I was born and brought up in a Marwari family where breakfast, lunch and dinner conversations (granny included) were about deals struck and money made. I guess that’s where I inherited my ‘entrepreneurial dna’.
It’s only after working in my father’s socks factory for almost 10 years and then taking the ultimate roller coaster plunge into the world of dot coms and mobile tech that I really learnt some heavy-duty entrepreneur lessons.
Post 4 companies, 7 Venture raises across my various companies and 2 successful exits (mobile2win china was acquired by the Walt Disney Co), let me share some insightful confessions with you:
Solve a BIG problem for a FEW folks or a SMALL problem for LOTS of folks – but nothing ‘in-between’.
In early 2000 in China, we cracked the elusive dual operator ‘sms connectivity’ [To explain - There were only 2 operators in China & both were govt. owned and hated each other. At that time they would refuse to give a single COMMON sms ‘short-code’ to any private company. So, if China Mobile allotted you 7007 as your short-code, China Unicom would purposely give you 8008. Now, if you needed to communicate that short-code on say, a TV Ad (to get people to respond to you), you would have to mention 2 short-codes, who to send what to etc which was painful]. We cracked a short-code ‘8558’ that worked on both operators by presenting the potential of brand sms promotions and sms revenue to the 2 operators and they agreed! Only Nokia China had succeeded before us. So, when Disney started sniffing at China and figuring out how to buy a simple communication platform, we were the acquisition of choice. To come to the core point – we had solved a small problem but the one that applied to 400 million mobile users (the mobile population of in China)!
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