Startup Talks-4 years and 10,000 people community, we are just starting !

I read about a statistic which says, “If you are able to run your organization for 3 years, it is most likely to sustain for very long.”

For our first event we approached Kiran who runs Eat, Sleep, Drink Startups, along with Adi and Subhash, to take advice. We took their advice initially and in fact, Kiran even came down to attend an event just to encourage us. I guess we were lucky as they liked our positive attitude and what we were doing, since they like the ecosystem itself (They founded The August Fest later).

Our first event, where Satya Kalyan was the main speaker (160/2 founder then), went well. We were panicking a day before the event since there were no speakers and out of the blue Nisha from 160/2 called to inform me that Satya liked the format and that he would like to speak at our event. Bingo!

And since then, there was no looking back. We had a lot of buzz created around our community, we got covered in major media houses for one of our events and have done partner events with different organizations in Hyderabad since then.

We started adding wonderful people to our team. Initially, we had Raghu and Prasad in the team. Slowly we added more awesome people as Divya, Vishal, Abhineeta, Keshava, Vinay and Yasha came on board in Hyderabad as volunteers for Startup Talks. Later joined Vini (who went on to start the same chapter in Bengaluru) and then came Anvesh and Aarthi supporting that chapter. Without the support of all the organizers/volunteers, we couldn’t have done a lot of meetups.

It has been 4 years now, we built 10,000+ community together in Hyderabad and Bengaluru — Organized 50 events, with 85+ speakers, had 12 organizers/volunteers till now and we believe that we are just getting starting. Till now, the project has just been a passion for all of us (and it will be the same going forward) but we are structuring it better to spread it further, probably to more cities so it lasts for several years to come.

We are just getting started, we will be helping more people at early stage of their startup journey. We have hundreds of people who supported us. We thank every one who helped us right from giving us venue, being a speaker, attending our event, supporting us in promotion to people who collaborated with us for events and those who suggested others to attend them. If we are talking about one of you, we thank you from the bottom of our hearts.

PS: If you have attended our meetup, please help us with your feedback so we can grow and help more people in a better way — https://goo.gl/forms/7Dcqqpv4wek1oFN43

PPS: Startup Talks is our passion project and all our organizers/volunteers either have their own Startups or work at startups. We need more support. If you would like to organize/volunteer or partner in any way, please reach out to us on meetup group or fill in the form above.

-Thanks to Neha Jha for editing :)

-Manoj Surya