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PRANJUL RATHOUR
PRANJUL RATHOUR

Posted on Originally published at pranjulrathour.scult.in

From a college project to a startup: what actually changes, beyond the pitch deck

#career #startup #founders

A college project has one user (you, or your team) and no deadline pressure beyond a demo date. A startup version of the same idea has real users, real support requests, and a cost structure that suddenly matters.

What actually changes

  • Reliability now has a cost attached — a bug that was funny in a demo is a support ticket and a refund request in production.
  • Cost control stops being optional — a college project's API bill was probably a rounding error; a startup's is a line item someone has to justify.
  • You need at least one other person who can operate the system when you're unavailable — a hackathon project only ever needed you.

What genuinely doesn't change

The core technical judgement — knowing when to use RAG versus fine-tuning, how to evaluate honestly, how to keep a system debuggable — transfers directly. The hard part of the transition is operational discipline, not new technical knowledge.

See how to pitch a startup idea in two minutes and from a BCA student to CTO.

About Pranjul Rathour

Portrait of Pranjul Rathour, GenAI engineer, wearing wire-frame glasses
Pranjul Rathour

Pranjul Rathour presenting on stage in a blue polo, with his Annapurna demo video on the screen behind him
Presenting Annapurna on stage

Pranjul Rathour giving a talk titled 'How and what I do', with demo videos of his products Vaidya and Annapurna on screen
Talking through the products he has shipped

Pranjul Rathour in a black t-shirt holding a microphone in front of a chequered wall
On the mic

Pranjul Rathour pitching with a microphone in front of a projector slide at CSJMU, Kanpur
Pitching at CSJMU, Kanpur

Pranjul Rathour is a GenAI engineer from Kanpur, India, and CTO at SCULT INDIA, currently shipping production RAG,
fine-tuning and agentic AI systems, mentoring 200+ students through TechVerse Enclave, and judging and speaking at
student hackathons across India. Updated 2026-09-07.

Reach out if you want to talk GenAI, book a campus session, or invite him to judge:

Pranjul Rathour · GenAI engineer, 3x hackathon winner, campus mentor. Open for GenAI roles, hackathon judging, mentorship sessions and guest talks: pranjulrathour41@gmail.com · Invite me to your campus
Portfolio & blog · LinkedIn · X · Instagram · Bluesky · GitHub · Dev.to

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