Even as the current economic situation hasnt seem to have harmed the Early Stage Investment scene by much, there is some major misunderstanding by First Time Entrepreneurs, starting off in India, who are looking to raise funds. This series hopes to shine some light on some of them

LESSON: MAKE THAT SACRIFICE. GROW WITH THE ORGANIZATION

Scenario: In the last three business plans that I have had the priviledge to look at and to give feedbacks on, it seems that the average entrepreneur wants a salary of around 2 Lakhs a month, seems to be hiring an office attendant or a secretary in the first year, is travelling extensively, starts a marketing budget even before the product is ready, claims a steady income stream, is absolutely immune to market changes, and can solidly break even in 3 years. And oh, they give a 4x return in the fourth year.

You cannot demand a salary that runs in the lakhs. You cant because If I were investing, I wouldn’t know if there is even an incentive for the entrepreneur to slog to make this company succeed anymore. Given the current employment situation, I would even have a slight doubt as to whether the guy lost his job and is getting self-employed with a raise. But I do understand if you would want to live comfortably. This is what I would suggest.

Take a pay cut in the first two years – till your product development is ready. Just so you get a number, You get paid at the same level as your Indian Lead Software Engineer (I have to specific about the indian part, since some folks also have high paid outsourced engineers). That should put you at around 40K a month. Once that is set, and once your product development is done, and your marketing and sales efforts start, align your salary so that a base of 40K and a incentive component from the sales defines what your take home package is. That will assure me as an investor that you are willing to take a paycut to keep costs low and burn things slowly to get through the initial phases and even as the company makes money you arent raising costs, but defining your salary from what is coming in. If you are a company that sells products that sells in the millions, or have several product packages, it would be wise to even define slabs, that define the percentage.

You do that, and all of a sudden I see a real entrepreneur, who could really use with some financial support, and the halo over the head glows and a lot more people just might be willing to seriously consider your financial proposition.

Its not a rarity these days to hear talks about turning entrepreneurship into a lifestyle. As a matter of fact, we – everyone of us who are involved in shaping the startup space in India – are quite glad that thats happening, because it just shows that things are changing, very much for the better.

Even as Barcamps, Open Coffee Clubs, Startup Saturdays and several forms of informal support groups are emerging in this country, one of the biggest problem that we seem to be facing is the fact that we are still very urban-centric. All these meets happen in four or five of the major metros in the country – whereas we probably should be a bit more inclusive about it. There are issues such as the lack of experienced entrepreneurs to share from their life’s tale and help out emerging and aspiring entrepreneurs that seem to be stiffling some of the productivity in some of these informal meets.

Well, technology can solve that problem in some aspect, and we are going to give it our best shot.

We are opening up this Chat Application that we’ve had built, and testing in some occassions to see how we can spin this to solve this issue. Every Saturday between 9am and 5pm – and without fail, every week, we are planning to keep the Proto.in Chat [Link here] open and anyone can visit the site, and interact with entrepreneurs from across the country. We understand that Startup Saturdays happen on the same dates, so if possible we will get someone who is attending the sessions to live chat in the sessions so that the wisdom share can be spread to a larger audience if possible.

So, we’ve done and are doing our part to solve this problem. Now the request is that you be a part of this, to be there, spend sometime in the channel, interacting with, and helping out one entrepreneur to another, and in truly making entrepreneurship a lifestyle choice for those who wish for it – even beyond the metros.

Looking forward to seeing you there. And spread the word.

Technorati Tags: startup, proto, proto.in, entrepreneurship, india, technology

I grew up with a poster in my room saying “The size of your world is as big as your dreams”. It was always there when you woke up to remind you to think beyond the box. It still hangs there in my room at my parents place. It’s the thought that came into my mind when I was browsing through the net, listening to some of the folk’s interpretation of Entrepreneurship.

It seems  to me as if there are a couple of theories floating around these past few weeks.

a) Entrepreneurship is overrated. Entrepreneurship is romanticized, and the often tweeted and retweeted phrase seems to be “My son is without a job, ah! he is an entrepreneur”. Well, That’s probably pushing it far, and yep, perhaps we are breaking the elitism that was once associated with being an “entrepreneur”, but isn’t this what we wanted with all the publicizing that we did and urging one another to chase their dreams? I do see that this could dampen the ones that pride in elitism, but as far as things go, there will always be a gulf between those who can dream, ideate and implement, and those who just wear the badge and do nothing. And really, the more the merrier in this party.

b) There is also this other camp, that seems to think that, Entrepreneurship is too Web 2.0-ised. I can emphatize with this camp.  I dont think entrepreneurship in India is equated with a venture in the web 2.0 world, but most of us derive our first impression from the media that we consume and web 2.0 is essentially Media and new age consumption of those content. You get hit by it in the face over and over again, till you find something interesting. That doesn’t mean that there arent other sort of ventures going on out there. Manufacturing is still one of our strongest sectors and there are plenty of neat things cooking up in that camp. So for those of you freaking out with the thought of drowning in Web 2.0 Gyaan, take heeed, there is a bigger world out there – you just need to step out more.

c) There is a third theory out there that there are a lot of NRIs returning home. And Rajiv Gandhi is rightly quoted that whatever happened a few decades ago was not brain drain, but brain banking. Along with those returning is returning a renewed sense of nationalism, pride, and a whole lot of global interaction practices, that really help us get our quality of work a notch higher to match global capabilities. The complaint is that, along with them comes the baggage to convert the cities of India, into New York and Boston, or London. They do have a point. But sooner or later as these fresh entrepreneurs hit the Registrar of Companies to get their incorporation work done, they will know that things work slightly in a different order in this country.

So, really gentlemen (and ladies), there is not much to fret. You can relax and enjoy the process as our landscape changes before our eyes.

We Really Don’t Dream Big Enough.

What I want to talk about really is not the concerns, but my own concern as to how we aren’t dreaming big enough.  I came across a video at India Interacts, an interview with Gopal Srinivasan of TVS yesterday. There seems to be mention of all the orgs out there, including some blip about “The Proto.in Mindset’. Following the interview closely, I hear him saying that there are lots of Indians trying to do US businesses here in India and its simply not working. That is a very good point and something I strongly believe in. As part of the work at TeNeT and RTBI in IITM, we do incubate companies that aim at Rural India. Trust me, when I say that my heart sinks when people try to fit super-sized urban technologies into that space. Technology has to invisible when it becomes a solution – as for it to really become part of the lifestyle. It’s a mantra i’ve really tried to live by.

What worries me is that the examples that he quotes, the poultry example, or the hospital example are just one angles of entrepreneurship. I agree that education and healthcare are the biggest intervention areas that we need to work in India, but creating any radical change will mean that we need radical policy changes. There are 700 million Indians in Rural India without much health care, but they aren’t dying. They are all getting treated by Rural health professionals (in other words, unqualified doctors, or by trained nurses also diagonising and treating, or pharmacists who are prescribing). We need to find a way to incorporate these things and formalize them as a system. Tell me which Venture capital firm, is willing to stand with a venture that will have to change the way the government thinks? Yet, we do that in IIT. But trust me when I say that it is quite a uphill task and one cant expect changes before three to five years. Most of these investors would be expecting a return and a profit by then. You see what I mean? Change, especially basic lifestyle change will also mean a longhaul game. Are Investors dreaming big enough?

I also think that Technology has to be nurtured. Yes we can think about solutions for our own country, and create poultry farms and money-spinning hospitals, but really how is that going to give us a leverage for us in the global arena? How are our aspirations to become a global nation going to come close to that. The issue with Poultry and Healthcare is that, at the rate the world is moving, there is always going to be a group of people who are going to fall behind. The question is. Are we going to take a stance to have our primary focus taking care of them, or keep our primary focus higher to reach a global audience, find a solution to some of our global problems (climate, energy, finance, communications etc), and then find the means to solve the problems of the lower pyramid?

If I sound a bit too far fetched, let me try this: Take any of the technological advancement or anything that you have, own or find entrenched in your life. Everything from computers to music systems to radios to mobile phones to aircrafts, to submarines to energy, came into our life because someone invested in them. Most of these technologies find their roots in either Military or Space research. Thats the reason why our first step into space is quite a critical one. But some might call that a “Baggage attitude” as well  perhaps. The question comes down to, are we going to outsource all the mainstream innovation to the west and remain a consumer for ever, or are we going to get into the game or not.

I think it is common knowledge now that the two greatest threats that we face are energy and climate. The financial crisis will solve itself – its all a matter of time. The worst that can happen is that we’ll go back to our ways of growing our own crops and working in the farm,but that doesn’t sound so bad as the world shutting down, and us gasping for breathe – or worse, drowning in the molten icecaps. What I fear even worse than that is our children and the generation that follows them taking the flak for what we’ve done to this planet.

I would say that we are already far behind in the investments that we should have put in these areas. If we had focused and invested on terraforming, we probably would have an answer to atleast avert some of the greenhouse effect that we are trapped in. If we had started imagining how we would fuel our cars once we reach mars (where there is no gasoline), we probably would have started to develop engines that can run on Helium and Hydrogen much before its too late.

I do not think we have the liberty to just play a catch-up game anymore (atleast not just that alone. We need to balance both). I am sorry to break that news to the old-timers, but thats the world we are in. We have an opening and a window to design the way this world is going to be tomorrow. We need social responsibilities (I totally agree), but we also need to invest in technologies that can make our lives efficient – not productivity wise alone, but also consumption wise, and that means we need people who can try, test, experiment and learn so that we can do that iterations faster.

We need entrepreneurs who will give this country its vision for the next twenty to thirty years. Where will our dreams be in terms of space, defense, lifestyle, and how will be take care of the poor and the weak amongst us. And more than all that, we also need investors and visionaries (like the likes of Khosla, who can think ahead of the curve), and not take sides of the spectrum, but be supportive and think long term as well.

This is a wonderful time to be starting up. You will come across very few people who will give comparisons to all the benefits they get working for big corporates. Its one such time. Hiring will be slightly easier, and retaining them will be even more easier.

Even in the midst of all that, it does seem that a lot of the Startup Companies are hardpressed for resources here in India. Here’s a solution.

A few of us have been talking about putting together a centre that trains people (as blank slated as freshers) on the common technologies that people use while building products – the usual PHP, Python, AJAX, MySQL, etc etc and getting them upto speed on mashups, APIs, documentation, and moving forward. That is the level of skill that most of the startup community folks are looking for it seems. Or am I wrong here?

If I am right, then there is a simple way around it. Every chapter of OCC in the country is doing quite well. I heard from Santhosh that Pune is a 300 people group now (though I do suspect that the turn out ratio would be still less), but who knew Pune had 300 people who would be open to being part of a community right? And the same case has gone on with Bangalore, Kolkatta, Hyderabad, Chennai, Delhi, and even now and then with Mumbai.

Here’s the thought. What if in one of the OCCs a dozen of the startup companies, especially the folks who can code and code really well, commit that they will run a two month training program for people in these languages? It is going to take a bit of time and commitment, but there are a lot of resources already on the web, and with a couple of screencasts, and proper documentation, you could essentially also use it as training material for the next batch of people that you hire in your company later on.

What I am proposing is that a batch of technology entrepreneurs, each taking a week to cover different aspects of the course, could put their hands together to collaboratively solve an issue which is haunting a great many of them.

So if you could fix one of the startups offices as the centre for this activity, Put up a wiki where people can sign up for this course, and these 12 startup entrepreneurs/programmers get a chance to do a round of questioning and if they think that the candidate would be able to perform with some guidance, then the community as a whole comes together to train these few candidates and at the end of it, can assimilate them into the company.

There are a couple of reasons why I think this can be made to work:

1. Most freshers are scared of working for startups. The first question I face all the time is “Will they train us?”

2. People who do undergo any sort of training, usually go for some MS Certification and those courses are expensive. Its not like you can afford to get the developmental licenses anyways, and since they have themselves invested in getting trained, the salary expectations are going to be higher from you.

3. At the moment there are very few people who can talk about these technologies for the mass community to learn from. Perhaps contributing to the general knowledge of the masses to improve their skill level, if reached critical mass, will start churning on its own.

4. More people trained on OpenSource Technologies (that’s really what enables Startups), might also slightly increase the chances of people contributing back to Opensource. *fingers crossed*

5. I also think that most startup founders struggle to explain what they have in their head to others. And teaching concepts to others gets you to that level where tomorrow when you need to grow a community around your product, you can converse in a manner that the people can comprehend.

And ofcourse, none of this has to be done for free. I’d strongly suggest that the teams charge the candidate 3000 – 4000Rs a month for this. That is also additional revenue, so its not technically charity either.

So, there is only one question that lingers. Worth giving it a try? What do you think?

You must know by now that we get involved in quite a bit of work related to the city. I believe that a city is a representation, collection and expression of the people living in it. If you walk into a city and cannot hear the voices, and expressions of its people, the city … aint quite alive. And I love having cities which are alive.

Mahesh Radhakrishnan, a friend of mine who is behind MOAD and is one really talented architect and I often meet to discuss about something we can do to solve these issues.

One latest such initiative is to setup something like this in Chennai. We are going to need some hands on this, but if and when it comes out, it will be quite something to boast about. What do you think?

This is an installation done in (Helsinski) Europe. We are planning to build the same at a fraction of the cost.

Youtube Link of the Wall in Action.

Question: I am interested in starting my own venture and have been doing the groundwork for it. I currently work for a company, but would like to do the pilot run while still holding my day job and as the venture stabilizes, take the plunge fulltime. What would you suggest?

Dear X,

There are a couple of ways to do this and a few things to keep in mind.

1. Usually all job offers have this clause that you have to solely focused on the job you are hired for at your primary workplace. Hence usually taking up another offer or even a consultancy (even if the employer may never find out) is done by getting a letter of permission allowing the employee to be involved with other things.

a) Though this is not required, it gets you a lot of brownie points with your employer, just for the sheer honesty. As much as Proto.in does not interfere with any of the activities of what I do here in the incubation centre – but only enhances it – I still wrote a mail asking for permission and to let folks know that i am involved in something. They go easy on me whenever proto.in is around the corner.

The point: Keep everyone informed so that they can give their support in whatever manner that they could.

2. If you are going to do this as a proprietary thing, then even step 1 wont help, cause its assumed that you are fulltime with the venture – when you are the 100% shareholder and the guy running operations. So what some folks do is register the company in the name of the spouse – if she is not employed, or if her employment contract is not so stringent.

3. One thing to keep in mind is something called the corporate veil. When a company becomes a ‘corporation’ it becomes an entity by itself, that even the founder is nothing more than an employee in it. Because of that structure, if the company goes down under, it still doesnt take the founders along with it – nor their assets, since they were just employees. But there are cases when they consider the corporate veil to be broken, which would be when the personal assets of the founder are mixed up with the assets of the company and in such cases, the founder can be sued – if in the future the venture gets funded and things go awry.

I don’t mean to scare you, but just giving you a heads up on all the things involved.

I would suggest:

1. Go ahead and register the company – if you are sure you want to do this venture.
2. This would be the time to bring onboard some advisors and get them involved in the venture – since there has to be a minimum of two directors to incorporate the firm
3. Get the permission from your current job to be involved.
4. Keep going with that setup, till you are comfortable making the flip – hopefully which wont be too far away.
5. During the process of step 4, at some point your venture will possibly take enough time out of you as your day job. Do talk to the management to perhaps transition into a part-time role if possible. Its good to stay clear with your conscience.

I hope that helps.

Vijay

I love the weekends. Especially the ones where you pretty much meet people after people, and get to see the world through a different set of eyes and perspectives. Always loved that.

So there goes the past weekend, which has just about been the most amazing weekend ever – after a really really long time, and partly thanks to meeting some of the folks from the startup scene in bangalore.

So here’s a thought that’s been on my mind. How many kinds of entrepreneurs are there? Well, it seems there are two kinds. The Incremental ones and the Iterative ones.

The incremental one is that guy who wants to be an entrepreneur, is very calculative, and goes on and takes up a job in that large firm, and after years of carefully planning his networks, funds and contigencies makes a leap to build one product, putting together a company with his colleagues. You could almost say that Mindtree was one such firm. The firm immediately attracts investors, because the experience of the founders talks volumes, the contacts are well established and the product/idea is usually something that is closely related to the domain that they have been working in.

This is pretty much your typical VC fundable business.

But there is this other kind. The kind that starts off young, comes up with an idea and grows the idea. The idea is usually nothing significant, but an improvement none the less. The grow the idea, and make an exit – small, okay or in most cases nothing at all, move on to the next idea, and with each new ideation and execution grow exponentially in terms of thinking, visions and execution style. These are your radical mavericks.

But you know what? In most cases the incremental ones, as great as they are, will only become what they are, if they are not funded. If they learn lessons the hard way. If they learn to bootstrap, learn to live in the trenches, and they grow from there.

I strongly believe, and there are quite a few others who agree, that we are destroying these genre of entrepreneurs by either cushioning them with hopes of investments, in the name of incubation centres (totally taking away their risk appetite)and by simply not letting that first idea fail.

If statistics are true, then its usually the third venture of an incremental entrepreneur that will or should get funded. Anything before that is all premature, and just part of the process.

So I am trying to validate this theory and it kinda starts to make sense. They say that for any product to be built, it takes roughly about 2.4 iterations before it can hit the market and scale. With an iterative entrepreneur, I really believe that the entrepreneur himself is the product – really think about it. Every icon that you can imagine is one of those. Do you really think they made it in their first shot?

The first step really doesn’t have to be that big idea. And i’ll repeat that over and over again. With Michael dell it was the idea of buying stamps for cheap and selling them. He writes in his book that he learnt things in that first venture which helped him put together Dell. It’s also the reason that I strongly believe that they should start as early as possible – right in High school or college if possible. It could be just about anything from running a local canteen to trying your hand with home made jewellery. What you understand about working and interacting with people will go a long way.

Trust me, it wont be easy. And as a audience in OCC Bangalore noted during discussions, it is a terrible experience when your first idea bombs when asked for feedback from peers. But you know what… its all part of building you as the product. It’s an excercise to shed that extra weight that you have in you – that air of confidence and assumptions sometimes. Really, for an iterative entrepreneur, its all about falling nine times and getting up ten times. It really is.

So if you are one that falls into the first category, well You probably wont be reading this cause you’ll be busy trying to keep those investors and partners in bay. As for the iterative kind, unless you are in your third or fourth venture, dont waste your time trying to raise money and all. Be smart, save some money here and there, be frugal and stick it out. See how far you can build and take a product without having to raise money – its very much like holding your breathe to see how far you can control yourself from now having to depend on oxygen. But when you do attain that balance – or even control in it, thats when you know you are ready for the olympics to show the world what you really got.

Alright, If you are not an Indian, this does not in anyway relate to you. So Shoo.

So there are have been plenty of thoughts, talks and words shared about this N’deal. I am personally glad that we are signing it and we move one step ahead to the league where we are authorized to launch ourselves into a new territory.

There are enough talks that go on in the corridors of IIT and now that the deal in the parliament is all done, it was probably the best time to talk about it. You know, we’ve been through this before. Long time ago we signed a deal with Qualcomm to develop their CDMA technology. They pretty much used our resources, built it and sold it back to us on higher royalty. I think we’ve learnt our lesson the hard way and the folks who are advising the government on this matter are people with relevant experience. Today, thanks to such incidents, we build telecom equipment which is in par with global standards, and also we dont get into such agreements where its not equally set anymore. We needed that stepping stone.

The common reason you hear for this treaty is that we are running short of power. Just who isnt? I think if our current energy consumptions keeping rising, we most certainly will keep depleting resources. But there are plenty of options being explored, including, wind, solar and the such and I absolutely believe that if necessity is the mother of all invention, there is definitely someone with a spark out there who has an idea to solve this issue.

But really, as much as energy is at the core of all this, there are two things which are of absolute importance to this deal. For one, our knowledge in the nuclear space is very limited. If Nuclear energy is permitted, trust me, we could have put a man in mars long time ago. Our space research program would have gone a long away – not as indians, but as citizens of this world, and I think this is a splendid opportunity to look into all that. The leverage that this deal will provide us in terms of raising our knowledge standards – in the same manner that the BPO sector did for us in the IT space, will do phenomenal good for us.

Secondly, there is the core issue. Energy. Energy consumptions are high and resources are running out. But India has the largest resources of Thorium, and thorium requires the residue of Uranium reactors to be made active. Really, think about it. Once Uranium reserves are depleted, and the fossil fuels run out, we are probably going to be the largest reserve of energy. Now that’s a trump card to hold in the future. If energy consumptions are not going down anytime soon – and though as I mentioned alternate energy generations methods are coming up, we will still need reactors to power up industries and residences – we will technically hold the same power and leverage as the middle east has, for years. Add that India rising to the global level and economic power, and I think we will put the US and the Euro to the test.

But all this hinges on one level of detail. Whenever there has been a country with lots of resources, it has always been exploited. We have been there before – and lost all our gold and riches, and the entire continent of Africa went through the same for the gold, and now it will be this. The Only reason the middle eastern countries havent been through that is because of their union and we know what happens when one of them falls out of the fold. And We better get our act together, and eventually for the sake of keeping our borders safe, develop the technology that will guard us.

There has been ofcourse a concern that we possibly don’t have as many nuclear engineers as we should for all this. Well, it was pretty much a similar concern long time ago for the booming IT sector as well, and we managed that, didnt we? We’ll do that once again. The one resource we are in abundant of, is manpower, and that’s quite an asset. We can definitely use that to our advantage.

This is an absolutely positive step for us. And a good one. The only thing, we better start playing our cards carefully, cause every move matters from now on.

There are only a whole total of 14 tasks that need to be done before the event,and given the capable team that we have this time, and the sheer level of enthusiasm flowing, I dont see that to be a problem. The core team from Chennai, Bangalore, and other places are starting to fly in into Delhi starting tomorrow – Our flight leaves in exactly another four hours. The team is busy getting their laptops on datacards so that we can still remain effective, even on the go. We are prepped, geared and all ready for it.

What did didn’t expect is the sheer push of some magical moment that has happened within the community to attend the event. we are nearing 400 attendees for the event, and that’s a “significant” jump from the 250 that we had last time – and trust me when I say that I am genuinely surprised. I always thought that the southern states were more entrepreneur-centric. I suppose it takes a good shot to really prove and debunk theories and myths as well.

In the following two days I am going to be writing to you to prep you to help set some expectations and in terms of some of the activities that we are planning at the event. The Innovation brainjam on the second day is something I am personally looking forward to. The credit goes to Amit Somani of Google, who threw open this open-ended way of brainstorming that they practice at google and as we pondered over the possibility of doing that in a conference. It should be loads of fun.

If you are a blogger by any means are a little rusty, this is the time to sharpen your skills. It’s going to be a liveblogging marathon this time, and we even have a surprise for the best live-blogged summary of the event. If you are the logical, knowledgeable one, well take heed. The quizzes are there to die for. I’m sure you’ve enjoyed the quizzes on the blog, and you’ll see more of it live in action, and as random teams come together to compete.

We are still looking for folks to take up various activities (If you are a good photographer, do let us know). So if you would like to help volunteer, the mailing list for the same is the first place to start, Have fun, keep your heads up high, and as we get together, let the voice that we always echo, echo once more – may the startups win!

PS: We’ll mostly be lurking around the venue starting tommorrow. Feel free to drop by and say hello. We do take encouragement in terms of homemade cookies too – Just kidding.

I’m convinced that we are doing something wrong.

During a conversation with someone who has experience beyond my age, on how the product landscape in India is evolving, he smiled, took the time to coin his words (into something more politically correct) and said, “Nobody is really changing the rules of the game. Everyone is looking to make a quick buck”. When I met Subho Roy of IAMAI a few weeks back, he pretty much resonated with that and almost let out the frustration saying “This is all turning into a valuation game. Where are the days of building solid businesses?” Is there something wrong with that? Thats what I am hoping we can discuss, argue and debate about here.

It’s that time of the year for Proto.in – got barely a month to go and usually this is the time when we are finalizing all the companies and lining up the speakers for the Fastrack Sessions. We are talking about… How to sell, as a Startup? Not how to sell-out, more like how to sell your products and make revenue. There is much that seems to be obscure in the land of the startup community with so much millions and trillions discussed about – especially the size of the VC firm’s wallet.

I have been touching base with a fair slew of guys who have natively built and sold products here in India. Tally is one such company that I got in touch with and the response I got really got me thinking – because it resonates with what Mr. Experienced told me before. He wasn’t sure if he could make it to the event since he has travel plans, but left with a note saying “I wonder if people are ready to hear the heartache of building a business over 18 years. It might even depress a startup.”

Lets not make a mistake here saying that Tally just didn’t hit it right. Do you know how long it took for Bose to become a double digit million dollar making company? More than a decade. There is a joke within circles that Bose would be a bad company in a VC’s portfolio. Infosys took 25 years to attain maturity and go public. Look at Wipro. Look at Microsoft. The list is endless.

Arguably so, there is a compression in the age of the entrepreneur, the pace at which modern businesses move and grow, and it certainly has shortened, but has it also shortened the lifespans of the company?

I strongly believe that as a startup entrepreneur, the wrong person to meet is a VC. Keep in touch with him, listen to them, and get your due diligence out of them, but when it comes to business models, ignore what they have to say. They are going to want you to make revenue from day one. And the process to do that is to have an opportunistic view and that unfortunately is always short lived. Forget revenues. Forget business models. Identify the need. Understand your customers. Understand what the market is evolving towards. Then its upto you to perceive those needs and demands and formulate the solution and figure out the price discovery as to how much your customers would cough up to get that handed to them in a platter.

Instead, if you go to an investor much earlier on, on your toddler days when you should be focusing on growing, having fun and enjoying the time speaking mumbo jumbo with your peers and playing hide and seek, you’ll be wrapped in a straightjacket or in a war suit and sent to battle the mammoths of the battlefield. The end of that is not rocket science to figure out. But trust me, a kid in the middle of a battlefield will be sensational story – and trust me you will get the attention of a whole lot of folks. You just wont last long enough.

I’ll nitpick on one industry. The Travel Industry. If you go and pitch to anyone saying that you are working in the Travel Industry they are going to shun you thinking that you are the next travel portal claiming the cheapest price on the web. It has unfortunately come to that. But do you know how much inefficiencies are still there in the travel industry? The issues with checking in, tracking baggages, and even the legacy systems that they have to manage the passengers inside the terminal – the systems are really not keeping up with the explosion in traffic. Buying a cheap ticket is the least of the worries as of now. How many of you know of Sabre? They are pretty much the underlying platform behind the entire air fleet management and PNR systems worldwide. They are big, which means they are probably scared of radical change. Tell me what they are missing out on, what of that is adding to the woes of the traveller, and fix that.

I remember recently when I was talking to a publishing media about a recent magazine that they had launched. This is a magazine which is focused for entrepreneurs – and its quite well known by now. The magazine house has defined a period of five years for them to break even. I asked the man at the helm if the print industry had such a slow uptake. He responded saying “we break even in 14 months, but we’d rather make the investments in the first couple of years towards a solid start”. He made sense. Lots of sense.

How you lay the foundations for your empire matter. There is a parable in the bible about a man who build his house on the rock, and one that built it on sand. The way the house came up, obviously had a difference since the one on sand required much less work and it was all upwards, but when the rain came down, it showed which one was a much solid refuge to live in.

I think, err believe that startups should have fun. Build something people want, and build it having fun and in a way that you are passionate about. I am strongly against working 18 hours a day and racing against time to catch the wave. My most favorite teacher in school always said that it was much easier to fish in a calm ocean than in the middle of a hurricane. Ideas, concepts and the clarity of mind to execute are all luxuries that you can only enjoy in a calm ocean.

So tell me, if you were absolutely passionate about something and want to totally change the rules of the game of an industry, and would want your name to live on for years to come, what would you do? Think about it… take your time… ah, thats what you should be doing. Not living on Instant noodles. Let me tell you what, lets sit down with some candlelight, under the clear skies, and treat ourselves to gourmet – slightly tedious, painful and takes more time, but I tell ya, its totally worth it. What say ye?