'Entrepreneurship Is About Independent Choice Of Work'

At BW Disrupt Women Entrepreneurship Summit and Awards 2019, organised by BW Businessworld, Mahendra Swarup, Founder, Venture Gurukool spoke about capital raising. “The purpose of that business is to serve someone with a product or service and not just having an ultimate goal of having an IPO. That's an outcome of a good business but not the purpose of the business. So the first thing which you should actually ask yourself is do you need money if yes, when would that money be required and what will you use that money?"

"A lot of people go prematurely in the market asking for money not really knowing what they needed for because everyone is going to enable Network Angel Round and everyone believed that lets go and raise money because everyone else is raising but that's not what it is.I think you should first have an idea, a commitment to that idea and because when you get in front of an investor, he just wants to know couple of things instead of just looking to 50 slides presentation of a business plan.That's the first question you should be asking yourself that why are you in this business? The second one is whom are you trying to address, who we are customer? And when will your customers start paying?  If you have answers to these three questions, I think you stand a chance to get funded all the other things are a matter of details your cash flows your business plan”, said Swarup.

He added, “Statistics suggest that, there are about 58.3 entrepreneurs in this country out of which about 5.8 Million are women entrepreneur. That's 13 to 14 percent of the total entrepreneurial population in India. Women at an average as an entrepreneur employ about 1.6 people. Still there is a large number of employment potential. Most of them are in the agricultural sector and when I say all kind of entrepreneurs, they are not only the kind of present in this room, it’s the type of entrepreneurs who are present on the streets. If you see a vegetable seller she is an entrepreneur if you see someone who collecting garbage on her own, she’s an entrepreneur. So India perhaps has the largest ratio of entrepreneurs in the world. Even the U.S. cannot boast of such a huge percentage of the population as being independent earners or entrepreneurs. So it's a great opportunity for in India that you have the freedom to choice of choice of your own career of what you want to do.

Swarup went on to add "It's extremely important that whether you want to be an employee or you want to be an employer, the earlier in life you make that decision that you want to be an employer then you would stand to gain."  

I'm an accidental entrepreneur, nobody from my family is an entrepreneur and nobody from my family knows what entrepreneurship means, said Annurag Batra, Chairman and Editor-in-chief, BW Businessworld at BW Women Entrepreneurship Summit and Awards 2019.

"I am the only one who has chosen this path and spent the last 18 years doing the same, I’ve been very lucky that I met very good people. We have had many failures."

Showing his positive gratitude towards failures, Batra said, "As far as I am concerned nothing in life is a failure but is an experience. You learn from your failures. But, our Indian culture only celebrates success and do not celebrate failures. In my opinion, if we don’t celebrate failure, we won’t be able to create something spectacular.”

He further added, "I myself have been trying hard to raise funds and what I’ve learned is that no means new opportunity and rejection means redirection. I believe, experience is what we get when we don’t get what we want. I want to say this to entrepreneurs trying to build companies, ideas and products that there is nothing called as failure. The product fails, the idea fails but the person never fails.