The stall and the pitch
In my final year at Kristu Jayanti I won the Best Entrepreneurial Award for pitching business ideas and running stalls, on top of six inter- and intra-departmental contests. This is what I took from it.
College contests are easy to dismiss. The stakes are small, the judges are lecturers, and nobody's money is on the line. I entered them anyway, over and over, and by the end of my final year I had won six of them and the college's Best Entrepreneurial Award. I'm not going to pretend that made me an entrepreneur. It did teach me two things I use every week.
The pitch is a customer conversation
A pitch competition gives you a few minutes and a room that has already heard nine ideas. Nobody cares how clever the idea is. They care whether you can say, in the first thirty seconds, who has the problem and what it costs them. Every pitch I lost, I lost by starting with the technology. Every one I won, I won by starting with the person.
Two of the ideas I pitched were healthcare ones, because that's where my degree pointed me. The first was a digital twin for cancer treatment: build a computational model of the patient and test treatment options on the model before trying them on the person. The second was much simpler, and I still think about it more. A lot of homes and offices in a city like Bengaluru have rooms that never see direct sunlight, and the people in them quietly run short of vitamin D. The idea was a lamp that gives a measured dose of UVB indoors, the way the sun would if it could get in.
Neither exists. I did not build a digital twin or a lamp. What I built was the argument for each one, and learned to make it to people who did not share my vocabulary. That is the skill that transferred.
The stall is the real test
The contests I remember best were not the pitch rounds. They were the ones where we had to set up a stall and actually sell something to students walking past. A pitch lets you control the room. A stall does not. People walk up, they walk away, they ask the one question you did not prepare for, and you find out within an hour whether your idea survives contact with a stranger who has somewhere else to be.
I got good at stalls. Later, on a shop floor and at brand campaigns, I realised the stall had already taught me the whole job: get someone's attention without being annoying, explain the thing in one sentence, answer the real objection, and close or let them go without making it awkward. Now I do the same thing over a phone line a hundred times a day. Different counter, same conversation.
Why this is on the site
I put this next to the lab work and the ticket queue on purpose. It is the earliest evidence of the thing I keep claiming about myself: put me in front of a new problem, with people who do not know me, and I will work out what they need and sell it to them. The award is a nice line on a CV. The stall is the part I would hire for.
Written by Mohammed Roshan, who has worked in operations at Assurant and on the bench at a diagnostics lab. Email or LinkedIn.
If this is the kind of thinking your team needs, the CV is one page.