Jayakumar Balasubramanian

The San-Francisco bay area of the US is popularly known as ‘Silicon Valley'. Its wealth generation story is well known, where it created umpteen numbers of billionaires over the past three decades. Companies started from the valley literally rewritten the technology entrepreneurship, thereby creating history. The amount of contributions by valley based technology entrepreneurs to the bigger world is unbelievable. Starting from Hewlett-Packard to latest Google every other company has changed the world to a larger extent. These valley based world class product companies, literally created the term Multi National Company (MNC), which is a house-hold name today. It was mainly due to the valley entrepreneurs and their ability to take risk, identifying the opportunity and tapping the correct market had made all the difference. Added to that, world class universities, access to venture capital and world class minds created the ideal ecosystem for entrepreneurship. India is in the similar ...

Got the link for this presentation from one of the blogs. Summarizes important aspects of entrepreneurship.

Author : Subroto Bagchi Price: 399 INR Related posts: Book review: High performance Entrepreneur Book release: Go Kiss the world The first book of Subroto 'The high performance entrepreneur' primarily depicted various aspects of Entrepreneurship. If the first book is all about 'work' the second one 'Go kiss the world' is all about 'life', thus completing the 'work-life' hemispheres. In the year 2006,Subroto delivered his famous speech to the students of IIM-Bangalore on the same title, where he shared some of his life lessons with management graduates. This book is an extension of that speech covering many aspects of his personal and professional life. This book has couldn't come at a better time where India is going through a huge transformation. Thanks to economic policies and availability of talent pool, the number of jobs for young professionals is growing at an exponential phase. Well paid global jobs are getting poured into the country ...

Followed by his famous book 'The high performance Entrepreneur' , Mindtree chief gardener Subroto Bagchi has released his second book titled 'Go kiss the world' yesterday. The book release function was held in Crossword book store in Brigade road and I was present there. Subroto formally released the book by handing over the first set of copies to Sudha Murthy, Girish Karnad and VG Siddhartha (see photographs below). Followed by the release, he read some chapters for the audience followed by a Q & A session. The phrase 'Go kiss the world' was told to Subroto by his mother when she was in her deathbed. These simple yet powerful words have become the mantra for Subroto's life who has become a successful Entrepreneur, coming from a very humble background. In this book he has used his personal life as a canvas to provide some of the most imporant life lessons to budding young professionals. I have bought a copy for myself and skimmed thro' the first chap...

Yesterday I attended 'Startup city' event organized by SmartTechie magazine. More than 40 companies showcased their products and services in the event. There were many interesting keynote addresses and panel discussions held as a part for the event. The event was kick started with inaugural keynote by Ashish Gupta from Helion Venture partners . He spoke about various stages/milestones of a startup and challenges at each phase. His venture capital firm has invested in many of the early stage entrepreneurial ventures. I have heard Ashish's pod cast some time back, but it was a good experience listening to him live. Followed by that there were some panel discussions with participants from companies like Microsoft, Sun, Amazon etc. I was not that interested in listening to them, primarily because they perspective changes (or rather looks out of phase) when big company's senior executives start talking about entrepreneurship. The real cool thing was the produc...

Author: Andy Sernovitz Price : 24.95 USD How smart companies get people talking? As an engineer it’s quite possible to think everything from a technological perspective. Most of technologists think what if they have some ‘cool’ product they can build a business around it. In reality only 15% of overall product cost is spent towards engineering the product. Remaining amount goes for marketing, sales and support functions. No matter how much ever better the product is (in terms of technology, cool features, price and performance), if it is not marketed properly it will be a failure. Most of the technology startups fail not because of their technical expertise, but mainly because of their inability to market and sell the product. In fact, marketing determines the success or failure of these ventures. Coming to marketing, quite some numbers of methods were invented over the years. For a startup/entrepreneurial venture (which is of my interest), its hard to invest heavily on some of the ...

Chennai based New Horizon Media (NHM) has raised the second round of funding from Beacon India Private Equity Fund. I have been following NHM company for the past three years. They are mainly into regional language publishing. To start with they published few non-fiction books in Tamil and went on publishing in English, Children books and Malayalam. Check out more details from their website. Coming to their books, I have read about 6 books published by NHM. Check out the book reviews of Marketing Mayajalam , Charlie Chaplin which are published them. Almost all the books are priced less then 100 rupees, which very much affordable for an average Indian consumer. Added to that paper quality, cover design and bigger fonts makes the reading as a pleasant experience. I have also listed to one of their audio books about 'Emotional Intelligence' and found it useful. Stay tuned for reviews of remaining 4 books. Areas like book publishing is one of the fragmented areas in India today. ...

Last week Star Vijay (Tamil TV channel) organized a debate about the role of Education in Entrepreneurship. It was organized as a part of 'Neeya? Naana?' (You? or Me?) program. They have called for two groups for the debate. The first set was un-educated (hardly passed 10th class) and successful entrepreneurs. They have accumulated more than a crore wealth thro’ their business, starting from scratch. The second set was the educated, working, middle class people. Following are some of the interesting points from the discussion. First, the un-educated folks have more appetite to take risk and start on their own. This is mainly because they start doing business as a survival, so there is less to loose. The educated folks get into the comfort zone quickly. This has made them risk-averse. In fact most of the successful entrepreneurs like Dhirubai Ambani, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Azim Premji don't even have college degree but were able to build business emphires. The combination...

So many things has happened in the last three months, when I was not blogging! Last month, Ram Shriram (One of the early investors in Google) was in India and I had a chance to watch his interview in CNBC. It is probably one of the best TV interviews (in the similar lines of Dalai Lama , Azim Premji ) I have ever seen. I was completely hooked up with each and every word Ram was speaking in rhythmic, soothing voice with clear thoughts. The text version of the interview is available here in the CNBC website. Here is my favorite portion (especially the highlighted one) from the interview. Very simple statements but very realistic. Q: How important is it for you to have an Aha moment every time you put your money into something? A: It is important to realize not every investment will be a Google. Q: It would be great if it turned out to be that way. A: Yes. So, every ten years or so, you will see a Google size company emerge. But in general, it takes committed entrepreneurs, great teams t...

Last weekend I attended the summer edition of Barcamp Bangalore . This is my first Barcamp and I found it very interesting! To start with, its amazing to see the energy level of attendees. They were all highly pumped up and it was showing up with almost everyone I have met. Compared with a hierarchial corporate setup, it was organized as a completely an informal, flat and free-flowing setup. Every session was packed with very interesting questions, debates, critisicms and smart answers in eight different tracks . I was mainly interested in the 'startups and demo' track and spend almost the whole day (saturday) there. I was able to see pretty good web 2.0 applications (Example: http://www.lifeblob.com) demonstrated for roping in the technology enthusiasts. There was an interesting session (according to me) hosted by Prof.Suresh from NSRCEL at IIM-B on the topic 'Startup pains'. He was asking the campers about the list of problems faced by aspiring Entrepreneurs and what...

Its time for a blog post on Entrepreneurship! I was brought up in the north-west part of Tamilnadu, which happens to be the ‘textile-hub’ of south India . Most of the businesses are Small-And-Medium scale and are into producing textile products like cotton sarees, lungis, hankies and shirts. Also, there are numerous businesses in various aspects of the textile value chain -- dyeing, calendaring, bleaching, tailoring and printing. There are 24189 registered SSI units as on 31.12.2000 in the district besides 59 Large Scale Units. I have vivid memories of this business hub – dusty, vibrant and narrow streets, bullock carts carrying textile materials, chai and bhajji shops serving snacks, businessmen from the north and western part of India , daily wagers leaving their kids to nearby schools etc. Most of these businesses are run by people who hardly have a university degree. Right from my school days I have always been spellbound by the entrepreneurial passion and hardworking nat...

Author: SS Kshatriy Price: 180 INR ISBN: 81-259-1459-5 When I visited Silicon Valley in the year 2002, I was amused to see so many Indians out there. Not only Indians are one of the major immigrant communities in the San Francisco bay area (which consist of counties like San Jose , Santa Clara , Fremont, Sunnyvale etc.) they are also one of the most successful group when it comes to Entrepreneurship. I remember reading one of the WSJ articles where as much as 30% successful Entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley are from Indian origin. Thanks to Nehru’s socialistic democracy, bulk of highly educated (mainly from IITs) engineers migrated to the US and made fortunes there. Right from 1970s these folks built tons of high-tech organizations and generated abundance of wealth, which built a very strong brand for India . Two decades later when Indian opened up the economy in 1991, it was ‘homecoming’ experience for these wealthy entrepreneurs as they acted as a bridge between Ind...

I like only two type of movies: serious and comedy. Since Mani Rathnam's 'THE GURU' belongs to the first category watched it on the theater (after a long long time). Overall the movie was pretty good at the same time raises lots of questions about building businesses in India. Before getting the business, let me quickly run thro' the movie. The hero Gurukant Desai, who hails from a small village in Gujarat moves to Turkey for employment and make some quick bucks. Because of his hard work and commitment (and of course his shrewdness)he raises very fast, but comes back to India and starts his own company. The first set of scenes itself says that 'Guru' is the story of Dhirubai Ambani and Reliance. If not for anything I would appreciate Mani's attempt to make movie based on real life heroes. Long time back he made an excellent Tamil movie called 'iruvar', which was a neat sketch of lives of MGR and Karunanidhi. Unfortunately it was a commercial failure ...

Author: Geoffrey A Moore Price: 17.95 USD ISBN: 0-06-051712-3 This book is one of the all time classics in the high tech product marketing and Innovation. Its been in my 'reading list' for years together and one of my colleagues literally forced me to read this book in order to have interesting 'coffee-table' discussions. As a matter of fact we had multiple discussions and I got ample amount of insights into technology product marketing. This book provides a basic frame-work, where any technology and its growth can be fitted in. To start with, what does it take to build great technology product and how to measure the success of any technology? The author introduces two key terms 'fad' and 'trend' to understand the consumer behavior, which is very key in innovating and marketing any technology product. The former (fad) is seen only among the small segment of people who are technology enthusiasts or special interest groups. These are the people...

Some time back I wrote a blog about ‘Muhammed Yuguf and Microcredit’ where I gave my perspective on the excellent work he has done. This December 10 th he received the Noble peace price for his revolutionary micro-credit implementation in Bangladesh . I got a chance to read his inspirational noble price speech, which is really wonderful. The total speech was very good and I personally liked the following points: On poverty: “World's income distribution gives a very telling story. Ninety four percent of the world income goes to 40 percent of the population while sixty percent of people live on only 6 per cent of world income. Half of the world population lives on two dollars a day. Over one billion people live on less than a dollar a day. This is no formula for peace. Poverty is the absence of all human rights. The frustrations, hostility and anger generated by abject poverty cannot sustain peace in any society. For building stable peace we must find ways to provide opportunitie...

Author: Subroto Bagchi Price: 395 INR For years I have been a sincere reader of Mr. Subroto Bagchi’s writings starting with his ‘Making of Mindtree’ write-ups. I have read his articles in Business world (Arbor Mentis), Times of India (Times of Mind) and attended ‘Ping-me’ sessions organized by Mindtree. I can very well say his writings are excellent almost everyone would have read his famous speech ‘Go kiss the world’ . For quiet some time I was not able to see much of his writings in the media and really concerned about it. But Mr. Bagchi came up with a ‘bonus’ by writing this book ‘The high performance Entrepreneur’ where he shared his learnings which he got from building Mindtree. This book is truly awesome and gave loads of insights into Entrepreneurship. To start with, Mr.Bagchi coined the ‘high performance entrepreneur’ in this book and talks about how ‘high performance’ entrepreneurship is different from mere self employment of small scale. High performance ‘rain making’ entr...