by Ragoo Raghunathan
In the past weeks, the ISW 2025 Professional and Entrepreneurs Network (PEN) initiative met with a group of entrepreneurs, community leaders and professionals to discuss and pull together ideas in an online brainstorming session. The 2-hour zoom call included a Jamboard session and discussed ways to support and develop this initiative. The participants included ISW President, Puneet Kohli, ISW ex-President, Ashish Cowlagi, Raj Melville, Manohar Ganapathy, Navinkumar Loganathan, Mandy Pant, Kelly Mittal, Nagendra Rao and Suzanne Gray and me, as leader of this initiative.
The session included very passionate ideas and feedback from the group. At the end we had collected over 100 ideas that were categorized into around 10 topics. We are currently collating and prioritizing these ideas. These range from collaborating with other entrepreneurship organizations, to having programs targeting youth and professionals interested in start-ups, having regular meetings at the newly expanded India Center, job fairs and career workshops – to name a few.
We soon expect to come up with a more detailed plan and strategize on how we can work with the community in supporting this goal. As a primary event of this initiative, we plan to have a Meetup at the India Center in Mid-May (15th) to launch the PEN Group initiative.
Please watch this space for further notifications and updates on this topic. Feel free to reach out to us at PEN@iswonline.org to get directly involved and contribute.
Update
Meetup group: https://www.meetup.com/ISW-PEN/
