Today I was in a panel discussion with Kanwal Rekhi and Dr Sridhar Mitta at the 3rd ISTE State Student Convention. This was held at the Reva Institute of Technology and Management in Bangalore. The goal was to get the students to look at entrepreneurship in a favorable light.
Kanwal Rekhi spoke well. He talked about how this was a great time to be an entrepreneur in India and pointed out that, in these times, entrepreneurship has possible upside but little or no downside. Yet he didn’t over-glamorize entrepreneurship and brought out the struggle that is often involved. Dr. Mitta talked about the need to overcome the typical Indian middle-class bias for steady stable jobs over anything risky and how to deal with the well-meaning push-back from parents. He also pointed out that new platforms like Ebay, Amazon (EC2 and S3), etc. are making entrepreneurship more feasible for everybody.
I talked about the two routes to entrepreneurship. I pointed out that, typically, student-turned-entrepreneurs do better with consumers as they are able to smell out trends among early adopters, usually their peers, and cash in on them. This is how Jerry Yang (of Yahoo), Larry Page and Sergey Brin (of Google), or Alexandar Amosu (the “Lord of Ringtones”) have become successful. Alternatively, one can become an executive-turned-entrepreneur after accumulating years of working experience. These entrepreneurs can then leverage their professional relationships to build and sell complex enterprise offerings. Either way, successful entrepreneurs are poor reciters, but inspired visionaries.
It’s good to see that our engineering schools are exposing students to entrepreneurship early in the game. So far, the India IT industry has been built by executive-turned-entrepreneurs. For example, Infosys founders came from Patni, HCL’s founders came from DCM Data Products, and more recently Raman Roy cut his teeth at American Express/GE before founding Spectramind BPO (now part of Wipro). They have all built businesses that cater to enterprise customers in the developed world. But now the local market is ripe (booming economy, high mobile penetration, cheap broadband) and Indian consumers are viable targets. So hopefully we will see some Jerry Yang’s emerge soon.
I have been talking to various groups of students and trying to get them excited about developing open source software - argument being that a) you would be working on real life systems and not toy projects b) the work you do is in the public domain and will build reputation for you and c) possibly, you could spin off a company based on your work.
I have been involved with IIT Mumbai’s Eklavya program (http://ekalavya.iitb.ac.in/) as a vehicle through which to push these ideas.
Unfortunately, the results have not been very encouraging so far and I see few problems.
1) Trying to reinvent the wheel
Each group of students wants to roll their own version of Linux
There is no clear value proposition and understanding of what is already out there.
2) Gap between students’ knowledge and the state of the art
I come across very few students who have understanding of new technologies such as AJAX. They still think that C or .net or Java should be used for all programming.
3) A disdain for ‘non programming’ work
QA, support, documentation could offer a gentler learning curve and a good entry point into the project of your choice. This is not understood and these tasks are looked down upon.
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I understand that the majority of the students are only interested in passing exams and certifications etc. which is fine. But where is that minority which is notable exceptions and which is going to create the next gen. companies?
Any ideas on how to find/nurture such group are most welcome.