Tarun Dua

Just finished reading Rashmi Bansal's book 'Stay Hungry Stay Foolish'(ISBN 978-81-904530-1-1) released during the IIMA Entrepreneuers meet organized by CIIE.

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'Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish' is the story of 25 such IIM Ahmedabad graduates who chose the rough road of entrepreneurship.
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Many of the 25 IIM-A alumni profiled in the book were present at the meet.
The book was released during the entrepreneur's meet and I am not sure if its available for sale yet. But highly recommended. The book is divided into 3 sections

• The Believers: IIM-A graduates who took the plunge straight out of IIM-A
• The Opportunists: Who saw an opportunity and capitalized on it
• The Alternate Vision: Social Entrepreneurs who cared about things beyond money

The book is written in a conversational format with the author thinking aloud before having a conversation with an entrepreneur followed by the conversation and a page of advice from the entrepreneur.

The sheer breadth of advice from entrepreneurs proves one big point, there is no consistent formula for success. There are examples and counter-examples of every strategy in the same book.

• There is no other way but to learn from one's own mistakes
• It pays to ride a wave in an upturn but then belief in one's ideas is as important to see through the trying times
• Bootstrap is good but sometimes there is no other way to scale up without a high leverage investments backed by a VC/PE fund
• Jumping straight into the rough is good but so is gaining some experience and building a nice nest egg before taking the plunge
• Its good to have equal partnerships with your co-founders but sometimes there needs to be a first amongst equals for smooth functioning
• You can plan really well and execute it with mathematical precision but sometimes the best of plans can be bested on first contact with the market
• Maintaining independence of your venture ('my baby') for long through the rough road is good but knowing when to let go even when the going is good is needed many times
• Government can be a very conservative regulator and prone to knee-jerk policy actions based on emerging events which can kill entrepreneurial ventures but sometimes they are the only ones who are willing to try out something new providing the much needed lifeline to ventures thinking ahead of their times.
• Small is beautiful but without scale the actual vision cannot be realised
• In all cases IIM-A alumni network helped a lot

Definitely a recommended read for students, as once one of my teachers at my alma mater put it succinctly 'acchi chhokri and achhi naukri is not the only goal in life for everyone'(apologies to women reading this but it applies equally well the other way around).

I have a backlog of what I intend to write about the iAccelerator program and the just concluded Entrepreneur's Meet at IIM-A, both organized by CIIE. So I shall continue to write these posts in chronological order.

Apart from technical mentors like I and Freeman, the iAccelerator program has invited a lot alumni and entrepreneurs to mentor the startup teams by taking up various topics in 2 hour sessions. I'll try and cover a few of these interactions.

Interaction with Faisal Farooqui: Founder of Mouthshut.com

Apart from the usual discussion about how Mouthshut was founded just prior to the dotcom bust and how it survived it, which is documented on the video embed above.

Faisal's 3 hour session with the incubatees included advice on how to be successful as an entreprenuer:-
1. Burn the boats: Being an entrepreneur is not about money, its a by-product. If you have a plan B, thats a sure shot way to fail and actually needing the Plan B.
2. Self esteem and huge ego: Entrepreneurs need to believe in their ideas more than anyone else. Ideas have no value without people willing to back them fully by investing themselves.
3. People Skills, they are in use for anything you do: You need to grow your startup by getting a lot of help from people, whether its partners or employees( paid with equity alone )
4. Hire the best: He recounted that early on he made hiring mistakes at Mouthshut by hiring programmers trained by poorer quality training institutes and not from good engineering colleges and soon learned that as a technology driven company they need to try and hire only the best engineers.
5. Don't die because of end of your cash: Be careful on what you spend your money there might be lower cost alternatives.
6. Apart from technology, learn business.

The discussion veered around to how exactly do you 'launch' your web startup to the market without spending money on advertising. Faisal recalled the Buzz mouthshut generated with the friends and family launch of about 600 people who knew about 11 of their employees.

He also recalled the story of how accidentally he pioneered autorickshaw's as the medium to get the word out way back in early 2000s when he started travelling by auto for first time in his life. Now ofcourse we find a whole lot of startups advertising on autorickshaw's with mouthshut itself sticking their ad to almost 12000 autorickshaws every month.

Audience questions included questions like:-

What makes the review conversations on Mouthshut are more objective than say trashy comments on other famous indian sites ?

Discussion on native language(written in roman script) profanity filters on mouthshut.com, legal threats initially while companies didn't agree to the idea of 'defamation' by consumers through mouthshut.

He also expressed his view that startups run by very young people in the audience should not be scared of an old but successful dotcoms in India which aren't doing great in understanding the young people, and worried if he is too old to innovate beyond mouthshut.com. Supporting his hypothesis is his own daughter's favorite site, despite drinking all the mouthshut.com koolaid since birth happens to be youtube.

He also expressed willingness to acquire new kind of websites developed by youngsters who understand their peers better if he has cash available.

The interactive session ended with him gifting a mouthshut.com coffee mug to each participant.

Coming soon:-
A description of interactive session with Sanjeev Bhikchandani: Founder Infoedge(Naukri)

So I reached Ahmedabad safely, my doubts about un-rest on the way to Delhi were mostly un-founded.

First impressions of Ahmedabad itself
1. Autorickshaw drivers are very friendly and honest,
2. According to the rick driver the city is secure enough for women to move about the town at 3 AM in the night, now thats a first for an Indian city.
2. Roads from Airport to IIM-A were wide and weren't clogged with traffic and weren't polluted.
3. The city is the heaven for vegetarians, most restaurant chains have removed non-vegetarian from their menu so as not to annoy their vegetarian clientèle.
4. Subway here has one vegetarian 'sub of the day' everyday as no one buys the regular high priced sandwich anyway. A lesson in free market for all those pricey MNC food chains ;-), which no other city in India could have taught them.
5. The city was promised 24 hours power by the government in power and it has been delivered, and now 24 hour municipal water supply has been promised and people are confident it shall be done.
6. The city has everything going for it except an high technology innovation scene.

Now to the real topic of this post, first impressions of the IAccelerator program at IIM-A

1. The CIIE is a remarkably autonomous organization within IIM-A and according to Aditi all the employees are basically entrepreneurs who have either done a startup of their own or intend to do one in future.
2. There is a complete understanding of startup/geek lifestyle and all attempts by CIIE are directed towards facilitating the same instead of opposing it as most IT companies end up doing when they grow big.
3. Startup Teams are a remarkable mix of people from those who have international exposure to technology business and college students who have just completed their 3rd year in college.
4. Freeman has been playing the role of an elderstatesman remarkably well, more than just another mentor, giving his insights into business as well as technology side for all the teams
5. Despite all my years in IT industry, I have learned quite a few things about technology from these young teams and their informed technology choices.

Photographs and more about this gig later.

Tomorrow I am heading to the Summer Startup Camp at IIM-A to be with the team which includes Aditi, Kunal, Freeman and a bunch of hardworking startups. I am a bit anxious traveling tomorrow through troubled times in India. Lets hope there is not much trouble on the way to New Delhi Airport. What I need is realtime news of what is happening in Delhi and on my way through Haryana, there is not much of it available on the web right now.