Nicholas Seet & Ashok Kamal – Sivi.com from The BusinessMakers on Vimeo.
VentureSpur 2013 startup SIVI and its co-founders, Ashok Kamal and Nicholas Seet, were featured in a recent episode of The BusinessMaker’s the online and radio program in Houston, Texas.
The long-running, popular interview show, hosted by Russ Capper, focused on the founders’ history as winners of the annual Rice Business Plan Competition, and on the company’s mission, which is to educate and qualify aspiring entrepreneurs.
From the interview:
Ashok: So we’ve packaged that sort of checklist of, you know, must do’s of knowledge into an engaging framework using, as Nick mentioned, some of the contemporary social technology tools and as we were measuring the pie, we realized that there’s more interest than ever in entrepreneurship. And good reason for it of course; you know, corporate job security is not what it once was and, you know, half of U.S. graduates are under employed or unemployed. So at the same time you have now a hundred and sixty-five million entrepreneurs between 18 and 35 around the world, there’s 400,000 students in the U.S. today taking classes on entrepreneurship in schools like Rice. That’s a 20X increase since 1985, so this is actually an industry that’s growing rapidly and, you know, we felt like it was the perfect time – the economic challenges of the traditional path plus the economic opportunities of entrepreneurship – for us to take some of the experience that we’ve accumulated, apply it in an engaging, you know, accessible, cost-effective way really create a game-changer.