Story of the founder of 3 start-ups -By Sai Sowmya from IIM Kozhikode

One of the top B schools in the country, IIM Kozhikode, is filled with gems from across the nation. Parshuram Khawle is one among this huge community and is not the usual CA that you might come across. He enjoys creating things and takes every chance to learn new skills. Parshuram was awarded the Best Student for his contribution at M.L. Dahanukar College of Commerce and was a part of the Innovation and Transformation committee during his time at Deloitte. He is also the founder of 3 start-ups and has led another start-up. His journey is a story of passion, perseverance, and seeing the world through the right attitude.

BookShareIndia

One of Parshuram’s early startups, BookShareIndia, first started as a project that was curated by him along with his friends during his under graduation for a contest. Parshuram recognized the opportunity to create mini-libraries within communities and enable people to share books among themselves. He quotes “Books have given me new dreams and the motivation to do things, and at that point, all I wanted to do was enable a similar access to books for everyone.”

The first module of the project involved collecting books and then distributing them to NGOs in and around Mumbai. During the first trial, the team collected a whopping 5000+ books and distributed them across 30 NGOs. The process, however, was not as easy as the team faced a lot of challenges and constraints at every stage. One such challenge was to sort out a whole pile of 20-25 categories of books that almost reached the room’s ceiling in their college. Parshuram would do his CA articleship in the morning and would start working on the idea at night, which would continue till 4 am the next morning.

Such were the days of hard work and mental toil; he extends his gratitude towards the 50+ volunteers and 7 interns from his college who helped him sail through it all. The team also started receiving praises for the idea from famous personalities like Vicky Kaushal. Finally, the project won the contest and later transformed into a startup that was backed by a funding of Rs. 12 lakhs from the CRISIL foundation. Today, around 1 lakh books have been collected and distributed across India to 120+ NGOs and around 14 Open libraries and 7 mini-libraries have been set up through this organization.

While the inception of the project was based on the concept of sharing, it couldn’t be implemented as yet because of technological and security issues faced at various stages even after the launch of the app. This didn’t stop Parshuram from envisioning his dream of sharing books as he planted the seeds of the idea of an OpenBookBox. This self-sustaining concept is purely based on trust where OpenBookBox is a box that consists of books that are controlled by an app. 

You can just open the app to find the nearest book box, enter details of the book you want to issue, pick it up and later drop it back in any OpenBookBox present in the city. His dream is to set up these in parks, cafés, metros, malls, and other public places so that people have access to books everywhere. An OpenBookBox was already set up in Mumbai and people started accessing it but it had to be paused because of COVID-19. But Parshuram, the founder of 3 start-ups is confident that very soon, a lot of OpenBookBox’s would be spotted in and around Mumbai.

Tie-ups 

Recently, he has tied up with YUVA, a non-profit development organization to launch MUMBAI 50 and Swapnanchi Bag. Mumbai 50 was launched with the vision of setting up 50 libraries across Mumbai out of which 7 libraries are already set up. Swapnanchi Bag was started with the agenda of ensuring that different parts of the slums of Mumbai have access to books all through the month by exchanging bags of 50 books each around the city.

The motive behind pursuing an MBA

With already running 3 startups, one would wonder why the founder, Parshuram took up an MBA. He says that he wanted an MBA to act as a lift for him to achieve the true potential of his visions and startups. He wants to complement his creative nature with a broad understanding of the different verticals of business. He talks about time management and the art of delegating while talking about how he has been able to manage both the rigour of MBA and the rigour of running not one, not two, but 3 startups. His stint at Deloitte taught him lessons of synergy, faith, and delegation and now he can finally rely on others in the organization to help him with the work.

Parshuram is a humble individual who isn’t in the game for the rewards and recognition but for his own passion. He says it’s not important to have a startup for the namesake, but what matters most is what is done through the startup. When asked for his success mantra for an entrepreneur, he says it’s important to have a good team, good mentors, and most importantly to continuously keep learning and exploring new ideas.

Parshuram’s story is an inspiration to the many B-Schoolers out there. He found his goal pretty early in life and has since been spending most of his time to working hard to achieve them. You can find your zing too! All you need to do is “believe in yourself”.

This article was submitted by the D2C Igniters Club of IIM Kozhikode.