Pratib Basu shares his insights on the softer aspects of building a company, specifically in the space tech sector. He emphasizes the importance of starting with a powerful idea but notes that an idea's success is only 10% of the journey. The remaining 90% is understanding and addressing real problems, validated by first-hand accounts rather than third-party observations. Basu narrates his experience of realizing a significant issue in the farm loan sector in India, which led him to a month-long interaction with farmers and the banking system, identifying the need for accessible, reliable data to assess risk.

Basu discusses the essential processes of building a successful company, such as team building, inspiring confidence in future achievements, and retaining talent with the right cultural fit. He highlights the importance of risk-taking, communication, and the continuous quest for excellence, sharing anecdotes from his own journey with his startup and the challenges faced. For example, winning a competition funded by the Gates Foundation was a pivotal risk-taking opportunity. Communication skills, like the "grandma test," are also critical for making ideas understandable to diverse stakeholders from different domains.

Main takeaways from the video:

Please remember to turn on the CC button to view the subtitles.

Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. frontier [ˈfrʌntɪə] - (noun) - A boundary or limit, especially one which is not yet fully defined or explored. - Synonyms: (border, boundary, edge)

Space, which, as per popular culture, is the final frontier.

2. ingraine [ɪnˈɡreɪn] - (verb) - To firmly fix or embed a belief or habit. - Synonyms: (implant, instill, inculcate)

Very much ingrained in the vision with which IST was set up.

3. armchair activism [ˈɑːmtʃeə ˈæktɪvɪzəm] - (noun) - Actions or expressions of support for a cause which require little practical involvement or effort. - Synonyms: (slacktivism, passive activism)

Now, problems, not the armchair activism, problems on social media, real problems that are happening on the ground.

4. reverse brain drain [rɪˈvɜːrs breɪn dreɪn] - (noun) - The return of highly skilled professionals to their origin country from abroad. - Synonyms: (knowledge backflow, return migration)

As a reverse brain drain, I was sent from us to India for a project by my firm.

5. emi [iː ɛm aɪ] - (noun) - Equated Monthly Installment, a fixed monthly payment made by a borrower to a lender at a specified date each calendar month. - Synonyms: (monthly payment, installment, repayment)

He was trying to make more number of rides that day because his loan emi was there.

6. conviction [kənˈvɪkʃən] - (noun) - A firmly held belief or opinion. - Synonyms: (belief, confidence, certainty)

conviction on the idea and combination of it with excellence gives you perspective of how to solve problems in real life.

7. frugal [ˈfruːɡəl] - (adjective) - Sparing, economical, and avoiding the waste of resources. - Synonyms: (economical, thrifty, sparing)

frugal mind, but get things done because we were flying in the UK.

8. excellence [ˈɛksələns] - (noun) - The quality of being outstanding or extremely good. - Synonyms: (superiority, distinction, quality)

excellence is a continuous process.

9. empathy [ˈɛmpəθi] - (noun) - The ability to understand and share the feelings of another. - Synonyms: (understanding, compassion, sympathy)

But that's where the empathy has to come in.

10. innovate [ˈɪnəˌveɪt] - (verb) - To make changes in something established, especially by introducing new methods, ideas, or products. - Synonyms: (invent, create, pioneer)

We have to innovate at a hardware level to be able to solve the problems at a software and analytics level as well.

Building a Spacetech Startup from India - Prateep Basu - TEDxIIST Trivandrum

Hello everyone. My name is Pratib Basu and I heard some woohoos. Thank you. So I have, you know, I have realized this only today morning, that while I was in Iast, I had never come to a podium and spoken. I would like to walk you through some of the more softer aspects of building a company, any company. Space tech just makes it harder. And it all starts with an idea. So while we fix that, see, ideas are powerful, and yet nothing like very few of ideas actually translate into some kind of a product, some kind of an innovation. Why? Because ideas are plenty, but people don't necessarily think through what's a good idea, what's a bad idea. There are thousands of ways to build the same thing, you know, and especially when it comes to space, which, as per popular culture, is the final frontier.

Why do we call it the final frontier? Because it's so vast, right in our, probably the future as a species. Also, we may not be able to explore it, but for people like me, whose career started in the space industry at the age of 18, when I came to IISte for us, it was a bit limited to at least think of how we can make space data more and more available, or space based services more and more available for national development. Very much aligned to the vision with which ISro was set up and very much ingrained in the vision with which IST was set up.

But then, as I said, ideas, it's only 10% of success. My talk today is about those 90% of what constitutes success and a definition of success, because that's also very fluid. And I'll be speaking more from the perspective of how we have seen failures, successes across the last seven years while building Satsure and Kalydio. And it all starts with finding that big problem to solve now, problems, not the armchair activism, problems on social media, real problems that are happening on the ground. For that, my firm belief was we should only understand the problem from people who face it, not from third party accounts.

So, Sarka 2016. I was still working with a us firm, and as a reverse brain drain, I was sent from us to India for a project by my firm. And as I happened to be on an Uber ride, my Uber driver's regular phone calls irritated me and asked him like, what's up? See, he was trying to make more number of rides that day because his loan emi was there, and that loan was a farm loan, which he was carrying from his father.

That triggered me to understand how does farm loan work? Because by then, you know, I had reached what we call today as quarter life crisis. So I was hitting that point of not feeling very satisfied with the work. This sounds exciting. Some of the pictures that you see here is actually me in the fields. I took a one month break and went talking to farmers, bureaucrats, associations, etcetera, and realized that there is a huge problem of accessing credit for farmers in India. And there are multiple levels of that problem.

Number one, they themselves have difficulty in proving the land is theirs. Many a times the documents, the transfer of titles were not very digitized. Secondly, the lands were so small that their own individual income basis, which the banks give the loans, that would not suffice for buying the necessary inputs for the farm. But their social construct didn't work like that. They were having two, three brothers working together.

So the total family income was much higher. So how the farm loan was designed and how the actual capital need for the farmer was, was completely different. So, you know, when, when talking to banks, like why is it. So we realize that they don't have data to assess the risk. They don't know whose farm it is, they don't know what they grow, they don't know how much they grow. They don't know whether they have irrigation facility or not.

Now I realize that despite having some of the top remote sensing programs in the world, we as a country are failing in the last mile delivery. So I realized it's less to do with technology availability, more to do with an operating language and a need to solve a real problem. So that is where I thought I had solved the problem. Thankfully, life hit me multiple times, which is where the talk comes.

What was the 90%? Because I thought, oh, I have found a big problem. I have figured out that there is a way to solve it. I was so excited. I made a lot of ppts. Nothing changed. So that is where this quote by our founding chancellor, doctor APJ Abdul Kalam, hit me that excellence is a continuous process. It's nothing, an accident. And I'll start with defining those excellence points, which we had to figure it ourselves.

My first and foremost challenge was building a team. So you see here two pictures. One is the team which started with three. Out of the six people in that picture, all the six are from IST at different, different batches. So my hunting ground was the alma mater. We started with all 100%. And what you see on the right hand side, which also has picture of our current chairman, respected Somnath sir, and our current chancellor and founding director, Doctor Suresh. This is from the inauguration of our office space in 2022. It doesn't come easy. How do you get people to come and work for you when you have really nothing to show?

Why should they trust you? Why should they come and work on something so difficult for maybe peanuts of a salary to begin with? Because you don't have the capital. And that's where the first and foremost aspect of leadership comes. And it takes me back to, you know, the experiences we had in the college. I'm continuously connecting it to the college because this is IsT and this was a startup when we joined. I'm from the first batch. So the reason we joined was because doctor Suresh was able to inspire us. He showed us a vision that where would ISRO be in 2020?

What's, what's the plan? I followed the same thing, you know, got the opportunity to learn from the best. And every person whom I met who had those hard technical skills, I went and explained where we would go. We got the first 2025 people. And I also started realizing what works and what doesn't work. You know, you may be able to even inspire some good people, but those good people individually could be good. But as the team started expanding, they were not fit in. Understanding the aspects of cultural Fitzhen, that becomes a lot more important than it used to be in the early stages, and not just hiring, but ability to retain the team that can deliver you real products, real innovation, that was the first thing that we learned as a lesson in the hard way.

Second part, this is a picture, again, where someone familiar, Mister Gates, was there. And I had taken risks in my life. I had quit Isro, had to pay ten lakh rupees as part of the bond. So risk taking was never something that I consciously did. I think it just came naturally by the time I was in my mid twenties.

Okay, so why I have put this picture is because this picture would never have happened. This is just two months after incorporating our company, and I was in Switzerland for some work, and I had at that time, six colleagues. So someone told me that today is the last day to submit a form for some startup challenge. I'm like, boss, I can't do it. Everyone apparently couldn't do it. So somehow I took that initiative between Zurich and Basel stations that I filled up the form on the train and I submitted it, we got shortlisted, then I presented, and finally after two rounds, we ended up winning this particular competition, which was funded by the Gates foundation. And Mister Gates himself flew down to give that.

Now, two months into a company, no one knows you, and suddenly there's a picture with Bill Gates, and then everyone knows you. So I took that risk and I continued doing that without us taking cognizance of the fact that it's not that we got lucky. I realized that luck is more and more formable. All you have to do is take the chances that comes at you. A third part, which is very much linked to the first two, is communicating your ideas properly. If you are able to communicate. And I call this like the grandma test. I tried explaining what I do continuously for three years to my grandmother until she got it.

And then I knew that I can explain anyone. And that is something which we miss because we come from scientific background. We think storytelling is an art. It's like something that is a secondary soft skill to acquire for professional growth. I can tell you that if we have been able to today bridge the gap between space, agri and finance, three very different domains, is because I managed to get people who are experts in all the three domains.

So getting them to work together, meaning, first, showing how to communicate ideas in a simplified manner, making sure that other person is understanding. It may seem very. Sometimes you can get impatient that why is this person not getting it? But that's where the empathy has to come in. Sometimes we just don't do that, and we miss out on executing a great idea which could have turned into something so meaningful. You can take care of five, but how do you engage 150? That's what communications does to you.

There is never a substitute for hard and smart work. I have made both those words visible. I'll give two examples. So I was mentioning about how this idea of connecting finance in agriculture with remote sensing and AI kind of seemed like a great idea. But again, we had to put everything together to detect crops at a farm level, which was seemingly impossible with so much of variations in cropping, such small farms, etcetera, resolution of imagery, availability of imagery. Being poor, we ended up solving one problem at a time. When you have a big problem, you break it down into small problems and treat it still as problem.

By the end of it, we were very tired. We were kind of almost going into depression in 2022 that we have still not been able to go live as a product. And it was like four years down the lane. Within that time, I saw some people delivering food faster than others and becoming unicorns in Bangalore. And we were working on real tough tech. So there was a last leg of the problem, which was the land records, the digital land records. The government had just started the land record digitization, and it was really in shambles.

The quality of the data for us we hit that roadblock and we had already some of the top banks signed up with us who highlighted that if we don't go live in the next two months, then they will simply consider that this technology doesn't work. I took it as a potential failure for the entire private space industry, applications industry, and we are probably the only company right now who has all the states boundaries information. The GIS files mapped to the ownership mapped to the crop. What the government keeps calling agri stack technically was built by us two years back just to service this aggregated finance thing. In two months we did this. So when there's conviction on your idea, it will take you to some place, but you still have to work hard.

And those two months were hell. I remember half of the team taking half a month holiday after that, after we went live, it was not just working hard, it was also working smart. It would not have been possible to do without making those small, small automations to do such a massive work in such a short time. So similarly, one other picture that you have seen, one yellow color gun that my colleague is pointing is because we were recently testing our payload on an aircraft. We did everything properly. We just forgot that the aircraft flying at 20,000ft will have 0.8 bars pressure.

So we had not designed our interface on the aircraft belly with our payload to handle temperature stresses. So he is holding a hot air gun which he was blowing on top of the payload as we were imaging and doing our test. frugal mind, but get things done because we were flying in the UK and I told them that I'm not getting you a return ticket if you don't do it. So last but not the least, I would say very important part of arriving at excellence is flexibility on top of conviction. conviction should not be that I will build this only in my way or this single way. There are hundreds of ways to do things.

And this picture that I have shared, the lens in the middle, which was the prototype lens. We could not find manufacturers of lenses to fit our budget, so we ended up finding some old lenses from previously declassified recon aircrafts on eBay. For $500, we bought two lenses. One of them actually worked. Because of the Ukraine war, we were not able to get proper manufacturers of optics. This is 2022. We had to buy something. We still wanted to do it within the set timeline. We didn't just raise our hands up and say, we will, you know, we'll either change our specs and we will go for something that we thought was subpar and not meeting the requirements.

We found a way to still achieve the specs and we defined what success looks like. And since I'm at the end of my talk to us, success for that particular experiment looked like this. This is an image taken by our payload, essentially making us as a first indian private firm, I should say, to generate such high resolution image on their own. And it comes with a massive innovation that most of the swath, you know, the coverage here of commercial operators for high resolution cameras, they are the pretty narrow we have gone. We have been able to achieve a 65 km for less than a meter spatial resolution. We have to innovate at a hardware level to be able to solve the problems at a software and analytics level as well.

conviction on the idea and combination of it with excellence gives you perspective of how to solve problems in real life. Thank you so much.

Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Leadership, Space Tech, Agriculture, Problem Solving, Tedx Talks