In the next decade, the entrepreneur will triumph over family and government

The entrepreneur in India has had to fight two forces—family and government—in two different ways. One, most Indian families, at least in the generation that reared me, always encouraged their kids to play safe and take up a ‘good job’. And the mom-fearing nation that we are, the kids complied, preferring en masse to be employees rather than employers. Our government didn’t do too much either. The colleges were never encouraged to teach us how to start a business. Even the best of our business schools had their curricula designed to turn their brightest alumni into slaves of  multinationals—not masters of their own.

As a result, and on to the second point, the Establishment has become dominated by the very two forces holding the individual back: families and government. Look at the list of India’s biggest companies in 2009: Indian Oil, Tata Steel, Reliance Industries, Bharat Petroleum, Hindustan Petroleum, State Bank of India and ONGC. Without exception, these are government or family companies of the Tatas and the Ambanis that have been around for a while.

Not a single first-generation entrepreneur is there. Now compare this list with that of the US—Exxon, Wal-Mart, Chevron, Conoco, GE, GM, Ford, AT&T, HP, Bank of America and Berkshire Hathaway—or from other geographies, and you can see the difference. Lots of companies that are not handed down from father to son—and none that is part of the public sector.

It’s been 10 years since the genie of entrepreneurship came out of the Indian bottle. And it won’t go back in. And it’ll be 10 more years for the ‘parivar raj’ and ‘sarkar raj’ to find their true place in the footnotes of industry—instead of the headlines they make today. That time is coming, yours to be taken. Will you take it?

I predict that if someone makes a list of the largest companies in India in 2019, it’ll look very different. Our public-sector stalwarts will make way for the private sector—and this means an opportunity for you. While the families—Tatas, Ambanis and Birlas—will continue to do well, there will be more room for the new Narayana Murthys among us. But it will take a blend of determination and understanding for the start-ups of today to make it big.

What should a start-up keep in mind over the next decade?

Start-ups: 10 Tips for the 2010s
Here are a few thoughts for the entrepreneurs among you—not just to survive but to make it big.
1. Be Indian, sell Indian. Think of serving the Indian, not the US, customer. The time for being a low-cost back-office for the Western world is gone. Only the biggest or the cheapest survive here and it’s hard to be either. Many of those BPO-type businesses will move to third-world countries like Laos and Latvia.
 
Meanwhile, a billion people here are moving up and need someone to clothe, house, feed and take some of their hard-earned money. Shouldn’t that be you?

2. Earn your funding. Get funding the old-fashioned way—earn it. Infosys didn’t get seed-funding. Neither did Apple or Microsoft or General Electric or Reliance. The best way to get funded is still to earn revenues from customers. If you’re completely dependent on waiting for some venture capital (VC) company or angel to fund you, be prepared to wait a long, long time while life and opportunities pass you by.

3. Don’t be an egomaniac. One person does not a company make. Find partners. Or teammates, or even other people to delegate to. More companies have failed because of insufficient quality and quantity of management bandwidth than for any other reason I know.

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