You will often see news where founders from IITs end up starting startups but the reality is most of the startups and great projects aren’t from IITs. They come from general people with a strong hand on tech and use cases.
ie: chatwoot is built by a non IITian
ie 1: live chat is a company that copied chatwoot and built a business labeling it as in IIT
Turns out, chatwoot got the funding by proving that they have built something interesting
and an IITian just copied the code and prove that they can build and have the capability to deliver
Isn’t that cheating in business?
Yes it is but chatwoot has a license that can be copied by anyone and anyone can build a product on top of that. There is nothing wrong legally but labeling open source software with a layer of new brand “limechat” and raising funds is a bullsh*t.
If their investor gets to know, they will not be quite happy about this manipulation. So will their customers. Why would a customer would like to buy a premium product, if they can get a consultant to manage their open-source stack for way lesser cost.
In the last few years,
IITians have been often been seen in media doing amazing things which turned out to be shady things.
A list of companies that have affected a lot of people in a bad manner. They have also been involved in some of the shadiest work or taken credit for work that was actually done by someone else.
- Byjus (Learn from IITians)
- WhitehatJr (sells future that is sold showing IITians, actually taught by housewives having no exp in tech)
- Vedantu (teachers from IIT but sell poor courses)
- Mitron (built by a dev from Pakistan)
- limechat (built on chtwoot)
- Airlearn (acquired, build on free and open source canvas LMS and bigbluebutton)
How exactly to build trust in an IITian?
How exactly to build trust and reputation f you are from a 3rd tier college?
- Having experience
- Having metrics to prove
- Approaching investors at the right time (not at the time of funding winter or recession)
- Completing the whole cycle of funding(4 months, 60 actual meetings)
- Finding issues, and fixing in the pitch
- Making improves my and fixing
- Presenting the right team (some from IITians if investor cares about college)
- Measuring your efforts, taking feedback from good founders(who actually raised you are raising) | ie: for me, Mainak from ExploreX as we are B2B
- Build connections around successful founders and build relationships, help them, and they will help you back (meet them in events, founder events)
- Realizing if you really need funds or you have “FOMO of Funding”
Activities that many likely make you meet many founders
- Be on Podcast on trustworthy people (Keeps you in their mind)
- Case study on your success and visibility for it (Encourages founders to appreciate your success)
- Your success story in PR (Encourages founders and some time makes them feel jealous)
- Speaking at events
- Going to Events (just casual talk, never talk)
- Going to a house party (trustworthy)
Note: There are different types of groups that entrepreneurs visit. started may come to draper house but good founders many only come to big founders and decent-sized events.
But once the money is raised, they will be able
Note: All IITians are not bad but the way media and people have been portraying their awesomeness, they are really not that awesome. Many of them are associated with projects that were built by normal people and credit was taken by an IITian. This should change so more entrepreneurs come forwards from tier 2, and tier 3 colleges and build products that are useful than feeling inferior that “that aren’t from IIT, they can build tech”, “they aren’t from IIT, they can’t raise funds”.
