Guardian Acuity hosts discussion forum ‘Journeys in Entrepreneurship’ on business ventures

Creating opportunities out of challenges, rising above market crashes and having faith in the Sri Lankan people. This is a cross section of some of the insightful discussions that took place at the recently held young entrepreneurs’ forum hosted by asset managers, Guardian Acuity.

Held at the Lakshman Kadirgamar Institute auditorium, the event featured an interesting line up of speakers from diverse backgrounds and was well attended with the participation of members from corporates, proprietors and aspiring entrepreneurs. 

Santhush Weeraman of BnS kicked off the program by speaking about how backward integration and diversification helped the duo to remain competitive in an industry exhausted by challenges such as poor enforcement of copyrights and intellectual property rights, the emergence of alternative digital music streaming channels at low or no cost to the users, high production costs, etc. 

Maintaining the tone set, his talk was followed by two more lively sessions, conducted by Lakmni Wijesundera, co-founder and CEO of Iron One technologies and Abishek Sithampalam, the founder of Iron One Technologies. 

Wijesundera spoke of how Iron One technologies started from ground zero and went on to become the company that it is today despite some early setbacks such as the dot com bubble crash. Emphasising on the initial difficulties associated with a startup, Sithampalam’s talk was based on the journey of Findmyfare, the company he co-founded with Thushan Shanmugarajah who was also present at the event.

The program also featured the winning team of CIMA launch pad 2016, an enthusiastic group of budding entrepreneurs currently pursuing their undergraduate studies at the Kotelawala Defence University. The team went on to deliver an impressive presentation on their product prototype “Spec Buddy”, a smart glass for the visually impaired. 

The host company, Guardian Acuity offers three investment plans (1) Money Market Fund (2) Money Market Gilt Fund (3) Equity Fund and has over Rs. 6 billion assets under management collectively.