I’m just amazed to look at the number of BITSian teams in various business plan competitions across the country. I’ve seen at least one BITS team in every major business plan competition this year. And it’s not one team which is doing well, but about 7-8 of them. Eureka had only two undergraduate teams and both were from BITS. One of them came third too!

Somebody’s doing something right and I hope that somebody is CEL as a whole and Epsilon specifically. Epsilon is a brilliant concept, though has not been perfectly executed yet. It doesn’t scare of people by asking for business plans or even executive summaries, but just a few basic questions about their ideas. The idea form is the same as the YCombinator’s application form. The questionslike, ‘How will you make money?’ , ‘Who do you fear the most?’ are simple enough to answer in early idea phases. Because of this, Epsilon recived about 140+ entries last year. On average each team has about 4 people, so that’s about 560+ people thinking business. 30 of these ideas turned into business plans.

Of course not all of them will turn into businesses or rather are not in that advanced stage of refinement yet, but they’ll get there with more work.

Even in Conquest, which undoubtedly has the best judging panel in the country, has a lot of BITSian entries. Some entries, which although did not make it to the finals, have VCs interested in them! And their are two BITSian finalists, which is no mean job considering the kind of competition. Yours truly is in the waiting list, and is hoping for other finalists to back out .

This is a great time to be in BITS!