Bharat Entrepreneurs

This is a very funny and quite serious question which I’ve been asking myself for sometime now. Well from my earlier posts you might have already realised that I want to have a company of my own sometime soon.

But how soon is the real question ? I’ve several ideas bumping in my mind at all times and it feels real misreable when I see others launching that idea before I could even start to work upon it.

Yesterday saw the movie Antitrust and I guess the initial speech by CEO of NURV company in the movie encapsulates the tech business. It’s a binary business he said, either 1(alive) or 0(dead) and with new technologies mushrooming every hour it’s very hard to keep up with the pace. If it was not for Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry and Brian then maybe some other kid working somewhere in a Garage might have been a success today. The difference between these guys and others I feel is that they are ready to take their chances while others are terrified to an extent, to stick to the orthodox way of secure life. It’s not that all budding entrepreneurs who’ve left their college midway have been successful but if the idea is really rocking and coool then there is no way that one can’t build another Microsoft, Apple or Google. And these are just the few renowned companies, there are thousands of others like Blake Ross (Firefox Kid), Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning (Napster), Bram Cohen (BitTorrent), Max Levchin (Paypal) who have made it real big despite having dropped out of college quite early in their career.

Max Levchin, a University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign graduate who sold the company he co-founded, PayPal, to eBay for $1.5 billion when he was just 26, uses his blockbuster success to persuade students at his alma mater not to follow his example. He makes the case that young people should seize the fleeting opportunity to get a different kind of education.

“You are essentially taking a class in real-life company-building on the nickel of a venture capitalist,” Levchin said. “It’s a pretty unbeatable deal.”

So the big question that remains to be answered is should one drop out of college or not to pursue his/her dream ? Debate is on ….

Popularity: 13%

Entrepreneurs are spread across all different domains of life. However if we look closely at the kind of work done by entrepreneurs in the domain of computer science (aka IT), we can see that in most cases the work done by these entrepreneurs be it Gates, Steve Jobs, Sabir Bhatia, Brian and Larry or any of the other people, comes under the class of inventors in someway or the other (Many people might not agree with putting Mr. Gates in category of inventors, but still what Microsoft did with Windows platform was something very unique). So this brings up a really funny question in my mind, “Are techy entrepreneurs, inventors ?”

Few months back I took a chance to find a VC for one of ideas I had in mind. As I was not well versed with economic fundas involved in business so I decided to take a safe way and registered myself with Global Entrepreneurship Network (www.genportal.org). This is one initiative by 7 premiere institutions in India to foster spirit of entrepreneurship among youth of this country. This portal provides means for funding, mentoring and even incubation. Though I was unable to attract any VC for my idea but it did provide me insight into the wonderful world of entrepreneurship. However one unique thing which I saw there was that most of the projects were not the kind like “Setting up a new restaurant or setting up an automobile workshop or things which we can find round the corner. Almost every project listed there was unique in it’s own way and provided solutions in a new and unique way.”

To a very large extent this is true also, as only a new invention can attract masses and if it clicks then money starts to pour in large proportions and VCs are benefited much more than if they had invested in a run of the mill kind of idea. But then what happens to the projects that might have real worth in coming years and the people at present are unable to justify the benefits of such a project ? This is question which still remains unanswered, at least to me.

Popularity: 6%