Team Thursday #2 — ACM Innovates’s Praneet Bhoj
ACM Innovate is a sub organization of ACM with the goal of fostering an entrepreneurial spirit at UCSD by developing a community of members who are interested in building things and bringing and innovation mindset to all aspects of their careers. If you are curious about entrepreneurship, ACM Innovate is here to teach you the basics to get you started on your journey!
For our second Team Thursday, introducing ACM Innovates prezzie… Praneet Bhoj!
Q: Pitch ACM Innovate!
Praneet: If you are someone who has any degree of interest in entrepreneurship and startups, then ACM Innovate is definitely the place for you! Our events are designed to help members hone their entrepreneurship skills and provide insight into the world of startups, while our community as a whole is the perfect setting to form groups for side projects by meeting other people who share the same interest in innovation. Regardless of your level of experience, you can always find something engaging in ACM Innovate through our events and side projects!
Q: What’s ACM Innovate up to now?
Praneet: One cool thing that I alluded to in the pitch is the fact that ACM Innovate now has side projects teams, so if you are interested in working on a project you can check out our Discord server, which is also the place to be for everything else Innovate-related. In terms of events, right now we are focused on delivering three different types of events for Winter Quarter. The first is our speaker events, which is a continuation of what we did during Fall Quarter. For these events we host really interesting discussions with innovators in the tech industry in order to get their perspectives on tech related topics and hopefully help attendees get an idea of the paths these people took to achieve success. We already had one this quarter with Rachel Dodell (Co-Founder and Executive Director at Coding It Forward) and we have a couple more planned. In addition to speaker events, we are also planning a few workshops for this quarter. Those workshops are focused on teaching people how to develop or improve certain skills that are crucial for success as an entrepreneur, such as prototyping, building minimum viable products, product pitching, and more. And the other events we have this quarter are our social events, which are pretty much just for people to chill and potentially meet other members of ACM Innovate during this remote learning period. Currently, we have Silicon Valley watch parties every Friday evening, and we are planning other kinds of social events as well so be sure to keep an eye out for those.
Q: What is something that you are looking forward to this quarter?
Praneet: I’m really looking forward to the workshops we are going to have this quarter, since this is the first time we are doing them. Fall Quarter was our first quarter as an organization, and we only had the speaker events I described previously. When I talked to people about Innovate, a lot of them suggested we host workshops, so we added that to our events lineup for the quarter. I’m really interested to see the what the workshop turnout will be like and what sort of feedback we get regarding the workshops so that we can work to adjust them to fit what people are looking for in them.
Q: Why did you want to start this community?
I have had an interest in startups and entrepreneurship for a while, and while I was on campus last year I didn’t really feel like there was a strong community for me to join. Maybe The Basement would be helpful if you already have an idea and are ready to run with it and turn it into a product/startup, but I wasn’t at that stage and I mostly just wanted to meet other people who also had interests in entrepreneurship and startups. So when Adam asked me if I wanted to help Ronak and Stanley start an ACM sub organization focused on innovation, I felt that was the perfect opportunity to create that community I was looking for, and that’s really what motivated me to help create and now grow ACM Innovate.
Q: What is the randomest thing that you hope ACM Innovate can do in the future?
Praneet: I would definitely want to create a shark-tank style competition!
Q: On that note, Quickly choose something on your desk! (Praneet reaches out for his phone, a Samsung Galaxy S10.) How would you pitch your phone to some random buyer?
Hello! If you are looking for a new phone with a high quality camera, and not too large and oversized then, the this is the phone for you. The Samsung Galaxy S10 has amazing battery life and is capable of handling all all your performance needs. Also its Samsung. *pauses* Good phone.
Want to get to know more about the different communities in ACM? Join our discord: https://acmurl.com/discord.
You can also join the ACM Innovate discord to get updates on their latest events and projects here: https://acmurl.com/innovate-discord
