The Place That Believed in Us First — Our Founder's Return to NIT Kurukshetra
April 3, 2025 · 4 min read · Manu Gupta, Founder — MonitorExam
MonitorExam's about page opens with four words: building trust in assessment.
But trust is not built in a boardroom. It is not built in a product roadmap or a pricing deck. Trust — the real kind, the kind that holds when a student submits an exam and an institution stakes its credibility on the result — is built over years. It starts long before the company does.
For me, it started at NIT Kurukshetra.
The Invitation
Alma mater. Latin for 'nourishing mother.' The institution that shaped you before you knew what shape you were becoming.
Last Wednesday, I returned to NIT Kurukshetra to speak at the Wednesday Colloquium — a platform the institute runs for students to engage with practitioners, researchers, and founders from outside the classroom.
It was a busy week. A significant personal commitment, a long-planned family vacation, and a large customer requirement all arrived at the same time. Some things got dropped. This did not.
Because the question I had to ask myself was simple: how many times in a life do you get to genuinely return something to the place that first gave you what you needed?
I could not count many. So I kept the meeting on the calendar.
What I Went to Say — and What I Said Instead
I had prepared a presentation on how to build a company while still in college. The slides were ready. The arc was clear.
But when I read the colloquium announcement more carefully, I realised the students wanted something different. They did not need a framework for entrepreneurship. They wanted to understand what the journey actually feels like — how a product gets made from nothing, how the first customer says yes when there is no track record to show them, how you stay building when nobody is watching.
So I put the deck aside. I restructured around the honest version of the story.
I spoke in Hindi — so that what I had to say reached every student in the room, not just those comfortable thinking in English.
The Session
The conversation found its own pace. The questions the students asked were the same ones I had carried, years earlier, sitting in those same corridors.
When do you know it is time to start? How do you convince someone to trust you before you have proven anything? What does it feel like when it is not working?
I did not give them polished answers. I gave them the real ones — which, for most of those questions, meant admitting that there is no clean answer. That the timing is rarely right. That trust is earned slowly and lost quickly. That the only thing that actually works is staying in motion.
The technology session wrapped up ahead of schedule, which gave us more time to get into the entrepreneurship conversation — which is what the room actually wanted to be having.
The Session Recording
Watch the full Wednesday Colloquium session:
Session — NIT Kurukshetra Colloquium
Addressing students and faculty at the Wednesday Colloquium, NIT Kurukshetra
Then the Newspapers
A few days after the session, a message arrived from a professor.
The session had been covered in leading Hindi newspapers.
That is the kind of note that stops you for a moment. Not because of the coverage itself — but because of what it means. It means the students and faculty considered the conversation worth carrying into the wider public. That the questions we were asking in that room mattered to people who were not in it.
For a company built around the belief that every assessment should be credible — that the result of an exam should mean something, to the student and to the institution — that kind of validation from an alma mater is not small.
What the Alma Mater Actually Gives You
MonitorExam was built on a belief that assessment should be credible — that when a student submits an exam, the result should mean something to everyone who relies on it.
That belief did not come from a market research report. It came from years of watching institutions struggle with exactly this problem — of being a student, then a professional, then a founder, in systems where the integrity of evaluation was never quite certain.
NIT Kurukshetra was part of where that conviction formed. The students I spoke to last Wednesday are at the beginning of the same formation.
The relationship between a founder and an alma mater is not transactional. It is continuous. You take from it early, and you return to it — not when it is convenient, but when it matters.
That is what trust actually looks like in practice.
The session was covered in Hindi newspapers. The LinkedIn post below was shared by the NIT Kurukshetra community.
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