Posted on

Fireside Chat: Vinod Khosla and Nandan Nilekani in Conversation with Sharad Sharma

Join us for a conversation with Vinod Khosla and Nandan Nilekani. Together with Sharad Sharma, our fireside chat host, they will talk about what it means to be an entrepreneur in India today and how these entrepreneurs can solve the hardest problems of India.

Vinod Khosla and Nandan Nilekani are arguably two of the most influential thinkers and innovators of our time when it comes to transformation, entrepreneurship, and large scale impact. Born within 6 months of each other, both graduated for IITs, created iconic companies, become billionaires in the in aprocess and continue to innovate and transform the world.

What better opportunity than to hear these icons of industry at a fireside chat discussing the most intriguing aspects of startups, entrepreneurship, digital transformation and India’s growth towards a multi trillion dollar economy.

About Mr. Vinod Khosla

Vinod Khosla is the founder of Khosla Ventures, a premier Silicon Valley venture capital firm, and a member of the 2018 Midas List. His firm, Khosla Ventures, invests in a wide variety of startups ranging from Healthcare, Sustainable Energy, Food/Agriculture to Space, AI and Robotics. He co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 after which he spent 18 years at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers before launching his own fund.

About Mr. Nandan Nilekani

Nandan Nilekani is the co-founder of tech giant Infosys and currently back as a non-executive chairman affecting a remarkable turnaround. In 2009, he was made a Cabinet Minister and Chairman of UIDAI – India’s mammoth National ID project – Aadhaar.  After Aadhaar, Nandan has actively supported India’s digital transformation through the IndiaStack initiatives in payments, digital locker, eSignature and other services. Nandan has also backed startups in the India ecosystem.

About Mr. Sharad Sharma

Sharad Sharma is the co-founder of iSPIRT and has worn many hats as CEO of Yahoo India R&D, Chair of NASSCOM Product Forum and as intrapreneur at AT&T. He is a passionate evangelist and an active investor in the software product ecosystem in India.

When?

2nd of August, 2019 from 18:00 – 19:30 hrs.
Venue to be disclosed. 

How to participate?

You can be a part of this Fireside Chat by registering here. Confirmed participants will be intimated by the 28th of July via email. 

Please note, due to limited seating at the venue we will not be able to accommodate everyone who applies.

Posted on

An Entrepreneur At 40? This Is What Not To Do…

I have often heard people say that most men hit their mid-life crisis at 40. That’s when they run a marathon, try to reinvent their personal image or quit their job. Though, as a general rule, I do not believe in such lores, I must admit that it might have been true in my case.

I experienced my ‘Eureka’ moment when I was merrily ambling towards my 4th decade. Sainergie was thus, borne.

I am one of those entrepreneurs who believes that age is just a number. Because, my success is directly co-related to my idea, passion and commitment. I have learned hard lessons along the way and have developed a nice blueprint on ‘what not to do’ things for first generation entrepreneurs like me who might or might not have hit the ‘mid-life crisis’.

Not keeping an intent to learn

 Irrespective of your long standing experience working to your advantage, you are still taking baby steps in entrepreneurship. You are as good and as bad as your fellow entrepreneur. Learning should be a continuous process. If you meet an entrepreneur younger than you, but with more ‘startup’ experience than you, there is no reason to feel conscious or disappointed. Rather, try to draw inspiration from people around you.Also, it doesn’t matter if you face an adverse situation. A smart entrepreneur learns a valuable lesson from a bad mistake.

Stop evolving and adapting to the changes

Right from technology to consumer behaviour, everything is dynamic and changing at a swift pace. You should be ready to embrace these changes in your product or strategy. Until you adapt to what customers are demanding, you wouldn’t be able to take the right course of action to achieve your vision. The bright side of things is that the smaller or newer your startup is, the easier it is to evolve.

Making a rush for seed funding

 When I launched my startup, people would ask me, “How will run you the show?“. Well, my thought process was very clear that my startup will remain a bootstrapped company as long as I can manage. Of course, given my age, my risk appetite was comparatively lower than an entrepreneur in 20s or early 30s. I had my children’s education and other family expenses to take care of. But, I had a decent corpus accumulated from my corporate earnings and I had invested wisely to manage my personal expenses even if I wouldn’t be earning. So, I didn’t hesitate to invest my money as the ‘first capital’ in my startup.

When the initial risk has subsided and your startup starts doing well, you can bring investors on board.

Trying to grow too fast

 I have observed that most new entrepreneurs prioritize on increasing the sales volume and the company size or diversifying the business. But, all these exhaust resources in terms of people, processes, time and efforts. Rather, you should focus on building a good company that creates value, even if it means being a tortoise in the startup race for the first few years.

Encourage the culture of innovation in your startup and groom your team for multi-tasking roles. This way, you can remain a lean company for many years and still drive your business in the right direction. Investors don’t look at how big you are, they see what potential you have to earn profits.

Making things complicated

“It was always very simple; I just made it complicated.” No matter how great your idea or product is, if it takes more than a few minutes for you to explain or for the customers to understand it, perhaps you have complicated things. It’s all about the basics, use all your career experience to plug the gaps and eliminate the barriers. You should keep things simple, smart and transparent so that your winning becomes simpler.

When deciding to become an entrepreneur at 40, remember that you have experience, network and maturity to back your vision and passion. All you need is to roll up your sleeves and take a plunge!

Your thoughts?

 

Posted on

Entreprenuers should’t sweat small stuff!

Was going through popular book “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff … and it’s all small stuff” by Richard Carlson, PhD and realized lot of the points outlined by Richard are applicable precisely for enterpreneurs in their startup journey.

Make peace with imperfection:

As a startup, we always are short of resources that are typically available for a big corporation. When resources are scarce, its difficult and often impossible to achieve perfection in all things. Its better to accept the same and make peace with imperfection. The same applies to all activities in startup – whether it is do with kind of talent we might want in the team, the kind of expectations you have with the sub-ordinates/peers or simple things like the way office is maintained, non availability of admin support when you have your important meetings scheduled in the office.

Remember that having zero items in ToDo list doesn’t mean success:

As an entrepreneur, your To-Do list is almost infinite. You have hundreds of things to do and the more you complete the activities in your to-do list, the more seem to get added. Don’t worry about this as this is more than natural for all entrepreneurs. So never get yourself so tensed up to complete all activities in your ToDo list. Prioritize and work on important tasks and move on.

Learn to Live in the Present Moment:

It’s important to learn from the mistakes in the past and plan for the future. But the most important success factor for any startup is execution. And key for succesful execution is to focus on the present moment. Focusing on present moment, important tasks that we are working on hand will give us best results and success.

Allow Yourself to Be Bored:

As entrepreneurs, thanks to the infinite ToDo list, we will ending up having no time for ourself or to relax. It’s a good idea to take some time out of our busy schedules and be idle. Being idle atleast for few minutes each day will give us new perspective and believe me this is the time most of us will come up with breakthrough ideas to scale the venture to the next level.

Repeat to Yourself, “Startup Isn’t an Emergency”

One can’t run a startup or a business as an emergency. Startup will usually go on if things don’t go according to the plan. And infact most of times in startups, things will not go per the plan. If one feels it as an emergency, things will only go worse from where they are.

Do One Thing at a Time:

Multi-tasking will do no good to any entrepreneur. Focus is the key. Work on one thing at a time, complete the same and move on to the next one. Your productivity will go manifold by just focusing on one thing at a time.

Get Comfortable Not Knowing:

You will not know about many areas of the business. Instead of feeling overwhelmed on multiple facets of business which you don’t know, get comfortable with the same. Most of the times, it will turn out to be a blessing in disguise. People who know all the things, will end up not doing anything as they are scared how tough it is to do!!

Give Up on the Idea that “More Is Better”

It’s always easy to believe that “More is Better”. Who doesn’t want more funding, more people in the team? But the point is that if you always want/desire more then you will not be able to focus on achieving results in what you have. Focus on what you have and maximise the results from it. If you do it right, automatically more will come to you.

Keep Asking Yourself, “What’s Really Important?”

With limited resources, limited time its important that one focuses only on few important things that have a maximum impact. In the rush of things, lot of us end up spending lot of time on things which are not really important. Always take a step back and keep thinking what’s really important and that will help you to focus and maximise the success.

Startup Is a Test. It Is Only a Test

When you look at startup and its many challenges as a test, or series of tests, you begin to see each issue you face as an opportunity to grow, a chance to roll with the punches. Whether you’re being bombarded with problems, responsibilities, even insurmountable hurdles, when looked at as a test, you always have a chance to succeed, in the sense of rising above that which is challenging you. If, on the other hand, you see each new issue you face as a serious battle that must be won in order to survive, you’re probably in for a very rocky journey. The only time you’re likely to be happy is when everything is working out just right. And we all know that won’t happen anytime.

Do add to the list of the “small stuff” that entrepreneurs should not sweat about based on your experiences in the comments section!

Guest Post contributed by Pawan Thatha, CEO, Arrayshield Technologies
Posted on

Just open the door for me, I can close the sale

In the course of my career, I can’t remember how many times I have heard some version of this phrase from entrepreneurs. In fact, there is a thriving industry that has grown to service exactly this need: door openers that use their connections to get warm introductions to companies for a retainer and a commission. Even with that, why is it that most startups fail for lack of sales? Is it because the introductions weren’t warm enough? the entrepreneurs weren’t competent enough? the product wasn’t good enough? or something else?

In this series of blog posts I will explore some of the reasons behind this and what can be done to mitigate the risk of failure.

In my view, the failing is in the mindset which leads to a flawed approach. Having a repeatable, scalable sales and go-to-market strategy is not akin to flinging stuff on a wall and seeing what sticks. You need a plan. You also need to be nimble and reduce your burn rate. Most of all you need commitment from the executive team. The good news is that there are people that have thought through this. In fact, it would do entrepreneurs a lot of good to learn more about Steve Blank and Eric Ries.

Steve Blank (steveblank.com) has written extensively on developing a customer before you even go ahead and develop a product. There is a lot of truth to that but it may not always be easy to do.  Not to worry. In case of companies that already have an offering but are looking to penetrate new markets or grow in existing ones, it will do them a world of good to understand the needs of potential customers before doing much else. There may be an unmet need that they can exploit.  There may be channels that can be used, partners that can be leveraged. The point is that, if you elicit potential customer feedback, you will likely spend less time and money and have a greater chance of success, than if you were to enter the market and tried your “luck”.

Eric Ries (http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/) has taken the philosophy behind the “Lean Manufacturing” techniques developed at Toyota Corporation and applied them to startups. The key philosophy is to have multiple, quick, low-cost trials of the product with real customers to figure out what customers really value and throw out what they don’t. The idea being that you don’t end up spending millions of dollars and many months in developing something that the customers don’t care much about.

There is a lot to learned from these gentlemen. There is a lot also to be learned from one’s own experience and other helpful individuals’. So, dear entrepreneur, slow down a bit, assimilate information, think, and then act. It will do you a lot of good. Above all, know that entering new markets or developing new customers is hard work that requires time, thought and resources. It is not just a matter of opening doors. If anybody tells you otherwise, then I have a bridge to sell you.