Archive for the ‘IIT’ Category
Research that now proves my assertion: An IVY league degree(IIT or IIM) is not the ticket to startup success
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.
Building a Kick Ass Team – Part I
Surround yourself with people smarter than you and see the impossible become possible. Startup founders who have built the biggest baddest companies have lived by this philosophy and proven time and again that it is possible for small groups of people to impact the world. Take the case of Google, Facebook or Twitter and all of them have one thing in common, there are small groups of great people impacting the entire planet in a very profound manner.
In the Indian context, we are just starting to realize that the next generation of leaders will not be the grey haired tenured industry veterans or people that went to cram schools with a roster of degrees and brands like IIT and IIM. The next generation of leaders in India will be young people with a dream that could assemble other young people and go change the world. The US went through this revolution and the Valley is a place where there are so many examples of young people just taking on the world and making the impossible possible. In the valley, people are not measured by their fancy degrees or their age. People are measured by what they can contribute. I love an article written by Paul Graham titled “After Credentials” – if you don’t follow Paul Graham, now would be a nice time to do so (piece of advice – don’t get carried away by his LISP can change the world rant). The article refers to a culture like ours where kids are pressured by parents to go to cram schools to prepare for entrance exams to the esteemed institutions of IIT and IIM, or the so called elite services (Civil services IAS etc) that make up the bureaucracy in India is a culture of credentials. The culture of judging people by their credentials and not by their performance is just broken. We cannot recreate silicon valley in India if we continue down this broken path of hiring people with credentials instead of people that perform into teams. I have several life lessons to share here that have made me a big believer in this theory as well.
