 In this first session I am primarily going to tell you some stories from my own experiences both in running the incubator here from the starting point and the realization of why marketing is important to be understood by entrepreneurs. What we found out here at least on this campus and on many other engineering institution campuses that I have visited is that the young people who want to start entrepreneurship, they understand technology, they do understand product. To begin with they do not understand issues related to fund flow, funding, cash flow, but they are smart people so they learn these things. However they have no clue about marketing for the simple reason that our educational system has unfortunately been divided into silos. You will appreciate that right from the school days when we move over to the college we are bifurcated into science education, commerce education, arts education, etc., etc., one thing not having any relationship with the other. Even in the engineering institutions we are very quick to label people as mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, aerospace engineers, computer science engineers and so on. And unfortunately many of these individuals go up, should mean that the field that they are studying is the only important thing in life. This does not matter. Unfortunately in real life the problem that you have to solve do not come with a tag. There is no problem that I know which announces that I am an electrical engineering problem or I am a mechanical engineering problem. Real life only says I am a problem, solve me. In the building and enterprise you face plethora of problems and solving these problems becomes difficult if you do not have the background. Of course being smart people you always learn things quickly but that takes time and some of the things perhaps are never learned. This is the reason why we thought we could have this kind of a discourse and interaction with you. So why marketing mantra? Marketing is wrongly presumed to have dimensions only about convincing the world on the ability of your production services to serve them better and generate revenue from that. That is not the only marketing that we are required to do. While that kind of marketing is going to be the theme of this entire course and other colleagues will be discussing that. I thought to begin with I will describe the various dimensions of marketing that you need to be aware of. Let me begin with the notion of incubating companies themselves in an educational environment. I thought of doing this because distributed wealth generation on large scale can happen only through entrepreneurship. We have seen that in the developed world and we wanted to sort of incorporate that model. In 1998 when I started the school of information technology we said two important initiators will concentrate on. One was related to distance education where we gave synchronous lectures using VESAC technology then and after that the same by the way is our economic project with the E-outreach program that I mentioned because the audiovisual recording, editing, transmission, etc is something that we learned over the last eight years through that process. The other thing was starting a business incubator. Since I was starting a school of IT it was natural for me to dub it as an IT business incubator. We started it as a pilot. We did not have any space here. We had some rooms given as faculty rooms for the new school. The faculty members had yet to join in sufficient numbers. I had six rooms and three faculty members. These were dingy 10 by 10 rooms in the ground floor of the old mass department building. So I set aside two of the rooms and said these two rooms shall house companies which have a startup. I had to market this concept within the institute itself as Professor Amman Nath Maitian. You will appreciate that most of the faculty members in academic institutions generally do not like money, wealth generation, etc. such concepts to what they say corrupt the academic minds of the one. My argument was that technology education is not like education in basic sciences or philosophy where you are driven only by the desire to discover the truth both globally and locally. The purpose of technology is to build gadgets, build systems, build implements, build products, provide services such that human life is made more comfortable and provide these at affordable prices so that people can buy these things. Unfortunately the affordability of prices is one issue, market-determined prices is the second issue and therefore if you have to develop enterprises which actually not just create products but manufacture these, create services and supply these then they must be able to do that in a cost effective fashion still making profits because the fundamental objective of any enterprise is to generate wealth, is not to generate technology. And then nothing wrong with the wealth generation. You will recall that in the first 40 years of the nation's independence because we followed a command economy pattern in the economic front and a socialistic pattern in our thinking earning money was not considered a very great activity or great achievement. This is in spite of the fact that the Hindu philosophy always said that dharma, artha, kama, moksha are all the purusharthas. So you have to excel in each one of these. Arthas and therefore is an important thing and as Chanakya has written, even kings have the responsibility to ensure that wealth generation happens in the kingdom. We forgot this for some time. It was not fashionable to respect people who generated wealth. In fact it was fashionable to believe that anybody who generated wealth must have done some chori. Unfortunately, chori has various connotations. In this context the chori means breaking the laws of the land. But if you frame laws of the land such that you pay 98% income tax on 100 rupees that you earn, no sane individual is likely to follow these laws with great enthusiasm. Because of such laws, things were not very good in the early days. Thankfully in the IT industry involved, most of the industry interacted with the rest of the world for its business. It did not depend on the license raj. And perhaps one of the reasons why the IT industry steadfastly has followed clean practices, present exceptions to be ignored, has given rise to a new conviction amongst the youngsters which is best articulated by my friend Maran Muthi of Infosys when he said that IT industry is perhaps demonstrating for the first time that wealth can be generated legally and ethically. And this is the cornerstone of the value system that we hope every entrepreneur embodies in oneself. But given the fact that there was a huge opposition, I had to convince a whole lot of my colleagues that there is no problem in permitting youngsters to follow up this policy of trying to pursue their own ambitions. I had a lot of opposition started saying that if you admit students, they will stop doing their academics. And I had to argue over heated debates, late nights, Saturdays, Sundays, where I said don't tell me all the students are academically so inclined that they do nothing but academics. That is not true. As all of you have been students, you would know. If nothing else, you would participate in cultural programs, music, whatever, whatever, as do other old students in India. There are still a bunch of students who don't do anything worthwhile. This is why they are worth type. So you get all kinds. And your objective must be to enthuse people in the right direction. Luckily, I could get some support from the institute administration and several of my colleagues. Then I had to market the incubator itself to possible venture funders. After all, there is nothing that can happen without spending money. And you need money to kickstart any activity. And I have no money. Like most of the dreamers, I dream without any money. If I can convince others about my dreams and share with them, and if they are convinced, the money comes. That has been my experience. And that I learned as the first marketing tech without calling it marketing done. So Kanal Reiki, whose ambition in life was to take every young Indian and convert him or have him into an entrepreneur. He told me unnecessarily. He says that is what he has seen in the Bay Area, that everybody thinks of generating billions of dollars for himself and his family. That's the ambition. So this entrepreneurship route, we started taking when I studied the business incubators in the United States and said, let's try some model here. Those incubators, most of them, actually provide the infrastructure, provide the support system, some mentoring, but they charge monthly fees, rental for the infrastructure and fees for other services. And I thought that model will be perfectly fine. So we went out typically for an IT startup. Luckily, you don't require huge costs of rupees of investment in chemical plants and things like that. So he said the investment will be a few servers, some machines, internet connection, and maybe a few specialized equipment in case somebody is doing some specialized hardware development of water. I paid the cost at about 6 lakh rupees a year. And I announced that these startup companies who make a proposal should of course describe their business plan, should describe what kind of thing they are going to make, and should be willing to put in 6 lakh rupees, for which they will be given office space support for one year. You recall that 1998, 1999, they were the headays of IT. Anything, you know, no e-commerce in all our common terms then, but my friends, either Mithra or Vipra, you've just come back from day area once and you're telling me, Professor Fatah, this e-enablement has gone to such a extremely funny extent that he says in day area, if I were to go with a scheme called e-enable toilets, I'll probably get a million dollar funding. The jokes about, we used to receive literally tens of applications every day. And it was not easy for me and some of my friends and colleagues were helping me to go through those. But interacting with the people when we shortlist them and talk to them made me realize that I need to do another kind of marketing. And this marketing is very subtle. The marketing is to the families of the entrepreneurs themselves. So one young chap I remember, he was not admitted to the incubator later, because we could admit only two people out of about 120 applications that were received. But one of the shortlisted persons said, Sir, my father wants to meet you. So I said, why no, he just wants to meet you. I said, fine. And this old man came. Not very old actually. The son was just graduating and then older brother was serving somewhere. So first he bombarded me. So I said, what is wrong with me? He's trying to do something like the family came from a traditional background of people engaged in jobs, services, good middle-class family. He says, but suppose he fails, what happens? I said, look, he has a beauty degree from IIT Bombay. Tries for one year. If he fails, he'll definitely get a good job. And there's absolutely no issue. He says, so I said, you are three partners. Can't a family borrow two lakh rupees or put two lakh rupees and get it started? Then he came up with a very peculiar problem. He says, but if he fails after one year, and as you say, we'll get a job, all right. But if he starts a job with two lakh rupees loan on his head, he'll get married. So I said, I beg your pardon? He says, no, his reputation will be mud. He has loan of two lakh rupees. He has failed. And he has just started a job. I tried to convince him that most such thing will happen, but he was worried. That set me hurrying that the Indian middle-class appetite for taking risk is very, very low. I mean, unless your name is Shah or Jain or Ambani or Chettiar, where the business equipment fails in your blood because of the Gujarati people, whatever. No, no. Andhra Pradesh people also are, they are a different kind of business equipment has been demonstrated, but anyway. But still, we have, you see, we have 120 crore people. We have 372 million Indians as per the census of 2002 is in the age group of 6 to 19. A very, very large majority of these people do not come imbibing the business functionality in their childhood as they grow. Most of them grow in the conventional way. They see their parents. They have come because everybody doing a job and nobody taking risk. So it's not very easy. So how do I market this to the parents of the youngsters? So I contacted Kamal, he was in U.S., contacted Nandan and told him, I have a marriage problem. They were actually surprised that they were setting up incubator, how can father have a marriage problem? They first thought there was a problem with my marriage. I assured them there's nothing like that. They explained the incidents and then they said, what do I propose to do about? So I said, I must have a different Indian adoption model. The American model will not work here. And the model that I proposed is that for one year, we will give all services infrastructure free of cost. We will not charge any money. Instead, we will have a notional stake in that company. And they said, fine, but to start off, you have to spend real money to buy your computers, servers, internet, whatever, whatever. So Nandan said, although the donation that I have given, take aside one crore rupees to set up the incubator infrastructure and run it for some time. So that is how our incubator started. And after that immediately, this happened within three days, by the way. And on the third day, I could announce on my notice board to all the people that you do not have to pay any charges for one year. I actually, one day, will underwrite all expenses. I had 15 more applications within 24 hours. So you see, once people are convinced that they have to take very minimal risk, the risk they are taking is there with their time and efforts only and nothing else, it sort of helped. So please understand these dimensions of marketing. First, you have to convince the youngsters to step into the risk-taking. Then you have to convince their family members that it is worth taking the risk. And you have to adjust the amount of risk which is commensurate with the present risk appetite. As the risk appetite increases, you can then increase the involvement of additional components of funding, etc., etc. from the people. I learned this kind of marketing the hard way. I saw a very peculiar kind of marketing happening in the two companies which were admitted. These were students, by the way, both were, I think, four, five million students of the complete science department. It has an IT incubator, so it was natural that their project proposals were found to be the best. One company is called Myzeus. The company still works. The person who started it is Roshan Desilva. And in fact, one of the attendant workshops, which also we have recorded and we are releasing it, on setting up and running incubators. Those DVDs after editing will be available shortly at cost. He had come and shared his experiences then. So that was one company. And the other company was WhiteHalf.com. Another student who is now an alumnus called Kashyap Dora started that. That company was later on taken over by Purple Yogi, a startup initiated by Rakesh Mathur in Bay Area. And now he has quit that and he has come back to India from U.S. And he has started another company called Chaupati. I think chaupati.org or something in B2C or C2C space. But I digress. So going back to those days, these people are starting with no money. Their parents have given them no money. The issue is giving them the space and some computers. A 10 by 10 room as you can see can accommodate at most three or four people at a time. But physically when you are building a product you require lot many people. So the first problem is of scheduling the activities of the staff that you employ. And equally important is the problem of employing staff when you do not have much money in your pocket. Afterall, staff is not enamored by your great, what should I say, dreams. They are enamored by the money that they get every month because they have to eat, they have to live because they are doing jobs, you see. So I was curious to find out how these two companies solve these problems. My interaction with them usually would be at two o'clock in the night, one o'clock in the night when I would finish off my work and when I am going out of my office I will just barge in. I had a very peculiar observation in front of what they used to do is two or three people used to work inside and some two people used to sleep outside in the sleeping bags because the corridor was available free like. And I once complained to a fellow that I see you seem to have a sleeping partner in your company because I see the same fellow sleeping every night at two o'clock. So he said you sir, his time schedule starts at four o'clock. So you unfortunately come only at two o'clock. If you come at 4.30 in the morning you will see him working. I did once saw him working when I was doing a night out. What I was curious about is how do they convince these youngsters to join them as staff. I found out that they were offering shares as salary. Now this is something completely common, you will all be familiar with that, but in India it is not common to hire people giving them e-sops to begin with. You know you earn e-sops as you work. Small percentage of this thing and so on and no money at all, zero money. Now you can see what kind of marketing these youngsters must have done to convince people sometimes older than them that this company is doing so exciting that you will make huge amount of money within many over two years if you join us and work for us for zero money. So they had actually convinced them or marketed to them the notion of risk taking. Limited risk, limited rewards, but they could market this. I remember one conversation I had again at 2.30 or 3 o'clock I saw some people discussing in the round table which is just outside these two cabins and the discussion was when I stepped in one fellow's back was to me to the door he was saying but that company is giving me one percent. So I was just curious I went in the person sitting there was the respective gold mage's of that batch. He was going to pass out and these people apparently were trying to hire him for a summer. He was going I think to Carnegie Mellon and Stanford for doing his PhD. As you know the American PhD program start in September and this check would be free May, June, July, August. So it was four months you work. Again there was no money to pay that I knew. So what I surmised is that there is a tussle between two companies after all if you can get a gold mage's of IIT Bombay for four months you should be able to pay him anything. So he was arguing that that fellow is giving me one percent you are offering me only half percent. So why should I join you? And then I was interested so I heard this fellow doing extraordinary marketing to a prospective employee. He said look at it this way. This is our business plan. Our growth is like this. Our enemies are going to be like this. Our margins are like this. And therefore our valuation at the end of one year is going to be this much whereas that fellow's valuation is going to be only this much. So will we have one percent of a very small amount or half percent of a very large amount? You can see the truth in the argument. None of them made money of that kind at the end of one year I assure you that these were the dreams that they were able to sell their people. And this gold mage was actually worth not for four months but for three months with that company working as half percent as the salary for four. And he will agree that half percent of any successful venture is actually a huge sum of money with proper valuation at a later date. So coming back to the notion of why marketing mantra is required I would like to emphasize again that marketing is not just about production services. That is of course the prime reason why we are all here and that is what we will discuss later. But you have to market about the notion of starting an enterprise to everybody around you. If you are going to take risk you have to market this notion to a family first. If you start an enterprise you have to market this notion to create conviction amongst the fellow employees whom you hire to work. Because if they are not convinced they will not put their heart in their work. They may put just their mind and that is of no use. As you will all recall most of you are entrepreneurs. Unless heart and mind both work the productivity in measurable terms is very little, very little. I will go one step forward and say that even when you hire employees whether by using these kind of innovative mechanisms ordinarily it is important to keep marketing the dreams of your company to your employees every once in a while. As you know the basic physics law left to itself entropy increases. So if you leave employees to themselves they will of course continue to work but slowly the enthusiasm levels may go down. Slowly the reality of bad world may start hitting them as much as it must be hitting you. They may realize that the dreams may not come to the extent that they have been projected or dreams may not come out at all. And that is the way that is the time when you need to buttress the level of conviction. I do not know whether you ever thought of doing a serious marketing to your own employees as an important strategy element of your organization. Because there you are dealing with human beings. Just like you deal with human beings when you market your product. But those human beings represent large organizations or individual consumers who have spare money to give you, to buy your services in product. Here you are trying to convince people about your dreams which you are also struggling to realize. We are perhaps as teachers better players because after all what do we sell to our students? We are dream merchants. So when I market let us say a new initiative in IIT and go to my alumna and other philanthropists saying will you please fund this activity by giving 1 million dollars or 2 million dollars knowing fully well that that particular philanthropist or the alumnas is not going to gain anything personally except perhaps name. And that person will gain name only when the activity actually shows the kind of results for which that person is donated. So effectively what I am doing when I am doing fundraising, I am doing marketing. And what am I marketing? I am marketing dreams. So we teachers are actually dream merchants. We sell dreams to our students. We sell dreams to people. We sell dreams to power. We sell dreams to a river. I realize that selling dreams is perhaps the single most important marketing dimension of an entrepreneur. Look at it this way. When you think of doing entrepreneurship when the first thought would have occurred to you, you yourself would have gone through a lot of turmoil. Should I do it? Should I not do it? You are trying to convince yourself that the risk is worth taking. The first marketing according to me that you do is to yourself. You convince yourself that the dream is worth taking this for. And you convince yourself to such an extent that you are willing to put in everything that you have behind that dream. As an implication, as I said, you have to do marketing to your parents, you have to do marketing to your employees, both prospective and real. And this marketing dimension has to be very subtle. You can call a meeting of the employees and say marketing to employees is the two days discussion topic. You have to do it very subtly. You have to convince them because you are selling them dreams and you must continue to sell them dreams. The next is you have to market your ideas to venture capitalists. VC funding requires an uncanny amount of marketing and a completely different kind of marketing. Which is unfortunately not taught even in our schools of management, even in marketing courses because the marketing has traditionally been associated with marketing of production services. I will tell you an incident of marketing that I had when these two companies were growing up and they needed funding to expand. They had business plans who were actually monitoring their achievements every three months, six months, formally. I had lots of friends in the IT industry that would help us. Ashan Desai of Maastec, for example, Harish Mehta who used to lead the Thai chapter in Mumbai. In fact, the Mumbai Thai is the Indus Entrepreneurs, TIE, which Kanagaki and Swas Parti and other set up in the area. With the ambition, as I said, of taking every individual from the Indus Valley culture which India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and give them injections of entrepreneurship, that was the ambition. So they set up chapters everywhere. Bombay was the first chapter and Harish Mehta was leading that chapter. So I remember I had taken these two companies to a dinner hosted by Mr. Kamath in ICICI and I formally handed over these two companies to TIE for mentoring, saying we have established them, we are supporting them, but to mentor them to help them rise to the levels that you see in the area is now the joint responsibility of these well-meaning people from the society and Thai chapter is best placed. So the Thai chapter charter members used to routinely advise these people once in fortnight, once in a week, once in a month, somebody will come. Anybody, any successful entrepreneur who passed through Bombay who would arrange their talks, sometimes in late nights, I remember Dr. Suhas Patel had to catch a flight in the night and he said I don't have time during the day because I am meeting, I suggested you come give a talk and then catch the flight in the night so that after dinner talk. And he told people why PhD is not contraindicated for entrepreneurship. As you know Dr. Suhas Patel is a PhD as a faculty member for many years before he started his enterprise. So you see I had to market this idea and you consequently were able to market your ideas to VC funders primarily but also to a whole lot of others who are associated, they themselves may not be VC funders but they are successful entrepreneurs. They are people who are amidst these group who are virtually fund and that is the reason why I consider networking with people as an extremely important attribute as specifically asked Suhshanto, our CEO who himself is an Ivy Network man to share with you his thoughts on why networking is important, networking with people. And for that you have to market yourselves. After all a successful entrepreneur, let's say a successful person who has built let's say billion dollars like Ramesh Vajwani or Kanna Vekhi or Manila Kani or something it's highly unlikely that he will spend half an hour with me, render that kind of time and like me there are hundreds of people waiting. So how do I market this quickly to derive attention? In the time I had held a, I was chairing an event which was a group of venture capitalists coming together to listen to the ideas from the start-ups and there were about 60 registrations and the type people were saying how will you conduct this because it will go on for a day and nobody will really know anything at the end. So I came up with the following idea that every start-up company will get exactly one minute to speak and they will have exactly one slide not on a power point but a handwritten slide on a plastic sheet an overhead project to be used. I was criticized initially why I am putting this one minute time limit and why am I putting this plastic sheet thing. My reason was that if you cannot get across the gist of your idea in one minute to the respected VC community then no VC is likely to put one hour with you. So the starting pitch of your marketing to a VC has to be very short, suscent and must come up with conviction. Believe me several people who actually connected with several VC's because not only their ideas were good but they could articulate it in one minute confessed to me that they have spent as much as one full day in preparing that one slide and mugging up one minute lecture. And this is nothing unforeseen as teachers who are familiar with this. I remember I was to give a presentation to the Minister of Defense in a exhibition in Bangalore on Aeronautical Development Agency. We were doing a project for ADA and I asked him how much time I would have. He says you have to give a 15 minute demo to Techies. I said I have defense ministers don't have 15 minutes to spend on a project. So they said you will either have one minute or you will have two minutes. He said tell me which one. They said we don't know at this stage. So I prepared a 15 minute demo, I prepared a two minute demo and I prepared a one minute demo. And I had mugged up every line of my presentation for that one minute. When we went there the arrangement was that the Quota Harimaran was the father of the LCA program who would be accompanying the defense minister. He says I will come to a person in your hall, the other group and I will be standing with my back turned to you. So I will show you either this or this. You should know it's going to be one minute or two minutes. And as I expected he said one minute. By the time the defense minister came we could give him a very sussing pitch in one minute. How many of you have actually done that? Well some of you would have been necessarily forced to do it because somebody would have said I don't know. But how many of you have thought of doing it? And you have prepared for that eventual. And I would tell you that is the point because in the event that I organized it was well publicized people were ready. But tell me how many times as luck would smile on you you might just get an opportunity to bump into somebody at airport or in some event or something like that. And you probably get 30 seconds, 40 seconds attention of some VC. If you are not ready with your pitch to be articulated for 30 seconds you have spent 30 seconds in telling him your name, your family and everything and you will say thank you very much nice meeting. So don't you think this is also an important dimension of marketing. That to be able to stay it with absolute clarity in the shortest possible time and to have 2 or 3 or 4 such pitches ready for 30 seconds one minute two minutes five minutes. Believe me for pitching for half an hour you don't need any preparation. Well you know you are in the midst of the dream. But for saying something in a shorter span takes time, takes effort. So this is the third dimension of marketing that you must understand. Marketing to VCs will always begin with some pitch which is very short duration pitch. The fourth dimension of marketing which is not exactly fourth but the attendant of the VC funding. VC funding is not the only funding that you get. Particularly in modern nations where the governments are very keen to support entrepreneurship there are large number of government schemes. Professor Amarnath shared some of these things with you. How many of you have known about DSIR schemes before you came here? Probably a few people. At least those who are in the IIT Bombay business incubator are always told about these schemes. I hope that every incubating activity anywhere in the country necessarily begins by telling people about this scheme. So please note that VC funding is not the only funding available. Not only in India, anywhere else. Many times unfortunately we do not know about this. And that's the reason I have requested Professor Dinesh Sharma to talk about marketing research. Marketing research means finding out what all schemes exist. On the internet typically when you do a Google search it is not uncommon to get 10,000 responses, 2,000 responses. If you have to study each and every of those 2,000 articles your enterprise will have to be closed even though that kind of time. The importance of asking the right questions to the Google search therefore. The importance of searching within the search results. The importance of concentrating on what exactly you want and trying to extract it. And then note it and follow it up as serious. Is an important aspect of marketing. Particularly when it comes to government schemes which are unfortunately much less publicized and much less known in the VC circles. So I would suggest that you should remember this aspect of marketing as well. Marketing to VC. Coming back to the main marketing thing. Of course you have to market your product and your services. That is a large dimension. I will deal with that in the context of start-up marketing when I have a session with you tomorrow. But let me tell you that even the best of the circumstances it is not an easy job. Particularly in India the marketing cycles are very long or the sales cycle if you would so prefer. Okay. You approach ten people with your ideas and products all ten will say yes nice idea. You will come back home believing that you got ten clients. Nothing of that sort will happen because in India it is uncommon to be blunt to anyone. Particularly to a young entrepreneur. So if you go to a big company or a small company as a client and say I have this idea he will generally say marvelous. Okay. I will be glad to look at it. You come back convinced that you got an order. Then when you start following up you find that the notion of marvelous is not real he is actually just expressing his sympathy to you. Then you work more and more and spend several days and months and then you find out that out of ten only four are genuinely interested because then you find that there is actually a match between their requirements and what you are giving. And that is the time you have to do other marketing to yourself and to your team. What is that? If you find that your product or services are not aligned to what the market needs then whatever great technology product or services you have to offer you will never make money out of it. So you have to modify your product if necessary to change the complete product line if you do not see a market response no matter what your initial studies had indicated when you did the market survey. Because at that time your observations might have been true but they don't seem to be true now because the reality is different the market apparently loves some different idea and if it does you better change that. And that is the hardest marketing to do because you are marketing this change of strategy to yourself your team. You have by this time a chief technology officer you have a team and they are convinced about that idea because they are working in it. Kamal says it very beautifully. He says don't fall in love with your ideas I have added to it fall in love with the ideas which the market loves. And it is extremely difficult to accept that my idea will not sell anymore. Because after all my entire conviction my dream is based on that idea I have slogged for months to get something developed and it is not easy for me to give up. I will still say no no no something more is required but this is the idea that will save the world or whatever. And I will persist in the process losing vital time and vital money. Again going back to my incubator experience one of our OMM Tech students as an alumnus he has started a company he is genuinely a flamboyant person he genuinely believed that he has technology which will solve all enterprise problems and whatever. We tried to tell him that it is not so. There are many smarter people who have tried that kind of thing and even the ERP packages don't solve it but he had specific technology developed. You might have heard the name B.V. Jagdish he is one of the successful entrepreneurs in US who have actually worked in developing and selling that product and he had a billion dollar IPO so he was a fairly rich person and I said that Jagdish seems to have worked in this so have you discussed this with anybody in his company of course these are small young stars of Jagdish who does not have time so their emails were not being responded I found out that Jagdish was coming to India he is an ex-VJTI student so he said I have to visit VJTI and then I will be free but I am not free during the day same problem. I have a flight at one o'clock in the night so he says come for dinner and after dinner he says no I have a dinner appointment with someone then I fixed up an appointment for these type of people in Hotel Leela for an after dinner coffee so that they could spend some time and listen to Jagdish and then Jagdish could catch his international flight. I drove them I had an old fiat at that time I drove them to Leela and you should see that half an hour because while Jagdish was deeply impressed by the technology progress and the ideas that these people had he also knew because he has actually dealt with his hands he also knew that some of these ideas will not work it was a phenomenal sight for me as an external observer to see that for half an hour he was taking each of their ideas and tearing it to pieces at the end of half an hour when he left the team leader tells me to say father what you told us was right perhaps we should ditch this and do something else it took a half an hour meeting with a great person like B.V. Jagdish to convince them because this time they are not trying to market to anybody else they are trying to market it to themselves and it is very hard to market to yourself something against the very grains against the very convictions that you have worked with that is very important to do that so this I call the rain check or reality check if we don't do a rain check or reality check ourselves we may get into problem since that is difficult we have to be helped in this marketing and that is where mentoring becomes extremely important so what mentors do apart from of course telling you a huge lot of useful things on business and technology and everything they also help you to market to you this great notion don't fall in love with your ideas fall in love with ideas which the market loves changing your entire game plan is not easy for anyone to be convinced about we must not do it ahead of time we must not do it out of fear but we must do it out of conviction that this idea truly will not make that kind of money and that I am capable of diversifying and doing something else I know at least 8 or 10 companies in our incubator at various stages who have changed their ideas completely from what they started there is nothing wrong in that because you are trying to create a successful enterprise which will generate wealth you are not doing research to create only one technology that you are convinced about and then leave it to the rest of the world to see whether that technology can be fully deployed your ambition is to create products, services and market them and that is why this reality check is important so this is the additional dimension of marketing you will notice that in most of these things I have not touched base the marketing of the product and services because that is as I said is the theme of the entire workshop and we will discuss it for pretty long time first with my colleague Professor Dinesh Sharma and later on with Arindam and others on the last day we have a panel discussion where you would have ample time to interact I am calling Ajit Shalat I don't know whether you know Ajit Shalat I will introduce him formally he is a successful entrepreneur and now we have started something called Navis Networks and they challenge even the likes of Cisco on what you call the MAC or network access control layer in terms of the technology that they produce they actually built Gigabit per second kind of handling capacity in the back plane and so on extremely exciting work so we will know more about it later but today I thought I will share with you some of these experiences which have taught me that marketing has these dimensions as well I hope you appreciate this ideal of marketing as well and we are ready for that I will conclude this talk by again emphasizing the need for value system which perhaps never before has been felt so badly as it is being felt at the current situation in this country our values of course are our own values and values change over generations there is no doubt about that but I am sometimes worried if people don't exhibit any value system because a value system does not mean you know Gita or Bible or whatever it actually means imbibing a few simple principles in life which you say to yourself that they shall never be violated even if sky falls on my head that is called values I tell you the importance by giving you a comparison with my friend Manesh Mehta he is a young chartered accountant he was my colleague in the bank of Barula board and he sent me an SMS and so beautifully stated roughly it translates into following you know as ambitious and capable youngsters that is what gets you started your ambitions, your capability you start in life you keep running because of the knowledge that you gather in technology in business everywhere both in your educational system as well as later in the field as you are doing now so every bit of knowledge that you gather every bit of professional competence that you gather keeps you running so these are the first two phases in other lives of entrepreneurship I get started because of my ambition because of my dreams, because of my convictions and because of my capability I keep running because of my professional knowledge professional competence which I continue to get the pace at which you run however is decided by your attitude you have a negative attitude in life you will move very slowly you have a very positive attitude in life ganku attitude I will do that, I will get there you will run faster so far so good but your destination in life will always be decided by the values that you cherish look at it this way consider two companies consider Enron and consider any Tata company Tata Moom both these companies have exactly the similar set of very ambitious and very capable people right? because they hire the best they must be most knowledgeable so they must have got started right they must be running and they must be running at very fast pace because all of these employees must have very very positive attitude what was the difference? the values wrong values made one company into Enron right values make a company into Tata you have to decide what destination you are choosing whether in marketing or whether in your running business anything that you do please set for yourself some values I don't care what they are I am perfectly aware that at 60 years my values would be different than values that you follow I am not worried about that at all values do change over time but there are a few values which are perpetual they are simple human values treating people with respect so there are some values like that in fact if you see most of the religions what they do is they take these common sense good values and emphasize that you must follow them but since you are in business since you are in business in these times you must take some of these values and translate them into laxman rekhas for you come what may may salak pe ajaunga may bhuka marunga thir bhi, yeh cheez main hi karunga I would sincerely appeal to you to consider this and this is the last marketing I am doing in this session but I do believe genuinely that in the long career span that you are all going to build it is the values at the end I have a simple asset test whether I am following values or not I may just share that with you you may not follow it, you may laugh at it perhaps but I have seen extremely useful asset test, litmus test you may call them sleep by God's grace I get very sound sleep wherever I sleep there are occasions when during the day something has happened but still the turmoil will last for may be half an hour, one hour but I do get sound sleep from interaction with several people I have come to understand that if there is something wrong that has been done by you somewhere your sleep will be the first thing to be perturbed it might be useful to look at whether you can get a sound sleep or not of course one friend jokingly commented when I observed this as a litmus test he says look, if I am a die hard criminal I actually sleep better when I create two people that day we are not talking of such people we are talking of decent ordinary human beings who are capable and ambitious like this so we are not talking of those people the second litmus test I found to be very useful is that in doubt whether I have done right or wrong stand in front of a mirror and try to see into the eyes of what the mirror reflects that is me only if I can see myself into the eyes I know for sure I have done nothing wrong if I have to even slightly bend my eyes there is something wrong and I must correct myself these may sound to be too simplistic and rather foolish litmus test but I thought I will share them with you because I have found them to be extremely useful in my life you may develop your own litmus test you may develop your own value system but please remember you have to be on guard every moment of every day because temptations are galore in this world and temptations we say okay, I will just do this once maybe I tired over this problem you may before you realize what is happening you may get used to doing it and if nobody discovers then you may believe that there is nothing wrong and that is the problem one value system with the armed forces follow I remember a third engineering student in 1965 one officer was telling me that the fundamental value is you buy a ticket because you are travelling in train not because a TC will catch you otherwise so the values are to be respected because of your own and whatever amount of marketing you do you please follow some values thank you very much we will break for tea now