Blume fellowship to give tech students a jumpstart in entrepreneurship

Photo credit: Yogendra Vasupal told Tech in Asia, admitting he started chasing vanity metrics instead of focusing on the fundamentals of cash flow. Tech in Asia broke the sad story of the shutdown of seven-year-old Stayzilla, India’s largest homestay network, yesterday.

This adolescent ecosystem, currently in a correction phase after a funding extravaganza that led many astray, sorely needs good hands-on mentorship. Now, a new fellowship initiative aims to do just that.

Blume Ventures, an early stage VC firm based in Mumbai, is starting a fellowship program for third year grad students in partnership with Venturesity, a Bangalore-based startup specialized in the hackathon mode of discovering good tech talent.

We recognize that a lot of high quality talent does not have access to the startup ecosystem.

Venturesity is holding a hackathon to select 16 students from engineering colleges for the first batch of the Blume fellowship program, Venturesity CEO and co-founder Subhendu Panigrahi tells Tech in Asia. The chosen students will be attached to tech teams for software development in 16 Blume portfolio startups. Applications have just opened for it.

“We recognize that a lot of high quality talent does not have access to the startup ecosystem,” says Blume Ventures principal Avantika Vohra, who is anchoring the program. “This would also ensure we stay closely engaged with the next generation of Indian entrepreneurs.”

See: Why Stayzilla backed by Matrix and Nexus shut down. A founder’s rare admission

Indian brains

Tech students from India’s premier engineering colleges are choosing to stay back in India instead of making a beeline for the US like they did in the past. Indians run many of the world’s biggest tech companies, including Google, Microsoft, and Adobe. But many of today’s college grads want to be entrepreneurs or work with startups, where they can experiment and learn, instead of becoming cogs in the wheel of corporate jobs.

But it can take a few years after college to figure out the startup scene. What is it like to set your own agenda and align it with the needs of a fast-growing startup? How should you go about starting a company of your own? When should you take venture capital?

It is a new and experimental endeavor which we will look to iterate and improve.

Most of the top engineering colleges now have entrepreneurial cells to give students a window to the startup world. But their activities are too few and rarely hands-on. Fresh entrepreneurs have to jump in at the deep end and start thrashing about to learn the nuances of the startup world. They have little real world startup exposure in their college days. That’s the gap the Blume fellowship aims to close.

The three-month program, planned for the coming summer holiday season, will later be expanded, based on the experience of the first batch. “It is a new and experimental endeavor which we will look to iterate and improve next year,” says Avantika. “The core idea of the fellowship is not just to benefit Blume and our portfolio companies, but also support entrepreneurship in the ecosystem as a whole​.​”

See: Startups are nailing their own coffins. Here’s a way to escape that fate

Beyond internship

Each one of the students will be working with a different startup, but they will also get together and exchange notes in training meetups with Blume partners and startup mentors. It thus goes way beyond the scope of internships.