Walking on a heavenly road I'm going to lay down. I'm going to lay down. So why don't you have no need to share nothing while walking on a heavenly road. Our gracious Heavenly Father we thank you for the week that is going well so far. We thank you for your grace, mercy and love that continues to abide with us. We pray, Lord, as we spend some time reflecting on stewardship that you would speak to us and draw us closer to you because we pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen. So this evening I'd just like us to share, or I'd like to share my reflections on stewardship. So as many of you know, I've been talking about stewardship quite a bit this year, last year as the Stewardship Director. So I've had a chance to just reflect again on stewardship. And stewardship, the Cambridge Dictionary says is someone's stewardship of something is the way in which that person controls or organizes it. And of course in our Christian context we are controlling and organizing that which the Lord has given us. So we're going to dwell quite a bit today on a story that we're very familiar with, found in Matthew 25, 14 to 30. And we'll just look at really some thoughts that I have on stewardship so far, my own reflections on stewardship. And I encourage you as we go along to also reflect for yourself what does it mean to be a good steward or what really does stewardship mean to you personally? And our key text today is taken from Genesis 2 verse 15 and it says, the Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. That's really the whole essence of stewardship is that God has delegated to you and I. So the first reflection I have about stewardship is that stewardship is empowering. Wow, you know, as a manager or as even somebody who reports to the board, I know what it means to have authority delegated to me. And so what is amazing about God is that he trusts me to delegate to me the care of everything around me, the care of his earth, the care of my treasures, the care of my time and the care of my talent. And the thing about God that is amazing to me is that he just allows me to go about my duties. And he does not micromanage me. And you know, one of the things that we desire a lot as managers or even as employees or even as children sometimes, I've had my daughter say to me, mommy, you're micromanaging right now and God is not a micromanager. He has fully delegated to me. He trusts me. Stewardship is so empowering. I think sometimes when we present it, it seems like you have to do this, you have to do that, you have to do that, but I was just reflecting to say, my goodness, God has just said, you know, look, here is the garden, work it and take care of it. He does not tell me how to do it, when to do it, with which way to do it, with whom to do it. He just says, oh, Millicent, I trust you, go ahead and take care of that which I have given you. And apart from delegating, God has also invested in me.  You don't have the resources, but God has given us resource and He has invested in us and so we have no excuse. And this is when we come to now Matthew 25, 14 to 30. I'll just read it for our consideration. The Bible says in Matthew 25, 14 to 30, for the kingdom of heaven is like a man traveling to a far country, who called his own servants and delivered his goods to them. And to one, he gave five talents, to another two, and to another one, to each according to his own ability. And immediately he went on a journey. Then he who had received the five talents went and traded with them and made another five talents and likewise he who had received two gained two more also. But he who had received one went and dug it in the ground and hid his Lord's money. After a long time the Lord of those servants came and settled accounts with them. So he who had received five talents came and brought five other talents saying, Lord, you delivered to me five talents. Look, I have gained five more talents besides them. His Lord said to him, well done, good and faithful servant. You were faithful over a few things. I will make you ruler over many things. Enter into the joy of your Lord. Then he who had received the one talent came and said, Lord, you delivered me two talents. Look, I have gained two more talents beside them. His Lord said to him, well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a few things. I will make you ruler over many things. Enter into the joy of the Lord. Then he who had received the one talent came and said, Lord, I knew you to be a hard man reaping where you have not sown and gathering where you have not scattered seed. And I was afraid and went and hid your talent in the ground. Look, there you have what is yours. But the Lord answered and said to him, you wicked and lazy servant. You knew that I reap where I have not sown and gather where I have not scattered seed. So you ought to have deposited my money with the bankers. And at my coming I would have received back my own with interest. Therefore take the talent from him and give it to him who has ten talents. For to everyone who has more will be given and he will have abundance. But from him who does not have even what he has will be taken away and cast the unprofitable servant into the outer darkness. There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. So let's just look at some considerations. So while stewardship is empowering, we've been given resources. It has been delegated to us. God has made an investment. He says it is like a man going on an extended trip.  And what is also amazing is that one of the reflections actually is that God gives according to our ability. That God really is not looking at some people like, wow, you are, you can do so much and that is what he delegates to you. And that is what we also do in our places or even at home. We know who can handle what and we assign them accordingly. And therefore, we do not have to compare with anybody. I don't have to worry about what Joanne is doing or what Peter is doing or what Elder is doing. Every one of us has been given according to our ability. So one thing is for sure that stewardship, good stewardship, rejects laziness. Because the Bible says that right off in the message version, the first servant went to work and doubled his master's investment. He was given five, he came back with ten. The second one was given two, he came back with four. The last one was given one, he came back with nothing. So stewardship, good stewardship rejects laziness. And Psalms 50 verse 7 says, May the favor of the Lord our God rest on us. Establish the work of our hands. So stewardship is not so much about money as much as it is about work. Working with my talents, working with my time, working with my treasures. And the Bible talks, and I think it's a good text to read really in Proverbs chapter 6. Let me just go there. It's consider the ant, Proverbs chapter 6 verse 6 to 11, take a lesson from the ants. The new living translation says, new lazy bones, learn from their ways and become wise. So they have no prince or governor or ruler to make them work. Consider the ant, it works without supervision. Good stewardship, anytime you see jobs advertised to say, we are looking for people who can work without supervision. Is it me? Good stewardship requires that we don't only work, but we work without supervision. The ant, that little ant has no prince, it has no governor, it has no ruler to make them work. And labor hard all summer, gathering food for the winter. Stewardship has an element of saving, you know.  When will you wake up?  So stewardship in my reflection is actually requires and rejects laziness it requires. Another element, you know, that I see here is that stewardship requires accountability.  There's no, it doesn't matter how high you are.  You cannot expect that there will be no accountability. So many times we don't want to be asked. We don't want to be checked. But really the Bible is telling us that in the message translation, it's beautiful actually. It says the master was furious. He was upset with the servant who hid his one talent. And he said to him, that's a terrible way to live. It's criminal to live cautiously like that. If you knew I was after the best, why did you do less than the least? The least you could have done would have been to invest the sum with the bankers, where at least I would have gotten a little interest. So the master will come for an account. And that's my reflection. And the good thing about God, as I said, he's not a micromanager, he's not checking every quarter. And most of us, if we work in the typical environment, we're supposed to account every month. We close the books and we say what is happening, okay? Every quarter, if it's a publicly listed company, they're supposed to publish to their shareholders, the owners, what exactly has happened. But yet in the church, or yet myself personally, I don't really want God to ask me any questions. Is that really being a good steward? So my reflection is that stewardship requires accountability. And that accountability, really, the good thing about God is that he has provided clarity. One of the challenges at work is that sometimes there's no clarity of the expectations. God is clear. He's clear. He's very clear on what his expectations are. His expectations are that we return a tithe and we give an offering. And the tithe, he has clearly said, is 10% of your first fruit, of whatever it is that you earn, okay?  What a wonderful manager. I was thinking to myself, 10% really in Kenya today, the lowest is 30%. And it is not, it's not discretionary. But God is saying, please do this as a sign that you actually value that which I have given you. And sometimes I was reflecting to myself, we sing, we give thee but thine own, whatever the gift may be, all that we have is thine alone. A trust, oh Lord, from thee. Then I asked myself, really, am I behaving like a trustee? Do we know who? A trustee cannot take, the trustee is that manage funds, that manage my pension funds, cannot decide what to do with my funds. They have to check with me. I am the owner. A trust, oh Lord, from thee. It was so interesting as I was preparing, I saw this, the next verse, as we normally sing just the first verse, the next verse says, may we thy bounties thus, as stewards true receive, and gladly as thou blessest us to thee our fast fruits, gladly as he has blessed us to him our fast fruits give. And then the third verse actually says, to comfort and to bless, to find a balm for war, to tend the lone and fatherless is angels' work, to see what she requires and accountability, accountability to God and accountability to the community around us, that people around us can see angels below.  Do we want God to send angels from above? No. A good steward will actually be able to be angels down below. They're captive to release, to God the lost to bring, to teach the way of life and peace. It is a Christ-like thing, and we believe thy word, though dim our faith may be, whatever for thine we do, oh Lord, we do it unto thee. So again, stewardship really is a call to worship. And worship here is acknowledge that everything we have comes from God. And after we have realized that, then we are able to freely share it. So stewardship, as I've said, is empowering. I feel like, wow, if God can trust me, what can't I do? Stewardship rejects laziness. Stewardship requires accountability. Stewardship also kindles humility. Stewardship tames our ego, especially those of us who feel like, you know, we are all that. That's the way to say it. Our ego is the quality of, you know, taming of our ego and our humility is the quality of having a modest or low view of one's importance. Stewardship makes us really have to realize that we are not all that. And when we remember texts like Deutronomy 8, 18, the message version says, if you start thinking to yourselves, I did all this. And all by myself, I am rich. It's all mine. Well, think again. Remember that God, your God, gave you the strength to produce all this wealth so as to confirm the covenant that he promised to your ancestors as it is today. Stewardship kindles humility. And that is why I think God, God in his wisdom, said, you know, return to me 10% and then give an offering so that we could not, we could tame our egos. Others will be walking around like, you know, what can this world do without me? Really, the world can survive without me any day.  Matthew 6, 1, 4. It says, be especially careful when you are trying to be good so that you don't make a performance out of it. It might be a good theater, but the God who made you won't be applauding. When you do something for someone else, don't call attention to yourself. You've seen them in action. I'm sure. Play actors, I call them. Treat in prayer meeting and street corner alike as a stage. Acting compassionate as long as someone is watching. Stewardship kindles humility. It makes us modest. It makes us have a low view of ourselves. It makes us assist other people without calling attention to ourselves. This is true stewardship. It's really not about as much our money as much as how we act. Stewardship kindles humility and stewardship rejects greed. Humility leads to selflessness and rejection of greed. When you are humble and when you are in worship mode and when you recognize that all this is not yours, you are ready to share. And the Bible in Matthew chapter 6, verse 19 to 21 and 24, it says, Don't hold treasure down here where it gets eaten by moths and corroded by rust or worse, stolen by buglers. Stockpile treasure in heaven where it is safe from moth and rust and burglars. It's obvious, isn't it? The place where your treasure is, is the place you will most want to be and end up being verse 24. You can't worship two gods at once. Loving one god, you will end up hating the other. Adoration of one feeds contempt for the other. You can't worship God and money both. So stewardship rejects greed. If I'm a steward, if I'm returning that which is the Lord's, if I am sharing with those around me that are needy, it makes me less greedy. And God is not against us having, He's just against us. He did not make us, He's given us all the earth as it is. We saw in Genesis 2.15 that He said, you know, here it is. Just work it and take care of it. But then He has then given us instructions to make sure that our ego is tamed. And as if that's not enough, then when our ego is tamed, we reject greed. When we reject greed, it even makes us more, more humble. So I was thinking, my goodness, how can I make sure that I don't stockpile treasures here where people will come and take them? Or when I disappear from the face of the earth, how will I have a legacy that outlives me? Something that people will say, oh, my goodness. Wow, look at those stories of Dorcas. People cried and said, please, please, please, please, she has to wake up. She has done this for us. She has done this for us. Let them testify, as we have said earlier, that don't create a theater of the things that you're doing. People will talk about it. Code stewardship rejects. Code stewardship, God is good. It reduces stress. When Jesus says to them, he says, enter into the joy.  So good stewardship, as it is, it reduces stress. And when you share, it reduces stress. And when you remain connected to the box, in this case, God, you produce the fruit of the Spirit. The Bible says in Galatians 5, 22, 23, but the Holy Spirit produces this kind of fruit in our lives, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against these things. And interesting, in Matthew 6 as well, another lesson actually, Matthew 6 and Matthew 25 are good lessons, really, on stewardship. In Matthew 6, as the Lord is teaching the disciples the Sermon of the Mount, he actually goes on to tell them in 25 to 34, the New Living Translation, that is why I tell you not to worry. That's a good, when you're a good steward, it builds your faith because it's not easy when the government has taken 30% and then you have 10%, that's 40%. And your costs may be easily another 30%, it's 70%. And we want you to give freely from the 30%, it can be tight. You need faith. But the Bible, Jesus says, this is why I tell you not to worry about everyday life, whether you have enough food and drink, or enough clothes to wear, isn't life more than food and your body more than clothing? Look at the birds. And this is really the point, I mean, we need to look at the birds. If you look at the birds or you listen to the birds, you know, it's interesting. One preacher says, the birds have no worry. They wake up in the morning, they start making noise and they fly a little bit and poop, there's a worm and they pick it up. They are not worried. Look at the birds. They don't plant or harvest or store food in bands for your heavenly father feeds them. And aren't you, aren't I far more valuable to him than they are? Can all your worries add a single moment to your life? Can all my worries, see what she produces stress? Because the Lord can all my worries add a single moment to my life. Can it make me, and it is not easy, I can tell you. Because as you're growing your family, as you're growing your work, there's a tendency to be very anxious, you know? So the good book says, you know, be anxious for nothing. But with prayer and supplications, make all your wishes at once known to the Lord. That is actually the second highest highlighted text in the kingdom. It is people are so anxious, stewardship, good stewardship reduces anxiety. It reduces stress. You know, the Bible says in verse 28, and why worry about your clothing? Look at the lilies. My goodness. Look at the lilies. They look flawless. If there's a plant you should look at, even Google, because maybe you might not see so many in Nairobi, but just Google it and look at them and see how they grow. They don't work or make their clothing. Wow. And yet Solomon, Solomon, in all his glory, the richest man that ever lived, was not dressed as beautifully as they are.  It looks flawless. And if God cares so wonderfully for wild flowers, literally, that are here today and thrown into the fire tomorrow, He will certainly care for you. Why do you have so little faith? Why do I have so little faith, Melisandre? So don't worry about these things saying, what will we eat? If I am faith, if I return my time, if I share with these people who are needy, if there's a call for evangelism, what will we eat? What will we drink? What will we wear? These things dominate the thoughts of unbelievers. But your heavenly Father already knows all your needs. So I ask myself, hey, these things sometimes can dominate my thoughts. Am I really a believer? If I'm a good steward, really, I should have less stress. I should enter into the joy of the Lord. Seek the kingdom, and verse 33 now, seek ye first the kingdom of God. And all these things. His version says, seek the kingdom of God above all else, and live righteously. And He will give you everything. So seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness. And He will give me all these things. So don't worry, verse 34, about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring its own worries. Today's trouble is enough. So stewardship, it reduces stress. And as I was reading, I came across something so interesting. There's somebody who has written a book on kindness, the side effects of kindness. Can you believe it? Scientifically proven that kindness makes us happier. When we do something kind for someone else, we feel good, isn't it? Yeah, I see some people nodding their heads. When you do something kind for someone, you feel good. On a spiritual level, many people feel that this is because it is the right thing to do. And so we are tapping into something deep and profound inside us that says, this is who I am. Okay, the writer is called Dr. David Hamilton, you can Google him. On a biochemical level, interestingly, it is believed that the good feeling we get is due to elevated levels of brain's natural versions of morphine and heroine. I mean morphine, yeah. If you've ever reached that level of pain, you know what morphine can do for you. God forbid if any one of us knows what heroine can do for you. Which we know as endogenous opiates. They cause elevated levels of dopamine in the brain. And so we get a natural high, often referred to as helpers. So you don't need the heroine. You just need to be kind. Just do something nice for somebody. Good stewardship reduces stress. Kindness is also good for the heart. Acts of kindness are often accompanied by emotional warmth. Emotional warmth produces the hormone oxytocin. In the brain and throughout the body of recent interest is its significant role in the cardiovascular system. Oxytocin causes the release of a chemical called nitric oxide in blood vessels, which dilates that is expands the blood vessels. This reduces blood pressure. And therefore oxytocin is known as a cardio protective hormone because it protects the heart by lowering blood pressure. The key is that acts of kindness can produce oxytocin and therefore kindness can be said to be cardio protective. So when God is saying these things, you know, that don't hold it to yourself. You know, spread a little love, show some joy. He knows that it is good for us. It's good for our hearts. So holding, not being a good steward affects our hearts. And then we go and look for other ways to raise ourselves. And yet there is something called a helper's eye. Oh my goodness. And the best part for those of us who are aging, kindness laws aging. Aging on a biochemical level is a combination of many things. But two culprits at speed, the process are free radicals and inflammation, both of which result from making unhealthy lifestyle choices. But remarkable research now shows that this oxytocin that we talked about, that we produce through emotional warmth, reduces levels of these free radicals and inflammation in the cardiovascular system, and so slows aging at source. Incidentally, these two culprits also play a major role in heart disease. So this also another reason why kindness is good for the heart. There have also been suggestions in the scientific journals of the strong link between compassion and the activity of the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve, as well as regulating heart rate, also controls inflammation levels in the body. One study that used the Tibetan Buddhist lab in kindness, compassion, meditation, found that kindness and compassion did in fact reduce inflammation in the body. Most likely due to its facts on the vagus nerve. Kindness improves relationships. I mean that one, honestly, if anybody needs more elaboration of that, then there's a problem because definitely the kinder you are, the better relationships you have. This is one of the most obvious points the writer says. We all know that we like people who show us kindness. This is because kindness reduces the emotional distance between two people, and so we feel more bonded. It is something that is so strong in us that is actually a genetic thing. We are wired for kindness. The stronger the emotional bonds within groups, the greater were the chances of survival, and so kindness genes were etched into the human genome. Really, this is God. He made us already to be good stewards, not to hold, but to share. So today, when we are kind to each other, we feel a connection, and new relationships are forged, or existing ones are strengthened. And finally, kindness is contagious. When we are kind, we inspire others to be kind, and studies show that it actually creates a ripple effect that spreads outwards to our friend's friend to three degrees of separation. Just as a pebble creates waves when it is dropped in a pond, so acts of kindness ripple outwards, touching others, lives and inspiring kindness everywhere the wave goes. A study reported that an anonymous 28-year-old person walked into a clinic and donated a kidney. It set off a paid-forward type ripple effect where the spouses or other family members of recipients of a kidney donated one of theirs to someone else in need. The domino effect, as it was called in the New England Journal of Medicine report, spanned the length and breadth of the United States of America, where 10 people received a new kidney as a consequence of that anonymous donor. So kindness is contagious. The more we are kind, the more kindness we will see, and the more kindness we will cause. And this will just reduce, stewardship reduces stress. And finally, stewardship is rewarding, because we are all in it for rewards. Sometimes we are like, you know, you have said, bring it all in, and there will not be room enough. That's really not the essence of it. The reward that we will receive, some of it is in the land of the living. One thing is, one reward is diligence and discipline. So I know you are waiting for me to say money, no. Because remember we said stewardship is about work. And you cannot be effective in work unless you are diligent and disciplined. And not only diligent and disciplined in work, you cannot be faithful in your 10% and in your offering unless you are disciplined and diligent. Why don't you? It is not possible. So in the land of the living, good stewardship will make me tell it, because it will make me make a budget. It will make me consider.  With no ruler, with no king, I will sit down and write for myself and say, I have 10 bull. I need to give one here. I need two, three will be taken away. I'll be left with seven. I have to give one. Then what about my mother? What about my community? What about my church? Good stewardship will make me diligent and disciplined. And I've already said, well, that good stewardship improves relationships. Because it makes you kind. And when you are kind, wow, it makes us kind to others every day. And when we are kind, it just causes us to love others and we produce the fruit of the Holy Spirit. Stewardship, I've already said, it makes us joyous. It gives us less stress. You know, when you're sharing, you're happy, you're not greedy, you're not hoarding, you have less stress. Stewardship makes the church and the ministries in the church effective. At the very least, it reduces the number of announcements we have to make to give, give, give, give, give. Because everybody is doing what? Giving. So I think it reduces the stress of the ministers and it will make the ministries more effective. It will make us go to unreached lands. It will make us, you know, it will make the productions that we have even better. And people want to know more about Jesus. But most of all, most of all, really most, when it's all said and done, we will inherit the new earth. We will hear the Lord say, well done, good and faithful. We will hear the master say, it is not easy. When I'm sitting in the office and the numbers don't look like, they should look like, I'm very anxious. Because the meeting is going to say, what are you doing? You said you would do this. I keep telling my team in the office that you know when your child is not performing well in school and they call parent teachers meeting, you are there for every meeting.  You're being told, this child, you need to have remedial. You have to do this, you have to do that.  And you enjoy hearing from the teachers, this is a good child. And this is the reward of good stewardship. We will hear from our boss. We will hear from our master, well done, good and faithful servant. And we will enter his kingdom and receive eternal life. Ellen G. White says, those who accept the teachings of God's will, not to be wholly ignorant concerning the heavenly abode. And yet, I have not seen, no ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man that things which God had prepared for them that love him. Human language, she says, is inadequate to describe the reward of the righteous. We can't explain it. It will be known only to those who behold it. No finite mind can comprehend the glory of the paradise. So don't worry about a little additional income here and there. Just imagine that no eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived that which the Lord has prepared for us in the new earth. So it is my prayer today that each one of us will make your own consideration, your own reflections. And you will feel empowered, my goodness. You know, we say, there's so much about especially empowering women. Don't worry.  That's what the Bible says. His divine power has given us everything we need for this life that we are living.  And engage faithfully, diligently, disciplinely. Don't wait to be supervised. The master has delegated to us. He is not micromanaging. He has actually, it's like a man who gave, invested, and left. He's not there checking on you every 10 seconds. But he believes that you are capable, respond to that capability. Then become accountable. Become accountable. Just draw up your own scorecard and check for yourself. How am I doing? Really, when it's all said and done, will I hear the master say, we're a faithful servant? And be humble. Be humble. Even as we say, be humble, it's not easy to be humble. The only way to be humble is to reject greed. And the only way to reject greed is to live according to the guidance provided by God. And wow, if we do all these things, we will see our stress reduce. And one of these days, our Lord will bring us to a land that we have not imagined, we have not conceived. And no human utterance can describe. And he will call us to enter his kingdom. I pray that that will be our inheritance one of these days. Amen. Let us pray together. Our kind and loving Father in heaven, we thank you. We thank you for trusting us with management of this earth and investing in us. I pray, dear Lord, that we will feel empowered to do your work, that, Lord, we will work and reject laziness, that we will experience less stress as we are joyous, not greedy, as we share in that Father in heaven, one of these days, you will bring us to your kingdom. And we will hear the words we desire to hear well done, good and faithful servants. Forgive us in the days when we have not been faithful. Help us, Lord, to be like the servants who doubled at which you had given them. That one day when you come, we will present our talents, our treasures, our bodies, our temples, and everything that you have given to us that will bring glory and honor to your name. Who give us our sins, accept our prayer, and make us good stewards because we pray in Jesus' name. Amen.


We would like to start at the very beginning and that is how did you even think of starting a business incubator in IIT? The history of business incubation actually is interwind with the history of the school of IIT. So let me roll back a bit and tell you about the events that were happening then. As is well known we had a very strong department of computer science but many of us felt that the computer science research was primarily targeted internally and nobody was taking care of core research requirements in applied areas because computer has application in practically every field. The name information technology was coined well then and there is nothing specifically happening which would support the IIT research. So we had felt the need for an entity which will spearhead the applied research in the institute. When we are contemplating setting of a school of IIT we said that the school must also take certain initiatives which could be very valuable in activities which are considered critical and crucial going forward for the nation. One of them was distance education by which the IIT style education could be spread across to engineering colleges. And the other was to kindle the spirit of entrepreneurship. If you recall after the early 90's when the country embraced free market economy it was essential to unshackle the entrepreneurship spirit. Indians have always been good at it but if you notice that in this century the well generation mechanisms will be increasingly knowledge dependent and therefore to participate in this new knowledge economy we felt that entrepreneurship must grow in the area of IIT and the related fields. In fact when we were contemplating these notions we had a visit from Kamal Rekhi in early 1998 and when we exchanged our thoughts with him he appeared to be more keen on the business incubation idea than the idea of the school. Since he understood that both will go hand in hand he agreed to support the school. And while the academic curriculum was being set up for the school the senate and board had approved the establishment of the school we started working on the setting up of business incubation. The way business incubation has worked everywhere else mostly in the United States and Europe is that these incubators typically charge money for the facilities that they provide where an office space and the related experimental facilities are provided and the startup companies develop their products and start working on their early businesses from there. So that was the model that we had in mind when we started our thinking. So that will be consistent not a problem. You want to rewind the tape? So don't you say they do Fatmaar in the movie Tech 2 Stars or something like that. So which years are we talking about what was actually the time period? The actual IIT business incubator started working informally in 1999 and it was formalized in 2000. And the thinking about it started in late 97 when we are contemplating setting up the school of IIT and one of the two new initiatives that we are planning to be started in the school of IIT one was the distance education program and the other was business incubation. Since it was school of IIT we dubbed it as a pilot IIT business incubator. What we wanted to do was we wanted to capture the entrepreneurship spirit that we had seen in the West particularly in the Bay Area in United States where young talented technologies were building small technologies and products and actually creating huge value by providing solutions to problems that emerge newly in the internet era. And towards that end we said it would be nice if the talent pool within IIT itself could be enthused to take up entrepreneurship as an option rather than just taking jobs which is what most of the students were doing. Kamal Rekhi was the first supporter for the school approved of this idea very much and that is how we started planning for it. Could you tell us a bit more about the actual setting up because we have heard a lot of things about how it was in the physics department and actually okay the physics department came much later. We were wondering exactly what should be the modus operandi it was very obvious that we would seek business plans and technology plans from young startup companies and then we will evaluate those plans and we will admit people for the incubation. The model that we had in mind was that we will charge the incubating companies a certain sum of money on a monthly rental basis providing them with all the infrastructure and so on. We had worked out that the cost per company would be about 6 lakh rupees a year kind of thing including the initial infrastructure. A great impetus to this idea was received when there was a special event that was organized in 1998 TechFest, TechFest as you know is the most popular technical festival in the country and IIT Bombay students annually organized it. In that particular year a small group of enthusiastic students who wanted to capture the idea of entrepreneurship started an event called Eureka. In fact I have a small photograph of the team which we called the dream team I do not know whether your camera can capture this. This is the team of students led by Professor Chandorkar of electrical engineering department I also participated a little bit in that and this event Eureka turned out to be an extremely popular event where large number of business plans were submitted as a part of the competition. In fact one of the first two companies to start their activities in our business incubator was started by a student Roshan Desilva whose team had won actually an award in the first Eureka competition. So spread by this initiative we found out that the youngsters were capable of actually coming up with solid plants which were viable plants both in terms of technology development and in terms of business opportunities and we are encouraged by that. The school of IIT as you will know was started in the then computer science department annex which was in the maths department ground floor. The school was given a small space there it had 6 faculty cabins and we had only 3 faculty members then. So we decided to use 2 of the faculty cabins these were small dingy 10 by 10 rooms and we decided to convert them into business incubator companies. And when we asked for the suggestions plants and applications we are inundated with requests. I remember the first after the first filtering we still had about 10 companies which appeared to be sort of good proposals. Then curious happened then which forced us to change some of our actual operational plans for running the incubator. Remember what I said that we will we decided to charge the company is a certain fees for the infrastructure that we provided for the running expenses working out to be about 6 lakh rupees a year. We decided that we admitted companies will stay for one year after which time either we will review and permit them to stay some somewhat longer if they showed a chance of success or we will ask them to quit. And of course successful companies could quit earlier if they want. This model I thought was a reasonable model till I had a request from one of the 10 companies which we were evaluating the leader of that company said sir my father would like to meet you and I said fine so I agreed to meet with him. The next day when he came and he started showing the usual worry that the Indian middle class shows when the youngsters try something fancy in the family instead of taking up a solid job. So he says sir in car venture fail ho jayega to kya karengi. So I said well if they try for one year and if they fail after all they have B.Tech degree from IIT Bombay they can always get a good job. And the experience which they will gain in trying out this venture would be immensely valuable to them. So he says but it costs a lot of money so I said look 3 partners are pairing in and is it not possible for the families to arrange a loan for say 2 lakh rupees per person which will meet the expenses for a year. He peacefully said yes that is possible but what we are worried about is suppose the venture fails. I said as I said he will get a job. He said that's alright sir but if this young chap starts a job after failing and wasting one year and that too he starts with a loan of 2 lakh rupees on his head who will marry him. That shocked me actually. It told me for the first time that the social stigma associated with failure in India particularly in the Indian middle classes is very very significant. And I think that is one of the reasons why many youngsters are discouraged from taking rest with their life. Because the cost of failure in terms of the social stigma is too heavy while the cost of failure in terms of money alone may not be much. So I thought about this and I realized that the model of charging people will not work because the Indian startups particularly those which we select or otherwise have good plans and all they just can't start. So I went back to Kamal Rekhi and Nandan Nilekhani. Nandan was the other supporter of the school of IT and told them that I have a marriage problem. They could not first understand it. Both of them laughed at this when I recited the incidents and they asked me what do I propose to do. So I said I have a different proposal. I will not charge any money for the first year from the startup companies but instead I will hold a stake in that company. So let's say a 3% stake. I will hold stake in that company and hopefully when the company does well, okay, when they do a billion dollar IPO, I will get a lot of money. If they don't do well and fail, that's okay, that is participation. Both of them approved of the scheme wholeheartedly. The only hitch was that to start the incubator to give people real facilities, we needed real money. So what Nandan graciously did is out of his donation for the school of IT, he said you can use some set of substantial money for setting up the incubator and running it operationally in the initial period. So we decided to change the scheme because we are buttressed with this money. In fact, it is with that money that we set up the first set of equipment in those two rooms which we have got and the incubator started functioning formally in 1999 in that place. But in the ground floor of the maths department where we had these rooms, but it was very obvious to us that the facilities are very inadequate and we would like to incubate at least 10 companies at a time to matter somewhat. At that time, the new building of the school of IT was starting to get constructed and it was still a year, year and a half away. So we wanted to sustain this initiative because of the tremendous response that we got from people and therefore I circulated a request to all heads of the department then saying that the newly set school of IT is looking for temporary space to set up such incubator. Initially, of course, people were reluctant to give any spare space and then I said that look the infrastructure that will build including the air conditioned offices and the furniture and the computers, we will leave behind. And this enthused the physics department. The physics department head, Professor Puntam Becker then had a faculty meeting with some senior colleagues and said this is agreeable. So they gave us a lab where Professor Patel used to have his office and we converted that lab. Mr. Arvind Patel who was the project manager for the infrastructure development, spent a lot of time getting that facility up and running in less than 3 months time. And we had about 5 or 6 offices there. So that is what is remembered by the people as the incubator. Although the first incubator started in the computer science department in those 2 faculty cabins as I said but because that space was in the physics department it was visible to people, the incubator activities flourished there. In 2000 when the building of the school of IT was substantially completed we shifted the incubator to the offices that were constructed on the 4th floor for specifically for the business incubator. In fact the pilot incubator along with the distance education plan were inaugurated on the same day both Kamal Rekhi and Nandan Nilek were present and I think the inauguration happened at the hands of Professor MGK Menon, then Chairman of the Board of Governors. So that is the sort of early part of the infrastructure development. I also wanted to ask you about the various people who were involved in this because I am sure a lot of people must, I mean faculty and. The initial involvement of faculty was slightly in the background. So many faculty members will you know provide support advice and so on but by and large the initial plans came from start-ups which were created either by the students or students who had just passed out or were about to pass out but the major help we got you see when people make proposals, technology proposals we can evaluate whether there is any merit whether the technology can be developed or not. But business plans okay while myself, Professor Saada and several others were involved with the corporate world for quite some time and therefore we had some idea of whether the business plans would succeed or not we wanted waiting to be done. Additionally, we wanted some kind of mentoring to happen for the companies which were admitted to the incubator. Substantial help was received initially from the Indus Entrepreneurs Mumbai chapter. Thai had set up Mumbai chapter then they were chapter set up in Delhi and Bangalore also subsequently but the early chapter members of the Thai chapter notably Ashank Desai who set up Maastec founder and Harish Mehta who was one of the NASCOM founders and several other people helped us tremendously in the early days. So they would cross check our evaluation of the business plans, they would advise whether this plan will work or not, whom to admit and so on. As a matter of fact I remember a key incident when the first company to come in was the right half dot com Kashyap Deora's company and I had taken all these partners of that company to a dinner hosted by Mr. Kamath of ICICI bank in honor of all the visiting successful entrepreneurs from the Bay Area. So Laxwas Patil was there, I think Jagdish was there, Kamal Rekhi was there, Ashank was there, a lot of people I will try and see if I can locate that photograph. So in that meeting I formally handed over the first company for mentoring to the Thai Mumbai chapter and that was in a very crucial conglomeration of the banking sector led by Mr. Kamath himself incidentally ICICI, CIDB, State Bank all of them have shown great propensity over the years to support such incubation activities. So that was I think almost a hallmark event immediately thereafter Myzeus which was the second company by Roshan Disil was started. But if you look at the people who were involved directly the people involved were our own team myself Arvind Patil was there, Poynibat who is currently with Sine had made her first appearance there, the Thai chapter members as I said in the external world, a very key person whose involvement came through a very interesting episode which I would like to relate when I was examining one of the applicants, the application said that the applicants were from Pune, they were from Aluna and they said their advisor is one Dr. Lagu. Of course the person who came with that application did not know that I had known Lagu fairly well. It so happens that Dr. Lagu was our own student one of our favorite students in fact batch of 78 subsequently went to industry finished his PhD and came back it actually was a faculty member in IIT he was our colleague in electrical engineering department for some time and then he had gone to Pune to set up his own company mostly in digital signal processing so without telling that Aluna say anything about this that student I just told him that I want to meet your technical advisor. So we promptly set up a meeting and Dr. Lagu came from Pune all the way so I asked him sarcastically so what is happening to your company he says no specific the company is doing all right but there is nothing new happening nothing exciting happening and managers are able to run it so this I thought was a very interesting thing and I always wanted to promote and support entrepreneurship so I thought I will advise them. So I made an offer why do you want to advise only one company we are going to have 5, 10, 15 companies in incubator would you not like to advise them and he said how I said become an advisor to us and in fact you use this approach to spread the spirit of entrepreneurship in the campus so he thought about it because his wife has been working for an NGO and Pune and she and daughter refused to shift from Pune but it was very nice of him to have agreed to spend a week here except for the weekend when he would go back for 4 days he would be the adjunct professor in the electrical engineering department adjunct professor of entrepreneurship and for one day a week he would advise the incubator and of course these two activities were complementary. These coming here helped us tremendously because with his experience of the real world he could actually point out realistic flaws in the not only in the plans but when the companies were incubating he could advise them constantly on course correction he could connect them network with other VCs and other people and so on. So as a matter of fact practically it was he who was taking all the major decisions and running the incubator in the early days after he joined us. Without Tressa Lagu I do not see how the incubator could have succeeded to the level that it has succeeded so well today. He also suggested modification to our plans remember I said that will not charge anybody anything but will have a 3% undiluted equity perpetually he pointed out that any undiluted equity will not be liked by venture capitalists they would like to dilute your equity when they put in money. So he came up with a suggestion saying that suppose we hold 3% equity why not we do the following that if the company gets first round of funding we discharge 1% of our equity along with that money. If the company later gets second round of funding we discharge 1% more and we retain 1% for a good chance later after the company has done an IPO and so on. And this appeared more sensible this appeared more realistic I again consulted Kamal and Nandan and Nandan said Nandan liked this idea very much Nandan said that by keeping 3% all with yourself you are being greedy for some future wealth generation. However that's not the point even VCs who put in the first round of funding try to exit when the second round comes. So the idea is that you should also have some cash flow for the incubator on a perpetual basis. So this idea got endorsed and we started operating like that subsequently. Did you have any specific policy measures as such because you were admitting only IIT people connected to IIT and things like that? Yes and no we did not have any policy not to admit others at that time. Our policy merely said that any startup company which has a proposal dependent upon technology development would be considered on the merits. One of the questions that we used to ask any company wanting to join the incubator is why is it that you must be incubated in IIT Bombay only? What is it that you will get here which you will not get anywhere else? That means tell us two good reasons why your company should be incubated in IIT. So you will notice that while business plans could also be and in fact there have been many good business plans which are built around services okay. Our policy implicitly discourage that because services could be built anywhere in the world you don't have to incubate in IIT Bombay. More specifically we wanted to exploit the research potential of our labs our faculty expertise and of the work that was being done by students to be converted there. There was one more reason in the early days the incubator was not a formal entity it was still operating as part of IIT Bombay. The stock option that I mentioned that will hold 3% stock technically IIT Bombay could not hold stock because we are not permitted by the government of India to invest in any speculative instruments stocks are considered speculative. So IIT Bombay as a matter of fact even when it receives donations in the form of stock the stock must be discharged almost immediately and converted into money because we are not permitted to hold long term or make investment. As a result this 3% was hypothetical okay. There was no paper agreement that we could sign because we did not have a formal entity status there. What was then the arrangement? The arrangement was essentially an understanding between the startup company and the people in the school of IIT who run the incubator myself Lagoon which means it was more a matter of faith not a matter of legal agreement. And you would agree that people are far more comfortable on such matters of trust when they are dealing with persons whom they already know. So it is perhaps this reason more than anything else why almost all the early incubating companies in the incubator turned out to have a strong alumni participation because alumni of the institute were expected to go by the promises that they make. And I am very proud to recall that the first company Roshan De Silva's company Myzeuse when they left the incubator subsequently he built a very large business in Middle East and that is a different business altogether. But recently when he met me he remembered that promise made and he said that sir while I am not working on Myzeuse anymore but Myzeuse is operating in India and I would be very glad to make a contribution back to the institute as I had promised. The second company the right half dot com company which Kashyap Deva started that company was taken over by purpleyogi.com of United States which was set up by Rakesh Mathur and when Kashyap Deva told him about this condition Rakesh called us one day from US and said sir I understand and appreciate the promise made by this company. So I am giving the equivalent shares as donation to IIT Bombay Heritage Fund for the utilization in IIT. So you see our trust in people was vindictive it was proven to be correct. However going forward this could not be sustained on a larger scale we needed specific entity status to run these activities and this is what was then contemplated there were two changes that happened subsequently when Prasashok Mr took over as the director he while he appreciated this idea he says why are you limiting yourself only to IIT and my answer was that since the school of IIT is running the pilot business incubator we have expertise in dealing with technology plants of IIT companies. We have expertise also in understanding the business plants of IIT companies because that is what we deal with in our sponsored and consultancy projects and our corporate relations. The second reason was that these companies more or less required a low and fixed investment which was essentially as computers servers internet connection and so on as compared to a conventional engineering field for example if you were to set up a pilot plant in chemical the cost would be enormous and we would have no where we thought to support it specially given our way of charging that is 0 rupees for the first year and all facilities will be provided it was not 10M. However it did make eminent sense for the institute to run an incubator which will not say this field or that field because entrepreneurship is necessary in each and every field so consequently the institute whole lot of thinking started on building a general incubator of the kind that was envisaged here to expand further. A great thought leader and a colleague of ours process Surin Narayan who was the dean of research and development then as dean RND he promulgated whole lot of process to set up an entity and Professor Lagu of course helped a lot in that the idea was either we set up a section 25 company which is not for profit company or we set up a society we finally chose a society to be set up. So the society for innovation and entrepreneurship called sign was finally set up this society is a separate entity therefore it can hold stock in companies. So there is no more hypothetical ownership is a practical ownership now Secondly the society is governed by a board which has a large representation of IIT Bombay faculty dean RND is on the board the director is on the board and there are 3 or 4 faculty members on the board. The first chairman of the board was Ashank Desai himself. In fact I think you should collect more information about science functioning from the sign itself because it has a history of its own but with the establishment of sign we became a formal IIT business incubator and in the early days some of the work that was done helped us tremendously to become probably the leading incubator in the country this was in terms of the processes which I was telling you as Professor Lagu was setting up and it was also in terms of our experience that we get what must be done what must not be done how should you run it how should you encourage people etc. I remember one more incident when the government of India decided to plan to extend support for starting up such entrepreneurship activity they invited proposals from various IITs to provide grant and they asked for the kind of model that they were supporting. Professor Lagu represented IIT Bombay with a plan more or less on the lines of how we were running our incubator and I am glad to share this that the ministry found IIT Bombay's plan to be the best plan and in fact they suggested to all other institutions whether they would like to modify some of their plans on the lines of what IIT Bombay had suggested. So this was an acknowledgement that what we had learned and applied turned out to be indeed good in the eyes of many others. The ministry of science and technology has been supporting the sign initiative for quite some time they give money in the form of soft loan nowadays therefore we are able to even provide financial help to start up company. So not only we don't charge we do hold stock of course but we also provide soft loan which could be converted into either shares or could be paid back and this has encouraged the entrepreneurship activity further. You said that you got funds from Kamal Reiki and they were setting it up but what about the actual venture capitalists? Kamal Reiki gave funds for the school of IIT almost all his funds we utilized in building the school of IIT infrastructure. For the incubator the funds were used from the donation that Nandan gave but Kamal remained the central theme behind this. Kamal and Nandan have been supporting it at each stage. You talk of venture capitalists so how do you attract venture capitalists to such a startup which is a fidgeting body the youngsters are just coming up and so on. There is another curious incident that happened we said the first company that is rightoff.com has some maturity in terms of its product prototype and so on that they could go to the ventures but none of us had an idea of what kind of questions venture capitalists asked whether our people were ready to answer those questions or not. So Rakesh Mathur got interested in funding that company but he said let us go through a process. So a committee was appointed to evaluate their proposal for funding. This committee comprised Nandan Dilakini, Rakesh Mathur and myself and we met in I think Oberoi hotel in one room where this team made a presentation. I believe it was one of its kind at that time in the country so some press people got wind of it and one press representative was also there in that meeting and that person was asked that she should just be an observer. She should not interject anything because it is a formal affair. So they made a presentation it was a very serious presentation very serious questions were asked and so on and Rakesh Mathur asked them so how much money do we need or something like that and they said you know they would require about a crore of rupees or whatever and he says why should you need crore rupees some haggling they said all right 40 lakh should be good enough some such numbers were talked about and then after they left Rakesh said that I would like to pick up a 20% stake in this to help them and let us decide the company's valuation at certain value. Then the person from the press at that time interjected and asked that but how did you come to this valuation this is a very crucial question just to tell you how things happen is that whenever a company goes to VC venture capital is for funding they will actually evaluate the company so what is the value of the product what is the value of the business plan what are the chances of their revenue how much value are they will do themselves this valuation is done on the basis that supports the company later on does an initial public offering and shares go to the market what is the market capitalization that those shares will fetch that is the final value now that value at the time when they go to the market 2 years later could be completely different you have to anticipate that value and evaluate that company today and that is called the current valuation and this valuation is done on very many set parameters and so on and what that lady was shagging to find out that we were not discussing those parameters at all so Nandan told her a very key point I think he made he says that look we have been doing this business Rakesh and I have been doing this Phatak is aware of these things and most probably if we spend a week of very serious valuation this is exactly what we are likely to come out with because a lot of valuation is based on the gut feel this is what we are likely to come out with the reason we are not going through that process is that the purpose here is completely different this is the first of its kind happening in India okay we have gone through all the formal notions they have been made to make a formal presentation they have done more of the valuation than us but the fact of life is none of the three people here are interested in making money out of this right he says the purpose of these three people coming together here is to give a significant boost to the entrepreneurship in this country particularly from technology startups not from establishment and he says that is the reason why so oh she says then then she understood that so she understood for example that what was being done is the need for cash flow was being estimated that need was being made that need was being converted into 20% funding by Rakesh Matul and Rakesh Matul was willing to pick up that Rakesh as you know is a successful entrepreneur when he set up jungly.com and has been a great spirited supporter of these activities here so that was our first VC funding round that we made for this but subsequently when Prasar Lagu particularly came in he came on the board immediately thereafter and we started training our startups on preparing for valuations we started exposing them to multiple VCs so VCs would come and give talks here and so on. Nowadays of course the VC community understands the value of the company incubating in IIT Bombay and I think that itself gives those companies a little extra valuation when they go to the VC. Any bottlenecks any difficulties in the whole process roadblocks? I mean the only roadblock was the early non-availability of infrastructure and so on which we could as came through but I'm very glad and almost proud to say that IIT Bombay gives an environment where absolutely nothing came in the way absolutely nothing came in the way firstly we are not using government money the money being used was donated by someone secondly there is a great ethos of experimentation that always existed any faculty member wanting to do something new was actually if not actively encouraged it was never discouraged so that helped secondly a whole lot of faculty members on the campus and students were looking at this new experiment with great amount of curiosity with great amount of expectation and that helped a lot I had conducted a series of seminars to appraise faculty members of what is being happening and so on there were some serious questions raised and those questions were important questions that if the startups are set up by the existing students then what happens to their academics and we now have very specific rules even those days for example if people had backlogs okay we would not encourage them to do that they must have had a brilliant academic career that is now a formal rule that if a student has to be a part of the startup company then the academic record must be blemishless. MIT follows a different principle if a student wants to startup he can or Stanford for example they can take a leave of absence go away for a year participate in that and come back if they wish to we have we do not have that model for students we have now in sign introduced that model for faculty members because one of the important priorities for sign today is to encourage commercialization of IIT research and to that extent we actively want our faculty members who have the entrepreneurial inkling in their mind and have good applied research if they wish to set up a company they can actually make an application as a matter of fact today you will find most of the sign companies incubating typically have a faculty member as a partner in that company so faculty members today in IIT can take a sabbatical leave for a year become CTOs in their own companies and contribute then if they wish they can leave but most of them come back to the faculty positions having handed over the mental of running that company to the CEO and other people so that model is working out very well. Also the fact that the business incubation center is in IIT how do you think that is how much difference do you think that makes from other business incubators how different is it you see if it is only a plain business incubator and has no technology component in it then the incubator can exist anywhere even there I would think that an incubator existing in an academic institution is a win-win situation because it gives an intellectual environment to the people who run the startup companies that intellectual environment in the early days is very vital where problems are getting solved minds have to be applied to the problem and where else can you see such a conglomeration of highly intelligent people who are willing to spare time to apply their mind to problem solution in particular if the startup companies have a technology product development then I believe they must exist either within or close by to an academic technical institution where the laboratories of that technical institution the faculty members doing research in that technical institution are readily available and accessible for solving problems which are invariably faced by the startup companies when they are trying to develop a product see all of them start with an idea they do not even have a prototype when they start developing prototype on one hand they require a development team but on the other hand there are hard technical problems that they face in particular if the idea itself is based on some cutting edge research which has happened recently either in that institution or elsewhere then to take it forward you require equally capable people who will solve any hard problems that may come in the way and while those problems can be solved anywhere in the world but the time that it will take elsewhere will be enormous I think it makes a lot of sense for such incubators particularly which have as a part of a crucial part of their plan development of a technology or development of a technology product the ideal place for the incubator to exist is within an academic institution so the BI in the IT school became sign yes and what do you see the future of sign as sign today is acknowledged and we are although we would with all humility we would like to state this but we are also very proud to say that sign is acknowledged as the best incubator in the country today and there are other incubating examples that are coming up IIT is all IIT is IISC IISC has a beautiful technology incubator IIMs have started doing that going forward my own dream is that incubating 8 or 10 or 15 companies at a time is not good enough for the size of the prospective entrepreneurs that this country has in IIT itself I envisage setting up of a of a much larger infrastructure and facility where we could incubate as many as 50 companies at one time okay simultaneously after these companies graduate there should be a place nearby in the city some kind of an S&T park where they could get out of incubator and face the real world but they would still get a technology environment in which they could set up their company and shop much like the infotec parks and so on that is for IIT Bombay that is good but that is not sufficient so I would expect at least 100 such incubators to be set up in 100 engineering institutions in the country at various places because if you ask me both the talent and the entrepreneurship spirit exists across every nook and corner of the country and there is no reason to believe that if young people from whether it is Bhuvaneshwar or Jharsugula or in in Lodhiana in Punjab or Jodhpur or Valodhara would not come up with some fantastic products and ideas just like people in IITs do as a matter of fact you will notice that there are many well-known engineering institutions in the country you take MS University Valodhara college of engineering Pune or the JNTU Hyderabad or there is so many every state has one or two colleges which has contributed a significant number of entrepreneurs to the society you know there they start up some business some product making in their own field whether it is electronics whether it is mechanical engineering etc etc how nice it would be if the cutting edge technology development could be made a theme of entrepreneurship in all such institutions so I am looking forward to 100 such incubating centers in the country and I am looking forward to a much larger facility in IIT itself which could incubate may be 50 companies we have taken some steps in that direction during the golden jubilee year we already have a commitment from none other than the well known industrialist Mr. Rahul Bajaj who was also our ex chairman of board of governors who has donated a million dollars to set up a innovation center we want to build a larger infrastructure around it hopefully sign will move into that over the next few years also sir you set up your influential in setting up something called the e-cell I would not take credit of setting up the e-cell but it has a very interesting history and it is the history is intrinsically interwind with the incubation activities so I will tell you how it came about remember I told you about the dream team which ran the event called Eureka which was a part of the tech fest it was soon realized the Eureka even continued by the way even today it continues but it was soon realized that making Eureka a part of tech fest actually restricts its importance in the sense that Eureka is about entrepreneurship whereas tech fest is about the huge challenges in technology events and competitions and so on so a group of students felt that also the model that we had in the first Eureka competition was various business plans were submitted and the competition was held along with the tech fest whereas if you see anywhere in the world a serious business plan competition undergoes several stages of evaluation so people go from one stage to the next stage the winning people at certain stage are given a chance to modify their proposals and send them and so on so we decided to go through that and the students body felt that it should be a separate organization which should support entrepreneurship in a general sense this caused the formation of e-cell Professor Lagu participated very enthusiastically in the early advice and support to this cell a great boost to the sale came when Vatvani foundation started their national entrepreneurship network in India NEN that incidentally is a very very important activity and is completely complementary to whatever little we have done and that activity has a potential to take the entrepreneurship to large number of centers in the country so this national entrepreneurship cell was set up in India with five founding institutions and these five founding institutions were selected by Vatvani foundation after a visit to more than 20 prospective candidates so all IITs were visited all irons were visited smaller institutes were visited and curiously IIT Bombay is the only IIT which was chosen as a founding IIM Amdabad is another founding institution there is a management institute in Mumbai there is an institute in Bangalore and Bit Spillani these were the five institutions of course this is not not to be little the efforts being done at other places but this was the founding group this group realized the great potential that e-cell has and in fact they tried to model e-cell like organizations in each of the founding institutions and elsewhere so e-cell has grown enormously in both the work that they do and the contributions that they make it is acknowledged by NEN and we have an ongoing funding relationship with NEN so NEN funding usually has a component to support e-cell activities so that is how it is today e-cell is a large organization by itself my own wish of course is that I would like to have a greater synergy between e-cell activities and tech-fest activities for the simple reason that when tech-fest is held every year in January, February there are 30,000 engineering students from all over the country who come here and I think is a great opportunity for IIT Bombay to inject the entrepreneurship spirit amongst as many of the 30,000 as is possible I personally feel that we are missing that opportunity by e-cell conducting its activities independent of tech-fest so if there is at least some kind of a coordination where in the tech-fest event there is a significant presence of e-cell through activities to encourage participation I think that would be useful.


Everybody, welcome back to our series of the Market Rebellion intro to TA to help people like me to understand technical analysis. This is CJ Rykel. He's from Market Rebellion, and he's graciously allowed us to use some of his time to go over some fundamentals. So, we just did the first episode where we talked about the basics of things going on, a lot of PowerPoint stuff, interesting, but this one we're going to get to more into the charts. So, CJ, take it away. Let's put rubber to the road. Thank you, Rob. So, what I wanted to go back or what I want to start it with is kind of candlesticks. Candlesticks are the building blocks of technical analysis. That's what you see on your chart. The minute you open it up, whether it's the Market Rebellion platform, trading view, finger swim, or whatever you're looking at. And just to understand how a candle body is created, say we have the opening of the candle. The beginning price of where it starts. Then if it trades down, it will create what is known as a wick. And if it trades up, it will do the same. But it depends on where the open of the day and where the closing price of the day is or were. That's what ultimately creates the candle body. Now, in this case, the candle close of the day was above the open. And so the candle body is formed green. However, if that was the inverse and the close of the day was below the open, then the candle would be colored red. And so we would have that negative momentum of how that was ultimately created. Now, there are some certain types of candles, five primary candles that I just want to make you guys aware of before we actually jump into the charts. And that is starting on the left here with the bullish engulfing candle. We also have the bearish engulfing candle. These are the most bullish and most bearish candles. They show that buyers or sellers are willing to step in and mass and truly move the price up or down. Now, the second most bullish candle we have is known as a hammer candle. It kind of looks like a green hammer. And it's created by buyers who have essentially bought the price up and created that wick. And so what you need to understand is that the momentum is finishing that candle up. And so that usually follows with a couple more bullish candles after a hammer candle. The third one we have is then just the normal bullish. That's pretty neutral. Then we have the other neutral one, the doji candle, which kind of looks like a spinning top as well. And that one is going to be most significant when at either the top of an uptrend or the bottom of a downtrend because it sometimes symbolizes indecision on behalf of the market participants and might lead to a potential reversal. The final one that I'll go over is the least bullish. That is a shooting star candle in which it's just the opposite of the green hammer. We traded all the way up. However, the bulls were not that strong enough and price traded down and momentum finished the day going down. And so sometimes we'll usually see price decline after a candle body closes in that shape. But without further ado, I want to get into some actual charts and do this live with you guys because I think it'll be a much greater learning experience. But with that being said, let me share the charts. Yeah, let's do that. Everybody likes live. Everybody likes to see what's going on. So here we're looking at the Bitcoin daily chart. And something that is pretty significant that I've highlighted throughout this entire uptrend has been these bullish engulfing candles. Now, I just talked about a bullish engulfing candle being at the bottom of a downtrend. When we have a bullish engulfing candle at the bottom of a downtrend, kind of around this area as well, as well as right here, that kind of tells me and is in technical analysis theory that by pressure is stepping up. And it's something that you should probably pay attention to because it means people are willing to step in and buy that weakness and will likely continue the trend. So that's always been the important nature to kind of understand about bullish engulfing candles because they are most significant when at the bottom of a downtrend and the inverse is true as well. When we get kind of a bullish or a bearish engulfing candle at the top of an uptrend, that's very kind of a warning signal that we may reverse as well. So that's kind of just a bearer overview of candlesticks. What I want to mention now is another core piece of technical analysis, which is support and resistance levels. And so support and resistance levels are basically just two prices where kind of the range trades around. And so when I draw a support level or when you draw a support level, you want to pick a point in which the candle body has hit multiple times. Let me make this a little bit more white so you guys can see it better. But as you can see, we had a candle body hit here as well as here and here. So if you have about three solid hits or four solid hits over time, that's an area in which price has created support or resistance. So on the way up, like for instance, if we're going at it like right here, it would be considered resistance because we're trying to get up but we can't. However, on the way down, it would be considered support because after we break above resistance, theoretically, it then becomes support. So we'll backtast and likely go up. And I'd like to draw just a couple more lines to show you guys kind of the range that price is traded in. This would be a level as well since we have support hitting here on those candles as well as here and here. So as you can see that 55k level for Bitcoin, it's been a strong support level. And when we match it up with the technicals, we can see it even more pronounced. So that is kind of the basics of support and resistance. When it comes to actually acting on a trade and what gets me into a trade is when we have a flush break above a prior resistance level. So here, for instance, I wouldn't even, I mean, I know we're already over 61k but I wouldn't mind entering this level because it's a breakout above previous and historic resistance. And so any breakout above historic resistance to a new all-time high is typically a trade that I really like to enter and is a setup that I'd be very favorable to. Now, there's also something cool going on in this pattern that I haven't mentioned yet, which is known as a triangle formation. And in technical analysis, there are symmetrical triangles, ascending triangles, and descending triangles. And they are all continuation patterns of the existing trend. If you're in an uptrend and you kind of land at a symmetrical triangle, typically it's going to break to the upside and continue. This and what we're looking at here is an ascending triangle and I'll describe why. An ascending triangle consists of an upward sloping trend line like this where the trend creates a series of higher lows. So this is a higher low because it's higher than the previous here. And the same is true for this touch point and this touch point. And then when you have price getting rejected at a single resistance level, that makes the ascending triangle. And when you have roughly five touch points and you get closer to this apex, ascending triangles typically break to the upside 70% of the time when in the midst of an existing uptrend. So this is a trade insights or a trade setup that I was very favorable to because due to the fact that we're creating almost new all-time highs and are in that existing uptrend with the ascending triangle, this is a pretty nice area where I could place a bet that we would break to the upside. And the other thing that you can do with the ascending triangles is you measure the initial leg up so you would measure this distance. You'd measure this distance and then if you take that and extrapolate it to the breakout point, you could get a completion of the pattern, which would be a rough projection of about 78k. So we'll see if we continue to hit and fulfill that projection afterwards because it's been pretty spot on to the technicals thus far. Last thing I want to mention before I pass it back to Rob here is just has to do with the inverse of what we talked about. So I just talked about an ascending triangle in Bitcoin's formation, but I want to take you guys back in history to one of the most notorious descending triangles in all of Bitcoin's history. And I remember a lot of people around this time were saying 6k is the bottom, we're never going below 6k. And there were other people in the space who said, no, if we're doing this by a technical formation, this is a descending triangle and we have a 70% chance of breaking to the downside because we're already in a bear market. And so if we connect those higher lows, or excuse me, those lower highs, because this is a lower high, it's a high price relative and lower to the previous, and when you get a series of those, it creates the descending triangle in which 70% of the time, once you break that bottom support level, you're probably going to fall roughly that distance of the leg up. So that's an example of an ascending triangle and a descending triangle throughout Bitcoin's history. And also kind of an example of how you can kind of break the port lines and resistance lines to try to see where price is going to go next. Gotcha. Well, that was a lot of information and I was trying to absorb it all. So for you at home right now, watch this, watch that about two or three times and that'll make a little bit more sense. But here's the thing that I want to make mention of. First of all, well, let's go back real quick. CJ, you just showed us potentially Bitcoin to $78,000. I think that piqued everybody's interest, who is at home. Listen, I'm not one you're going to watch this, but today is April 13, 2021. It's about high noon and Bitcoin just hit that's all time high. So to go from 62,000 to 78,000, I think it was because we drew those lines. Let me take a look at where it was before where it could go. What are we talking about time frames? Let's just get that out of the way because technical analysis, it can't tell you essentially like the time frame. But for this one, how can we take a look at that? Or can it actually tell us the time frame? If we take a look at the other triangle and just go, well, it took this long. So it might take this long. That's a good question. And it's not always concrete. Sometimes, I guess if you were to look at the actual textbook definition of an ascending or a descending triangle, it would require five touch points on the one, two, three, four, five. But that's not always the case. Sometimes we'll actually break before we get to the apex of the triangle. We'll actually break either to the upside or the downside, sometimes only 50% or 70% through the actual apex. In terms of a time frame, this is kind of a rough estimation. I mean, it's generally no longer than the amount of time in which took to form the triangle. Typically, once you break out of this triangle, it'll be a pretty quick catalyst and sometimes a back test down before even going higher. But there isn't a concrete time frame. I would just say that it's usually shorter than what takes the entire time to form the triangle. Also, another thing touching on time frames is that I showed the weekly before, and I was just showing the daily. There are also the hourly and the four hour. In a very generalistic way, the longer the time frame is, the more likely that it will follow the technical analysis and will be more sound to the theory because more traders are looking at that chart than, say, the 15 minute or the 10 minute. And technical analysis is kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy in many ways because you have all of these traders looking at the same charts and they're all looking at the same levels. And when price hits a certain level, they decide to either get in or vice versa. So that just kind of proves the things that we've already talked about. So we talked about just what CJ said, self-fulfilling prophecy. If you can find it, that means somebody else can find it. And if two people could find it, that means 1,000 people can find it and 10,000 people. And before you know it, you've got a situation where you're like, I either got to sell, I got to buy, or I got to get the heck out of the way. So there's that. And then what CJ also said about the 70% rules on this one, technical analysis can't give you 100%, but it can get you more in the driver's seat to where things are going, could go, and potentially might be something bigger than what you think it is. So just take a look at that. So technical analysis, fundamental analysis, maybe a little sentiment analysis and get the best information, do your own research, and it makes a lot of sense. So CJ, thanks for following up for this second series. We appreciate it. And then we're going to continue on in our third series in just a bit. So thanks for stopping by. CJ, thanks so much. We'll hit you on the next one.