Can Did- Inspiring Human Stories of Resilience, Perseverance & Focus from Sciencepreneurs At Venture Center

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N. RAMAKRISHNAN (RAMKI) is a Chennai-based independent journalist with more than 35 years of experience. He became a freelancer after working for over three decades in The Hindu group, including in the group's financial daily newspaper Business line, where he held various responsibilities. He has been writing about start-ups and tracking the start-up ecosystem for nearly 13 years, having anchored a fortnightly page on entrepreneurs at the Business line for 10 years. His interests include reading, nature, wildlife, bird watching, heritage and photography. He loves coffee and watching all forms of cricket, especially Test match cricket, on television. He has been helping Venture Center with their communications for nearly two years now.

Can Did is a candid account of selected deeptech entrepreneurs from the Venture Center family. The book not only aims to inspire the next generation of scientist entrepreneurs but also provides a narration of the genesis, trials and tribulations of deeptech start-up founders in India. The book is a tribute to the "Can do! Did it!" attitude of these remarkable selection of entrepreneurs a reflection of positivity, hope and confidence of these entrepreneurs. This book is an ode to their grit, perseverance and determination. The stories are based on interviews with start-up founders and reflect their personal journeys and emphasis. In a world that glamorises start-up founders into people with superhuman powers, this book aims to provide relatable and emulatable stories of real- world start-up founders who while not being superhuman are heroes nonetheless!

Venture Center has been thinking about such a book featuring selected start-up stories for many years now. On one side, our team was never sure whether our start-ups were at a stage ready to be showcased, and on the other side, we were looking for a catalyst and enabler to assess feasibility and make it a reality. Deeptech start-ups take time to reach the stage of rapid scaleup! Truly innovative and disruptive start-ups take even longer. This presents a dilemma of whether to present start-up stories in the early stages while the journey is in progress or to wait many years till the start-up reaches significant scale and impact. This dilemma delayed this book till a point where we realised that there is an urgent need in the Indian ecosystem for relatable stories of deeptech entrepreneurs in action for the rapidly growing Indian start-up ecosystem. The catalyst to make this happen presented itself in the form of N. Ramakrishnan (Ramki), a Chennai-based freelance journalist. Ramki has been helping us out with our communication and has come to know many of our start-ups quite well. It was he who convinced us that the book should be done. Ramki met a few of our founders in the middle of 2022, had long conversations with them and sent us a sample profile. It was only after that we were convinced that this book could and, more importantly, should be brought out.