Entrepreneur Journeys (Volume One)

Sramana Mitra

Prologue
Entrepreneurship is not a career. It is a way of life.
I had originally intended this book to contain very little of my own story. I
don’t for a moment feel that I have reached a point in my life where writing a
memoir is appropriate or desirable. After all, my entrepreneurial journey is
far from over. Nonetheless, my editor at Hachette insists that I put this
volume in context, against the backdrop of my own career. I am, therefore,
sitting amidst rice paddy fields in Ubud, a small village in the island of Bali,
Indonesia, trying to string some beads from my memory.

This is December 2008. The financial crisis in Wall Street has brought a
global recession upon us. It is audacious, at this juncture, to speak of
entrepreneurship. And yet, I truly believe there is no other way to emerge
out of this mess; none other than entrepreneurship, innovation, and
individual leadership from each of us.

I am an entrepreneur’s daughter, and I grew up in an environment in

which risk-taking and swinging for the fences was accepted as a virtue. My
father founded Himalaya Shipping, one of the early container shipping
ventures in the seventies. I watched him make, lose, and remake money –
and businesses – as I grew up. It helped me grow comfortable with the
knowledge that failure is part of the equation when you try a lot of new
things. My favorite philosopher on the subject, Albert Einstein, puts it
perfectly: “Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything
new.”

My entrepreneurial journey began as a graduate student at MIT in 1994. A

year later, the world watched as Netscape went public and the Internet
swept over us like a virus. As I wrote my Masters thesis, I also wrote my first
business plan. We were – as a generation – shaping the Internet during those
early years, and, my degree in hand, I was ready to jump into the unknown.
From then on, really, I have been jumping into unknowns at every turn.
Fortunately, I’ve had great mentors – people who took an interest in my
destiny, stopped along the way, and taught me a thing or two. But, back in
1994, if I’d had the knowledge I have gleaned now – pieced together from
my years as a serial entrepreneur and strategy consultant, and my extensive
in-depth conversations with a diverse group of successful technology
entrepreneurs – my climb up the mountain of ignorance and inexperience
would have taken a much more direct route.
 In 1994, when I started my first company, DAIS, I knew very little about
business. My education had been in Computer Science and Economics. So
when I started my professional career as the CEO of DAIS, the learning curve
was steep. But I had always known that I was going to become an
entrepreneur; it was only a matter of time.

I had, at the time, contemplated living in India long-term. DAIS was, in

fact, based in Calcutta, with me living on planes. Calcutta, in the mid-
nineties, was not a friendly environment for a young technology
entrepreneur fresh out of MIT’s ivory tower. Things used to get on my nerves
easily, and the fact that I had to run the company without a telephone line
for six months created a level of frustration that I was not programmed to
endure. It changed the course of my life, and I eventually settled in Silicon
Valley.
Another driving force in my early years as an entrepreneur was the
tension I felt between body-shopping versus building a true product
company. At the launch of DAIS, I made an impassioned call for India to think
beyond body-shopping, and to focus on real technology innovation.

And yet, at the time, India was not ready.

Looking back, the practical thing would have been to build a body-shopping
business as a cash cow, and develop a product business on the side by using
the funds from services. In effect, that is what we did with DAIS – we did off-
shore services to provide the bread and butter (and even served some Indian
clients). And we built ProspectMiner, an Artificial Intelligence based lead
generation application as a product, which was later spun into Intarka.
However, instead of using the consulting proceeds to finance the product, I
decided to go out and raise venture capital for Intarka. Had I met Frank
Levinson and Jerry Rawls of Finisar, or Sridhar Vembu of AdventNet early on,
they would have sat me down and explained the concepts of bootstrapping.

But you see, in the late nineties, entrepreneurs were expected to raise
venture capital. I came of age in an atmosphere of abundant venture money
fueling the dotcom bubble. And I did not have the experience to evaluate the
trade-offs of bootstrapping versus raising investor money.

The process of raising venture capital was a different style of challenge. In

1998, the fact that I had developed the product entirely in India – with 30
engineers and for less than $300,000 – was a humongous problem. Some
twenty VCs told me with straight faces, that an Indian engineering team for a
product company was too much of a risk.

Five years later, as the dotcom bubble exploded, as 9/11 ripped the US
apart, and as a deep recession took hold of the US, finally, offshore software
development became main stream. VCs started asking, “What is your India
strategy for product development?” as a precondition to funding discussions.
I watched. I learned. Being too far ahead of the market is just as problematic
as being too late. I have done this repeatedly – been too far ahead. And it
has not served me well.

Anyway, I did succeed in raising venture capital for Intarka in January 1999.
I made my presentation at the NEA partner’s meeting. Mark Perry asked me
to step out for 15 minutes. Then, he invited me back into the conference
room, shook my hand, and said, “We will take the whole round.”

We will take the whole round. That simple. After a whole year of driving up
and down Sand Hill Road with a beggar’s bowl, here was NEA ready to write a
big check! We had a product. We had big name customers. We now had a big
name VC and money in the bank.

Now, the Board (not NEA, but the Angels who had made the product
possible) wanted to bring in an experienced CEO. I was open to the idea and
felt the need to work for someone who could perhaps become a mentor to
me. I had “felt” my way around with some help from Ajoy Bose and David
Chen, but having a full-time compatriot to work on the project would be
wonderful, I thought.

Well, the CEO we recruited was an absolute disaster. First, within a month,
he fired me. Then, within six months, he got himself fired. Intarka,
eventually, got a third CEO, who invited me to come back and help him pull
the pieces back together. I did help, and we eventually sold the company. But
by then, my life had moved on.

When I got fired from Intarka, I found myself with no job, no visa, and no
idea for a new company. One of the Board members had just started a
venture fund, and offered to fund me again if I wanted to start something
new. And that was the birth of Uuma, my third company, at the height of the
dotcom era. So when Intarka needed me, I could only be available partially.
Anyway, I am not going to go much further into the details of Uuma. But I will
say this: I have pretty much all along lived by my instincts, and have had to
tackle plenty of adversity.

Today, when I look back, I am able to extract and synthesize the lessons of
my rather unconventional choices, one of which was to experiment with
consulting for the last eight years. This gave me the opportunity to
experience the journeys of numerous entrepreneurs, their failures and
triumphs, and see first-hand some eighty case studies of business building.
These ranged from zero-stage companies, all the way to the $10 billion SAP,
and a lot in between.

In many ways, when I was a CEO myself, I only had the time to act, not to
learn and synthesize. In my consulting years, I have done the real synthesis.
And that, today, has prompted me to write this book series in which I have
invited entrepreneurs to tell their stories with me, highlighting the lessons
and the nuggets that may light another entrepreneur’s way.

For me, during the early years, venture capitalists were an integral source
of learning. Between 1994 and 2000, I never stopped raising money for my
three startups. It was exhausting revising slide-deck after slide-deck, as VCs
poked holes in my analysis of business opportunities. Heart-breaking as it
was to hear so many “‘No’s”, it was exhilarating to hear the few vital “Yes’s”
that catapulted me forward. Today, in my capacity as a consultant, I have sat
on both sides of the table – sometimes representing clients pitching to VCs,
sometimes doing due diligence on behalf of VCs. This has helped me
develop an invaluable perspective, one which has led me to a core
conclusion: at the early stages of a venture, bootstrapping is generally a
better path than dependence on venture capital.
HP Michelet’s ERI, for instance, would not have endured in the hands of
early stage venture capitalists given how many iterations they survived to
bring a successful PX to market. Philippe Courtot’s conviction that SaaS was
the business model of the future, when his VCs remained bound to the axel
of Enterprise Software, would have died on the vine had it not been for his
personal wealth, with which, he managed to salvage his dream. And yet,
venture capital, used well, is a powerful tool. VCs bring leverage, speed,
hiring power, and sometimes excellent mentorship.
In the summer of 2006, as the technology industry resurfaced from the
nuclear winter that followed the dotcom meltdown, I was invited to speak at
a startup workshop. My session was supposed to focus on Positioning. At a
Silicon Valley law firm, some sixty entrepreneurs packed a conference room
to listen to me. I asked each to pitch his business idea in one minute,
following which I gave feedback for another minute or two. My 90-minute
rapid-fire session, alas, was not enough to accommodate all the pitches. In
the lobby, even as we spilled onto the front steps, I tried to respond to some
more, but it was hardly satisfactory. In fact, it has always frustrated me to
realize that I did not have enough time in my day to stop for each
entrepreneur who asked for guidance. Friends – seasoned entrepreneurs –
have expressed the same frustration.
“Entrepreneur Journeys ( Volume One) : How to Stop Looking for a Job…And
Finding a platform for your Life’s Work ” is my attempt to capture that tribal
knowledge accumulated in the private lives of great entrepreneurs – and give
it shape, form, color, and a broad reach.
And as you curl up in bed with this book of inspirational stories of
startups, you will learn, as I have learned, from their real-time experiences.
Seated in the living room with Sridhar Vembu; lounging at Coupa Café in Palo
Alto with Philippe Courtot; on the patio of Woodside Bakery, perhaps, your
lunch companion is Russ Fradin. Punctuating their stories with certain
nuggets of my own learning, as the conversations grow deeper, and the
discussions more deep. All those dinners, lunches, coffees, teas, and glasses
of wine from which so many stories have flowed – I invite you to experience
all these with me.
In the set of stories you are about to read, each entrepreneur has
illuminated his own unique path. My intent in collecting these disparate
“case studies” is to help you develop awareness about the choices, the
options and trade-offs with which you will draw your own map. Listen to
these stories. Watch how successful entrepreneurs formulate ideas, navigate
turbulent waters, create strategies, change directions, and make choices.
Listen. Learn. Empathize. Agree. Disagree. Develop your own point of view,
and blaze your own trail.
Wherever you are in your entrepreneurial journey – and I am many years
into mine – these stories stand as an immense repository of wisdom. In
subsequent volumes, I will present many more case studies encompassing a
diverse set of entrepreneurs, industries and business ideas. Each to inspire
you, and offer perspective with which you can craft your own map.
To all those aspiring entrepreneurs and IT engineers in India, I would like
to say: The India I grew up in was not the land of opportunities it is now. I had
to travel west to find my opportunities. But this is not true anymore. The
India that you want to build is yours for the making, given that you are
entering the workforce at a point where the basic platform is ready. You have
the world’s attention as one of the two greatest consumer markets of the
21st century. You have a financial system that is ready to support high
momentum growth and building of new enterprises with an openness
unknown to prior generations.
Your India is brimming with optimism; take advantage of that mindset. Your
India is also full of problems; help solve them. Your India, I believe, needs to
be an entrepreneurs’ India. Your generation will need to rise above the risk-
averse tendencies of your previous generations. They have been satisfied
with too little. You can do much more. So, my number one advice to you is
that you need to change your expectations from “getting a job” to “finding a
platform for doing your life’s work.”
You need to reach for bigger goals. And how do you decide these goals? To
answer that question, look at the problems that are pretty much staring us in
the face. India’s supply chain is a disaster. Amidst rampant urbanization,
India’s cities are bursting, fuming, overflowing. If the Bay of Bengal or the
Arabian Sea rises a few inches due to global warming, it could wash over our
precious shores. Water is fast becoming a crisis, and India will need to figure
out how to meet the population’s drinkable water needs, as well as the water
needs for growing crops and livestock. You, new engineers, need to build a
road system, a port system, and an air-transit system that scales with India’s
growth ambitions. You will also need to build cars that do not pollute. You will
need to find alternative sources of energy, including solar, wind, and nuclear.
And let me be very clear: you can and should plan on making huge
fortunes. There is a venture capital industry coming together in India to
support your wealth creation journey. But, remember, risk and reward have a
direct correlation. And, to reap the rewards, you have to learn to build. Build
products. Build companies. And finally, build fortunes.
The interviews and personal success stories compiled in this volume are
just as much to teach me, as they are to teach you. Fourteen years ago I had
no map with which to negotiate my way forward. Fourteen years later, at the
time of writing this book, I have a map but I know now that this map is not
the same for everyone; it does not offer a universal route to success, for its
roads are written by hand and, at its crossroads,decisions must be made by
its author. For entrepreneurship is by definition a venture into as yet
uncharted territory. And the path you stake as your own is the “right” path
only if it is a function of who you are, and what your personal needs and
aspirations happen to be.
You can purchase Entrepreneur Journeys (Volume One) from Amazon.com or
at bookstores in India. Sramana Mitra’s blog is at
http://www.sramanamitra.com.