The book takes the reader through Kishoreji’s journey of building a great retail business in India from scratch. Author recounts on how he started as an ordinary cloth seller in Mumbai and eventually how he established the giant retail business spread over a few hundred cities in India serving millions of Indian consumers.

The unique and interesting point I liked about this book is: Kishoreji’s friends, relatives and employees of the company share their experiences about being associated with Kishoreji and give the reader a deep insight into Kishoreji’s personal and as well entrepreneurial abilities.

Kishoreji takes the reader through his childhood days, college life and finally how he had left the usual way of doing family business and started his own journey on a road called entrepreneurship, which most of the young Indians now are aspiring to travel.

Doing something that opposes the established system of beliefs is not an easy task. An entire chapter titled ‘Defying the Odds’ is dedicated to how he started Pantaloon Shoppe amidst very testing and difficult times.

He talks about building emotional connect with consumers. He emphasizes on how he brought Indianness to the business and how he studied Indian consumers with passion. He confided that even till today he visits some of his stores and observes the consumers to understand their needs and their thoughts.

KB emphasizes on relationships throughout the book: relationships with customers, employees, share holders and most importantly family and friends. He also emphasizes on building trust and the importance of mutual trust in relationships.

Kishoreji has even shared about his failed businesses. KB explained about how he tried to enter into movie making in the bollywood but could not produce a huge success there. In a whole chapter dedicated to his bollywood stint, he shared his learnings from this failed attempt of movie-making.

Its an inspiring story every budding entrepreneur should read. The book has something for everyone. If you are aspiring for a career in retail you have a lot to read from a man who built everything from nothing. If you are a casual book reader, even then you have a lot to appreciate and learn.

Finally, it costs only 99 rupees! Go and get a copy for you and I assure you that the time and money you spent is worth the effort.

Here are few inspiring lines I am reproducing from the book with all the due credit given to the authors.

I based everything on one philosophy ‘Rewrite Rules. Retain Values’. Chase your dreams but don’t compromise on your belief system.

Entrepreneurship is about thinking big, believing in your own ability and going ahead with huge risks even if you are aware that some of the ventures may not be successful. It’s also about making decisions, leadership, and about making your colleagues believe in you dream.

When one is young and tries to rewrite rules, he is called ‘mad.’ But when he is finally successful, because he dared to risk it, he is called a ‘maverick.’

By the time one manages to get out of the control of one’s family, one loses his zeal and becomes complacent with what has already been created.

John Wood was Microsoft’s Director of Business Development for the Greater China region when he decided to say good bye to the corporate world and enter the world of non-profits by helping the poor children in the developing world to give the lifelong gift of education. The core belief of ‘Room to Read’ is, ‘world change starts with educated children‘.

The defining moment of John Wood’s life had happened when he was trekking in Nepal on a vacation to escape from the work. One day, Wood met Pasupathi, resource person for that province and responsible for providing facilities in the schools of that province. Along with Pasupathi, Wood visited a school, which is supposed to be the biggest school in that area. He could not believe his eyes and was moved by the way school had been operating. He was confronted by the harsh reality that there were no books in the library that a child can read and the class rooms were accommodating more children than they actually can. After interacting with the school headmaster and teachers, he promised them that he would return with books and help the school build a better library. Then the headmaster of the school said, ‘Perhaps, sir, you will someday come back with books.‘ In the book, he shares that these words had really changed the course of his life forever.

An year later, John Wood did exactly what he promised the headmaster and the teachers of that school. With the help of his friends and family, he was able to collect a large number of books and went to Nepal to distribute the books. But, Wood felt the task was not finished. There were literally hundreds of schools with not enough books and few communities did not have schools in the neighborhood and children had to walk for few kilometers to reach a nearby school. He thought, there was something more that he can do to address this issue throughout Nepal.

The following year John left Microsoft and established a non-profit to send books to Nepal. You should read the book to know how this small project to help build a library in rural Nepal school has now become a world famous organization with operations in nine countries in Asia and Africa. Ever since it’s inception, Room to Read has impacted the lives of over 1.3 million children by: constructing schools, establishing libraries, publishing local language titles for children books, girl scholarships and establishing computer labs.

‘Leaving Microsoft to Change the World‘ is one of those few books which everyone will like to read. No matter where you live and what is your work, you are going to remember this book for a lifetime. The story is so inspiring and uplifting that you will start considering doing something to make the world a better place to live. Most of us have taken the education for granted, but that is not the case in the developing world where standard education is a dream for millions of children, and that dream will only come true when people like John Wood dedicate their entire lives to make that dream become a reality. Keep a box of tissues handy. Few of the lines are so moving that I was brought to tears while reading.

I finish this review by asking you to go and buy the book and share the story with your friends and ask them to read. I am very sure that you are going to like this book and every second is worth spent reading this book.

Videos you might be interested to watch:

• Room To Read - Leaving Microsoft To Change the World
• John Wood speaking at The Power Within

I am one of the very first consumers and I have ordered over a dozen books in the last two months from FlipKart. I am really impressed with the way they ship the books so fast and at no cost.

Following is the interview I have done over email with Binny Bansal who is one of the two co-founders.

When is flipkart.com founded?

Flipkart.com was founded on 5th Sept 2007. The website was launched on 15th Oct 2007.

Could you tell me about founders and their background?

Sachin Bansal (26) and myself, Binny Bansal (25), started flipkart.com. Both of us are computer science graduates from IIT-Delhi from the 2005 batch. Sachin worked at Techspan for 6 months and then at Amazon India for a year and a half. I worked at Sarnoff India for a year and a half and then at Amazon India for 8 months. We quit our jobs in September 2007 to begin our startup journey. And to clarify any doubts in advance, we are not related to each other.

How many days it took to launch the service?
It took us about a month and a half to start a basic working website with 50,000 titles. We’ve now grown our catalog to over 1 Lakh available titles.

Whats the total team size?

Primarily, there is only Sachin and myself. We also manage a small team which takes care of our back-end operations.

What made you to start something on your own?

We started flipkart.com because we ourselves felt the need for a good online book store. E-commerce sector is one of the toughest to get into in India. We believe that we can make a difference here. We wanted to create something which has a long lasting value and which we can be proud of. Also at this point in our life we can devote our entire time and energy to flipkart which is very important for any startup.

What are the biggest challenges you have faced while launching the service?

One major challenge was to get tie-ups with the major book vendors as we didn’t have an off-line book store. We have somehow managed to persuade them and now most of the vendors are supporting us.

The second major challenge was to get the approval for the credit card payment gateway. We didn’t want to use CCAvenue as their interface is really confusing. So we had to convince Axis Bank for the payment gateway and that wasn’t easy given the fact that we are a self-funded startup and we don’t have an offline presence.

What are your current challenges to scale flipkart to the next level?

The biggest challenge currently is reaching out to a larger set of people with minimum budget. Scaling the back-end operations will be a challenge too. We do plan to get angel/seed funding in the next three months to scale our operations.

What are your future plans for flipkart? Do you want to go beyond books and offer other products as well?

Currently we are completely focussed on books. We want to be number one in books first, get a big customer base and then look at the possibilities of offering other products.

Could you give me an idea about the market size for online book stores in India?

Market size for online book shopping in India is expected to be between Rs. 20-25 crore for 2007-2008. Market size of whole of book industry in India is estimated at 4000 crores and is growing at a very quick pace.

How are you marketing the service?

Marketing on a small budget is very difficult. A large part of our marketing is built into our low prices. We believe that if we keep prices low and keep the customer happy we can generate a lot of positive word of mouth which has much better ROI than spending that
money on regular marketing techniques.

But, we do have to reach out to people somehow and hence we are experimenting with pay per click online advertising. We are also going to start a marketing campaign in Bangalore targeted at people working in IT companies. The current goal is to reach as many enthusiastic online book shoppers as possible.

How are you building trust? How can a first time visitor trust your service?

We have clearly defined and listed our shipping and return policies on the website. Also, we think free shipping adds a lot to the trust factor. We also have a page on which we address the issue of secure online payments.

All this coupled with an interface that quick, clean and user friendly, and the positive reviews on the web from our early adopters builds trust for our service.

Do you have any off-line presence?

We don’t have an off-line presence and we don’t plan to have one in the future either.

What is flipkart’s USP compared to other online book stores in India?

Flipkart.com’s USP is simplicity, convenience and customer service. We’ve made searching and browsing for books as simple as possible. And there are a lot of features lined up for the future which would help you in selecting books based on your interests.

And one of our major goals is to maintain very high standards for customer support. The lack of customer service is one of the major reasons for the slow E-commerce growth in India. We want to change this perception and get people to embrace E-commerce due to the many benefits it provides.

If possible can you share some statistics till date?(books sold and number of visitors, etc)

We can’t share exact statistics at this point but we are growing at the speed that we had expected when we first started out and we also met the goal that we had set for the first 3-4 months.

Finally, what are your suggestions for wanna be entrepreneurs in India?

Take the plunge. The timing couldn’t be better. And very importantly don’t go at it alone. Have at least one co-founder.

It was a real pleasure interacting with FlipKart founders and I wish them all the luck. Being part of a founding team in a start-up is one of the very exciting and challenging jobs I can think of. Every transaction a customer makes will lift up your spirits to a greater level, every good testimonial you receive keeps you excited about the future and every day is a new day with new challenges and opportunities which will unleash the creativity and talent you have got.

Please use the comments section to let me know your thoughts about this post.

Link to the original article: If you don’t give up, you get lucky.

Here are some key takeaways with few thoughts added by me.

He never once gave up on being an entrepreneur and resorted to a stable job with a predictable monthly paycheck and a less chaotic and secure lifestyle.

As an entrepreneur life is usually chaotic, at least at the beginning stages especially for those who are starting on their own from scratch. The lifestyle may completely change and of course not as secure as getting a predictable monthly paycheck irrespective of the amount of work you do. But one needs to be prepared to cross the initial barrier and as he says one should have a don’t give up attitude to become successful.

Being in enough places at enough times, means that you are bound to get lucky sometime. Also if you don’t give up at trying to be lucky, one day you will. Maybe not now, maybe two years later maybe five or maybe even after ten years. Its all part of being an entrepreneur.

Being an entrepreneur definitely needs some luck in your favor. I am sure being lucky is not the only contributor to the success. But, you need to try, otherwise there is no way the luck comes to you. This reminds me of the book “Founders at Work“, which I have read recently. This book is a collection of interviews with founders of famous technology companies. To my surprise most of the founders mentioned that they were lucky in some way or the other at some point in their entrepreneurial journey. Luck comes only when you don’t give up. Sabir Bhatia the founder of Hotmail mentions that he was very lucky to be at the right place at the right time. This will only happen only when you are in enough places at enough times.

“We had a group of about five-six who always spoke of entrepreneurship” he says. Many of Sanjeev’s IIM friends have become successful entrepreneurs in their own right today. R Subramaniam of Subhiksha and Nirmal Jain of India Infoline are a few of them.

The line, “We had a group of about five-six who always spoke of entrepreneurship” strikes me a lot. Its all about being with right people at right times.

So what does he think of new entrepreneurs today? “Most of us today are bound by the monthly EMIs and the visiting cards. Once we learn to look beyond them, one can take the leap. You have to be convinced that this is what you want to do and then go for it,” he says.

Thats really true. We are bound by so many factors in daily life. We need to clear the EMIs, pay the credit cards bills and so on. At the beginning your own company’s visiting card may not appeal as good as big MNC’s visiting card to your friends and relatives. But that’s what being an entrepreneur is all about in the initial stages. But you need to be convinced about what you are going to do. Do you know what Hewlett-Packard’s first product was? A bowling foul line indicator. They decided that they were going to be entrepreneurs before they knew exactly what they were going to do. It’s all about being truly convinced about what is that we are going to do.

Bikhchandani holds that his early days as an entrepreneur taught him a lot. “I see huge value in bootstrapping. You learn that it’s hard to make money, so you learn not to spend it foolishly. I struggled but learnt a lot,” he says.

It’s really hard to bootstrap than to start a company with enough funding. We come up with creative ideas when we don’t have enough money. Let me give you a real world example.

The founders of HotOrNot.com started the website as a hobby project and it was mostly done for the sake of fun in the initial stages. Once they started getting huge amount of traffic their server was unable to handle the loads and went out of service some times. At that time they din’t have enough money to buy several servers to handle the incoming traffic. They came up with really some creative ways to handle the incoming traffic. Even after that they see their server is unable to handle the traffic some times. Then they came up with a creative business decision. At that time they were getting lots of media coverage for the website. They went into an agreement with a dedicated server hosting provider where the hosting provider will give them free servers to handle the traffic and HotOrNot will mention the hosting provider in the media coverage. HotOrNot got the infrastructure they want and the hosting provider got the media coverage in return. That was a win-win deal and it really worked for them in the initial stages of sustaining their business. I suggest you take some time to visit James Hong’s blog who is one of the founders of HotOrNot. Believe me they are really making some real big money out of this website now. From the interview by James Hong in the Founders at Work book one could easily make out that they never gave up their idea and were passionate about it even though there wasn’t a clear business model at the very early stages.

So, to wrap up the things, being an entrepreneur is not as easy as doing a 9 to 6 day job. Its very difficult to cross the initial barrier. But all we need is true commitment and don’t give up attitude. As someone perfectly said:

Fortune favors the brave

I have just started on my own and want to become a successful entrepreneur. I really like learning from the established entrepreneurs. I hope I have made some sense here and if you are in the initial stages of your entrepreneurial journey you might also be interested in the following resources as well.

• Bootstrappers Bible
• Art Of The Start
• How To Be Creative

Thank you for reading. Wish you good luck for your entrepreneurial quests.

-Chandra

There are really valuable suggestions for anyone starting their own business. I am waiting to get my copy of the book The Art of the Start.

Video Link: http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/06/the_art_of_the_.html

Link: How to name your company
Happy Reading!

-Chandra

He returned to India in 1991 after working in US for 2 years. He has recently published a series of articles on the topic 15 Years as an Entrepreneur where he explained his journey as an entrepreneur.

In the current Web 2.0 revolution in India, there are so many young entrepreneurs dreaming to make it big. Blogs like this will definitely inspire and encourage these next generation entrepreneurs in India.

Personally I would like to see the established entrepreneurs in India start blogging and share their experiences to inspire the wanna-be entrepreneurs.