No? Are you sure you’re not the white cow? 99 out of 100 people in this world are. Well, look again, go check yourself in the mirror. Are you still sure?
Looks can be deceptive. we see literally hundreds of white cows every day, we even eat with them, walk with them, talk with them, share jokes with them. Confused?
Well, our beloved ‘white cow’ as described by marketing guru, Seth Godin, is the average man, common man, aam aadmi, call him what you may. As Seth notices, suppose you’re driving down a highway .You see a cow grazing by the field. Nobody stops and looks at a cow and says “Hey look, a cow! “. That’s the truth, cows are everywhere, hence they’re invisible. Likewise, average man is invisible. Average man is boring. Average man is well, average! Our average man does not like to take risks, he likes to play it ‘safe’. He likes to go with the flow. He thinks that by doing what everybody else does, supposedly one day he’ll become better off at doing them than others. He thinks if he can’t do anything, nobody can especially you. YOU, the reader of this article, you is a future Ambani, Mittal, Gates, Buffet. You is a shining star of India. You is the next big thing. He usually will show high self-esteem about the work he’s doing. He will think anybody taking a risk is the biggest fool he’s ever met and will smirk, laugh and criticize your ideas. That’s the average man. He can come in many forms, maybe your teachers, friends or even parents. But ‘ You’ should not care about the world , rise over all this and move on.
Well, in today’s world,’ being safe’ is the riskiest thing to do with your career. Well, among other things this is one of the biggest lessons the recent hush-hush in the financial world has taught us. According to thousands of people who lost their jobs, they had one of the safest, best jobs in the world. Who wouldn’t kill for a job at the Wall Street at a top-notch firm where billions move from one place to another everyday! But we all know the consequences.
To be successful, one has to learn to take risks early in life. Risk taking capability reduces with age, hence the earlier the better. You win some, you lose some. But here’s the deal. The more risks you take, the better you learn how to manage them. That’s what entrepreneurs do; they take risks AND manage them. India, and the world, in general needs more entrepreneurs. We don’t need more average men; there are already a lot of them. About 6 billion to be precise. Well then, do I mean we don’t need scientists, artists, rockstars, politicians, lawyers? Of course not. We need. Infact, I say ALL successful people are entrepreneurs. Don’t believe me? Let me explain.
Entrepreneurs are people who do what they love, they break new grounds by being innovative, they live by their own rules, and they do something that is useful to this world and do it to perfection. It’s a way of life. For example, Great scientists are just like business people who build great products in the form of their theories that have a profound effect on our knowledge of the world. Likewise, other people.
Take another example of Mahatma Gandhi; he was an entrepreneur according to me. He had a great idea to change the world (freedom of India) for millions of Indians(customers).He went against the market forces (Britishers) and build great products(like Quit India Movement, Non-Obedience, Non-violence, Non-cooperation) which he advertised( through local newspapers started by revolutionaries, by holding seminars and conferences).He built a great team(Pt Nehru, Subhash Chandra Bose, Sardar Patel, Gopal Krishna Gokhale etc.).With such a business strategy, people of India finally bought his products (yes, they finally bought his ideas), which led to the greatest victory ever in the history of India.
Lets talk about this concept in the context of creating great companies that change the world we live in. So the first big question comes, why this?
Well, like I said being risky is the new safe today.Furthermore, its a lot more than that. You set out to create a change in this world, a positive change. You will be known by that years after you are gone. Entrepreneurship is the tool with which you can create this change. You see a problem that’s bothering people or you see an area where you can improve the life of people around you. That, my friend, is the Holy Grail of entrepreneurship. That is the golden goose, the opportunity! You can either kill it by ignoring it, or use it to make billions! Let’s not forget, it’s not about the money. This is a trillion dollar advice. You make making-money your prime motive and you dig your own grave with your own two hands. Great companies are build to make meaning, they make our lives better and that’s exactly what you should look out for. As simple as it may sound, many people forget this basic principle. You make something that is of great value to people and they will be more than happy to pull out their wallets and pay you! Make meaning, Money follows!
When is the right time to do it? Now, is the right time to do it.
Well, you say you are young, just a recent graduate, you don’t have an experience in the industry, you don’t have the money, oh, and you forgot, the best of all, you don’t have an MBA. How can you even think of doing a business. Right?
Not a problem!
Recent graduates make the best breed of entrepreneurs, speaking statistically and generally. You’re well networked, you’re young, you’re enthusiastic, you is the only person you have to feed, there are no spouses and thank God, no kids .Moreover you live amongst technology. There’s no better place to find a team than here. And frankly, once you get caught in the corporate web, you’ll find that life way too ‘safe’ to leave it and start anything from scratch .Well then, do I mean everybody should leave everything else including job at Schlumberger/MS or PhD at MIT/your favourite MBA from IIM A ? No, ofcourse not, that would be a sin by many peoples’ standards. But the point here is, are you doing it for the money or do you really love it? “Oh, I don’t care, all I care about is money! After all, now even Govinda says Money hai to Honey hai. Why should I trust you over Govinda? “ Well, trust me, if you are not excited by the idea of working in oilfields in the scorching heat in a no man’s land , or if the prospect of working with cutting edge technology in closed labs with weird LCD displays and a plethora of buttons around you, doesn’t excite you, don’t go for it. It’s not that fun after all.”And money? How am I supposed to buy a Lexus before my classmate does?” Well, just look around more people have gotten rich otherwise. Money is everywhere. Chances are that if you do something you like, and you do it repeatedly to perfection, you’ll have more Lexus than your classmates.
Second obstacle that comes is the experience in general and experience of your industry. One thing, EXPERIENCE IS OVERRATED! You are going to learn more by trying to setup a new business from scratch than your counterparts sitting in cubicles writing codes. You call that experience? That’s wasting time, frankly. It’s adding no real value to you. You don’t learn by typing around, you learn by going to the streets, talking to real customers, who are going to pay you for your cutting edge software or your next big product or your new life-saving drug. That is where you learn the nitty-gritty of the trade. You learn how a great product is developed, you learn what people want and what they don’t want, you learn to negotiate, you learn to sign deals, you learn to manage your finances. Business is largely about people. When you learn how to deal with people, half the battle is won. It can’t be done in cubicles, by definition. That is what is called experience. It’s kind of a blessing in disguise, not having an experience. You have a clean board, you can see for yourself what works for you and what doesn’t. Sure, you can and should take advice, but that should be it. When you make a mistake, it’s your neck on the line, not your employer’s. You learn faster when it’s your business. It’s your baby, won’t you care? Ask yourself, where you will learn more.
As far as MBA is concerned, what a person learns in 2 months while “trying” to setup a business is far more valuable than the 2 years spent in classrooms. That is the whole point of it, when you do everything yourself, you learn accountability, responsibility and best of all leadership, the three most important pillars of your professional life. There just isn’t a better way to learn these skills. Education is not a bad thing, not at all. But one should know when to get it, why to get it. Brushing up your skills with an MBA after you have some real world solid experience and networking will go a long way in making your case stronger than sitting in MBA classrooms right after your graduation, where you don’t know the basics of how a business is done.
MBA is not there to teach you how to do business, it won’t, it can make a good business person better. That’s it.
The last and often the most daunting problem that you might face if you walk this route is raising capital for your venture. Where do you get the money from? Is it really that tough? “I’ve heard a majority of start-ups die before their second year and that’s mostly due to lack of funds!” Well, I’m afraid to say it’s in fact the fact. A majority of people who start out forget the other principles I discussed about before, some die off simply due to bad decision-making and other due to lack of funds. But that should not deter our vision. People who set out to make money leave all hope at this stage, but people who set out to right a wrong continue.
There are a lot of good opportunities to raise capital. Govt of India provides funds to young entrepreneurs with promising ideas under a scheme called TePP. One of our alumni, Natasha Sodhi, founder of Yellow Fourier Technologies, is one such person. Other than that, various banks throughout the nation are increasingly making investments in the sunshine sectors of our country. Apart from that there are our good old venture capitalists and angel investors or private equity routes. One of our alumni, Raghu Khanna, founder of www.cashurdrive.com was one such person. Apart from that, one of our alumni, Sachin Bhatia, along with a few others opened Drishti Soft Solutions with a initial capital from their own pockets(called bootstrapping) and are currently looking for venture capital to scale up. People often use a mix of various paths to raise capital.
When you set out to change the world, small problems like these often come along. That’s where risk management comes in. One should learn to mitigate it as much as possible.
Now that being young, inexperienced (with no MBA in Finance) and penniless are no longer a problem, we can move on to how to go about actually doing this!
Well, there have been complete set of books written over it. I’m going to try to sum it all up in a few lines here:
1) Find the problem, it’s the golden goose.
2) Conceptualise a product/service around your target customer that will solve the problem.
3) Go to the market experts, concerned professors, potential customers to fine-tune it and know if people really want it. If yes, in what quantity, how much are they willing to pay for it?
4) Build prototypes, give them away for free and let people test them and let you know how good or bad a job have you done.
4.5) Appoint a advisory board comprising of people who know how to do the business: technical, legal and operational aspects. Ask them nicely to be your mentors. Give them a share of your profits. Good Samaritans are not a minority in India!
5) Use the satisfaction reports, advisors and prototypes to finalize contracts with dealers, suppliers, customers and raise capital to scale up.
Following these steps should help one take off! But then, easier said than done. There can be no guarantees to avoiding failures. They will happen. But one should learn and move on and never stop. That’s the biggest lesson.
There’s a joke which goes like:
“One entrepreneur is explaining to another how he got into business. “I was afraid to go out on my own, but my former boss gave me a jump start by telling me the most encouraging two words in my life. One day he came into my office and said “You’re fired.” “
Well, one shouldn’t wait for that day. Should one?
A person has his whole life to be average, for once, try to do something out-of-the-box, surprise yourself, challenge yourself. Entrepreneurship is living a few years of your life like most people won't, so that you can spend the rest of your life like most people can’t. So go ahead, start thinking today. Don’t be afraid of failures. Don’t be safe like other 99% people around you, get up and get going. Safe is stupid. Safe is boring. Safe is average. Safe is risky.
And as Mark Twain put it nicely,
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover “
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