Sanika Bhave is representing 3 Day Startup at the Austria to Austin Alumni Summit in Vienna. She currently works as a Venture Associate at Capital Factory in Austin, Texas.
Hey y’all! I’m Sanika, a firm believer in people. Since childhood I’ve been fascinated with the dreams people have and how they set about realizing them. In undergrad I explored how dreams translate at the social entrepreneurship and policy making level by working on my own environmental social venture, creating new spaces for student entrepreneurship involvement, and doing policy work in Washington DC as an Archer Fellow. Now, I support change agents and their dreams from an investor lens as a Venture Associate at Capital Factory.
I came into the entrepreneurship scene with a very narrow view of what startups, venture capital, and communities could be and what impact they could have on people. Now I know that entrepreneurship can be a vehicle to build community around a specific idea, locale, or industry. While I was working with students in undergrad to build our own social ventures, I realized that everyone in this world relies on goods and services — it’s a part of our life that is so unavoidable that instead we can work with this framework — and not against it — to modify the way products function to best benefit people!
I love that both community and entrepreneurship are at the center of 3DS’ mission! By opening up the world of entrepreneurship and making it more accessible through education, we can help accelerate the growth of these communities and hopefully transform peoples’ lives around the world.
I am so incredibly honored and grateful to have the opportunity to travel to Vienna with 3DS and the U.S. Embassy. In Vienna, I’ll deliver a keynote speech centered around climate entrepreneurship and have the opportunity to learn from incredible minds and entrepreneurs working on some of the biggest issues affecting our generation and world. I’m really looking forward to getting to broaden my own perspective on both sustainability and entrepreneurship — I think entrepreneurship at the collegiate and venture level in the United States can be quite geographically focused and limited to the States but climate change is a global issue and entrepreneurship is a global opportunity so I’m looking forward to approaching both at a higher level! Also hello the art? If I get to see “The Kiss” in person while I’m there I will …. simply pass away.
If you could give a piece of advice to an entrepreneur who is at the beginning of their career, what would it be?
I’m going to kick it back to my social entrepreneurship days here and say that make sure you’re building a solution for a problem that your beneficiary actually is experiencing, not one that you think that they’re experiencing! Put yourself in their shoes, go through the customer journey yourself, and do soooo many beneficiary interviews.
