[super student] Sachin Bhat, who relishes fledging with startup ideas

For every aspiring entrepreneur or a student entrepreneur, college ceases to be a perfect playground to test his/her ideas. Unlike their batchmates they refuse to let go this valuable time at college. But that doesn’t mean they don’t have time for other activities; student entrepreneurs have their own leisure time.

Our Super Student today happens to be one such person who contributed to a bunch of startups during his college days and has deep interest in travelling and trekking. His startup Currys was selected at MIT Accelerating Information Technology Innovation Scholar (AITI) event at Mumbai this year.

How it all got started

Like any other tech aspirant of his age Sachin Bhat too drew inspiration from biographical movies such as ‘Pirates of Silicon Valley’. He also remarks that the penetrating effect of Facebook and Google in regular persons' life also inspired him. But it was not until he was in 12th standard that his inclination towards programming grew bigger and he started to dream of a career in the same. He shares “My college CS dept must have had a role to play in it, and yes, My brother and cousins used to be very tech savvy too. Must have been a cascading effect.”

India has been a breeding ground for numerous service ventures but now the trend of producing a quality product is catching up as well. With young minds like Sachin Bhat contributing their bit, he adds, “During my 2nd year I was working on few startup ideas and I could see that there was a lot of potential if real products were developed rather than just venturing into service startups.”

In the very first year of his stay at IITB he participated in Imagine cup (Microsoft's product development competition) with a team which had three 5th yr students. Working with them inspired and pushed Sachin towards coding ideas/startups.

The lure of startups

During his stay at IITB between 2nd and 3rd year he was associated with a startup: CStreet. It was involved with the idea of having a buying-selling model within each campuses. Sachin was responsible for the tech lead in the startup and was working on the frontend and backend managing data movement and user interaction.

During this period he also presented a bplan in Eureka - NGOCentral, a social venture. It won the best student bplan award and stood 4th overall.

But along the road, he kept the idea of NGOCentral aside, he shares “I stalled the plan as it felt it didn't have a huge potential out there. And from then, my inclination for capital entrepreneurship grew larger than a social one”.

Toying with startup ideas was not the only thing Sachin did during his college days. Career-wise he was inclined towards coding and had won a few competitions like Yahoo HackU! He promptly mentions that travelling has been favourite hobby and has been travelling for most of this summer.

MIT AITI and Currys

Right from his second year when he was working with different startup ideas, he preferred working on some idea of his own. Later his perseverance saw fruitful result, when he started Currys which was then selected into MIT AITI earlier this year.

Currys is a social hyperlocal micro-review aggregator app which lets a person tell what he feels not only about a place but different items in that place in an extremely user-friendly manner.The startup has five team members and has been in development stages over the last 3-4 months.

At Currys he handles more than just tech and has been experimental on the strategy and business end.

He chirps in, “I got drifted out of tech of late. In the last year, it has been more of travelling, adventure sports, health issues, business consulting etc., and had not coded for long till MIT AITI happened. I joined it with the very reason to get back the lost motivation.”

Sachin recently graduated out of college and has been contributing at Currys along with his job at OperaSolutions.

Say hi to Sachin on Facebook.

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