What Can Make You a Successful Entrepreneur?
Date: Tuesday , April 06, 2010
In an attempt to earn fame and gain the ground among the corporate bigwigs, every person starts the entrepreneurship journey, but there are many who don't make it to the top slot, and a number of them don't even see the daylight. Hard work combined with intelligence alone can help one to be a successful entrepreneur. An entrepreneur is recognized by three traits - patience, perseverance, and dedication. They are required to be more aggressive about their ideas, amidst all kinds of disagreement from people around. There is no dearth of determination, but what dissuades one from being an entrepreneur is the fear of failure and worries about not meeting the expectations, making a mistake, or trying something new. Because of this, many never get started on the path toward reaching their goals, and thus ensure themselves of the very thing they are afraid of - failure. Success is built on the pillar of lessons learnt from failures and the biggest example for entrepreneurs would be Thomas Alva Edison. Edison would have never invented the light bulb if he were afraid of failure. While finding the right filament that would create light for a sustained period of time, Edison failed more than 2,000 times, but he did not regard all this experiment as a failure. He reframed the situations to successfully eliminate the 1,999 possibilities, refining and narrowing his search as he proceeded, thus drawing him closer and nearer to his goal. Similarly, an entrepreneur trying to create a successful startup faces a lot of challenges along the way. With both short term problems to address and long term corporate objectives to keep, a person needs to focus on his or her venture 24/7. Wrong and near term decisions, can often have negative consequences on the long-term success.
Speaking at SiliconIndia Startup City, which has become a multifaceted platform for startups in recent years, allowing entrepreneurs to flex their muscles to warn the corporate biggies that they ought to be counted upon; Murugavel Janakiraman, Founder and CEO of the Consim Info Pvt. Ltd. (bhartamatrimony.com) says, "It is very important for a person to know the reason to become an entrepreneur. If anyone has the purpose to earn money through entrepreneurship, he should leave it in early stage only, and if any individual is passionate about entrepreneurship, he should keep experimenting till he or she does not get success in his or her purpose." For Janakiraman, it took almost three years to identify the matrimony business. In those three years, he experimented with almost everything to achieve success. He says that passion is what gets entrepreneurs started and keeps them there. It gives entrepreneurs the ability to convince others to believe in their vision. It can't substitute for planning, but it will help them stay focused and get others to look at their plans.
To continually add value every day, an entrepreneur needs to identify the company's value added proposition and continually focus on significant value added activities. And, this can only be accomplished by creating value and focusing on those items that necessarily make a difference to both targeted customers and investors. "An entrepreneur has only one life, and in that life a person has the obligation to himself or herself to know what he or she is really capable of," says Satya Prabhakar, Founder and CEO, Sulekha.com. Industry leaders present in the SiliconIndia Startup City also stressed on the importance of mentors in the journey of an entrepreneur. "In any entrepreneur's career, mentors make sure that he or she is going on the right path," opines Janakiraman. Also, that mentor should be experienced, successful business people who are willing to help entrepreneurs get started and grow at no charge. Mentors can be found in myriad places: family, former teachers, suppliers, or the people one admires.
Having a goal to reach across every corner of the country, SiliconIndia startup city took one step forward towards it, and reached Chennai this year on March 20, where around 30 technology startups, with a hope to become tomorrow’s industry leaders, showcased the cutting edge technologies they are building and the best-of-breed solutions they have developed. Also, they have highlighted the culture of innovation that thrives within their organizations and the challenges they are tackling. Nokia, Sun Microsystems, and Shorthand Mobile were the sponsors of the event. Shorthand Mobile, which uses text messaging to send and receive information to and from favorite websites, without a data plan solution provider, also won the best startup award in the Mobile segment. While Precious Microtech, a software solution provider to the Gem and Jewelry industry, won the best startup award in the Software segment. GLOPORE IMS, an IT Infrastructure Management Services (IMS) company clinched the best startup award in the Services sector, and Home Plan Guru, which helps Indian customers to get homes on par in quality with the homes in developed countries at lower or the same price, emerged as the best startup in the Internet segment.
Also, the event managed to motivate the entrepreneurs to take confident steps towards realization of their billion-dollar dreams. Moreover, it was like an awareness program for the aspiring entrepreneurs and techies who came to know that there are geeks who are fiddling with innovative technologies in their own backyards. Advising the entrepreneurs present in the event, Suresh Sambandam, Founder and CEO of OrangeScape says that if entrepreneurs need to build the business in an effective way, they themselves have to sell, and if they think that they can’t sell, they should not aspire to become successful entrepreneurs.
After attending the event, the entrepreneurs took home some invaluable lessons from the industry gurus, the investors were able to include some hot startups in their portfolios, and the tech enthusiasts got an insight into some out-of-the-box technology products. |