Great Companies: How did you get your idea or concept for the business?
Atanu Roy Chowdhury: In my previous professional experiences I observed that my technology delivery teams were spending upto 30% of their time interviewing pre-screened candidates. The candidate CVs met the Job Description in letter, but not in spirit. When I dug deeper I realized that the college curricula had not kept pace with technology tools in the market. Thereafter, candidates had very limited time to explore new technology tools, even if they knew it would improve their productivity significantly. Therefore I wanted to build a “TikTok” for creating technology exposure, in a high intensity short duration format. My vision is that we will be able to create a highly productive technology talent pool using effective short term intervention programs.
Great Companies: What are the various services provided by Gapcrud Private Limited
Atanu Roy Chowdhury:We operate in the academia industry. So we interface with and service Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) and technology-led companies. For HEIs we offer new-technology workshops, hackathons and competitive coding events at an intermediate level for students and at a deeper level for faculty. Our corporate customers leverage our university reach for introducing their next generation commercial systems to the young graduates. For tech-led organizations we offer custom online hackathons and competitive events to streamline their recruitment process. We also support them with outsourced learning and development among new hires.
Great Companies: What makes Gapcrud Private Limited different from hundreds of other similar service providers?
Atanu Roy Chowdhury:We've developed a unique Capsule Labs SHOTS platform that can be configured to run a workshop, hackathon or coding event. This cloud-based platform can be used to run concurrent events and provides support for multiple evaluators. The SHOTS platform also has many built-in productivity and gamification tools that allow us to recoup the costs of developing high-quality curated content and delivering high-impact events to thousands of participants simultaneously. The combination of our curated content and the participation experience create lasting impressions on our learners and encourages them to explore a topic deeply.
Great Companies: What were the struggles and challenges you faced and how did you overcome them?
Atanu Roy Chowdhury:We faced some initial resistance when introducing a new pedagogical approach in HEIs. But, the overwhelming positive feedback from the participants helped to change that outlook. Over the past couple of quarters we have been able to sign up MoUs with more than 30 HEIs and we have successfully conducted over a 100 events. What started off as a push model for academic relationships and now pivoted into a pull model with HEIs approaching us for MoUs.
The second challenge was to scale our delivery to match the event requests. We achieved that by rearchitecing our SHOTS platform, helped by a generous USD $5000 cloud credits from AWS Activate Founders program.
Great Companies: How do you plan to grow in the future? What does 5 years down the line Gapcrud Private Limited?
Atanu Roy Chowdhury:With a content team of several PhDs and a scalable delivery platform, we are set on expanding beyond our test markets in the near future. Our mission is to work with at least 10% of AICTE approved HEIs and provide technology exposure to at least 1L candidates annually. Our AI based recommendation engine is currently learning from the event results in order to provide potential employers with candidate alignment insights. This will help technology led companies organizations identify raw talent beyond the Tier 1 institutions and democratize their recruitment processes. In 5 years I envision that many of our learners will leverage their technology exposure to solve hyperlocal issues and build their own start-ups around them.
Great Companies: If you had one piece of advice to someone just starting out, what would it be?
Atanu Roy Chowdhury: The wave of digital transformations will touch every one of the billion plus Indians and unlock tremendous economic potential over the next decade. This is the time to materialize ideas and create value for our citizens. When we initiate an activity with nation building in its spirit, support will come in unexpected forms from unexpected quarters.
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