Entrepreneurship in hard times by Dr. Kanwal Rekhi
A few days back I received an email from NSRCEL about a talk by Kanwal Rekhi on entrepreneurship. I heard about Dr. Rekhi first when I did my internship in IIT Bombay a few years back. Dr Rekhi is an IITB alumnus and has donated significant amount of money to IIT Bombay and started KReSIT there and also in Michigan Tech. He has a very impressive resume as an entrepreneur and as an investor and I decided to drive down to IIM to listen to his advice to students/entrepreneurs.
Dr Rekhi talked initially about his journey as an entrepreneur and the challenges he faced being an Indian entrepreneur in the valley in the early 80′s. Around that time, Indians were considered to be great engineers but not good CEOs or businessmen and therefore they had some trouble raising money. Dr. Rekhi told that he met over a 100 VCs before they got funded. He finally took Excelan (his startup) public and it was listed on NASDAQ in 1987. They were later acquired by Novell where he stayed till 1995.
I really liked a couple of points that he mentioned during his talk and would like to list them down here
- Always have your fundas right. What he means by this is that you should always think of revenues, costs etc while making business decisions
- If you wanna sell to the geeks, let geeks do the customer service and pre sales.
- Ignore YAFO (yet another f**ing opportunity). Have a single focus and try to learn and solve one pain point well. It takes years to do that and distraction is easy
- Your first funding should come from friends and family because it comes with more responsibility to be successful and give returns. This is generally good early on
There were some more points he mentioned that I don’t remember now. A lot of points would seem like common sense but it was good to hear it from someone who has such an impressive track record. Its amazing how many of these points are being ignored by companies right now, especially in web. If you get a chance to listen to him, please don’t miss it.
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