Key takeaways from Growth Forum 2016

Veni Bansal

NEW DELHI, INDIA: Growth Forum 2016, the annual event organized by Cybermedia, Sify, and PC Quest saw a congregation of renowned international speakers, investors, founders and award winning serial entrepreneurs sharing their ideas with young startups on how innovation and technology can be used to grow business.

The day started with Saurabh Srivastav, the Padma Shri awardee, serial entrepreneur and angel investor, passionately talking about how failures should be looked at. "Profit is like gravity, you might not beat it for a while because it's gravity," said he adding that the underlying economy for business has to be perfect to grow and succeed.

Adding to that, Pradeep Gupta, the chairman of Cybermedia group and co-founder of the Indian Angel Network  said that the best ideas and products are not enough to win the game and reveals a secret, ''Do not step on each other's toes. Give sufficient space or else stringent layers will restrict your growth.''

Sandeep Majumdar, Chief of Operation, Sify Technology said, ''Startups are like teenagers, disrupting the industry and challenging everything." But the Darwinian theory of "survival of the fittest" is true for startups as well. He emphasized on the need for transparent working in favour of the customers.

Rajneesh Kapoor, President (India Ops) DMI, and ex-CTO MakeMy Trip spoke about the set of morals that go into the making of a good startup. He focused on the organizational structure and said that there should be a vertical division of people rather than a horizontal one. ''Data should freely flow in the organisation, it then creates a new energy,'' said he.

Also present at the event was, Kunwar Asheesh Saxena, co-founder of the RedDoorz. He elaborated on data driven organizations and said, ''Metrics is the pulse of business.''

David Wittenberg, the marketing guru and CEO of The Innovation Workgroup who conducted a workshop- 'Using innovation to earn 1000 crores', where he spoke about the importance of right marketing strategy for an item to flourish in the market. He elucidated that marketing is the only exposure that the customers will have and therefore, it needs to be the right one.

There were live tech demos and ideation sessions as well, where the young startups got an opportunity to present their ideas and solutions to industry veterans and investors and also got guidance ion implementation and growth further.

The day ended with a networking session, where young startups got the opportunity to meet the technology and marketing gurus, share their ideas and clear some of their doubts as well.