Abhishek Rungta

It hosted 500+ delegates, 30+ speakers, and eco-system partners to bring interesting conversations and learnings on a platform.

I had a great opportunity to engage in a fireside chat with Prashant Pitti of EaseMyTrip.com. We spoke about “Challenges and opportunities of bootstrapping a hyper scale business”. The discussion was quite engaging and fun. We touched upon several aspects and a few broad ideas that came out were:

1) Core business needs to be built and understood first before digitization. This allows one to build a meaningful business that sustains and makes profit. Hence transformation of an industry instead of disruption is a way to go for higher probability of success.

2) Gimmicks are short term. You need to be honest, create real value, and sustain for the long term to build a meaningful business. I loved the fact that Prashant used an in-house call center to create differentiated customer service.

3) You need to take big bets when you need to take them. However those bets can only be taken when you have your ears to the ground and you know how the earth below you is turning.

I also got an opportunity to facilitate the panel of Anne Prabhu and Sakshi Kapahi who led a panel on “Hiring top performing leaders”, which is a prerequisite of building a hyper growth business.

It was sheer joy working with Bimal Patwari, Alkesh Agarwal, Kamal Agarwala, Atul Gupta, Alok Patnia, Srish Agrawal, TAMEKA DHAR, Neha Agarwal TiE Kolkata and TiE Kolkata volunteer team in putting together the show.

I am also humbled to have played a small role in bringing together TiE Kolkata and STN network with help of Abhishek Modi, Bindu Subramaniam and the speakers from the STN network who took out time to visit Kolkata and experience + contribute to the event.