Entrepreneur Journeys: How to stop looking for a job and start up your life’s work is Sramana Mitra’s first book in a seven book series filled with inspiring discussions with entrepreneur legends and their case studies. Sramana Mitra, an entrepreneur herself, begins the book with a modest prologue about herself and her experiences entrepreneurship. She starts with the unfriendly environment that greenhorn entrepreneurs had to face in early nineties Kolkata and how she had to move to the Silicon Valley, the entrepreneur’s paradise.
She talks about the companies she built, not founded but built, from DAIS to ProspectMiner to Intarka. She then tells the readers about the mistakes she made when she was a young entrepreneur. Like how she decided to raise venture capital for Intarka instead of bootstrapping the business with her funds. She shares her experiences with VCs [Venture Capitalists], the dotcom bust in late 1990s when most companies around the world, particularly the US, hemorrhaged money and collapsed.
Her first section of the book talks about Bootstrapping and contains two discussions. One is with Jerry Rawls who is the CEO of the fiber optics giant Finisar and has the Texas Tech University’s business school named after him! The other is with AdventNet’s [Now called ZOHO Corp.] Sridhar Vembu who is more popular as the creator of the ZOHO suite that is based on cloud computing. Bootstrapping a business is basically the process of starting up a company without relying on external capital [Venture Capital]. I once read in a blog[I think it was Guy Kawasaki’s], that the chances for an entrepreneur to get venture capital are the same as the probability of getting hit by a lightning, while standing in the bottom of a swimming pool on a sunny day.
Sramana says setting up a startup and funding it without relying on VC’s is all the rage. She quotes several instances where bootstrapping played a key role, including the now very popular Craigslist.
The first interview is with Jerry Rawls, a Texan, who was an entrepreneur right from his childhood and is a graduate of Purdue’s business school. They talk about his first small jobs at Raychem as a sales engineer and then his position as a General Manager of Interconnections Systems Division where he hired and met the soon to be founder of Finisar. Jerry describes how they initially provided consulting services and used the revenues as startup capital for Finisar. He then tells us about the stock market collapse of the 2000 and how they had to decide if Finisar would be a long term asset and the strategies they would use to ride it out.
The second interview is with Sridhar Vembu, a product of our very own Chennai IIT, whose completely bootstrapped company ZOHO Corp. now gets a six figure[in dollars] profit a month. He starts off by telling us about his software development center in India that he uses to cater to the demands of networking companies like Cisco. He started out with a network monitoring and management company, the Manage Engine, now a part of ZOHO Corp., reached out to his customers with innovative targeting techniques like Google’s AdSense and AdWords and then diversified into an on-demand offering.
In the second section of her book, Sramana talks about the evolution of the Web from the Web 1.0 with the static pages, linear searches to the Web 2.0 with dynamically generated pages, rich user generated content to the upcoming Web 3.0 which promises to be all about intelligently customizing your online experience by tailoring the data presented to you as per your requirements, tastes and search patterns. She talks to Kayak.com’s Steve Hafne, Simply Hired’s Gautam Godhwani and Russ Fradin of Adify, an online ad network solutions provider which allows advertisers to use their backend and processing services and run their own ad networks.
Steve Hafner is also a Texan who started Orbitz, as a direct rival to the internet based travel agency giant Expedia. He then collaborated with Expedia’s and Travelocity’s former CEO’s and started Kayak, which was billed as a one stop shop for all travel related services, from transit to accommodation. He then describes how he started out with the ideal that concentrating on the functionality of the business would be better than marketing. And when he felt the conspicuous need for a sales and marketing division, he signed an agreement with SideStep which had a strong marketing and sales platform.
The second discussion is with Gautham whose SimplyMind seeks to be something more than a plain job search engine. He says that the Simply Mind aims to be a refined job search engine that also understands the resumes submitted and links the qualified and available opportunities with them. He starts off by talking about his maiden ventures, AtWeb and Website Garage which were both online website code optimization tools. He then tells us about the research he did before he setup the Indian Community Center, a 20,000sft facility for Indians to learn about and contribute to the Indian heritage and the transition to SimplyHired.
The third discussion with Russ Fradin talks about the fact that the media is now aware that companies like Google and Yahoo now are the major players in the bloggers’ arena and the steps the media is taking to remedy this folly. In this connection, the chat with Russ begins with an in depth discussion about Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick, a leader online advertising tools business. They then talk about the business model of Adfiy which essentially connects niche advertising networks from around the world by providing a common technology and services platform.
The third section of Sramana’s book is titled Disrupting Business Models and relates to organizations providing Software-as-a-service [Saas] model. She talks to Philippe Courtot who’s the CEO of Qualys, a Saas provider, deals with security, risk and compliance management solutions. She also chats with Steve Singh, CEO of Concur, an expense and payment software provider.
In the first discussion, Sramana Mitra chats with Philippe Courtot the CEO of Qualys and a former CEO of Signio and Verity. Courtot talks about his younger years in France when he was denied a job because the psychometric tests showed that he was an independent thinker, while the companies wanted an employee who would follow given instructions! He then realized that the American society acted much different compared to the way the French did. The former placed merit in what you could do while the later placed importance in what you were. After running a very successful ad campaign about mammograms for Thompson CGR, he studied for a year with a VC firm. He then joined an ailing software firm cc:Mail which later became the standard for more than 250 Fortune 1000 companies and became a direct competitor to Microsoft’s Mail. In this discussion, he talks about his spectacular track record in turning small ailing companies around, how he setup Qualys and his plans for the future to ward off the competition.
Steve Singh shares his experience with Concur in the second discussion. He tells Sramana that when he had to file expense reports when he worked at Symantec, it took him nearly a week to file $150,000 worth. This got him thinking about making a simpler way of expense reporting and payment management.
The fourth section of the book, titled “Addressing unmet marketing needs”, contains two case studies. One with Mercado Libre’s Marcos Galperin and the other with Edward Fields of Hot Chalk.
In her first discussion, Sramana chats it up with Marcos who is the founder of Mercado Libre, Latin America’s top online market place. Marcos tells us about the research he made about the penetration of online shopping services in Latin America. He talks about the poor initial penetration of online business stores in Latin America, nearer to 3% and how he adopted his business model from eBay. More interestingly, he tells us that he’s more interested in building the business than flipping it, especially after the effort he’s put in.
In the second discussion, we meet Edward Field who setup HotChalk a site that has teamed up with NBC news, to offer a free online educational community for teachers, students and parents. Ed then talks to Sramana about creating and forging alliances with other business for a bigger market reach. He then narrates how he achieved funding for his startup with a combination of bootstrapping for round one and venture capital for rounds two and three.
The last section of the book is titled Tackling Planet-scale Problems. It contains a talk with Hans Peter Michelet of Energy Recovery International, a company that produces a freshwater extraction device from salt water, with Carol Realini of Obopay, a payment system based on mobile phones and with Harish Hande of SELCO, a company bent on bringing solar lighting to the masses.
Sramana starts off the discussion by asking Hans Peter about his latest venture. He states that PX is a ceramic pressure exchanger for desalination of water. He states that he has just 50 employees but is expecting a turnover of about $40 million. He further tells Sramana that he has three offices around the world to talk to his customers directly. Hans peter says that PX is a renewable energy answer to the rapidly depleting freshwater supplies around the world. He then tells us about the unconventional ways that he used to fund his R&D with, something a traditional VC would never let him do.
In the second chat with Carol, it is revealed to us that she hit upon the idea of using a payment system via the mobile phone after seeing people in Congo, standing in a queue with bags of money[heavy inflation I suppose], waiting to recharge their prepaid cellphones. Carol tells Sramana about her move from her cushy and well paid job at Legato to become the CEO of a consultancy firm. She later setup Obopay. She then tells us some more about the general architecture, working and her financial strategy vis a vis Obopay.
The last interview/case study is with Harish Hande whose goal is to enable rural India with solar based independent lighting. He tells us that the main difficulties he faced were in having the banks to finance his project and having enough technical assistance in the villages. He then tells us the business model of his project and how he thinks it would be useful to the numerous villages that dot India. He then talks about microfinancing and microcredit, the industry buzzwords for the relatively easy method to finance a project in rural areas.
In conclusion, I feel that a five hundred or a thousand word review can hardly do justice to Sramana Mitra’s book. The little nuggets of tips and information that she’s scattered all through the book, makes it a pleasure for the both the young entrepreneur and the veteran business man. I definitely recommend this book to anyone looking to setup a business on their own or even willing to learn a bit about doing so.
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