'A Good Time For A New Venture'

Sramana Mitra has never been employed. A serial entrepreneur and a strategy consultant, 39-year-old Mitra has been there and done it all – starting three firms, consulting individuals and companies on strategy, giving lectures and even runs a successful blog. Her book Entrepreneur Journeys a series of conversation between Mitra and several successful company heads such as Sridhar Vembu of Advent Net, the company behind productivity suite Zoho; Steve Hafner of Kayak; Simplyhired's Gautam Godhwani; etc., attempts to bring out the experience of building a company "block-by-block". Based in the Silicon Valley and in between her full-time consulting schedule, Mitra is trying to finish the rest of the pre-planned volumes of Entrepreneur Journeys. Tech-savvy Mitra responds to BW Online Sanjitha Rao Chaini's e-mailed queries on the book and how it would benefit entrepreneurs. 
 
What is Entrepreneur Journeys all about? How did the book come about?
As a self-taught entrepreneur, much of my learning came from my own mentors who told me their stories and shared their insights. Entrepreneur Journeys is my attempt to capture that knowledge base and institutionalise it, so entrepreneurs all over the world can vicariously experience those conversations, which I have been fortunate to have access to, and through which I built myself up.
 
Because of my blog, I get a lot of requests from Indian entrepreneurs asking for mentoring on their business ventures. While it is not possible for me to mentor them all individually, I think this book series will simulate the experience of sitting face-to-face with a few dozen entrepreneurs for them. In a way, it is meant to serve as a scalable mentoring device for technology entrepreneurship.

I started doing these interviews back in 2006. The idea of the book came together with my Amazon deal in June 2008. 
 
The book says Volume One. How many volumes are you planning to bring out?
In Entrepreneur Journeys (Volume One), my primary objective has been to provide inspiration to the readers. In subsequent volumes of the series, I plan to dig deeper into specific aspects of entrepreneurship. I am a big believer in 'Bootstrapping', and in Volume Two, I will dedicate the entire spectrum of journeys to entrepreneurs who have used various flavours of bootstrapping to get their ventures off the ground.
 
Then, assuming that even a bootstrapped venture may eventually need capital, I will focus Volume Three on the critical issue of Positioning. Through years of strategy consulting, I have seen case study after case study of badly positioned companies that have failed to raise the next round of capital. My intent in this volume is to show examples of great positioning, and illustrate how one can learn both art and science of strategic marketing. Volume Four will deal with the topic of innovation. Thereafter, I will dedicate three more volumes to three emerging areas that I believe are ripe for entrepreneurial activity: Cleantech, Healthcare, and Education.
 
Another book that I am working on to go along with this series is Vision India 2020, a series of essays on entrepreneurial opportunities in India and my ideas on how to tackle them. Some of these essays were syndicated as a column by DNA India.
 
What do you intend to capture through Entrepreneur Journeys?
This book is for entrepreneurs, aspiring entrepreneurs, professors teaching entrepreneurship, and media and professional organisations promoting entrepreneurship. It focuses on the technology sector, and recognise that many entrepreneurs are engineers moonlighting at companies, while dreaming of building the next Google. They often have no business background or training, and are typically self-taught, hungry to glean any and all insider tips from those who have come before.
 
More than anything else, I want to demystify entrepreneurship, so that a lot more people feel confident about becoming entrepreneurs. My message is, this isn't voodoo. There is a method behind the madness. You can learn the tricks of the game.
And I want as many as possible to play the game.
 
Chapters in the book are in the form of conversation. Do you consider this a better form of communication?
I do think this is the best form of capturing the style of content I wanted to capture. Remember, I am trying to simulate the experience for readers of actually sitting down with these people. I want the entrepreneurs' voices to be accessible, unencumbered by my voice. I have tried my best to be as authentic as possible in preserving this basic tonality in the book series.
 
It also creates the feeling of a short story collection, instead of a dry business book. In these stories, you see an entrepreneur starting with nothing, and block by block, building a company. The payoff for the reader in going along the journey with the entrepreneur creates tremendous empathy.

The world is reeling under financial crisis. How relevant is your book in these times?
Very relevant, because the opportunity cost right now is low. Talent is easy to attract, and there is a precedent of great companies being started during recessions. Eight out of 12 case studies in my book were companies started during the dot-com bust and the last recession. If I look across the entire series, the numbers are very high as well. I think, this is a very good time to start a new venture.
 
How do you think the book will help entrepreneurs, especially now?
I hope it will be a reference guide for Indian entrepreneurs. While in Silicon Valley, there are numerous experienced entrepreneurs that new entrepreneurs can access for guidance, in India, the entrepreneurial eco-system is still very rudimentary. Even the VCs playing in the market don't have that much experience. And the Indian industry completely lacks the product and strategic marketing skills to bring new technology products to market. In the next generation, entrepreneurs can use the book series to learn from others before them, especially the highly sophisticated ones from Silicon Valley. 
 
What, according to you, are the essentials for any entrepreneur?
Entrepreneurs need courage, self-confidence, resilience, and determination. They also need to be comfortable with the notion of failure. India's biggest drawback is that our culture penalizes failure, and that causes people to not experiment. There is no innovation without experimentation.  So most of all, I hope that Indian entrepreneurs can learn to take failure in their stride.
 
What did you personally gain through interacting with company heads?
I learned a lot from the interactions. Even as a serial entrepreneur many times over, and after consulting for so many years, I still found great wisdom in listening to the stories. The challenges, sometimes, felt familiar. Yet, how people tackled them were often extremely insightful. I would say, the entire Bootstrapping discipline and how various entrepreneurs have been practicing it, is eye-opening. If I knew all this when I started, I would have done things differently my first time round. 
 
Do you think the entrepreneurs you spoke to have a vision and foresight most corporates lack these days?
In India, the biggest problem with the technology industry is that people take a very low-risk approach. Someone gives them specs. They execute. No innovation at all. This is because of the Indian IT industry's outsourcing legacy. We really need to grow up, and grow out of outsourcing. This story is getting very old, very boring, and quite uninspiring. 
 
You have spoken to both Indian and international entrepreneurs. What is the one area, which you found through your research, Indian entrepreneurs could learn from their international counterparts?
Indian entrepreneurs need to be more bold, take more risks. We go back to that fear of failure. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are a lot, lot less afraid to fail.
 
Hachette India is scheduled to launch Entrepreneur Journeys in February 2009

sanjitha at bworldmail dot com