[super student] Arvind Nedumaran: Persevering in entrepreneurship
The current state of entrepreneurship in India always amazes me. The school and college students have stepped ahead to redefine entrepreneurship, and that its more of determination and skill rather than age and experience.
Our super student today had a clear thought in his mind of starting young; and, with a few startups ideas under his belt, he has gained valuable experience to move ahead in life. Arvind Nedumaran is a second year engineering student from Rajalakshmi Engineering College, Chennai.
Early life and introduction to different programming languages
As Arvind describes, he has been familiar with computers from an early age. “Since about four. But I started really messing with them only when I was about 9. By then, I got an e-mail address and had used the web. I'd been fascinated by it all and wanted to know more,” he adds. His curiosity to learn more gradually took him towards the field of programming, the first exposure being HTML.
And then, as years folded away, he got acquired with Ubuntu, then came the interaction with C, Visual Basic among others. He adds here, “Beyond a certain point, learning languages is not the same anymore. But learning your first, second or even third language can be a life-changing experience, and I believe it has to be a result of nothing but your own curiosity.”
Maturing with age, he started developing ideas and also figured out means to materialize his visions. Later, he realized that his zeal to move and change things, to deliver a product, service or solution across the world, was called entrepreneurship.
Startups and the thrive to create a product
Arvind started off early, at an age when his counterparts were busy playing games, to which he adds, “Honestly, I wasn't the best of students academically, and I came to believe that the 'Magical Wonderland' that most people say you can unlock just by means of getting yourself a degree doesn't exist. I wanted to be part of something bigger than myself and entrepreneurship was my call.” When he did realize that entrepreneurship was his real call, he didn’t wait for anything.
Arvind started working on his first idea in December 2011, based on model of PaaS for artificial intelligence based applications. He wished to build a service that made it easy to build an application based on neural networks. The overall idea never took off but he made his first contacts in the startup scene.
Then, in May 2012, he along with his friend started working on Bunkydoo, a information access platform. Both of them faced trouble once they started working on the model. “We couldn't go through with Bunkydoo because my co-founder and I were located on the opposite sides of the world, and couldn't really get much done. We tried starting it over several times but it's still at bay."
In the midst of this journey, he got an invite to join a 3D-printing marketplace as the CTO. He took the opportunity, and along with his founder accelerated at Chinaccelerator in Dalian, China, for 3 months. But later, things started to fall apart between the co-founder.
Arvind returned back home and again started working on a project that had been on his mind for a long time, Mirrasys, a complete automated online management consulting service targeted at small and medium enterprises. This time his dad is playing the role of management consultant and he is working with him. “We're making good progress and are close to an MVP in about a couple of months from now."
Starting up early and what future holds for him
Arvind has plans to work exclusively for Mirrasys now. They will be launching their service in about 2 months from now. He adds, “Currently, my only plan is to build and launch Mirrasys. We're currently working towards implementing our service to offline clients, to validate our model."
Arvind may not have tasted success but never did he lose track of his dream. He continues to meet new people and learn from them. He concludes, “Starting up in your teens is actually not a lot different from starting up much later. The world actually took very less notice of my age or whether or not I had a degree. Starting up is definitely not a one-man-show, and it's not going to be a ride in the park. But that's what makes it all the more exciting."
Say hi to Arvind on Facebook.
