The might sound mystical to people who do not believe in concepts like reincarnation, after-life and spirits. Well it is a part of our life and has to be accepted by the non believers some day or the other.
For people who do believe in these concepts it is a treasure as it takes the reader through the conversations with various masters and the purpose of life.
Read more about this in the book, " Many Lives, Many Masters" written by Dr.Brian Weiss.
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Monday, September 15, 2008
Guy Kawasaki speaks about making meaning not money
Courtesy: Inquirer.net
As a motivational speaker, Guy Kawasaki is blessed with a funky name, a charming smile and sense of humor perfect for delivering slide presentations. Yet he calls himself a "bozo".No wonder, business intelligence and analytics software firm SAS timed his presentation after lunchtime. Kawasaki wowed the Mumbai crowd with his presentation entitled "The Art of Innovation", eliciting plenty of chuckles and applause.In his speech, he gave advice on what he refers to as the Holy Grail for any entrepreneur: coming up with a unique product that has great value. To illustrate this point, he talked about how companies like Nike, Apple, Federal Express and Breitling are doing it.So what exactly are these types of products? A flashlight that can run on different types of batteries and an outdoor watch that comes with a built-in SOS signal are among his examples.But his most profound piece of advice for would-be entrepreneurs: Make meaning, not money."Based from my observation, companies that really are successful change people's lives. Most companies that set up just to make money eventually fail," he told INQUIRER.net during a short interview after his talk.Kawasaki who was born on Honolulu, Hawaii and considers himself half-American half-Japanese, was appointed Apple Fellow during the 80s. He is credited as one of the earlier "evangelists" responsible for the success of Apple's Macintosh computer. He is also a noted venture capitalist in Silicon Valley as managing director of Garage Technology Ventures. Recently, he founded alltop.com, a website that aggregates news based on topics.Asked if his "make meaning, not money" ethos applies more (or maybe less) to entrepreneurs in places like the Philippines where there isn't as much access to venture capital, Kawasaki said it applies to everyone, while saying it's now a "different world out there" for entrepreneurs in the technology industry, thanks to open source."Now, because of things like MySQL, Rails, PhP, you can do things so much cheaper than before. It's a great time to be an entrepreneur, you can delay venture capital funding for a longer period, get further and therefore you have higher valuation," Kawasaki said."Before, the first step was sort of try to raise money and build your product. Now you build your product and then try to raise money. It's a very different world," he added.And in the same vein, he had another advice for would-be CEOs: Make a mantra, not lengthy mission statements. And to observe his personal "10-20-30" rule: 10 Powerpoint slides, 20 minutes tops (he takes a crack at Windows for booting up longer thus, less presentation time) and size 30 font (which also applies to his business card below).Also, he took note of bozos (or slang for stupid) who are either out to make money (who, according to him, drive cars and wear clothes ending in "i" like Ferrari, Maserati and Armani) or who fail to see where technology is heading.So why does he call himself a bozo then? He tells his story about how he was once offered to become a CEO of a then start-up but was too lazy to drive all the way to his new office and after looking at the company's website, dismissed it as "just a collection of their these guys' favorite websites".That company turned out to be Yahoo!
As a motivational speaker, Guy Kawasaki is blessed with a funky name, a charming smile and sense of humor perfect for delivering slide presentations. Yet he calls himself a "bozo".No wonder, business intelligence and analytics software firm SAS timed his presentation after lunchtime. Kawasaki wowed the Mumbai crowd with his presentation entitled "The Art of Innovation", eliciting plenty of chuckles and applause.In his speech, he gave advice on what he refers to as the Holy Grail for any entrepreneur: coming up with a unique product that has great value. To illustrate this point, he talked about how companies like Nike, Apple, Federal Express and Breitling are doing it.So what exactly are these types of products? A flashlight that can run on different types of batteries and an outdoor watch that comes with a built-in SOS signal are among his examples.But his most profound piece of advice for would-be entrepreneurs: Make meaning, not money."Based from my observation, companies that really are successful change people's lives. Most companies that set up just to make money eventually fail," he told INQUIRER.net during a short interview after his talk.Kawasaki who was born on Honolulu, Hawaii and considers himself half-American half-Japanese, was appointed Apple Fellow during the 80s. He is credited as one of the earlier "evangelists" responsible for the success of Apple's Macintosh computer. He is also a noted venture capitalist in Silicon Valley as managing director of Garage Technology Ventures. Recently, he founded alltop.com, a website that aggregates news based on topics.Asked if his "make meaning, not money" ethos applies more (or maybe less) to entrepreneurs in places like the Philippines where there isn't as much access to venture capital, Kawasaki said it applies to everyone, while saying it's now a "different world out there" for entrepreneurs in the technology industry, thanks to open source."Now, because of things like MySQL, Rails, PhP, you can do things so much cheaper than before. It's a great time to be an entrepreneur, you can delay venture capital funding for a longer period, get further and therefore you have higher valuation," Kawasaki said."Before, the first step was sort of try to raise money and build your product. Now you build your product and then try to raise money. It's a very different world," he added.And in the same vein, he had another advice for would-be CEOs: Make a mantra, not lengthy mission statements. And to observe his personal "10-20-30" rule: 10 Powerpoint slides, 20 minutes tops (he takes a crack at Windows for booting up longer thus, less presentation time) and size 30 font (which also applies to his business card below).Also, he took note of bozos (or slang for stupid) who are either out to make money (who, according to him, drive cars and wear clothes ending in "i" like Ferrari, Maserati and Armani) or who fail to see where technology is heading.So why does he call himself a bozo then? He tells his story about how he was once offered to become a CEO of a then start-up but was too lazy to drive all the way to his new office and after looking at the company's website, dismissed it as "just a collection of their these guys' favorite websites".That company turned out to be Yahoo!
Chaiwala at IIM-Ahmedabad
Courtesy: The Telegraph
A humble chaiwala who inspired a website has been honoured with a case study at IIM-A on his business that has all the ingredients that go into a successful venture.
For the past 25 years, Ram Attar Kori has been selling student favourites such as tea, biscuits, egg bhujiya, buns, paan and cigarettes on the footpath outside the campus of the premier business school which has recognised him by “opening” a window through the border wall which allows easier access.
Today, Rambhai, 51, was in the classroom as an “observer”, listening to three management experts who presented a case study on his business model, which, as one of them said, was a humbling lesson on the untold success stories that abound on India’s dusty and bustling streets.
He keenly listened to the discussion on the case study presented by the three: Umesh Neelakantan of the DCMAT School of Media and Business, Kerala, Jaspreet Ahluwalia, assistant professor at the Centre for Management Training and Research, Mohali, and Sonal Katewa, assistant professor, Asia Pacific Institute of Management, Jaipur.
The trio are part of a batch of 38 business management teachers who are doing a faculty development programme at IIM.
“The reason why we chose Rambhai as our case study is that we noticed he had a huge clientele among the students. We learnt that he has been doing business at the same place for the last 25 years. As we have to do a case study as a part of our curriculum, we decided that instead of going to any corporate house, why not study this man who has blended various principles of management without undergoing any formal management training,” said Katewa.
Language was no barrier as Rambhai listened to the presentation on him and his business model.
“I was not supposed to say anything as I was there as a guest and observer,” said the man who had turned out for his big moment shorn of his patent stubble and smartly attired in a new olive green shirt and cream trousers.
Much like Pramod-da of Calcutta’s Presidency College and Arun-da of St Xavier’s, who has “retired”, Rambhai is a legend on campus. He has even inspired a website www.rambhai.com, which is a platform for free exchange of views, similar to the kiosk he runs where many ideas have been born.
The son of an agriculture labourer from Faizabad in Uttar Pradesh, Rambhai came to Ahmedabad at the age of four. After doing odd jobs, he started his teashop in the early eighties and has not looked back since.
And like any savvy entrepreneur, he isn’t willing to let out the numbers. “Let me say that I earn well enough to look after my needy relatives and educate my 20-year-old daughter, a student of fine arts at CN Vidyalaya,” he said, adding that the IIM experts had promised to help him expand his business. But students say his daily sale would be “at least” Rs 2,000.
Neelakantan said the rationale for doing a case study on the man was to show that “even an institute like IIM-A can learn a lesson from a street vendor”.
“Generally, street vendors are perceived to be tough and ill- mannered guys, but here is a man who is simple, loveable, light-hearted and yet has been successfully doing business outside an elite institute, stationing himself in one place for the last 25 years and maintaining a long-term customer relationship,” said Neelakantan.
Ahluwalia pointed out that even without formal management training, Rambhai was “practically executing all management principles”.
“Like every entrepreneur, he first saw an opportunity to start his own business outside the IIM-A campus, developed a strategy and maintained a system which ensured he got repeat customers,” said Ahluwalia.
Katewa said Rambhai mastered the concept of good customer relations: a popular management concept considered a cornerstone of success for any consumer product. “He has been observing customers. He realised the importance of location, right outside the IIM-A gate,” said Katewa.
A humble chaiwala who inspired a website has been honoured with a case study at IIM-A on his business that has all the ingredients that go into a successful venture.
For the past 25 years, Ram Attar Kori has been selling student favourites such as tea, biscuits, egg bhujiya, buns, paan and cigarettes on the footpath outside the campus of the premier business school which has recognised him by “opening” a window through the border wall which allows easier access.
Today, Rambhai, 51, was in the classroom as an “observer”, listening to three management experts who presented a case study on his business model, which, as one of them said, was a humbling lesson on the untold success stories that abound on India’s dusty and bustling streets.
He keenly listened to the discussion on the case study presented by the three: Umesh Neelakantan of the DCMAT School of Media and Business, Kerala, Jaspreet Ahluwalia, assistant professor at the Centre for Management Training and Research, Mohali, and Sonal Katewa, assistant professor, Asia Pacific Institute of Management, Jaipur.
The trio are part of a batch of 38 business management teachers who are doing a faculty development programme at IIM.
“The reason why we chose Rambhai as our case study is that we noticed he had a huge clientele among the students. We learnt that he has been doing business at the same place for the last 25 years. As we have to do a case study as a part of our curriculum, we decided that instead of going to any corporate house, why not study this man who has blended various principles of management without undergoing any formal management training,” said Katewa.
Language was no barrier as Rambhai listened to the presentation on him and his business model.
“I was not supposed to say anything as I was there as a guest and observer,” said the man who had turned out for his big moment shorn of his patent stubble and smartly attired in a new olive green shirt and cream trousers.
Much like Pramod-da of Calcutta’s Presidency College and Arun-da of St Xavier’s, who has “retired”, Rambhai is a legend on campus. He has even inspired a website www.rambhai.com, which is a platform for free exchange of views, similar to the kiosk he runs where many ideas have been born.
The son of an agriculture labourer from Faizabad in Uttar Pradesh, Rambhai came to Ahmedabad at the age of four. After doing odd jobs, he started his teashop in the early eighties and has not looked back since.
And like any savvy entrepreneur, he isn’t willing to let out the numbers. “Let me say that I earn well enough to look after my needy relatives and educate my 20-year-old daughter, a student of fine arts at CN Vidyalaya,” he said, adding that the IIM experts had promised to help him expand his business. But students say his daily sale would be “at least” Rs 2,000.
Neelakantan said the rationale for doing a case study on the man was to show that “even an institute like IIM-A can learn a lesson from a street vendor”.
“Generally, street vendors are perceived to be tough and ill- mannered guys, but here is a man who is simple, loveable, light-hearted and yet has been successfully doing business outside an elite institute, stationing himself in one place for the last 25 years and maintaining a long-term customer relationship,” said Neelakantan.
Ahluwalia pointed out that even without formal management training, Rambhai was “practically executing all management principles”.
“Like every entrepreneur, he first saw an opportunity to start his own business outside the IIM-A campus, developed a strategy and maintained a system which ensured he got repeat customers,” said Ahluwalia.
Katewa said Rambhai mastered the concept of good customer relations: a popular management concept considered a cornerstone of success for any consumer product. “He has been observing customers. He realised the importance of location, right outside the IIM-A gate,” said Katewa.
Thursday, September 4, 2008
Nayana Karunaratne Woman Entrepreneur of the Year
Courtesy: Dailymirror
Nayana Karunaratne, one of the most well known faces in the Asian hair and beauty industry was recognized as the Woman Entrepreneur of the Year 2007, at the awards ceremony organized by the Women’s Chamber of Industry and Commerce on August 26, 2008. She was also the winner of a gold medal for the Business category - large.
The Woman Entrepreneur of the Year 2007 awards ceremony takes place on an annual basis, with a focus on evaluating the performance of women in business. The winners were selected from four categories – Large, Small, Medium and Micro, along with an overall award to outstanding professional women from the large category.
Speaking on her achievement, Karunaratne said, “I am greatly appreciative of winning this award but in perspective I am more overjoyed that someone from my industry has been recognized for the hard work and dedication put in to become a success story. I am essentially a hairdresser, and have been a businesswoman for the past 28 years. It has been long road to get to where I am today but I have perservered, because I knew at a very young age that this was what I wanted in life.”
Adding on, she said, “The key to my success is because I am very focused, goal oriented, hard working, disciplined and extremely organized in what I endeavor in. This has been a progressive growth for me, starting with the opening of my salon, and its expansion within Sri Lanka as well as into India. What has driven so far has been my passionate sense of personal commitment to the services offered at Salon Nayana. This goes hand in hand with the fact that I have dedicated my career in helping both men and women to look their best and to elevate the profession of hairdressing in Asia to global standards.”
Nayana Karunaratne has been instrumental in revolutionizing the concepts of beauty culture among Sri Lankans for over two decades. The success of Salon Nayana is attributed to a team of over 150 dedicated professionals comprising of cosmetologists, stylists and nutritionists who bring in their uniqueness and expertise, with an unrivalled, passionate sense of personal commitment to the services offered by Nayana and her reputed network of salons.
Established in 1980, Salon Nayana has come along, becoming an enterprise has evolved and positioned itself as a contemporary leader in the hair industry with a chain of 12 salons in Sri Lanka and India, and has produced many winners at both nation and international hair and make up competitions.
In addition to her chain of unisex hair and beauty salons in Sri Lanka and India, she is the founder of the Image Academy of Hair and Beauty as well as the Image Academy of Personality Development. The professional hairdressing and beauty therapy courses conducted by the academy are recognized by the Immigration authorities of Australia and Canada.
It also works in association with Pivot Point International, issuing certificated recognized by the European Union. The Image Academy of Personality Development provides personal development programmes for corporates and individuals on self worth, grooming, corporate dress sense, team work and stress management among others.
She is also the founder of the Sri Lanka Association for Hairdressers and Beauticians (SLAHAB) in 1996. Reflective of her commitment to elevate the profession of hairdressing in Sri Lanka to international standards, today the organization has a 3000 strong membership and represents Sri Lanka in the Organization Modiale de la Coiffure (OMC), also known as the World Federation of Hairdressers to represent Sri Lanka. She has also organized the Hair Asia Pacific, the international Hair and Make up competition for ten years to develop the Asian industry.
At present she is a board member of the World Federation of Hairdressers (OMC) and the President of the OMC Asia Zone. This position enables her yearly access to attend and host six training events all over the world.
Her working partnership with the best creative talent in the world and the experience gained judging OMC Zone and the World Championships has widened her creative and teaching horizons immensely. Today she is one of the most respected and experienced hairdressers in the world.
She is also an international trainer, in her capacity as OMC Asia President, where she travels extensively nationally and internationally, inspiring future stylists and make up artists.
Her vast experience includes training programmes in Hair and Beauty, Chennai, Hair India People, Mumbai, Hair and Beauty Association of Thailand as well as Sino Beauty, China.
Nayana Karunaratne, one of the most well known faces in the Asian hair and beauty industry was recognized as the Woman Entrepreneur of the Year 2007, at the awards ceremony organized by the Women’s Chamber of Industry and Commerce on August 26, 2008. She was also the winner of a gold medal for the Business category - large.
The Woman Entrepreneur of the Year 2007 awards ceremony takes place on an annual basis, with a focus on evaluating the performance of women in business. The winners were selected from four categories – Large, Small, Medium and Micro, along with an overall award to outstanding professional women from the large category.
Speaking on her achievement, Karunaratne said, “I am greatly appreciative of winning this award but in perspective I am more overjoyed that someone from my industry has been recognized for the hard work and dedication put in to become a success story. I am essentially a hairdresser, and have been a businesswoman for the past 28 years. It has been long road to get to where I am today but I have perservered, because I knew at a very young age that this was what I wanted in life.”
Adding on, she said, “The key to my success is because I am very focused, goal oriented, hard working, disciplined and extremely organized in what I endeavor in. This has been a progressive growth for me, starting with the opening of my salon, and its expansion within Sri Lanka as well as into India. What has driven so far has been my passionate sense of personal commitment to the services offered at Salon Nayana. This goes hand in hand with the fact that I have dedicated my career in helping both men and women to look their best and to elevate the profession of hairdressing in Asia to global standards.”
Nayana Karunaratne has been instrumental in revolutionizing the concepts of beauty culture among Sri Lankans for over two decades. The success of Salon Nayana is attributed to a team of over 150 dedicated professionals comprising of cosmetologists, stylists and nutritionists who bring in their uniqueness and expertise, with an unrivalled, passionate sense of personal commitment to the services offered by Nayana and her reputed network of salons.
Established in 1980, Salon Nayana has come along, becoming an enterprise has evolved and positioned itself as a contemporary leader in the hair industry with a chain of 12 salons in Sri Lanka and India, and has produced many winners at both nation and international hair and make up competitions.
In addition to her chain of unisex hair and beauty salons in Sri Lanka and India, she is the founder of the Image Academy of Hair and Beauty as well as the Image Academy of Personality Development. The professional hairdressing and beauty therapy courses conducted by the academy are recognized by the Immigration authorities of Australia and Canada.
It also works in association with Pivot Point International, issuing certificated recognized by the European Union. The Image Academy of Personality Development provides personal development programmes for corporates and individuals on self worth, grooming, corporate dress sense, team work and stress management among others.
She is also the founder of the Sri Lanka Association for Hairdressers and Beauticians (SLAHAB) in 1996. Reflective of her commitment to elevate the profession of hairdressing in Sri Lanka to international standards, today the organization has a 3000 strong membership and represents Sri Lanka in the Organization Modiale de la Coiffure (OMC), also known as the World Federation of Hairdressers to represent Sri Lanka. She has also organized the Hair Asia Pacific, the international Hair and Make up competition for ten years to develop the Asian industry.
At present she is a board member of the World Federation of Hairdressers (OMC) and the President of the OMC Asia Zone. This position enables her yearly access to attend and host six training events all over the world.
Her working partnership with the best creative talent in the world and the experience gained judging OMC Zone and the World Championships has widened her creative and teaching horizons immensely. Today she is one of the most respected and experienced hairdressers in the world.
She is also an international trainer, in her capacity as OMC Asia President, where she travels extensively nationally and internationally, inspiring future stylists and make up artists.
Her vast experience includes training programmes in Hair and Beauty, Chennai, Hair India People, Mumbai, Hair and Beauty Association of Thailand as well as Sino Beauty, China.
Monday, August 4, 2008
Indian Harvard grads turning biz plans into success stories
Courtesy: Economic Times
Back in 2005, Ashwin Damera, a student at Harvard Business School (HBS), had a bright idea. What India’s booming e-commerce industry lacked, he believed, was a comprehensive travel portal. His idea won him second place in the classroom business plan contest; the winner of which was a proposed plus size lingerie company. He doesn’t think that one came through, but a year later Travelguru did, thanks partly to generous cheques from three unexpected investors - Damera’s own classmates. Meet Ankur Daga, one of Damera’s angel investors, and himself an entrepreneur. Fresh out of HBS he founded Angara, an online jewellery company that emerged from watching friends struggle with purchasing jewellery. Despite his family background in jewellery, Daga wasn’t expected to follow suit. “The question was always ‘You’re highly educated, shouldn’t you be working for a private equity or a consulting firm’ ?” he says. But Daga doesn’t feel deprived. “I’ve done the McKinsey stint; I wanted to start something on my own, and the earlier the better.” Daga and Damera aren’t the only ones to go against the grain. More and more Indian graduates from HBS are rocking the boat by ditching traditionally espoused careers on wall street or in consulting for entrepreneurship , ending up with cross-border businesses and bifurcated lives. They include people like Naveen Tewari (Class of 05), a McKinsey consultant who returned to India to start mKhoj, a mobile advertising network . “When I went in to HBS all I wanted to be was a partner in McKinsey . That disappeared in exactly three months,” he says. According to William Sahlman, Senior Associate Dean at HBS who teaches a second year course on Entrepreneurial Finance, after 10-15 years, almost 50% of graduates are involved in entrepreneurial settings. India has seen its share of successful HBS entrepreneurs from Ashish Dhawan of ChrysCapital to Avnish Bajaj and Suvir Sujan of Bazee (later gobbled by eBay). Lately, though, they are jumping into the water and getting their feet wet earlier, sometimes , while still in school. Kapil Vishwanathan’s was a case of campus entrepreneurship. He floated Pre-Media Global, a Chennai-based leading vendor providing content services to the US publishing industry , while still at HBS, along with his sister Kami, also an HBS alum. He’s wanted to become entrepreneur as long as he can remember. “It had to be a cross-border enterprise . It was just a question of when,” he says. He even tried to support other young business leaders pursue their entrepreneurial dreams by starting the Entrepreneurship Club at HBS. “Of course, the investing and banking clubs were larger,” he jokes. Entrepreneurship has never been more in vogue than now. Paresh Vaish, a partner with Boston Consulting group and HBS Class of ‘86, says, “The top quartile of the class got jobs in investment banking and the rest aimed for corporate jobs.” Since his time, the number of electives in entrepreneurship has gone from three to 20, and number of dedicated faculty from five to 32, the largest faculty contingent focused on entrepreneurship at any business school in the world. “In the 70s, 80s and even the 90s, HBS was all about propelling you the quickest to make partner in McKinsey or Goldman Sachs. It’s no longer the case,” says Sumeet Narang, batch of 06, who rejected an offer from Goldman to start Samara Capital, an India-focused private equity firm. For Narang, this was his second management degree; he’s also an alumnus of IIM Lucknow. His second stab at it was largely driven by the fact that HBS offers one of the most “international and diverse candidature among business schools” . With a history in private equity and investment banking in his six-year career with Citibank, Narang says the tug to turn entrepreneur was always there, but HBS intensified it. Like Narang’s , many of these startups were based on business plan entries in the second year business plan contest. Georgia-born , Gujarat-raised Abhi Shah, founder of Clutch — voted top Legal Process Outsourcing (LPO) company from among 80 LPOs worldwide — says he and a classmate came up with 38 different business ideas during Think Week, a concept they borrowed from Bill Gates. A part of the plan generating process was to have them be thrown out the window. Anshul Arora (MBA 04) followed neither of the two plans he submitted for the contest. Instead, with an “atypical” career at McKinsey with exposure in developmental work, Arora pursued his dream of a business with a “clear social mandate and a commercial motive” . The result was Edvance Learning, an inventive education model that spots gaps in the education and training landscape, and designs products to fill the lacuna. For Arora the choice was between Harvard and Stanford which, he says, also has a great entrepreneurial flavour to it, along with physical proximity to Silicon Valley, the birthplace of aggressive entrepreneurship. A key Harvard advantage, he says, lay in its international leaning. “HBS with its general management perspective naturally has a strength in entrepreneurship vis-à-vis business schools like Wharton or Stanford that have strengths in finance and strategy ,” says Ashish Singh, MD Bain Consulting and HBS alum. Another trump card for the school, according to Tewari, is its famed case study methodology. “The case study method means there is no structure and no formula. Life is like that. You’ll never get a situation that is a replica of what you learn,” he says. Every week, he recalls, the class was introduced to the case of a thriving entrepreneur, ranging from Narayana Murthy (Infosys) to Jeff Taylor (Monster) and Andrew Viterbi (Qualcomm). “I began to realise that I could be just like them and it didn’t involve rocket science,” he says. That’s a sentiment everyone felt at some point in the course of two years , says Daga: “In a class of 900, at least 200 think seriously about entrepreneurship .” Those that do act upon it have a common starting point — the HBS alumni network — deemed one of the world’s most powerful networks with over 70,000 members. “The best part about graduating from HBS is that you can get a meeting with anyone at anytime. And as an entrepreneur that’s the hardest part,” says Daga. “We have more than a 20% share of the global venture capital business with examples like John Doerr at Kleiner Perkins and Tim Draper at Draper Fisher Jurvetson. That kind of network is hard to replicate ,” says Sahlman. A significant part of mKhoj’s $7 million Series A investment was landed through the HBS connection. “There is immediately a connection and the first question is, ‘Which section are you from’ ?” says Tewari. In fact, HBS has made such a success out of institutionalising its network that Vishwanathan didn’t require an investment banker when he raised $18 million for PreMedia ; he knew exactly who to call. For Shah, on the other hand, the HBS advantage wasn’t just about fund-raising . Having built a political advocacy group for the Indian American community with 65,000 members , and a successful summer internship with Jerry Rao at Mphasis, meant his network of influence was fairly extensive and with deep pockets. “For me the choice was going the Bobby Jindal way or coming to India and making an impact as an entrepreneur ,” he jokes. Where the HBS connection did come to play was in his endeavour to recruit the best and the brightest. “It’s the credibility that comes from a school with pedigree,” he says.
Opening doors If there is one thing the school doesn’t provide, it is in first-hand startup operational exposure, but that is acquired by candidates over their summer internships, typically spent shadowing first generation entrepreneurs. When Damera was torn between BoozAllen, London and assisting the CEO at Jet Blue in New York, he chose the latter. “I realised I want to be this guy, taking all the decisions,” he says. Daga got a bird’s eye view of mining operations, manufacturing and wholesale when he interned with the CEO of Rosy Blu. The CEO promised he would be the first investor in Daga’s venture, and Rosy Blu emerged the largest of four. There’s something also to be said of affluent classmates. Narang wangled a $1000 cheque from a classmate as well as the use of his father’s office in New York for the few months before setting up office in Mumbai. Daga himself “successfully” invested in more than one friend’s venture; in some cases followon rounds have come from top-tier VCs or have received substantial offers for acquisition. And where chequebooks didn’t count, the collective intellect in the classroom certainly did. Vishwanathan recalls a classmate who, at 26, sold his first company — an auction site — to eBay for 75 million and he wasn’t the exception. “It really helps to have a peer group with such varied perspectives. HBS is very focused on that in its selection process,” says Nandu Madhava (Class of 06), who himself deferred a job with Goldman Sachs after his undergraduate degree to volunteer with the Peace Corps in the Dominican Republic as a medical and teaching assistant . He saw the transformation in the city of Bangalore while on a vacation and chose it to launch mDhil, a medicare information portal. Sometimes, as those same classmates start giving in to the trappings of a job in consulting and i-banking, even the bravest of resolves waver. Vishwanathan recalls hanging out in shorts and loafers while friends attended recruitment day. “When they were talking about their signing bonuses, it wasn’t always easy,” he says. Most graduates exit HBS with substantial debt and the economics of rejecting a $175,000 job with a $50,000 debt doesn’t always work out. People like Shah chose to skip recruitment entirely so that he “wouldn’t have a back-up to tempt him to cop out”. Rahul Aggarwal, class of 05 and ex-Bayers , did the same because his heart was in returning to India. He started Red Earth, a hospitality company that turns around underperforming assets and converts them into branded two and three star properties . According to Madhava, this trend of US-raised HBS grads of Indian origin coming to India to start ventures coincides with macro factors. “Our year (2004) was the tipping point. Not only has the number of students coming directly from India gone up but the HBS India research center has come to life bringing richer case studies to the school and world class executive education to India,” says Arora. Still, with all the conviction they had, some say there was nothing that prepared them for start-up growing pains. The hit they have to take on their lifestyles often comes as a shock. “Conceptually one knows what entrepreneurship is about, but living it is a whole different ballgame,” says Daga. Shah recalls how his first employee landed up in the emergency room before finalising his contract and his first client passed away one day before signing the contract. He’s not especially unhappy to have to take a hit in lifestyle — flying economy and taking rickshaws is not a problem, maybe because he understands he may not have to do that for long, given his ambitions to take Clutch public for a billion dollars in five years. And if that doesn’t go according to plan, he says Harvard is the best insurance policy you can get. “I know that at the end of the day if I don’t succeed, I’ll get a $200,000 job,” says Damera, who admits that it might just be thanks to the safety net of HBS that he took the leap. Luckily, nobody believes they’ll ever need it. “Harvard forces you to think big, which unfortunately is not part of the Indian middle class mentality. You just realise that just working for a large company is not making full use of your resources,” says Tewari. Madhava believes that the most important lesson learnt at HBS is not how to cope with failure but a strong moral code. He recalls how an entrepreneurial professor once told him - “You’re so fortunate to be at Harvard, the only thing that you can ever do to jeopardize your future is something unethical or illegal”. Those futures are being written. For most going back to consulting or banking would be like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. “I think most of my section wishes they had done what I had done,” says Daga. For Tewari nothing could top being summoned to the entrepreneurship class of 2020 as a case in point.
Back in 2005, Ashwin Damera, a student at Harvard Business School (HBS), had a bright idea. What India’s booming e-commerce industry lacked, he believed, was a comprehensive travel portal. His idea won him second place in the classroom business plan contest; the winner of which was a proposed plus size lingerie company. He doesn’t think that one came through, but a year later Travelguru did, thanks partly to generous cheques from three unexpected investors - Damera’s own classmates. Meet Ankur Daga, one of Damera’s angel investors, and himself an entrepreneur. Fresh out of HBS he founded Angara, an online jewellery company that emerged from watching friends struggle with purchasing jewellery. Despite his family background in jewellery, Daga wasn’t expected to follow suit. “The question was always ‘You’re highly educated, shouldn’t you be working for a private equity or a consulting firm’ ?” he says. But Daga doesn’t feel deprived. “I’ve done the McKinsey stint; I wanted to start something on my own, and the earlier the better.” Daga and Damera aren’t the only ones to go against the grain. More and more Indian graduates from HBS are rocking the boat by ditching traditionally espoused careers on wall street or in consulting for entrepreneurship , ending up with cross-border businesses and bifurcated lives. They include people like Naveen Tewari (Class of 05), a McKinsey consultant who returned to India to start mKhoj, a mobile advertising network . “When I went in to HBS all I wanted to be was a partner in McKinsey . That disappeared in exactly three months,” he says. According to William Sahlman, Senior Associate Dean at HBS who teaches a second year course on Entrepreneurial Finance, after 10-15 years, almost 50% of graduates are involved in entrepreneurial settings. India has seen its share of successful HBS entrepreneurs from Ashish Dhawan of ChrysCapital to Avnish Bajaj and Suvir Sujan of Bazee (later gobbled by eBay). Lately, though, they are jumping into the water and getting their feet wet earlier, sometimes , while still in school. Kapil Vishwanathan’s was a case of campus entrepreneurship. He floated Pre-Media Global, a Chennai-based leading vendor providing content services to the US publishing industry , while still at HBS, along with his sister Kami, also an HBS alum. He’s wanted to become entrepreneur as long as he can remember. “It had to be a cross-border enterprise . It was just a question of when,” he says. He even tried to support other young business leaders pursue their entrepreneurial dreams by starting the Entrepreneurship Club at HBS. “Of course, the investing and banking clubs were larger,” he jokes. Entrepreneurship has never been more in vogue than now. Paresh Vaish, a partner with Boston Consulting group and HBS Class of ‘86, says, “The top quartile of the class got jobs in investment banking and the rest aimed for corporate jobs.” Since his time, the number of electives in entrepreneurship has gone from three to 20, and number of dedicated faculty from five to 32, the largest faculty contingent focused on entrepreneurship at any business school in the world. “In the 70s, 80s and even the 90s, HBS was all about propelling you the quickest to make partner in McKinsey or Goldman Sachs. It’s no longer the case,” says Sumeet Narang, batch of 06, who rejected an offer from Goldman to start Samara Capital, an India-focused private equity firm. For Narang, this was his second management degree; he’s also an alumnus of IIM Lucknow. His second stab at it was largely driven by the fact that HBS offers one of the most “international and diverse candidature among business schools” . With a history in private equity and investment banking in his six-year career with Citibank, Narang says the tug to turn entrepreneur was always there, but HBS intensified it. Like Narang’s , many of these startups were based on business plan entries in the second year business plan contest. Georgia-born , Gujarat-raised Abhi Shah, founder of Clutch — voted top Legal Process Outsourcing (LPO) company from among 80 LPOs worldwide — says he and a classmate came up with 38 different business ideas during Think Week, a concept they borrowed from Bill Gates. A part of the plan generating process was to have them be thrown out the window. Anshul Arora (MBA 04) followed neither of the two plans he submitted for the contest. Instead, with an “atypical” career at McKinsey with exposure in developmental work, Arora pursued his dream of a business with a “clear social mandate and a commercial motive” . The result was Edvance Learning, an inventive education model that spots gaps in the education and training landscape, and designs products to fill the lacuna. For Arora the choice was between Harvard and Stanford which, he says, also has a great entrepreneurial flavour to it, along with physical proximity to Silicon Valley, the birthplace of aggressive entrepreneurship. A key Harvard advantage, he says, lay in its international leaning. “HBS with its general management perspective naturally has a strength in entrepreneurship vis-à-vis business schools like Wharton or Stanford that have strengths in finance and strategy ,” says Ashish Singh, MD Bain Consulting and HBS alum. Another trump card for the school, according to Tewari, is its famed case study methodology. “The case study method means there is no structure and no formula. Life is like that. You’ll never get a situation that is a replica of what you learn,” he says. Every week, he recalls, the class was introduced to the case of a thriving entrepreneur, ranging from Narayana Murthy (Infosys) to Jeff Taylor (Monster) and Andrew Viterbi (Qualcomm). “I began to realise that I could be just like them and it didn’t involve rocket science,” he says. That’s a sentiment everyone felt at some point in the course of two years , says Daga: “In a class of 900, at least 200 think seriously about entrepreneurship .” Those that do act upon it have a common starting point — the HBS alumni network — deemed one of the world’s most powerful networks with over 70,000 members. “The best part about graduating from HBS is that you can get a meeting with anyone at anytime. And as an entrepreneur that’s the hardest part,” says Daga. “We have more than a 20% share of the global venture capital business with examples like John Doerr at Kleiner Perkins and Tim Draper at Draper Fisher Jurvetson. That kind of network is hard to replicate ,” says Sahlman. A significant part of mKhoj’s $7 million Series A investment was landed through the HBS connection. “There is immediately a connection and the first question is, ‘Which section are you from’ ?” says Tewari. In fact, HBS has made such a success out of institutionalising its network that Vishwanathan didn’t require an investment banker when he raised $18 million for PreMedia ; he knew exactly who to call. For Shah, on the other hand, the HBS advantage wasn’t just about fund-raising . Having built a political advocacy group for the Indian American community with 65,000 members , and a successful summer internship with Jerry Rao at Mphasis, meant his network of influence was fairly extensive and with deep pockets. “For me the choice was going the Bobby Jindal way or coming to India and making an impact as an entrepreneur ,” he jokes. Where the HBS connection did come to play was in his endeavour to recruit the best and the brightest. “It’s the credibility that comes from a school with pedigree,” he says.
Opening doors If there is one thing the school doesn’t provide, it is in first-hand startup operational exposure, but that is acquired by candidates over their summer internships, typically spent shadowing first generation entrepreneurs. When Damera was torn between BoozAllen, London and assisting the CEO at Jet Blue in New York, he chose the latter. “I realised I want to be this guy, taking all the decisions,” he says. Daga got a bird’s eye view of mining operations, manufacturing and wholesale when he interned with the CEO of Rosy Blu. The CEO promised he would be the first investor in Daga’s venture, and Rosy Blu emerged the largest of four. There’s something also to be said of affluent classmates. Narang wangled a $1000 cheque from a classmate as well as the use of his father’s office in New York for the few months before setting up office in Mumbai. Daga himself “successfully” invested in more than one friend’s venture; in some cases followon rounds have come from top-tier VCs or have received substantial offers for acquisition. And where chequebooks didn’t count, the collective intellect in the classroom certainly did. Vishwanathan recalls a classmate who, at 26, sold his first company — an auction site — to eBay for 75 million and he wasn’t the exception. “It really helps to have a peer group with such varied perspectives. HBS is very focused on that in its selection process,” says Nandu Madhava (Class of 06), who himself deferred a job with Goldman Sachs after his undergraduate degree to volunteer with the Peace Corps in the Dominican Republic as a medical and teaching assistant . He saw the transformation in the city of Bangalore while on a vacation and chose it to launch mDhil, a medicare information portal. Sometimes, as those same classmates start giving in to the trappings of a job in consulting and i-banking, even the bravest of resolves waver. Vishwanathan recalls hanging out in shorts and loafers while friends attended recruitment day. “When they were talking about their signing bonuses, it wasn’t always easy,” he says. Most graduates exit HBS with substantial debt and the economics of rejecting a $175,000 job with a $50,000 debt doesn’t always work out. People like Shah chose to skip recruitment entirely so that he “wouldn’t have a back-up to tempt him to cop out”. Rahul Aggarwal, class of 05 and ex-Bayers , did the same because his heart was in returning to India. He started Red Earth, a hospitality company that turns around underperforming assets and converts them into branded two and three star properties . According to Madhava, this trend of US-raised HBS grads of Indian origin coming to India to start ventures coincides with macro factors. “Our year (2004) was the tipping point. Not only has the number of students coming directly from India gone up but the HBS India research center has come to life bringing richer case studies to the school and world class executive education to India,” says Arora. Still, with all the conviction they had, some say there was nothing that prepared them for start-up growing pains. The hit they have to take on their lifestyles often comes as a shock. “Conceptually one knows what entrepreneurship is about, but living it is a whole different ballgame,” says Daga. Shah recalls how his first employee landed up in the emergency room before finalising his contract and his first client passed away one day before signing the contract. He’s not especially unhappy to have to take a hit in lifestyle — flying economy and taking rickshaws is not a problem, maybe because he understands he may not have to do that for long, given his ambitions to take Clutch public for a billion dollars in five years. And if that doesn’t go according to plan, he says Harvard is the best insurance policy you can get. “I know that at the end of the day if I don’t succeed, I’ll get a $200,000 job,” says Damera, who admits that it might just be thanks to the safety net of HBS that he took the leap. Luckily, nobody believes they’ll ever need it. “Harvard forces you to think big, which unfortunately is not part of the Indian middle class mentality. You just realise that just working for a large company is not making full use of your resources,” says Tewari. Madhava believes that the most important lesson learnt at HBS is not how to cope with failure but a strong moral code. He recalls how an entrepreneurial professor once told him - “You’re so fortunate to be at Harvard, the only thing that you can ever do to jeopardize your future is something unethical or illegal”. Those futures are being written. For most going back to consulting or banking would be like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. “I think most of my section wishes they had done what I had done,” says Daga. For Tewari nothing could top being summoned to the entrepreneurship class of 2020 as a case in point.
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