Jamshedpur, Nov. 5: Aspiring entrepreneurs got real-time business lessons from distinguished experts at XLRI today.

Organised for the third time by the Entrepreneurship Cell of the premier B-school, the daylong event, IdeaKon, enlightened over 200 students from five colleges about various challenges of running start-ups.

The distinguished panel of speakers included Rajat Tuli, founder-director of Happily Unmarried; Angshuman Bhattacharya, founder-CEO of SIBIA Analytics; Faisal Ahmad, founder-CEO of BIS Research; Balaji Viswanathan, founder of Zingfin; Amit Sahu, co-founder of JustRide and Saurabh Kocchar, CEO of foodpanda.

Amit Sahu of JustRide, a technology aggregator in the business of self-drive car rentals, shared his journey. "It is very important to create a risk-taking attitude among aspiring entrepreneurs, which can be done only when one has considered the worst possible scenario," he said.

Balaji Viswanathan of Zingfin, which is a financial research and visualisation portal providing financial data for stocks, said that one must have conviction before opening a start-up.

Students also interacted with the experts and shared their concerns.

"The objective behind organising IdeaKon is to bring variety to the platform and facilitate healthy talks to encourage students and other business institutes in starting their own ventures," said Mayank Choudhary, an XLRI student from the Entrepreneurship Cell.