Indian colleges culture should be encouraged entrepreneurship By cultivating a strong alumni network and fostering innovation, said Sambhav Jain And Kush Taneja, ns founders teen-focused fintech startup fampe, Who
Won in The Best on Campus category at the Economic Times Startup Awards 2021. In an interview with ET’s Ashwin Manikandan, Taneja and Jain talk about their experience building a startup in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, pitching the biggest venture capitalists and how they inspired them to launch FamPay. Happened. Edited excerpt:

You founded FamPay when you were in final year at IIT-Roorkee. Was this always the plan?

Sambhav Jain: Kush and I have known each other since the first day of college. Right from our first internship, we knew we wanted to be associated with a startup. Even before FamPay, we were working on different ideas together. We worked together in our third year on a mess management app, which later became the official dining app of IIT Roorkee. By the last year, it was clear that we would not take any placements.

Kush Taneja: We were brainstorming about several problem areas across the board every day – whether it was ride sharing, food management, payments. At that time, we were never thinking of business proposals. For this it was just a brain storm.

How did you come up with the idea of ​​starting a fintech startup focused exclusively on teenagers?

sj: We saw peers and everyone was working hard for placements and that too the jobs they were not sure of – just to get attractive salary packages. We realized that for most teenagers or young adults, the idea of ​​money is a hindrance rather than a deterrent to greater aspirations. One might assume that IITs had the smartest kids, but the reality is that most schools and parents never taught us money or finances or how to think about it. The cost of learning something at an early age is much less than what it earns later. That was the idea behind the concept of a teen-centric banking solution, with payments as the first use case.

Katie: The concept was easily relatable to us, as we were taking cash from our parents three years ago. We got access to UPI through our bank accounts while in college. Even the idea that there was a class just two years younger than us that didn’t have this access was a stark one.

Earlier this year, you raised $38 million in a Series A round, one of the biggest ever in India. How was it going from pitching off campus to the biggest VC in town?

Katie: Before, when we were building products and got stuck, the instinct would be towards Google (laughs). But fintech is a different ball game in its complexity. We started talking to banks and other entrepreneurs. We at (fintech firm) Razorpay met our peers who helped us a lot. It was difficult, but one thing that helped us was following Y Combinator very closely. We relied heavily on their public resources even before we applied there.

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Your first big break was when you were accepted by Y Combinator for the 2019 batch. How was the experience?

sj: The moment YC happened, things started getting easier than in college. They helped us navigate through challenges, problem statements and obviously they come with their own network. They connected us with other founders and people also started taking us seriously.

Indian universities are known to be academically rigorous and grade oriented. What can be done to encourage more entrepreneurs to emerge from Indian campuses?

sj: In our time, IIT-Roorkee had a very good ecosystem and culture. What allowed us to really focus exclusively on building our idea in the last year, which helped us in a big way. He also invited various entrepreneurs and he was a huge inspiration. This is a fundamental problem in the education system where innovation is not encouraged as much as higher grades. Institutions should focus on how to encourage innovative ideas at appropriate grades.

Katie: One good thing is that the campus had an incubation center which would fund early stage startups. Support for promising ideas would be around Rs 20-25 lakh, but at such a level it was good enough. We also had a good alumni network, but we think institutions could probably make better use of these networks. Innovation is not only in technology, I think institutions do not encourage research.

How challenging was it to navigate through the COVID-19 pandemic?

sj: The impact of a pandemic is really hard to measure. There were pros and cons. Coming to the cons, we had a strong market in 2020. We were set to launch in partnership with coaching institutes, especially in cities like Kota. We obviously could not launch the product due to uncertainty. The second effect was that the children were no longer going out. Most of our use cases were cut. The third is that the word-of-mouth marketing and visibility of our cards has diminished. On the bright side, spending went online. However, we would have done better if not for the pandemic.

Building a fintech business in India is considered highly challenging due to evolving regulations and high competition. What were the challenges?

Katie: With banks and regulators, our learning has been that we have to be patient. Previously, we thought we needed to do everything at startup pace in a week or two. But we realized that we need to do a lot of talks with the banks. For example, at first we were a bit apprehensive about the concept of KYC, but when we saw the kind of frauds and the scale at which they are happening, we realized its importance.

sj: The irony is that there are challenges but the scope is immense. There is a lot of thought behind the rules and order that allows us to grow on such a scale.

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