Amar Gopal Bose, an Indian American and MIT graduate is the founder of BOSE Corporation which is one of the pioneering companies in the world in the not so popular world of acoustics. According to Forbes, the company was worth US $ 1.8 billion in 2007.

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But what makes Amar Bose a completely different kind of entrepreneur is even after 45 years, his company has not gone public ! And if you’re wondering why such a handsomely profitable company has no interest in the stock market and is not selling shares and raking in billions like everybody else, embrace yourselves when you hear this. All company profits are diligently pumped back to augment more research.

When companies like Yahoo, Microsoft and Google have grown overnight to becoming “an abyss filled with gold trinkets” by going public, BOSE Corporation remains a sterling example of true entrepreneurship. The kind of entrepreneurship which fosters extensive research and developing better products and organically growing the company on such merits rather than wasting time answering concerns of overreacting investors.

Once when Mr.Bose was on a Swiss Air plane and he tried to use the in-flight headphones to listen to music, he found the experience very unpleasant because of the accompanying loud engine noise. When he would raise the volume so that he could hear the music over the engine sound, the headphones would distort the music.

Struck by this problem, that there must be a way to be able to separate sounds and channel only those that we want to hear and cancel the rest, he solved the problem on that very flight and proved it mathematically that it could be done.

We live in a money-hungry planet where everyday entrepreneurs desperately look for new ideas to start new ventures and then hope to sell stocks at the stock market to become immediate (and also volatile) millionaires. Example, Enron the energy company. But then there are entrepreneurs like Mr. Bose who slowly yet steadily build a company with innovation and not profits as its core strategy and thus continue to survive market volatility.

Concept, photo by Sunny Walia

Article content by Sourabh Chakraborty

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