Actionable Insights into the World of Indian Startups

I have written a lot about entrepreneurship and qualities of successful entrepreneurs in my earlier posts and based on my experience working with a lot of great people I concluded that a pedigree does not guarantee startup success. The most successful entrepreneurs have been underdogs who never got things easily in life and developed fierce tenacity and with just this one quality they are able to achieve greatness. Larry Ellison who founded Oracle and where I started my career is a great example of a total underdog who is one of the dominant forces in the tech Industry today.  Larry still has my greatest respect for sheer intellect and tenacity in business.  I remember an event very clearly back in 1995/96  when Oracle 8i was launched and Informix started positioning themselves as the game changer in the database world as they had just bought Michael Stonebraker’s Object Database company Illustra and announced to the world that Relational Databases were dead and that Object databases are the future.  I was part of a technology team that was working on training Oracle’s Salesforce on how to position against Informix’s attack.    Larry knew all along that change in the technology world is very slow (though people outside the industry perceive it as very fast)  and bet that evolving Oracle to the object world as and when the market was ready was the right approach and people were not going to dump relational technology for object technology overnight.   His way of defending against Informix’s attack was to simply change the compensation plan of the entire salesforce and double their incentive if they took out Informix in any of their deals.   Oracle at that time had one of the best Enterprise software salesforce in the world and this one small change just motivated every single sales person to go and kill Informix.    This type of tenacity is not taught in IVY league schools.    We don’t hear a lot about Informix today

This awesome post written by Vivek Wadhwa on TechCrunch today drives home this point:

Quote:  ” An Ivy League degree may get you a job as an investment banker or VC, but it won’t increase your odds of becoming a successful entrepreneur.”

Read the entire post at TechCrunch titled Got degree envy? No worries, you can still make it big.

My life is truly amazing and I feel very blessed that I have had such a wonderful life with great parents, an amazing upbringing, a fantastic family, a rich professional life filled with interesting life experiences and most importantly connecting with great people.

In India, we are often given examples of great individuals who are termed Innovators. These individuals are usually heirs of large formidable empires with deep pockets and are able to take a successful empire and keep the Juggernaut rolling. However, true entrepreneurs are those that have risen from the dust and built large businesses and more importantly a culture of success. We have very few examples of such success in India. Silicon Valley and Israel have been able to provide an environment, culture, and a great pool of VCs, entrepreneurs, ecosystem and mentors that fuel the engine of innovation and keep creating a steady supply of new entrepreneurs/innovators. The point I am making is that if you dream of being an innovator/ entrepreneur, find people who truly deserve to be role models and try to learn as much about them and emulate their behavior closely as there are very important life lessons to be learned from them. But, it is important that you use your good judgment in picking these role models. Ask yourself if the person you want to follow has leadership qualities, is personable, is social, has risen from modest backgrounds to create something large, has created an enterprise culture that is designed to win. I will discuss the role of role models and mentors in later discussions but it is important that you start thinking about people who can inspire you to achieve greatness.

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