Rahul Saxena With Georgia Tech CREATE-X

Intro: [00:00:04] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Atlanta Business Radio brought to you by on pay Atlanta’s new standard in payroll. Now here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:24] Lee Kantor here, another episode of Atlanta Business Radio. And this is going to be a good one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor on pay. Without them, we can’t share these important stories today on the Atlanta Business Radio. We have Rahul Saxena with Georgia Tech’s Create X Program. Welcome, Rahul.

Rahul Saxena: [00:00:46] Hi. Thanks for having me.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:48] Well, I’m excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us a little bit about critics.

Rahul Saxena: [00:00:53] Sure. Critics is Georgia Tech’s initiative to help students launch real startups. We actually have a twofold mission of instilling entrepreneurial confidence and launching real companies out of Georgia Tech. And we focus largely on what we say the students are doing in the dorm room.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:14] So how does this differ from all the other initiatives that Georgia Tech is working on that serves the startup community?

Rahul Saxena: [00:01:23] Sure. So where Georgia Tech is focused on is we there have been organizations like Venture Lab or Partner, which is one of our partner organizations at D.C. that have helped either mature companies or what has been largely Georgia Tech intellectual property related startups come out of Georgia Tech. What critics is focusing on is largely non Georgia Tech and IP. So these are what students are doing in the classrooms or ideas that they have that they want to launch on the side where they own all the IP and are interested in moving forward with it. There’s a lot of just great talent and just creative ideas to solve the problems that they face on a regular basis or that they see in their daily lives.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:15] So what was kind of the genesis of this idea to really cater to this group and to really kind of wall off how this is different than the other initiatives that are at Georgia Tech?

Rahul Saxena: [00:02:27] Sure. So I’m an alumni from the late nineties and I can say. From my experience and the experience of a lot of the alumni during those years, Georgia Tech didn’t emphasize as much on entrepreneurship in those early, early times. They the type of jobs that were available, the type of opportunities were largely with some of the larger companies that were established out there. And so in order to help facilitate just mindset of students saying, hey, I can do entrepreneurship, I can do a startup, it’s not a big deal to give it a shot. If it doesn’t work out, so be it. There’s no better time to do a startup than while you’re while you’re in school. Just to give it a give it a try. And that mindset wasn’t as available or prevalent on campus. This is why we have that twofold mission I talked about earlier about instilling entrepreneurial confidence. We want students to be able to say, Hey, this is a pretty neat idea. Look, this thing I’ve created really does solve a problem. How do I take it forward to the next step? And so create X was to help students have a pathway to figure that out, where it wasn’t always something that had deep intellectual property or deep, deep value, deep technology, I should say, based on research where millions of dollars of research that’s gone through but does solve a problem and there’s a market for it.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:04] Now, it’s interesting that you are kind of working in this space because historically at least the startup community is almost like a unicorn or bust mentality where if this thing doesn’t scale, if this doesn’t, you know, generate hundreds of millions of dollars, we failed. And I’ll just move on to the next thing. This sounds like you’re going after maybe more of the aspirational entrepreneur or the person that wants to maybe have gone from a side hustle to this or to open their mind that, hey, this may not be a unicorn, but it could still be a great lifestyle business, or it could even be a great business for you that just stays, you know, in the single million dollar range. And that’s okay.

Rahul Saxena: [00:04:50] Absolutely. So we want our students to think big and be untethered to kind of conventional limitations. We want them to go after big companies, be unicorns and so forth. But for us, we do want to just more get them exposed to the entrepreneurial mindset that that understanding of launching, failing, fast pivoting, trying new different types of ideas out there. And that is how we maintain from a from our academic initiative of helping students grow, getting them exposure to different aspects of entrepreneurship, where we’re helping them out, where we don’t need to from a BS, unlike an ABC, where you need every company to be this unicorn, we’re not doing it from an investment financial investment standpoint where we need these returns to justify our program. We’re doing it 1/1, student first. Hope the entrepreneurial. Just that environment, that ecosystem. That confidence that comes in and saying that. What’s the process of being an entrepreneur, of understanding who your customers are? What’s the problem that needs to be solved? And for us, what we find is that the students are coming in at a very raw stage in the sense that they have they may have a problem that they’re going after. And then giving them this pathway allows them to iterate, pivot when needed, and then they’ll evolve into a much broader market or broader business than they originally thought was applicable for what they were doing.

Lee Kantor: [00:06:39] So if if having your student not found the next unicorn, if that isn’t necessarily the thing that gets you all excited, to which I’m sure you would be excited if that happened. What are some of the outcomes that do get your team high fiving each other at the end of the week? What is those kind of breadcrumbs or clues that you’re doing some impactful work?

Rahul Saxena: [00:07:08] I think the. On one level, it’s getting students who understand the evidence based entrepreneurship side of doing a business. So back in the day. You probably heard the expression Entrepreneurs were born, not made. And what we’re showing is that we can produce entrepreneurs with a methodology. What the quote natural born entrepreneurs knew is, hey, talk to customers, know, find out from the customers. Do people want what you’re selling? Are you solving the problem? That is the problem that you want to solve, really a problem for them. And instilling that process can be applied to even if you’re going to a bigger company that’s trying to figure out innovation to doing a startup. Understanding and defining the problem first before jumping to a solution is, I think, one of the most important skill sets going forward, no matter what you want to do, the students who are exhibiting that, who go through and aren’t afraid of having 50 customer discovery calls where they’re defining the problem is a huge win. And we see a lot of those students are the most successful. It may be what we’ve seen in Create X during the we launched in about 2014. And since then we’ve launched 300 plus startups. We did 80 startups this past summer, 70 the year before that, and about 46 the year before that. And the startups that are the most successful are the ones who are talking to customers, pivoting when they need to, and just being scrappy, not tethered to any train of thought or what they think the solution should be. And we’ve seen some great outcomes come out of that.

Lee Kantor: [00:09:08] So what’s your background? How did you get involved with this?

Rahul Saxena: [00:09:11] Sure. I’m a Georgia Tech engineer with mechanical engineering from the late nineties. I did a European master’s and then moved out to the Bay Area right at the peak of the bubble and wrote it down and joined a startup there that it just raised some money in biotech area, worked with some really smart people, and so saw how a bunch of engineers can run a company into the ground, if you will, where you tend to over design put out a solution that you think is the right one and not what the market needs at the time and missile market as a result of it. So it was a great experience for me during that time frame. Couldn’t have gotten it any other way. I moved, came back to Atlanta to do some entrepreneurial stuff and then joined Emory to go to business school. And right after I got to know a lot of the entrepreneurial ecosystem during that time, made a special effort to really get to meet some of the venture capitalists and entrepreneurs here, and then joined a VC firm here in town called Seraph Group that was a brand new firm.

Rahul Saxena: [00:10:23] We were an entrepreneurial VC firm where we had to make sales as we were doing deals. 90% of our portfolio while I was there was on the West Coast, so got to see a lot of the innovation that was happening there and some compelling startups and then did that for a few years. And one of our portfolio companies went sideways and stepped in to do a turnaround. And once I got it sold to a public company called Tyler Technologies was looking for my next thing and saw this initiative that critics had already started with some colleagues of mine from the past and got really excited that Georgia Tech was addressing this issue. During my time on the West Coast, I was always frustrated that Georgia Tech, the students coming out of Georgia Tech, didn’t have this mindset of doing entrepreneurial, trying out startups, if you will. And during my time there, you had students coming out on their second or third startup, and I was like, Why can’t Georgia Tech do this? And now we’re seeing that with Create X and really wanted to be part of that story.

Lee Kantor: [00:11:36] Now can you share with our listeners, since you have been exposed to both coasts when it comes to this kind of an ecosystem that works? Can you talk about maybe some of the similarities between the Atlanta and the West Coast startup ecosystem and what maybe you wish Atlanta had that it’s lax.

Rahul Saxena: [00:11:57] You know, I think part of the reason Atlanta probably took a little bit longer to get here, it didn’t have a big body of water next to it. It’s one of those funny things that a city of this size shouldn’t exist without a big body of water, which somehow attracts a lot of the major city, bigger city resources. With all that said. There is this importance of. The community and the people in it. Identifying with other success stories in the Bay Area, you have so much success that’s happened that, you know, I can throw a rock down a sidewalk, I’ll hit a couple of entrepreneurs, will give me good advice. And that’s that’s relevant. And in Atlanta, it took a little bit longer for that ecosystem to happen. And I think a lot of the startups that were successful, some the founders didn’t as much go through that repeat cycle where you’re going on to sold one company. Let me start the next and as you saw that grow more sense over the last ten years in Atlanta and really over the last five years, we’re now you have multiple unicorns in town. You’ve had these founders that have been really successful.

Rahul Saxena: [00:13:16] I think a lot of people are looking at us like, oh, maybe I can do this, or I can relate to the story of how they started early on and they started getting that confidence that to give entrepreneurship a shot. That coupled with the fact that it’s never been more capital efficient to start a company you can do. You can launch a company or launch a product on a few, probably less than a few thousand, whereas in the past 15, 20 years ago, you needed several million dollars to do the same thing. And so the biggest thing that I see that’s different right now is just this ecosystem and some great mentors and ecosystem here where a lot of founders are giving back and mentoring some of the younger, newer founders that are coming in. These companies that are big and successful are creating a halo effect. Their employees are seeing it. They’re like, Oh, I have this idea. I want to move forward with it. And that halo effect is what’s really key and just basically fostering and building that ecosystem here in town.

Lee Kantor: [00:14:30] Yeah, I think that the West Coast, because of the density of startups that if one of them blew up, you could land somewhere else pretty easily. It wasn’t like, game over. And now we’re starting to get that here where if you want to stay in the startup community, you can bounce from one startup to the other or start a new one and get some other founders with you. The ecosystem is getting that level of density where that’s pretty easy if you really are inclined to do so.

Rahul Saxena: [00:15:02] That’s right. I think it’s that in just the pool of talent that’s here and the fact that we have such, I think there’s no better place to start to do a start up right now than Atlanta, just in the diversity of talent, the different types of industries that are here. And you have a city that’s really all in on growing this entrepreneurial ecosystem more now than ever before I’ve seen.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:28] So walk me through the creative process. So do I have to be a Georgia Tech student in order to participate, or is this open to anybody?

Rahul Saxena: [00:15:37] So we work with students at a really early stage. So we’ve taken in students from some of the local schools from Georgia State and Spelman too. We are largely Georgia Tech, where one co founder should be Georgia Tech affiliated. We never want to dictate who your co-founders are. You know, that’s a very personal decision. So we’ve had 20 to 30 schools around the country represented as their best friends or their sisters brothers. We’ve even had parents, mother, daughter, father, son, type of founders come through the program. Our biggest requirement is just one person is Georgia Tech affiliated. And then we’ve also made exceptions to the rule for some of the local schools like Spelman, Morehouse, where they’re just developing the program. And we see this talent that we want to help out and really believe are going to be building the next big thing they come through the program, the the accelerator portion of create X is a 12 week summer accelerator. You apply into it, we’ll will incorporate you over the summer. We have some great in-kind resources from law firms like Foley and Lardner and accounting services from Bennett and Thrasher that help incorporate you. We give some seed funding just five K and the whole goal of the summer is show product, market fit show that there’s some subset of customers that value what you what your product is and may be willing to pay you for it. But they believe that you’re solving their problem for them. It’s a fast summer. We want you to be talking to people and pivot as you’re learning every week. And the whole goal of it is by the end of the summer we’ll have a demo day where you’ll present historically has been at the Fox Theater when we weren’t in a pandemic where you get to present to 1000 plus people of investors and stakeholders and other students to learn about what you’re working on.

Lee Kantor: [00:17:50] And then every team is assigned a mentor.

Rahul Saxena: [00:17:55] That’s right. We we have coaches that are there that meet with meet with the founders every week. And then the beauty of Georgia Tech is that we have this rich ecosystem of really accomplished alumni or sponsor partners to just a whole vast array of resources that can help expedite and expedite your learnings every week, learn what their problems are, or talk to as many different people and open doors for them. So that’s a huge what we call an unfair advantage that we can provide to our students.

Lee Kantor: [00:18:35] Now, earlier, you mentioned that you’ve launched hundreds of startups. Can you share any of the successes?

Rahul Saxena: [00:18:42] Sure. This past fall was a a big win for us where we had several startups do well. So our most successful startup buy venture valuation is stored here in town, which is the supply chain management startup. Sean Henry came in as a freshman after his freshman year into our program. It was a great example of just they went after a consumer model and after a year had some success doing the consumer model and then saw the opportunity in solving this in the B2B level. They started growing their base out. They got great funding from West Coast investors like Kleiner Perkins and Founders Fund. And then with the pandemic accelerating things and the problem that they were solving became such bigger, they were able to raise a lot more money. They were just recently valued at 1.1 billion. We’ve had companies, startups that did online virtual school, which are developing a high school program for largely homeschooled students. They were launched in 2019. Also, the pandemic was able to accelerate the. The need and the market for parents looking for an alternative solution for their for their kids. They raised 19 $20 million and are valued a little above $90 million. Last I heard this was last fall and probably increased in value since then. And then our other startup Reframe, which is a company that helps you reduce alcohol consumption. They just recently closed a large round at the end of last year, valuing them over $100 million, too. So we’re seeing a lot of startups that. Address. They may start it off consumer, they may go to B2B, but finding really impactful ways to solve the problems that they’re trying to that they face.

Lee Kantor: [00:21:01] So what do you need more of? How can we help?

Rahul Saxena: [00:21:05] You know, we’re always looking for mentors and people who can look at the startups, provide guidance and give them just some direction, expose them to problems that that could be solved or there could be other uses for their for what they want to do. For us, we’re kind of a grassroots organization, and we’ll be looking for providing just the support, whether it’s financial or mentor or mentoring support. We grow through the partnerships that we have with different, different groups. So if you’re interested in partnering with us, go to our website, create x tech edu and reach out. We can see some of the startups that we’ve launched and just see who you’re willing, who if you see that they’re solving a problem that interests you to reach out to them, to some of our portfolio startups.

Lee Kantor: [00:22:05] Now, do you have any upcoming events?

Rahul Saxena: [00:22:08] Our next big event will be at the end of the summer. It’ll be our demo day event. It’ll be August 25th. We’re looking to have it in person if everything goes well, and that’s when you get to see. We’ll be launching 80 plus startups this summer, too, and you get to see just the latest class and some of the problems that they’re solving. And I think it’s a it’s a signature event for Georgia Tech that encourage everyone to see what kind of the next generation of founders are thinking about.

Lee Kantor: [00:22:43] And is it too late to apply?

Rahul Saxena: [00:22:47] We are extending the deadline today. Tonight is the application deadline and we’ll be extending it for another week or probably about another two weeks actually to bring in some founders. But we have just a great number of applications coming in that we’ll be serving. But no, it’s not too late to apply. And you can go on the website to submit an application.

Lee Kantor: [00:23:12] Well, congratulations on all the success. Once again, the website is create hyphen xigmatek hdd. You create x. Georgia Tech. Georgia Tech edu. Thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing important work and we appreciate you.

Rahul Saxena: [00:23:33] Really appreciate the time and helping helping our students get the exposure out there. So enjoyed it.

Lee Kantor: [00:23:39] All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see y’all next time on Atlanta Business Radio.