Google set to Launch Startup School In India (SSI)

US tech giant, Google has announced the launch of Start-up school India (SSI) as part of the google for start-ups initiative.

With this platform, Google intends to bring investors together as well as successful entrepreneurs and programmers that own start-ups from the smaller cities. Google’s idea for creating the start-up school India is for the technology company to be able to reach out to more start-ups in India.

It aims to reach at least 10,000 start-ups with this program. The start-up school India (SSI) is said to be a nine-week program that will be delivered virtually. The program will feature fireside chats between Google leaders and trailblazing collaborations from across start-up ecosystems spanning biotech, D2C, B2B, and B2C e-commerce, language and social media and networking, job search, and many more.

Registration for Tekedia Mini-MBA edition 9 (Sep 12- Dec 3 2022) has started. Register here. Cost is N60,000 or $140 for the 12-week program.

Subjects covered within the nine-week virtual program would include fintech, social media and networking, job search, language, and business-to-consumer e-commerce. Other topics that would be covered in the curriculum’s instructional modules would be, an effective product strategy, user acquisition, product user value, and designing apps for the next billion users in the market like India.

In a blog post released by Google, it disclosed that the program is aimed at early-stage founders with a minimum visible product, which provides the flexibility of a virtual curriculum that allows attendees to pick and choose the modules they’d like to tune in for.

Entrepreneurs will also have the opportunity to learn from conversations about essential factors like what makes a founder successful, formalizing, recruiting, and the like. One may be wondering why Google will decide to set up a start-up school in India since the country is the 3rd largest start-up ecosystem in the world.

Also, knowing full well that the country has created 14 unicorns in the first half of 2022 as they seem to be doing exceptionally well and hence do not need the start-up school India (SSI).

Well, Google has disclosed that despite the large number of start-ups in India, 90 percent of these start-ups during the first five years of function, experience certain significant issues, which include lack of leadership, inaccurate demand projections, inefficient feedback loans, uncontrolled financial burn. Also, lack of proper guidance and mentorship is one of the biggest problems that exist in the Indian start-up ecosystem.

This recent program recognizes these gaps and therefore saw the necessity for this initiative that will help to assemble obtained information into a structured curriculum and disperse it over a large geographic area.

The program is also aimed at start-ups that come from smaller cities in the country that are looking for some knowledge sharing that will be very helpful to them in their next stage.

Also early-stage founders with a minimum viable product, the program will provide the flexibility of a virtual curriculum and allow attendees to pick and choose the modules they’d like to tune in for.

Some start-up founders in India are already commending Google for this program, as they disclose that the Google start-up school India will provide an avenue to entrepreneurs to come out of their closets and look for opportunities.

Indeed the start-up school will assist so many tech founders in India to build their businesses, and with what they will be taught at the Google start-up school, these founders will be knowledgeable on the fundamentals so that they can build start-ups for the long term.