Paresh Masade, an alumnus of NITIE (National Institute of Industrial Engineering), Mumbai is a mechanical engineer and a coder by passion. He has developed an incredible knack of bringing out the best in everyone around him. He is the Founder and Managing Director of Vaave, a one-stop solution for all alumni networking needs.
Q. How did the idea of establishing a Start-up come about?
From an experience of trying to raise funds and connect the alumni for my school in a backward district of Adilabad, I realized that strong alumni networks have the potential to solve all the quality and infrastructure problems rampant in the education sector. With the vision to empower every school and college we built a one-stop SaaS platform for everything that is needed to manage an active alumni network, after interacting with hundreds of alumni members.
Q. What are the challenges that you faced when you set out to become an entrepreneur?
The idea being pretty new in Indian Education Sector, we had to educate the customers regarding the importance of alumni engagement and way it can create an impact. There were many who mentored us from time to time including Our Accelerator-Investor Utthishta and Shashi Chowdhary, Founder – Nagpur Angels / Former MD – Global Logic
We help educational institutions and corporates engage with their alumni by launching an exclusive LinkedIn like alumni network on our Software as a Service Platform.
Q. Studies show that 90 percent of Start-ups fail within five years. Can you share your experience on this parameter?
Most of the startups fail because they build something that no buyer is ready to buy, many times they start building something without speaking to customers and understanding what they want. Simple Advice – “Speak to customers, make something they want, not something you want”
Q. Where do you see in five years from now and what are the future plans?
We are growing very fast adding about 10 customers a month and we are expecting the similar growth in coming months. Our mission is to grow into a global leader in providing alumni networking services. Five years from now, we would emerge as global leaders in alumni engagement building a complete ecosystem that adds value to alumni networks.
