so what is a startup the way I see it is we are actually surrounded by startups when you walk
out in any town in India you will see hundreds of businesses thousands of businesses these are
all small businesses and in fact most of the jobs in India are not formal picture jobs at
all and they should be considered entrepreneurs and they are small-scale maybe only 1% businesses
but they are still businesses because at the end of the day they still have to make money
enough money to some light which is their good definition of a business and they have to serve
some customer in order to earn that money so in that sense they are really a start-up so I
don't want to really glorify that start up the word startup because when you overthink it you
tend to be afraid of it when you think everybody is actually doing it when you
when you realize that everybody is doing it it becomes actually easier to do the second thing
now is bootstrapping and Zoho is a bootstrap company and I am a fan of bootstrapping so
what is bootstrapping I look at it as you are starting in a year minus 5 rather than at 0
and you spend those 5 years learning business learning how to build product how to sell out
to service customers how to collect money maybe how to manage employees none of these things
actually can be learnt in any kind of school and business school is actually a misnomer that way
because it cannot really teach you much less you can only learn business by doing it and all of
those people who are in business those thousands of businesses that surround us they are actually
in the real world of no real School of Business so that's what I believe is real business water
and being in business you actually make mistakes I have made my share of mistakes in fact my those
five years I said this - file - zero here I actually spent money and maybe has spent 10
15 lakhs of my own money making mistakes the very first product I tried to launch you didn't even
get off the toilet but I spent all my money without even having a product of the market
that was the first mistake of light when it taught me a lot of lessons and it was better that I did
not raise money to make that mistake because you know learning it this way were actually
much more powerful lesson and sometimes when you raise money you did not learn the lesson
because you spend somebody else's money and you don't actually end up learning anything
so that's why making mistakes your own way is actually often beneficial even if it's a mistake
so how do you scale a business you can only think about scaling in the long term you know sometimes
business gets lucky and it grows really rapidly but that's not actually the usual pattern when
you read about these exceptions but in reality you can only plan on scaling a business or a lot
where there's a lot of things involved here I mean it's not merely just revenue growth
because you have to develop the skill sets in the company you are the develop the managerial depth
all of these go hand in hand with scaling and these things don't just magically happen it's
not like you know sometimes you read these stories as though somebody is magically to grow from zero
to billion dollars but there's nothing really magical when you're in the middle of it there
is a lot of experience all of that goes together and that can only be gained mouths down in most
companies and sometimes when you see that in a Silicon Valley is scaling rapidly that's
because people came together from they already had prior experience and they came together in
this place to just scale it up rapidly in India that we don't have that much more
of the new businesses have to be born we still have maybe a thousand billion dollar businesses
to be born still in India and all of those businesses served to scale the old-fashioned
way which is to develop their own internal talent pool that is only able to scale up
I wish the startup community good luck may your dreams come true you