Dispel myths of being too old, not
being from Silicon Valley or not having the right background
VIVEK
WADHWA ,a distinguished fellow at Carnegie Mellon University at Silicon Valley
and author of The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Our Technology Choices Will
Create the Future , expressed the personal views
‘Research
done by a Duke and Harvard team found that family entrepreneurship, prior
interest, and extreme interest, did not heavily influence the success of the
first-generation entrepreneur. So what had? Tertiary education — though not
which university they’d graduated from — provided a huge advantage.
With
a billion people becoming connected via smart phones with the computing power
of supercomputers, India can build a digital infrastructure as monumental as
China’s Great Wall and America’s interstate highways. There are opportunities
to create dozens of new companies as valuable as Reliance.
Just
one thing could hold India back: That the people who should be availing
themselves of these opportunities continue to believe that entrepreneurship
isn’t for them but is the domain of young college graduates like those from
Silicon Valley.
The
reality is that even Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurs aren’t young and don’t have
special backgrounds. They merely saw an opportunity and seized it. Anyone can
become an entrepreneur. I know, because I made the same transition. I was 33
years old and had developed a revolutionary technology at First Boston, an
investment bank, and IBM offered to invest $20 million in it — provided that we
spun the technology off into a new company. I was offered the job of chief
technology officer.
I
didn’t come from an entrepreneurial family and starting a business
was something I never even thought of. My father was an Indian government
official; my mother, a teacher. I had no entrepreneurial aspirations
and had a wife and two children to support. Taking this position would entail
relinquishing a great job that paid a hefty six-figure salary, for a startup
that could easily go out of business and didn’t pay well. So it wasn’t an easy
decision; but I took the plunge.
Our
startup, Seer Technologies, grew to 1,000 employees and had annual revenue of
$120 million in five years; then we took it public. The IPO was fun, but the
experience thereafter was like a nasty hangover. The excitement had gone. Sick
of the big-company politics and the obsession with meeting short term revenue
goals, I wanted out.
Microsoft
tried recruiting me, telling me it would offer stock worth a fortune, but I
couldn’t stomach the thought of working for another big company. So I chose to
start my own company again. Having tasted entrepreneurship, I had become unfit
for the corporate world. My only regret was having wasted so much of my life in
it. I was 40.
Some
people say that my transformation was a fluke; that entrepreneurs are born, not
made. They also say that successful entrepreneurs are young and have
special entrepreneurial traits. Research — including my own Duke and
Harvard team’s — says otherwise. But my health suffered due to the stress of
running my second company, and I had to switch careers. I still didn’t want to
go back to the corporate world; so I became an academic. And the question of
what makes an entrepreneur is one of the earliest I researched.
My
Duke and Harvard team researched thousands of American entrepreneurs. We found
that the majority did not have entrepreneurial parents and entrepreneurial aspirations
at school or university. They’d started companies through tiring of working for
others; they’d had a great idea and wanted to commercialise it; or they’d
woken, one day, urgently wanting to build wealth.
We
found that 52% of entrepreneurs surveyed were — just as were Bill Gates, Jeff
Bezos, Larry Page, Naveen Tewari, and Vijay Shekhar Sharma — the first in their
immediate families to start a business.
While
in college, only a quarter had caught the entrepreneurial bug, and
half hadn’t even thought about it by then.
Family
entrepreneurship, prior interest, and extreme interest, then, hadn’t heavily
influenced their successes. So what had? Tertiary education provided a huge
advantage.
But
what about all we hear of IIT graduates’ dominating Silicon Valley? It is a
myth. My research team found that only 15% of the Indian immigrant founders of
tech and engineering companies were IIT grads. Education matters but not the
school.
We
also found that, in the tech world, older entrepreneurs are not the exception
but the norm. The average founder of a high-growth company had launched his
venture at 40. Most were married and had, on average, two or more kids. They
typically had six to 10 years of work experience and real-world ideas; they’d
simply tired of working for others and wanted to rise above their middle-class
heritage.
There
is no real difference between Indian entrepreneurs and American ones. So if
anyone tells you that you’re too old to be an entrepreneur or that you have the
wrong background, don’t listen. Go with your gut instincts; pursue your
passions. You’ll come to wonder why you wasted your time working for your
idiotic boss.
Source:HINDUSTAN TIMES-12th March,2019
