Serial entrepreneur Ravi Gururaj has on-boarded Bengaluru-division of the global community of budding startups, The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE). He was previously associated with Nasscom’s startup programme for nearly four years and has accelerated it to a great extent. He has been a mentor to numerous entrepreneurs, technology executives, and ecosystem evangelists under Nasscom.
Under his position at TiE Bangalore, Gururaj is all set to take the organisation onto different levels connecting it with early-stage ventures, non-tech startups, and self-sustaining ventures. He will be guiding the startups in such a way that these startups could easily sustain without the need of any external funding and still have an option of viable exit from the industry. He believes that TiE is yet to explore the startup space where the need for raising venture capital funds does not exist.
On his appointment at TiE, Gururaj commented,
The VC model is based on the home-run concept – zero or 100 (get no returns on the investment, or get a bumper investment),Even the government is looking at broader entrepreneurship – beyond tech.
Established back in 1999, TiE presently incorporates 22,000 members and 2,500 charter members across 61 chapters globally across 17 countries. The non-profit community focuses on mentoring, networking, education, incubating and funding young and potential startups. It further organizes programmes such as TiE Young Entrepreneurs (TYE) and Mentor Match in order to foster entrepreneurship globally.
Gururaj also strengthens the team and plans to extend the reach of TiE by including further various groups such as ventures in IoT (internet of things), education tech, and retail etc. He further added,
We will also focus on women entrepreneurs, for which we have co-opted into our board Anjana Vivek,founder of VentureBean Consulting, Sharda Balaji, founder of NovoJuris Legal and Bharati Jacob, managing partner, Seedfund. We will also look at deep tech areas by working with universities.
The latter takes over Naganand Doraswamy as president of TiE Bangalore and adds 12 new members to the governing body. Apart from Gururaj, Natarajan R, COO & CFO at RNT Capital Advisers will be heading as the secretary for TiE with Parag Dhol, MD of Inventus Capital Partners as the treasurer for the same.
