Federation of Startup Foundation hosts a Meet the Mentors program for young entrepreneurs

The StartFed mentor panel included several renowned names from the entrepreneur world such as Kallol Datta (former CMD of Andrew Yule), Taranjit Singh (founder of JIS Group), Aniruddha Lahiri (former president of TCG), Amit Ghose, Arup Roychowdhury (former chairman of NTPC), Indrajit Mookherjee (former MD of Praxair), Rana Som (former CMD of NMDC), Utpal Sengupta and Partha Bhattacharya (former CMD of Coal India).

Speaking on the program, chief mentor Kallol Datta said: ”We provide a 360 degree support for all those entrepreneurs, especially youngsters, who have ideas but do not really know how to execute them. We will help them with accounting, digital marketing, and even promotions, once our executive committee is convinced of the feasibility of the idea. Other than this, the program involves organising a B-plan competition, certifying the start-ups, and creating a mentorship pool for area specific knowledge. Providing a co-working space and incubators, providing capacity building training to developers, and also connecting the entrepreneurs with seed funds, angel investors and VCs will be part of the mentorship.”

Saurabh Suman, the face behind online payment app ‘Paydeck’ said:” Paydeck is basically an online application where one can use a credit card to pay even house rent or maintenance fees online without any hassle. It is basically for those people who have a credit card but are unable to use it in certain situations.”

Arnab Chaudhury of Uberanalytics said: "Our startup provides custom web analytics for large web businesses. Most of our peers provide only a specific type of analytics, while ours is designed to suit our client’s needs completely.”

Ronodip, from Rare Planet said: "We essentially visit all the villages and rural areas to collaborate with the artisans and create handicrafts and showpieces by painting on bottles and traditional earthen pots or kullars. The challenge is to keep the quality high such that they can even be sold at high end stores and malls and be at par with a world class object.”

Ankur Roy spoke on his startup named Trustbin, where he recycles ink cartridges at an extremely low price and even replaces cartridge parts in remote and rural areas.

Shankha and Tanushree, law graduates, spoke on their startup, named ‘Layman’s Lawyer’, which provides law services and online consultation at affordable charges.

Several other startup founders spoke on their business ideas ranging from drones to customised business cards and items.

Startfed is slated to host events in interior areas of Bengal, Odisha, Sikkim and the North East.

(Reporting by Tanushree Sen)