Indian Institute of Management Rohtak hosted Mr. Saurabh Jain, Vice President of Paytm on 25th October 2018. Saurabh is the person leading “Paytm – Build for India” initiative of Paytm whose objective is to promote grass root innovation in India. They have started Open Source Incubator to achieve this purpose. He is also the founder of Fun2Do Labs which is an Open Education Project and a Mentor- Digital Business at Delhi Press Magazine. Saurabh has authored two books on mobile phone programming. His book, “Mobile Phone Programming” based on J2ME technology, was India’s first book on mobile app development. He has various patents devoted to his name. He has also been awarded the title of ‘BlackBerry Elite’ by Blackberry and the title of ‘Nokia Developer Champion’ by Nokia.
The guest lecture started with Mr. Saurabh Jain sharing his life story as to how he learned coding which was driven by his immense passion for creating games and mobile applications. He continued talking about the million problems which exist in Indian society and the need for someone to come up and solve these issues. He further told that solving a problem at such a scale is only possible by creating a revolutionary product. Further, he pointed out that the main issue of Indians is not corruption but instead the lack of proper user experience in the products and services which people come across. He emphasized this point by quoting the examples of pits on highways or Indian Railway where a citizen might face queue or problem with ticket reservation service and misunderstand that for corruption in the system. He further elaborated on how Paytm focuses extensively on providing improved user experience and thus, is becoming popular among Indians intensively. The idea behind the success of an entrepreneur is to solve one problem on a large scale among the vast number of problems which exist in Indian society. Here he quoted the example of how Paytm succeeded by introducing peer-to-peer payment and thus reduced the efforts involved in the payment process and also curbed corruption to a greater extent due to the introduction of digital payment. He further emphasized the importance of entrepreneurship and the need for an engineer to have an innovative mind and get their hands dirty in order to develop personally before he/she can get on the field to develop others and their lives. Saurabh introduced to the b-school graduates, the concept of “maker education” which is the concept of project-based learning.
Mr. Saurabh Jain ended the talk by spreading the message of “Paytm-Build for India” which is “build for Indian because your country needs you”. He further recommended participants to get acquainted with lean startup and emphasized the immense career opportunities and exponential growth a startup can offer. This was followed by an insightful and participative Q&A session. The guest lecture was remarkably informative and engaging throughout the duration of 1.5 hours.