Venture capital firm Lightspeed India Partners has launched ‘Extreme Entrepreneurs’, an eight-week-long training program aimed at giving the Indian founders an opportunity to learn from entrepreneurs around the world.
This programme will commence in mid-September in India. Various business leaders that will be participating in this program include Jon Steinberg, ex-Buzzfeed president and now Cheddar CEO; Ritesh Agarwal CEO of OYO Rooms; Dheeraj Pandey CEO of Nutanix, a cloud computing company; and John Thompson, chairman of Microsoft. They will help the startup founders by sharing their experiences and learnings from their own entrepreneurship journeys.
Anu Hariharan of Y Combinator and Jeremy Liew and Ravi Mhatre of Lightspeed will also be participating in the programme. They will also be shedding some light on how they helped shape the journey of countless successful companies.
Talking about the programme, Vaibhav Agrawal, a partner at Lightspeed India Partners, said, “Most of the partners here at Lightspeed, including myself, were founders before. I myself started up twice, once in India and once in the US, and having gone through this journey, we know how critical exposure and right advice can be, early on. Therefore, we decided to start this community initiative to help Indian founders build iconic companies.”
In the Extreme Entrepreneurs programme, eight startups will be selected and they will get the opportunity to engage in sessions with the business leaders over the course of eight weeks. It is to be noted that none of the startups involved will get any funding, or deal out of this programme. It is a complete community-driven initiative.
Lightspeed Venture Partners has been involved in the Indian market since early 2004. It is a venture capital firm focused on early-stage investments in technology and consumer space.
Some of the successful Indian startups in its portfolio include edtech unicorn Byju’s, India’s largest hospitality company OYO, among many others.