These students are scouting for startups in tier-2 cities of India for a BITS Pilani pitch-fest

Parth Gupta is doing a B. Tech in Manufacturing Engineering at BITS Pilani, one of India’s top tech universities. He is also the COO of Conquest, a student-run pitch-fest for startups which has been growing bigger by the year since its inception way back in 2004.

Gupta faces a problem few other event organizers run into. He often tries to negotiate the price for booking a banquet hall for a whole day and ends up having to convince the concierge at a premium hotel that “we are not random students playing a prank.”

A bigger problem Gupta faces is the sheer size of India. This edition of Conquest aims to reach the smallest of startups in tier-2 and tier-3 cities in collaboration with 30 other organizations. That takes a lot of logistics. “We aim to reach more than 200,000 entrepreneurs, especially in cities that do not have supportive startup ecosystems,” Gupta tells Tech in Asia.

(Disclosure: Tech in Asia is a media partner for Conquest. See our ethics page for more information)

“Every startup that registers gives us happiness”

As the operations head, the week begins for Gupta with digging out listings of meetups around the country. Then his team reaches out to each one of them for a collaboration. By Friday each week, they try to get on to 10 good meetups and send all their outreach materials to them.

“It is that common urge to increase our efficiency that I find satisfying,” says Gupta. “And every startup that registers gives us a happiness that does away with all the tired heat-struck evening meetings we have had till now.” All this of course on top of studies and other college activities.

Conquest is a part of the Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership (CEL) at BITS Pilani. Srikanth Garimella, doing M.Sc.(Tech) Information Systems, got involved with it right from when he joined BITS Pilani in 2013.

“Being a fresher, I was more or less involved in the grunt work. But I also had the good fortune of personally interacting with over 50 startups with trail-blazing ideas in my very first year of college. Organising the finale was a hectic task considering the fact that we were based in Pilani (at the edge of the Thar desert in western India). But it was a fulfilling experience. For a sophomore to meet the co-founders of SlideShare and Snapdeal was worth it,” he recounts to Tech in Asia.

Now in his third year, Garimella is leading the Conquest project, which has a team of 20 students handling everything, from marketing and logistics to raising funds. “I consider myself very lucky as I get to experiment, make mistakes, learn from them, all in the confines of a relatively forgiving environment. We do get a helping hand from our institute when required, but even our institute is proud of the fact that this is an event completely run by its students,” says Garimella.

For Dhairik Fuletra, whose job it is get sponsors for the event, it has given him a form of tinnitus, except that it’s a positive buzz. “One of the things I had to deal with was the large number of calls that I had to make. That was okay, but then there was also the callback. Every incoming call from an unknown number gets me excited with expectations of success,” says Fuletra.