Blog

If you are reading this, you’ll agree with me that over the last decade, India has become a formidable destination for startup innovation and value creation.

In the last 14 years, we, at YourStory, have been privileged to chronicle and catalyze many of these impactful journeys.

And as with any journey, there are learnings. These are some of my personal learnings – 

First, entrepreneurship does not follow a single growth pathway. Each one of us can choose entrepreneurship for different reasons. Each of us can have different strategies for solving the problems we are going after. And each one of us can choose our own definition of success while building our startups. 

Hence, definitions around entrepreneurship need to be more inclusive, and so the learnings need to reflect each persona and their goals.

Second, there are many turns and pit stops on this journey that often get missed out in the race for scale and glory. We have 14 years of these learnings from our data, our interviews with inspiring founders, our stories, and our events. We have tracked and observed, and been with startups every single day for the last 14 years. We’ve seen many failures and many successes closely. And, yes, we have been witness to our own mistakes and what could have been done better closely too 🙂

On this National Startup Day, we want to bring all of this back to you, our founder community. We are launching YourStory University, where PASSION meets PREPARATION. Where we will bring the ground learnings from closely chronicling and observing 1.2 lakh stories synthesized in the form of practical learnings you can use and leverage in your journey as you would deem fit. What are the core skills that have led to success and many times, challenges and failures? How do you learn and prepare for it as you navigate your journeys? These are learnings that you can keep going back and revisiting across your startup journey. 

And at YourStory University, we will bring outcome-based courses that can make the journey to entrepreneurship a bit easier to navigate. We are starting with courses in English and in Hindi and will over time, provide the learnings in other languages. Along with that, we will share benchmark reports, growth frameworks and case studies rooted in Indian entrepreneurship journey stories.

We are starting with our first course this January. We call it the Panchatantra of Entrepreneurship. These 5 skills we believe, are the most foundational skills that every entrepreneur, regardless of sector or stage gets tested with.

Through this 3 month course, we will bring toolkits for you to build your narrative and the best entrepreneurial minds that can shine the light on the underlying learnings.

On another note, we believe that for India to become a $5 trillion+ economy, entrepreneurs like all of us in every corner of the country are playing and will have to play a key role. We are deeply committed to help create and further help 5 million+ job creators across the country. It is something that we’ve lived by and believe in very deeply. Join us in this mission. 

Join our YourStory University today because you’ll agree with me that learning is an entrepreneur’s forever journey.