Key takeaways from Gaurav Munjal, Ashish Hemrajani, and other insights from Day 4 of TechSparks 2021

Day 4 of TechSparks 2021 kicked off with a fireside chat featuring Unacademy's Gaurav Munjal as he spoke about his vision to revolutionise education in India.

The democratisation of creation and distribution channels will drive the growth of the creator economy in India in the coming years, he said, adding that Unacademy wants to ride to become the largest consumer brand in India by 2025.

Unacademy wants to create a playbook by tapping into consumer business through its test-preparation platform, while it wants to tap into the creator economy through Graphyas a business-to-business platform for bringing out cohort-based courses.

Here's all the other action from Day 4 of TechSparks 2021:

The future is decentralised

As a distributed ledger technology for executing and recording transactions in a transparent and secure manner, blockchain has been making the case for building a decentralised future.

Diving deep into this topic at YourStory's TechSparks 2021 were Sandeep Nailwal, Co-founder and COO, Polygon; Ganesh Swami, CEO, Covalent; Aniket Jindal, Co-founder, Biconomy; Illia Polosukhin, Co-founder, NEAR Protocol; and Neeraj Khandelwal, Co-founder and CTO, CoinDCX. The panel discussion was hosted by Raghu Mohan, CEO and Co-founder, Lumos Labs.

The panelists explained that for them, decentralisation represents freedom, immutability, self-ownership of identity, a new way of establishing trust and transparency, and a paradigm shift in the way humans organise, create and transfer value.

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Surviving the COVID-19 storm

At TechSparks 2021, Founder and CEO of BookMyShow Ashish Hemrajani explained how the pandemic brought out the operator in him after 20 years, pushing him to take charge of business metrics and drive some hard decisions.

The company had to enforce pay-cut and resize its teams to survive the pandemic, which had a massive impact on the entertainment and live events industry.

This also led BookMyShow to re-evaluate its business and add other streams of revenue. The company launched its pay-per-view video-on-demand (TVOD) in February 2021 which lets consumers pay for each movie they watch. With the global markets opening up, this will prove to be an important addition to BookMyShow’s core business of movie and event ticketing.

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Ashish Hemrajani reveals BookMyShow’s playbook on staying the course to steer out of the storm

Customer-centric approach to drive India growth

India is poised to disrupt existing solutions in the market as a result of changing mental models, which puts consumers at the centre of the business, said Saurabh Chandra, Managing Director at management consulting firm, The Boston Consulting Group(BCG), at TechSparks 2021.

According to him, the change in customer-centricity of businesses has also paved the way for Indian companies in the global paradigm. 

“We as a country are poised to disrupt many solutions in the market for betterment. This is the future on the markets side. On a global platform, many countries will want to partner with us on this journey or would want India to come and build these new solutions for them too,” said Saurabh.

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Toolkit for driving organisational change

“When you employ larger levers to shape an organisation, the impact can be profound, but be prepared for resistance,” said Rajesh Uppalapati, Vice President, Product Development, Consumer Group and Platforms, Intuit, at TechSparks 2021.

“Just as a physical lever influences distant objects — where if you move one end of the lever, it causes a change at the other end — levers can help you shape parts of an organisation where you don’t have direct visibility,” Rajesh said.

He listed six levers in the context of an organisation: mental models, goals and metrics, organisational structures, policies and rewards, communication channels, and resources.

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Driving next-gen employee experience

Swapnika Nag, who heads the People Function at Tata Cliq, said at TechSparks 2021, “The needs of today’s workforce have changed quite a bit. They're looking for experiences and engagement. That's very different from what was true a decade ago.

“Workforce needs are now evolving. Today, you're no longer looking at solving the ‘what’ for an employee; you're looking at solving the ‘why’ for an employee,” says Swapnika who also recommends asking the question, ‘Why is an employee looking for this?’ when solving for the why.

“Today’s workforce is looking for autonomy; employees are looking for purpose in whatever they do. And that's honestly how we have thought about a lot of policies,” she added.

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Unlimited paid leave and flexible notice periods: Swapnika Nag of Tata CLiQ on next-gen employee experiences

To log in to our virtual events platform and experience TechSparks 2021 with thousands of other startup-tech enthusiasts from around the world, join here. Don't forget to tag #TechSparks2021 when you share your experience, learnings and favourite moments from TechSparks 2021.

For a line-up of all the action-packed sessions at YourStory's flagship startup-tech conference, check out TechSparks 2021 website.