By bringing together movers and shakers from different segments of the business world on a single networking platform, the Kitchen has become a go-to destination for entrepreneurs and businesses alike

It started out with a group of fifty-odd people meeting up at the rooftop recreational area of the Centre A business centre six months ago, with the aim of creating a platform for entrepreneurs, designers, businesses and people with an idea to get together and network.

Despite having plenty of start-ups and a lot of indigenous development, all the participants of the event agreed that Kochi did not have a space for all these people and businesses to come together and network. This gap is what entrepreneur Andrine Mendez sought to bridge when he gathered these people, a mix of different ingredients with flavours of their own, put them all in one place and called the gathering, Kitchen.

“The prevailing trend is that the business events space lacks a middle ground. The big companies meet up at a Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) meet and the startups have their startup weekends. But participating only in events geared towards one segment limits opportunity; so we came up with the formula of having 20 per cent big businesses, 40 per cent professionals, ten per cent from the investor community and the remaining 30 per cent consists of entrepreneurs, established and aspiring,” says Andrine, outlining the blueprint that the platform is based on.

This cross-segment nature of the event, where one is likely to find well-connected corporates as well as the upstart CEOs looking to build the next big thing, is what brings Jofin Joseph, one of the co-founders of Vibe, an app that collects publicly available information about people and businesses in one single profile, to the Kitchen. “I’ve been attending the Kitchen since its third edition, and its appeal is that you get to meet people from across the spectrum. For people like us, who have just started finding our feet, it is an opportunity to meet the established names and learn from them, broaden our horizons.

“But at the same time, we meet people younger than us as well, who we can help on some level too. This is beneficial for the new entrepreneurs, because every startup has to go through a learning phase, and events like this help accelerate that learning phase,” says Jofin.

Having recently completed its sixth edition, the Kitchen, which is usually held on the second week of every month, has seen its share of big names, such as Ernst & Young, Asset Homes, Muthoot Group and V-Guard.

The event is usually divided into casual networking sessions, a panel discussion, individual addresses, and even a time for entrepreneurs to make a pitch to investors. Among the speakers who attended have been names associated with a diverse spread of fields, ranging from finance, IT, app development and even virtual reality.

Brijeesh Mohamed, one of the partners of Waffle Street, believes that Kochi needs such gatherings to amp up the scale on which businesses and investors think. “All business starts from a contact. It is about reaching a point where you meet and interact with the right people,” says Brijeesh, who is among the newer entrants into the fold of the Kitchen. “In larger cities like Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru, such meet-ups happen every other week, and the scale of doing business is on a whole other level. The unfortunate problem we face here in Kerala is a lack of opportunity. If businesses here had the same opportunities that the ones in the other cities do, things would be different,” he adds.

Jofin explains that while youngsters can use the exposure to more experienced people provided by the event to their advantage, it is also an opportunity for established names to reflect on their own paths and give back to the community, a point that Andrine agrees with.

“This is as much an opportunity for big businesses to meet future market disruptors as it is a learning opportunity for the new start-up. One of the most welcome surprises for me in the past six months that we have hosted the event is how many women have participated, given the trend where such meet-ups tend to be male-dominated,” says Andrine.

With a tasty recipe established, Andrine reveals that the Kitchen has also been helping emerging businesses with skill sets they may lack, such as design, branding, marketing and sales. It will soon have Thiruvananthapuram and Kozhikode editions as well.

For more information, visit http://www.atkitchen.org/ or www.facebook.com/makesomethingnew.

source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> Features> MetroPlus / by Sooraj Rammohan / Kochi – October 15th, 2015