KOCHI: It has been nearly a month and a half since Anoop Ambika assumed charge as the chief executive officer of the Kerala Startup Mission (KSUM). In an interview with TNIE, he discusses the challenges he faces and the advantages of the Kerala startup ecosystem, which he needs to build on. Excerpts.
There is a perception gaining ground that, when Kerala began its startup journey, we made a mistake by pushing college students into the segment through the ‘Startup Village’. How do you look at it?
Before joining KSUM, I went to meet Saji sir (Saji Gopinath, vice-chancellor of Kerala University of Digital Sciences, Innovation And Technology, who served as KSUM CEO from 2017 to 2020). The first thing he told me was I may find many or some decisions made by KSUM in the past to be foolish. But the decisions and strategies made at that point in time were based on the needs or requirements of that period. After five or more years, it’s very easy to say, in hindsight, that the decisions were wrong.
What are your thoughts on Startup Village, because there was a huge hype surrounding it? (Startup Village, established in 2012, was taken over by KSUM in December 2015)
If you ask me what’s Kerala’s contribution to the country’s startup sector, my answer would be ‘Startup Village’. Several people came forward, co-created, made a lot of noise, and perhaps, a large number of them have flopped. But the impact it created for the rest of the nation was amazing. If we have 20,000 startups now, I would say it was the Startup Village that created the spark for the movement.
Don’t you think we focused too much on college students and those just out of college to create startups, which gave a feeling this was not a serious attempt?
Let me ask you, who else would have come forward? Even now, are there enough people quitting their jobs to set up startups? So we could create this only with the available raw material, and the available raw material was these youngsters. I would call that a ‘boot-strapping exercise’. A beginning. It was a movement, and the movement served its purpose.
But, somehow, there is a feeling we lost our way in the startup sector. Your comments:
I admit, that we have the problem of initial enthusiasm fizzling out in the later stages. This is a real issue. I think it’s more of a social issue. This is true of our entrepreneurs too. We are not extremely hungry for money. After earning a certain amount of money, our attitude is: ‘This is enough. We can live happily with this. Why should I take further headache?’ This has to change.
How can we change that?
We should convey the message that this is not a game of money alone. It’s a social transformation that every entrepreneur is doing. When we give jobs to 100 people, it will change the lives and families of 100 people. When that awareness comes, our approach will be to increase job creation from 100 to 1,000. There’s also another side. Society should respect these entrepreneurs, that the person gives employment to 100 or 5,000 people... that these are people who are also working for the betterment of society, and they are not exploiters.
Another criticism about the Kerala startup ecosystem is that startups go to other cities like Bengaluru, Chennai, Pune, and Hyderabad once they achieve a certain size.
The question is do we want to hold on to them? Should we insist that they stay here, sacrificing their growth prospects elsewhere? I would say no.
If we can create a suitable ecosystem here, the startups may continue in Kerala.
What we can strive to achieve is can be the most attractive hub in India to create a company and take it to a level of success. An affordable ecosystem where companies can be germinated and where the idea can be built to a scale in the most affordable and effective manner.
What are the biggest challenges you are going to address as KSUM CEO?
There is a tendency in our society to discourage those who try to do new or different things. I have seen people finding fault with everything people do. This is the basic approach as a society, starting with TV debates every evening. I can’t solve these problems. We can only celebrate successes, and create spaces like this (KSUM facility at Kalamassery), which are positive, and displays success stories, and the people who come here will get motivated.