Raj Shankar's Blog, page 15

Startup India starts up in style

When I was in school, I have often watched cricket matches on Television. It was a very comfortable way to enjoy the game with numerous additional benefits. But today was a very different experience. Without a Television, in the comfort of my home, I sat on my laptop and watched the live coverage of the Startup India Standup India event without a hitch. One who has grown up in India during the 1990s cannot imagine watching a webcast of a live government event, on a government website, running without a hitch. Thanks are due to my internet service provider too.

The Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi stole the show as usual. I loved the spirit of his talk – lets stop doing things to allow startups start doing things. The action plan he unveiled at the end of the day was reflective of this philosophy. He pointed out to a few important things in the action plan and I enjoyed listening to them. I kept smiling all the way, as he kept shared what is planned to be stopped:

No Labour inspector visits for the first three years
No income tax for first three years
No capital gains tax if you sell your property and invest in your venture
No more prior experience or minimum turnover to apply for public procurement

I loved the initiatives around what they intend to start as well:

Fast track patent application processing
Government sponsored patent filing support (fully free)
Bankruptcy Law
1 Day startup App
Strengthening of the incubation system
Greater focus on knowledge backed and technology enabled innovations
Tinkering labs
Pre-incubation support system
Seed capital

I especially look forward to seeing the ‘Grand Challenges’ part of the Innovation mission as that is where our much touted Google / Apple could be.

Overall an impressive show. The remaining day was equally interesting and inspiring. I truly wish all of that which is spoken actually sees the light of day.

Though most of the above are potential action items, at least we did not listen to very high level, broad based, no-one-knows-whose-action-it-is type of statements. Having been one associated with the entrepreneurship ecosystem for a decade now, I can tell you for sure – the people who have prepared this document have heard what stakeholders in this ecosystem are saying. Simple. Wondering why it took so many years to hear this. Glad that it has been heard and acted upon.

Very impressed and inspired by the attention my domain of work is gaining in this country. If this trend continues it will not be far when India will regain her glory as the land of opportunities, progress and prosperity.

In a way this program is an exciting pitch. I now want to read that action plan. I now want to  know who is going to implement what. I now want to know where I can participate. This is an example of a great pitch.

This blog is my feeling after listening to an interesting day of inspiring people. I am sure the details will be made available in the public domain soon. I am sure you will look up to it as much as I do.

Startup India. I am sure if you do, we will Standup too.

 

Startup Valuation seems a funny game

I teach a number of classes on entrepreneurship and startups across Asia. Almost every group wants to know about how valuation is arrived at. Though I do justice to the various methods of arriving at ‘valuation’, I insist of letting them know that the practice is fairly disconnected from theoretical classroom discussions. The theoretical models help gain a range of values and one has to add the euphoria of the market, emotions of those involved etc before arriving at the final value. One new item caught my attention and reminded me of our classroom discussions.

News item titled ‘Lyft Receives $500 Million Investment From General Motors to Develop Self-Driving Cars’ (Link: http://www.inc.com/associated-press/l...?). In particular this paragraph caught my attention.

‘Following its latest round of fund-raising–which also included a $100 million investment from Saudi Arabia’s Kingdom Holding Co.–privately-held Lyft set its value at $5.5 billion. The company expects revenue of around $1 billion this year. By comparison, GM is valued at $53 billion and earned $153 billion in revenue in 2014.’ (quoted as is from the above linked article. purely for academic explanation)

After reading it a few times, I thought it was to be shared in valuation classes. Is there really a relationship between revenue and value? If valuation is really about the future, how much of it can truly be captured? And if everything is captured, then where is the fun in valuation?

It is this uncertainty and varying perceptions of it, that make a market possible. In such a market, valuation thrives. We still have to learn the techniques, but remember that what happens in the world will have an irrational component added to the mathematics.

Happy Thinking!!

Books and Me: The Design of Business

Book Title: The Design of Business

Author: Roger L Martin

I am fan of Prof. Martin’s writings. Though I have read and reviewed his earlier book on strategy, this one eluded my consumption since sometime. During a recent discussion with one of my entrepreneur clients in the design space, I casually asked her to refer something to read on her subject. She told me since I was from the business strategy arena, I may like to see the work of one Roger Martin. I smiled and issued the book as soon as I came back to my base.

It is no surprise that ‘design thinking’ is taking the business world by storm. The examples quoted in the book showcases the benefit of using this approach to strategy making. While some aspects of it are intuitive and some may be using it too, Prof Martin has made it structured and repeatably usable.

Being an academic myself I enjoyed the philosophical underpinnings of design thinking. I was introduced to a philosopher I had only heard in the past – Charles Pierce. I actually consumed the book like how a child eats ‘ice cream’ – ate slowly so as to not get done with it; and felt bad when it actually got done.

But the nice part of a good book is the number of triggers it provides for furthering its thoughts. It also leads you to more reading. This book did both.

Thanks Prof Martin for providing an inspirational read on ‘design thinking’ and leading me to read more on this subject. I am so convinced that this approach to thinking will guide me in my scholarly life as well as in helping the thousands of entrepreneurs and students I interact with everyday.

Dr Mohanty on Educational Leadership

Earlier today I attended a special guest lecture by Dr Ajit Mohanty (http://ajitmohanty.org) at The Entrepreneurship Development Institute of India (EDII), Gandhinagar, Gujarat (www.ediindia.org). On the dais was Dr Mohanty sandwiched between his teacher (Dr Misra) and his student (Dr Shukla). It is rare to see three generations of teachers (or students) sitting together and sharing their mutual warmth. I feel privileged to have had the good fortune of seeing and listening to them. Now to the subject of the lecture itself.

A well known, seasoned and celebrated academician in India, Dr Mohanty, was true to his topic. He had his agenda clearly laid out. The presentation was easy, smooth and candid. His astute observations brought to light some of the key leadership issues and challenges that the Indian Higher Education System faces. As a researcher, I enjoyed the approach taken by Dr Mohanty and the innumerable opportunities it provides for further scholarly investigation.

Most well made speeches start with a bang and today’s was no exception. He stated a well known truth – ‘our education systems are a large scale failure’ (wow! I could not think of a better way to put it). He did not stop by stating the obvious, but took a deep dive into the possible reasons for the problem. Some of them are: macro level policy hurdles, leadership, chaotic nature of academic environments, debatable business role of today’s faculty members, narrowing gap between for-profit enterprises and socially inclined enterprises such as educational institutions, amongst others. As a true academic he did not promise to provide a panacea to the challenge – but restricted his remaining talk to one aspect of the challenge: leadership.

He beautifully captured through the ‘ringing bells’ example how our educational systems strive to remain status quo. He also spoke how most selected leaders are better academics than administrators. He used the popular ‘Peter Principle’ to highlight the leader identification and appointment problem. It seems that most leaders in educational institutions focus more on ‘chaos avoidance’ rather than ‘innovation and entrepreneurship’. He clearly established the fact that academic skills are not sufficient to lead educational institutions.

With examples from India and around the world, he gave a number of examples and cases of both success and failures of educational leadership. He also justified his stance that probably the Indian educational system is not ready for transformational leaders, but can greatly benefit in the interim with change-producing leaders. His examples provided leading thoughts on a possible solution – ‘distributed leadership’. Distributed Leadership is not delegation, but leaders at every level. Higher education truly requires leaders at all levels, who can bring change (in a small way, though routinely), which in turn will result in habits and eventually a change in culture.

I liked his approach towards the end of his presentation where he offered solutions, which he said we could choose to reject (not accept). It speaks a lot about the person.

This was one of the occasions where I did not want the talk to end. May be because it was on a topic close to my heart or was it my love for teaching or was it that I was listening to a true academic after long? A short amount of time, borrowed from lunch was used for answering Q&A.

I left the talk inspired about academics and with number of ideas for future research. I am excited at the timing of the lecture since I am currently working on some ideas of applying entrepreneurship to higher education.

Thanks to EDII for arranging this insightful lecture.

He did it, but that’s not the point

He did it (https://rajshankar.wordpress.com/2015/12/20/crowd-funding-my-way-to-jagriti-yatra-2015/) but that’s not the point.

This boy fought his internal inhibitors and took action. He is now on his dream tour across India. I am sure he will come back transformed and inspired. But that’s really not the point.

The point is:

he realised that our biggest enemy is inside us
he realised that taking action only moves us forward
he realised that there are a lot of good people in the world
he realised that there is nothing wrong is experimenting
he realised that it takes a lot of courage to take action

I have seen a number of my students turn entrepreneurs (some very successful and some very popular). But this incident with Saurabh taught me that so many of us have to break out of our self-made assumptions about how the world works, our self-made assumptions about what we must and must not do and our self-made limitations on ourselves. It is this victory that is important to achieve. Over time he will realise that it is not going on the Yatra that was important (not less important anyways), but the confidence and courage to experiment that he has gained which is more critical.

He has done it, will you?

366 Days of 2016 – Make them Count

Seasons Greetings and Happy New Year 2016 (once again).

It is not unusual to see another ‘leap year’. The beauty is that there is one extra day (29 Feb).

Don’t spend it just counting an extra day. Make it count. It is a blessing to be alive and receive another year (especially one with an extra day), don’t waste it living someone’s else life. Live your dreams, your passion, every day of the year. Make sure you do something worthwhile with all that nature has showered on you. Remember there are many who are not this blessed.

So, my message for the year is “Do not count your days, make them count.”

Best wishes for an entrepreneurial life

My blogging in 2015 – a review

Dear Readers,

Seasons Greetings and Happy New Year 2016

Reviewing is a powerful exercise to know what was done against what was planned. It is a good way to showing the mirror to oneself. Though I love writing, much of 2015 went in reading. It showed in my review. Hence I am making an attempt to revive the writing schedule for 2016. The next year’s review will show how much I lived up to my plans.

In the meantime may you all have a lovely, happy and prosperous 2016!

Thanks to the WordPress.com stats helper monkeys who helped prepare the 2015 annual report for this blog.

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Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 12,000 times in 2015. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 4 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Crowd Funding my way to Jagriti Yatra 2015

Guest Post by: Saurabh Sharma.

This is Saurabh Sharma, a student from Entrepreneurship Development Institute Of India (EDI), Gujarat. Previous year, I applied to the Jagriti Yatra but didn’t make through. This year I was selected for the prestigious Jagriti yatra 2015 (JY2015). But for me it was not easy task to get on board for I found some constraints after selections. As we keep hearing from our childhood, there is nothing like a free lunch in this world; I also faced a similar situation after selection in Jagriti Yatra. The total cost of the program was about Rs 59,000 and they gave me 50% scholarship. So I had to pay Rs 27,000 to be on board. I also had to pay a registration amount of Rs 5000. So in total I needed to pay 32000, if I had to be part of the Jagriti Yatra 2015. There were some financial constraints which stopped me from thinking further but it was my dream to go. I told myself; anyhow I will go to the Yatra. But for me the biggest question was where to find the money for the yatra. I had saved Rs 12000 at that time, so I needed Rs 20000 more to get on the board.

As I was thinking on this, one day I met with Raj Shankar Sir, who is doing his Fellowship Program in Management at EDI. Over lunch he advised me to go for crowd funding. I thought about it, but I didn’t have the confidence because I thought dignity is more important when it comes to asking the money to someone. My confidence level was so low, and almost lost my dream to be on board JY2015. Then magic happened.

Ramkrishna Mistri Sir, who is a visiting faculty of Development Studies course in EDI was teaching us the Fund Raising subject. After the session, I met him and shared my problem. He also suggested the option of crowd funding. But this time, he announced in the class and asked for everybody’s participation for crowd funding my JY2015. Some of my friends drafted the letter, which actually captured my financial problem and also my dream. See the poster by the side. We shared this message across EDI and asked for support. It worked. Some of my friends gave me funding and it helped me reach Rs 6000. But further 14000 was needed to be on Board for JY2015. Then I told to Ramkrishna Mistri sir that I have raised only this much but he kept assuring me that it will all work out.

Then, he shared this message on his social media especially his WhatsApp group where Alumni, Faculty and Ex faculty were also there. The first person who supported this initiative was Dr Dinesh Awasthi, ex-Director of EDI. After that alumni, faculty and ex faculty gave their support and I managed to raise the required amount. So I am now going to live my dream, I am going to JY2015.

Meanwhile another incident also took place. Our senior Sanjay Romala was suffering with a similar problem that I faced. So I told this thing also to Ramkrishna Sir and he helped him as well. All the alumni and senior faculty members also helped him.

So crowd funding works. It helped me get on the Jagriti Yatra 2015. It was a very good and challenging experience and I am sure that this journey will change my insight and give me exposure to understand the practical challenges of the community. I hope to also do something for the community in the future.

I now look forward to boarding the train for JY2015. Thanks to all who made it happen.

Books and Me: 9 Things Successful People Do Differently

Book Title: 9 Things Successful People Do Differently

Author(s): Heidi Grant Halvorson

Every one wants to be successful. While this little book distills 9 things that one can do to be successful, there are lists of varying lengths suggesting success. I have not come across too many people who have read their way to success. It is like reading writing guides to start writing – it rarely happens. But there are few reasons you may want to read this book:

it is short (really short)
it is easy to hold in your hand (less than A5 size i believe)
you can complete it in a couple of hours (maximum)
it is well written and to the point
written with authority for the busy professional
tips and suggestions for practice

Don’t expect anything that you don’t know in this book. This in my opinion makes the book useful. Of the nine things (listed below) the first is my favourite:

Get specific goals
Seize the moment to act on your goals
Know exactly how far you have left to go
Be a realistic optimist
Focus on getting better rather than being good
Have grit
Build your willpower muscle
Don’t tempt fate
Focus on what you will do and not what you won’t do

I love the first one simply because all the others make no sense if it is not fixed. The problem that I have seen with most people is that nobody wants to fix the first thing. Most people feel that by fixing one thing they are letting go of a lot of things. Misunderstanding!! Think about it.

I am sure you will learn something from this book that can make you more successful than what you are. The reason I say ‘can’ and not ‘will’ is because you need to act on something to make success happen. So if you are ready to get off that chair or bed or whichever you are sitting on and get to doing something, this book can give you suggestions to sharpen it. The one thing that this book does not touch upon is – what is success? It is left to you the reader to decide that first. It makes sense to put the tools to use when you know what you want to achieve, else as they say, you may be simply climbing quickly the wrong wall. Think about it.

Happy Reading!

Happy Children’s Day 2015

Factual Details: 14th November every year is celebrated as Children’s Day in India. It is because 14th November is the birthday of India’s First Prime Minister – Jawaharlal Nehru. He loved children and insisted that they be given love and affection, because they were the future of his beloved motherland.

But what we miss is that there is a child inside every one of us. And it is the grown-up in us who stops the child inside us from manifestation. While all of this may seem abstract and philosophical, ask anyone who is towards the end of their life and he or she is bound to speak about the innumerable things they wanted to do, but never did. Why? Because they let the grown-up voice in them get the better of themselves.

The only way to truly live life is to live like a child, with that childlike attitude. It is a life of curiosity, joy, experimentation, and fun. A life without inhibitions, without prejudice, without fear of failure and without a need to comply to others beliefs. I strive hard as a teacher to embed this lesson into every class I teach and at every level. Let us allow the child in us to live all through life.

Happy Children’s Day!