It was a weekend with inspiring talks at Zorba Delhi. Talks led by successful entrepreneurs who’ve built their own companies from scratch. Students, to be entrepreneurs, investors; anyone in the business of learning about, or starting a new venture were present at the beautiful lawns on 20th Feb. The list of storytellers across these two days represents some of India’s most sought-after enterprises with collaborators across venture capitalists, incubators, knowledge institutions, social platforms, business groups, business dailies and technology companies.
The event was organized by SimplyHR, India’s leading HR consultancies based out Delhi. “With SimplyFest, we want to help pass on their wisdom to the next wave of innovators who have the potential to start the hottest startups of tomorrow,” says Rajneesh Singh, managing partner at Simply HR. The event invited a small community of individuals to encourage interactive sessions instead of one-sided monologues.
A specially crafted interactive boot camp had 16 hand-picked storytellers. 4 by 4 sessions focused at knowledge sharing through activity based interactions under the themes People, Communication, Money and Technology. It was initiated by Rajneesh Singh, Abhinav Rajput (Partner & Co-Founder, Beam & Words), Sahil Seth (Marketing Consultant) and Mukesh Marwah (Founder, PixelVJ).
Rajdeep Sardesai (Senior Journalist, India Today Group), Suchita Salwan (Founder & CEO, Little Black Book), Arvind Singhal (Chairman, Technopak Advisors Pvt. Ltd.), Shilpa Sharma (Co-founder, Jaypore) spoke on how brand and strategy needs to revolved around communication of a start-up. The session on cost management had speakers like Sudhir Rao (Founding Managing Partner, IndusAge Partners), Raghav Bahl (Founder, Quintillion Media & Network18), Rohit Sarin (Co-Founder, Client Associates) and Atul Jalota who interacted with the audience on how money needs to be managed while raising investments, how much equity to be diluted, etc. “Audience made the most out the sessions,” says Sahil.
“SimplyFest aims to be much more than just another startup conference. It intends to be an ongoing process of inspiration, spreading beyond the metros through SimplyTalks! A 2-Storyteller format designed especially for Tier 2 cities,” says Abhinav Rajput, a cofounder of SimplyFest. All this will be bound together by SimplyOnline, a community for entrepreneurs to stay connected as they write their success stories.
The session on culture and talent of a startup team was addressed by Avijit Das (Managing Director, Eveready), Sanjeev Agarwal (Co-Founder, Helion), Shilpi Singh (Executive Coach & Founder, Purple Tree) and Anil Sachdev (Founder & CEO, Soil) where the speakers focussed on hiring people to fit in the startup culture. The last session had innovators from technology. Anand Sinha (Founder & CEO, Pressplay), Varun Chawla (Co-Founder, 91springboard) and Saubhik Mandal (Co-Founder, SalesPanda) spoke about technological development in startups.
The talk show with Gul Panag and Shweta Tripathi lightened the mood for the evening and the Ballantine’s tasting session added to the fun! Brilliant performances from bands like Reaction 70, Big Bang Blues got the audience tapping their feet. The next edition of SimplyFest is in April 2016 in Pune. Stay Tuned to check out what they bring to the city.