At Crossword Ahmedabad, Sept 20 2008

Stay Hungry Stay Foolish is the ‘book of the month’ at Crossword Ahmedabad. And it’s less than a month since release!

More on the amazing book launch events @ Ahmedabad & Baroda, on Sep 20 & 21, in my next post!

Another question I often get is:”How did you decide who to feature in the book?”

Well, we started by shortlisting the ‘big success stories’. The companies which have scaled up phenomenally, had an IPO or likely to have one soon. The names which rang a bell with the general public.

Some of these names were naukri.com (Sanjeev Bikhchandani), Subhiksha (R Subramanian), Edelweiss Capital (Rashesh Shah), Mphasis (Jerry Rao), makemytrip.com (Deep Kalra), Mastek (Ashank Desai) and India Infoline (Nirmal Jain). Among others.

Then there were really low profile guys but people I just knew we had to feature. Among them: Narendra Murkumbi (Renuka Sugars), who was a junior on campus and Shankar Maruwada (Marketics) who I knew of through my brother (a P & G connection).

Similarly Prof Basant and Kunal suggested names like Vikram Talwar (EXL) and S B Dangayach (Sintex). Every new name was almost a moment of discovery (“Oh, I didn’t know he too is from IIMA!”). Agar hamein nahin pata to shayad bahut logon ko nahin pata hoga. The project got that much more exciting.

Then we realised there was no comprehensive database of IIMA alumni who had become entrepreneurs. There might be a bunch of really interesting and successful folks out there who wouldn’t even be in the consideration set because… we just had no clue about them.

So we invited IIMA Alumni to nominate batchmates who deserved to be in the book. And we got quite a few excellent nominations, of which we chose a few. For example Madan Mohanka (Tega industries) and Shivraman Dugal (ICRI).

We consciously sought out people from across industries and across age groups. If we see decade wise, here’s how it looks:

Batches       Entrepreneurs in SHSF (‘Stay Hungry Stay Foolish’)
1966-70:              2
1971-80:              8
1981-90:              9
1991-2000:           5
2001-2008:           1

A bit of interesting trivia. The book features 3 entrepreneurs from the ’79 batch and 5 from the ’89 batch (yeah, maybe a separate book is required to figure out why certain batches have been super-entrepreneurial!).

There are a young entrepreneurs in the post-2000 batches but we felt that a company should be in existence for at least 5 years before you it has a ‘story’. Yet, it was important to cover the excitingnew trend on campus – of students dropping out of placement and starting their own ventures.

Vardan Kabra was chosen to represent this ‘new generation’. It was also appropriate because Vardan was the first OOPser (campus term for ‘Opting Out of Placement’) who got widespread media attention.

Lastly, I felt we had to include some entrepreneurs with a different vision. So we chose two social entrepreneurs (Venkat Krishnan, Vijay Mahajan) as well as Anand Halve of chlorophyll who believes ‘small is beautiful’. That every company does not HAVE to scale up and get publicly listed to be a ‘success’.

Success is what you define for yourself. There is no one size fits all model of entrepreneurship!

As for the number ’25′. Well, it could have been 30 or 50 or 20. But 25 sounded good and felt right. Which is exactly how an entrepreneur would have made the decision

“So how did you get the idea for this book?” is a question many of you have asked me.
The answer is, “I didn’t”.
Prof Rakesh Basant @ IIMA had been toying with the idea for a while.

One fine morning I got an email from Kunal Upadyhay, the CEO of CIIE (Centre for Innovation, Incubation and Entrepreneurship @ IIMA). He had in mind an IIMA Entrepreneurs Conference. And at this conference he wanted to release a book which would showcase some of the successful ventures created by IIMA alums. A  “My Story & Success Mantras” kind of volume.

He invited me to be on the core committee and guide CIIE on how to go about the project.
“Sounds good!” I said.

And then I opened the attachment which outlined how this project would be done. The plan was to hire two RAs (Research Assistants) to identify and interview the entrepreneurs and…

A siren went off in my head. Such a wonderful subject, such amazing people and an RA would write the book??? No offence to research assistants but a book needs an AUTHOR.

And then it hit me. This was the book I have been wanting to write. Since a couple of years now. But what have I done? Zilch. Nada. Nothing. A voice inside me said,”This is your book, Rashmi”. Someone Up There knows it and has sent it to you. Now grab this opportunity and run with it!

And that is exactly what happened. I offered to take the RA’s place and well, thirteen months to the day that Kunal and I exchanged that first email, Stay Hungry Stay Foolish has gone from possibility  to paperback
And what a journey it’s been.

Over the next few weeks I will share with you my experiences and impressions. The process and the pressures. The way things just magically came together. The wonder of it all.

And of course, I will invite you to join us (me and the many wonderful people in the book) as we launch Stay Hungry Stay Foolish at events being organised across India.

Stay hungry, stay foolish and stay logged in!