At the young turks tutorial – CNBC TV18

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Yesterday I was at the sets of the first episode of the new show on CNBC TV18 Young turks tutorial. It was shot at in the Royal ballroom at The Leela, Bangalore. The show brings young turks and power turks on a common platform, where the Power Turks share there experience with the young guns. The format is completely interactive, all of it is questions and anwers, which is really good.

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The host of the show was Shereen Bhan and power turk for the show was Nandan nilekani , he was very good with his answers which were both candid and insightful. He stayed around after the show to talk to people, I chatted him for a little bit as well.

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One dampener for me was that the crowd was slightly different than what I expected, I was expecting more “real startup” crowd, you know young guys and girls dressed casually, high energy entrepreneurs. In reality the startup crowd was in minority (I met folks from chakpak, picsquare and storzz) and majority people were from fairly set and matured businesses, well dressed in formals and stuff.
Show started slightly late, but went on well, people asked a lot of good questions and answers were equally good. There was a jazz band along with drinks and dinner after the show. The drinks session was supposed to help people network, but for some reason I saw people sticking in groups of already known people and not really looking to meet/know new people, which was kind of sad. I only managed to catch with about 3 new people, where normally in a event like this one could easily meet 10-15 new people.

I have a few suggestions for the CNBC team (assuming that show is actually to help out entrepreneurs and startups)

  • Ensure equal participation from young startups from upcoming fields like mobile, web 2.0, social networking etc
  • Get people to ask questions which are more and more relevant to companies in the younger days (when they need the most help)
  • Encourage people to mingle with new and unknown people

Overall the concept is very good and will be very interesting to see it unfold over next few months…