SV.CO Launches Dual Strategy to Fire up Student Startup Ecosystem

KOCHI:
The recently launched SV.CO, the digital makeover of Startup Village, will launch a free online course on all aspects of entrepreneurship on the Independence Day to bring the best startup industry practices to engineering students for building world class startups.
Students can register online at www.sv.co/startincollege for the free course that will be launched on August 15. The online registration will be absolutely free. Students in any year can take the course.
To create high quality startups from campuses, SV.CO has also designed a highly competitive and intensive six-month Silicon Valley Programme for ambitious students to build a real product and launch it to customers while in college.
“The Silicon Valley programme is quite ambitious in its contents and objectives. We will expect students enrolled in this programme to accomplish the objective of building a quality startup within 6 months,” said Sanjay Vijayakumar, Chiarman, Startup Village.
“The entire process from idea selection, creating a prototype and launching to early customers will be completed in six months with the last week of the programme being hosted in Silicon Valley,” he elaborated.
Being online allows the digital incubator to increase its capacity to provide online courses to five million students in 3,500 engineering colleges across the country on the skills required to set up an enterprise straight from colleges.
“It will give a huge impetus to student entrepreneurial ecosystem in India with its dual strategy of both quality and quantity,”  Vijayakumar said. “We want to inspire students to create startups which can be the next Google, Facebook and Apple from our college campuses.”
Billed as Phase 2 of Kochi-based Startup Village that was set up in 2012, the digital incubator was launched by Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan at Thiruvananthapuram on July 13.
“While #StartInCollege creates the mass awareness, the Silicon Valley programme helps bring the best startup industry practices to engineering students to build world class startups,” said Vijayakumar, who set up MobME, one of the first college startups in India.
The Silicon Valley course structure is different from the mainstream education in that only teams are accepted; there are no textbooks to learn from or any exams to write. SV.CO can take up to 100 Teams to Silicon Valley in its first year.
“In the world of internet, students don’t have to learn formulae by heart or write exams but can show real products build using real technology to real customers. A global exposure to Silicon Valley will tremendously enhance confidence of our youth that they can build truly global Indians companies, he pointed put.
Students in the conventional education system have only two options at graduation: either take a job or go for higher studies. But the students who do startups in colleges have six options. These are securing funding from investors, getting admission to accelerators like Startup Chile, getting acqui-hired by companies like Tally, becoming self-sustainable, landing a job in startups like Ola and Freecharge or securing admission in top foreign universities for a Masters’ degree.
The average salary of SV.CO students who created startups in college was Rs six lakhs while the highest was Rs 12 lakhs. This is higher than the average software job that pays Rs 3.5 lakhs a year. The average valuation of a student startup, which gets into an accelerator, is Rs one crore.
“It does not matter if you are from a village or a town; you need to have hunger to succeed, and we will help you learn to build your future and of the nation” Vijayakumar said, in a message to the aspiring student-entrepreneurs.