Founders must know when to pivot when things are off: String Bio cofounder Vinod Kumar
This is part of a series of interviews with the winners of The Economic Times Startup Awards 2023.
If there is one thing that Vinod Kumar, chief executive officer and cofounder of String Bio wants to call out from his entrepreneurship journey it is a critical pivot at the right time, which eventually helped the company get the right product for the market.
Back in 2015, two years after having started String Bio, the founder couple Kumar and Ezhil Subbian understood that their first idea of building biodegradable plastics hardly had any takers in the market.
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“We had a small team then and we sat with them and told them the problems we were facing and asked for suggestions, that is when we realised that the nutraceuticals market was opening up and we quickly pivoted to creating ingredients for that industry,” Kumar told ET.
Also read | ET Startup Awards 2023: String Bio bags the Top Innovator award
Even before they started String Bio, when the couple was working in the US back in 2009 they initially wanted to build an AI model for deep science companies which can help reduce the incubation period for these startups.
But both these ideas seemed to hardly have any takers in the market and the founders quickly changed tracks.
In the space of deep science and hardware innovation, when one is building a product company in a country like India, founders need to understand
