Photo: Deer Express Club

On May 19,  Deer Express Club conducted a special DeerTalk session that warmly welcomed Mr. Subrat Basnet along with Sanjay Maharjan and some members of Safety Driving School. The program started with Sanjay Maharjan, the Business Development Associate at STARTUPS Nepal briefly explaining what it takes to start a company and sustain a business with the help of an animated video. He described Udhyami which is a five-day long program camp for start-up companies and he highly encourages women to participate as he hopes for at least one woman in each participating team. Shortly, the program then continued by welcoming Mr. Subrat Basnet on stage. Mr. Basnet is the co-founder of a data mining company 'Grepsr.' He shared his story about how he started as an entrepreneur and how far he has come. Mr. Basnet completed his Masters degree in IT from Australia. Soon after he came back to Nepal to start a business.  He was not encouraged by his peers to start up a company  in Nepal because of lack of opportunities here, however that did not stop him. So Grepsr was launched back in 2012, mainly inspired by what was happening in the Silicon Valley. Grepsr is a data mining company which is the simplest web data extraction platform built for non technical individuals and teams all over the world who are happy to pay a premium to have the data executed, aggregated, and organized.  According to Mr. Basnet, data is an essential oil for business companies to keep track of their competitors. Initially, Grepsr had no hope, it was a small company and the main target market  was the developing countries like the USA , Austraila but sadly nobody wanted to do business with them because it was from Nepal. But after launching the websites, the system and the software, the team was very surprised to get a project request on the very first month from one of the bigger companies of the US.  After the completion of the project, more companies came with requests and Grepsr flourished in the US. After talking about the starting journey of Grepsr he briefed about how it works. Technically, it works with robots, software robots basically called computed websites. He explained that working with these softwares are efficient and consumes less time as it would take manually. The idea of Grepsr was to replace humans with software robots to collect data for the customers.  Now it serves companies like Twitter, Boston Consulting Group, and many others. He says that just staying or not staying in Nepal is not the solution. He believes that if one can build a product that appeals to customers all over the world, the world can be your market place. He considers people in the tech field lucky because,  to create a product and bring it upto a level in the software business,  all you need is a laptop and your time. Finally, he concluded his session with a round of interesting questions from the students. It was an encouraging experience to have him share his journey and opinions. Lastly, Deertalk ended with an important and serious message about safety rules in the road shared by Mr. Murali Bhatarai from Safety Driving School. Thus, this deertalk session definitely proved to be beneficial and informative to every student who aspires to be an entrepreneur.