How Entrepreneurs Become Visionary Leaders

Naveen Jain,

CEO, Intelius

As a child I experienced firsthand the severe effects of poverty and illiteracy, especially upon women and children. My parents taught me the importance of education and that it was a key to improving an individual's life. Very early, it made me understand that success is simply not doled out but it must be earned through hard work, persistence, educational commitment, and even a little good luck and timing. I worked for Microsoft until 1996, till I had different angle to view life. I wanted to be a billionaire and hence started off with a company-Infospace with my own funding. The company was listed among the most successful companies and indeed I became a billionaire.

Sometimes we never see what failure is and often fail to recognize it. Before defining failure we need to discuss what success is. Success is not about how much money we have in the bank but it's about how many peoples' lives we have impacted through it. Success is experienced when we do things which are never done before. If we have to make things work, if we have to impact hundreds and millions of people we have to do things differently. If we look at the problem as an infrastructural problem we cannot impact it because it requires a lot of effort. When we convert this problem into a knowledge problem we experience a lot of changes thereby starting to impact the environment on a positive perspective.

Hence, it becomes important to realize what failure and success means to a person and what he does with it. It is the duty of every entrepreneur to go through this process of growth in order to fulfill his dreams.

An entrepreneur is not a person who starts a company but he is the person who actually solves a problem. It's all about execution and it is a state of mind. A person who sees a problem is a Human Being, person who finds a solution is visionary and the person who goes out and does something about it is an entrepreneur. I am really happy to see the number of entrepreneurs in India not only because of the ideas but also because of the passion at which their ideas are put across. The only problem I noticed was that people here in India are constantly "reinventing the wheel". People keep repeating the mistakes their older generation had done. We need to create an eco-system where the successful people have to help the startups to take their companies forward. The reason being, nobody in history has ever succeeded without the help of the society. It is not only the successful peoples' responsibility but also their obligation to give back something to the society. And part of their obligation being helping as many entrepreneurs as they can. There are two ways with which we can do it. One way is to do it on a scalable basis and the other is to do it on a local basis. If we are planning it on a local scale, the entrepreneurs need each other to help resolve issues and the successful ones need to help and provide mentorship to the growing entrepreneurs. Through this both can learn the lessons that are common being an entrepreneur. This also needs some amount of seed funding which will result in giving the budding entrepreneurs a great potential to grow and understand their business through these mentors. These people now need to promote each other’s products and generate revenue through an eco-system that is relevant to them.

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