Titan will answer a lot of doubts of founders or executives who are aiming to build a successful partner channel GTM strategy in his upcoming masterclass. How does an indirect model compare to a direct model, when do you engage in a partner strategy and when do you recruit, find or partner up with other parties to go to market together? For anyone looking to address such doubts, this workshop would be of great value.
Crafting a luxury chocolate brand from India
This masterclass by Vimal Sharma, Founder-Director & CEO, , is a ‘three-in-one’ playbook for entrepreneurs looking to build a luxury brand, a brand from India or a chocolate/confectionary brand. Vimal will aim to provide deep insights on creating a luxury brand in the country through his own journey, right from quality and craftsmanship of the offerings, analysing the target market to sustainability of the niche that you settle for.
Is my BIG idea big enough? Assessing market size, industry structure
At Sequoia India VP Aakash Kapoor’s session, founders will be able to understand how they should assess market size, its structure and more. The workshop will drive real-life examples of startup majors like Zomato, Razorpay, Amazon and Shopify to help founders do the right market sizing and figure out where to play today and to win over time.
Need to speed: Innovating with MongoDB
For most organisations across industries, their competitive differentiation is closely tied to the quality of applications they build, and how fast they innovate. MongoDB’s Solution Architects and technology experts—Mohit Bhargava and Nitin Mukheja—will take founders, developers and engineers through the latest technology trends and tools in building a strong database and much more.
For the learners of tomorrow, technology needs to evolve today
With the fourth industrial revolution fuelling industries with new age technologies such as AI, ML, cloud, automation, robotics and more, helping young minds of the country to adapt to these advancements at an early stage is the need of the hour. In this session, Manoj Kapoor, VP- Head Product Engineering and Product Management, Optum Global Solutions will deep dive further into the opportunities ahead and why it is important to evolve our technologies today.
The cohort-based insights hiding in plain sight
A lot of new founders might not be well aware about tracking cohorts and its importance in running a business. Cohort-driven analysis may seem a bit daunting at first, but with a few simple steps, you can become a master in no time. To gain more insights around this important tool, join this masterclass by Ankur Gattani, VP - Growth and Marketing, .
D2C supply-chain playbook for operation efficiency
Experts believe that omnichannel and D2C commerce will be a difficult puzzle to solve for the Indian ecommerce companies as the segment is riddled with many tech complexities. This session by Prateek Mahajan, Director, Unicommerce will help stakeholders of ecommerce businesses to enhance their understanding of the D2C space and execute key supply chain strategies to increase profitability and productivity of their services.
All this and more only at TechSparks 2021 - click here to register
Edited by Sanhati Banerjee