Moloy Kumar and others Bannerjee - Start-up City: Ten Tales of Exceptional Entrepreneurship from Bangalores Software Miracle

Title Page

This book is dedicated to all entrepreneurspast, present or futurewho ever had the dream, drive and dedication
to turn their ideas into reality.

Contents

Tally Solutions

S ome decades ago, the study of entrepreneurship in the subcontinent was limited to a few rags-to-riches stories that inspired awe and wonder. Few systematic and accessible accounts of entrepreneurship existed. As a result, our perception of the phenomenon in an Indian context remained limited.

As participants, chroniclers and readers, we have witnessed stories of exceptional courage and grit in Indias software industry. The stories of success embedded in the history of this sector are inspiring and instructive. They offer us insights into a proliferating industry which has always made room for the spirit of entrepreneurship to flourish with ease. We feel that discovering, documenting and sharing these stories was imperative to enhance our understanding of both entrepreneurship itself and a new generation of entrepreneurs who are redefining the notion of enterprise in India.

This book is in many ways an ode to this new romantic notion of entrepreneurship, as also to the software industry that we belong to. It is also a paean to Bangalore, the completely transformed city that lies at the heart of this new emerging entrepreneurship.

The bulk of the book consists of short chapters which are idea-rich accounts straight from the figurative horses mouth. Through these stories, we explore the Nature versus Nurture debate as well as posit our list of the top five assets of a successful entrepreneur based on our research and interviews. We also give a short historical perspective of software development in India and present contextually relevant examples. In the concluding chapter, we summarize the stories narrated by our software entrepreneurs and reflect briefly on the future of the sector.

We offer a few final conclusions but are deliberately careful not to be overly prescriptive. Because we sincerely believe that every entrepreneurial journey is unique in itself, there are no hard and fast rules that apply to a generic situation. We only wish for our readers to take away some valuable life lessons, and, ideally, benefit from applying them to business decisions that they take.

This book is meant to engage, inform and inspire, not to dissect and analyse. We have tried to keep commentary to a minimum, unless absolutely necessary, and our contributions are based on personal observations. We have intentionally retained a semi-formal style of narration so as to engage readers while ensuring that the voice of the entrepreneur is not lost. Our hope and belief is that this book will most benefit young and ambitious entrepreneurs across India and other developing countries which may be looking for inspirational yet relatable examples to use on their own entrepreneurial journeys.

Finally, as active participants in the software industry in India, we, the co-authors of this book, have had similar trials and tribulations as well as successes. And given this thread of shared experience, we thought it would only be a fitting tribute to bring out a book about our peers, to reflect some of their individual efforts in creating modern Indian business history.

Happy Reading!

T he desire and ability to control ones environment are distinctively human attributes. Early on, humans realized that working together in teams and planning their activities beforehand helped make life easier in the long run. As bonds of identity and belonging began to form among people, they began operating in groups. This early social impulse sowed the seeds for the gradual growth of cities and civilizations.

Unfortunately, the simultaneous development of power relations and political systems in traditional agrarian societies swung towards a top-down approach of command and control, setting the stage for monarchies and feudal arrangements for most of human history as we know it. To their credit, these systems gave citizens a sense of stability, but they lacked economic flexibility, denying opportunity for social mobility and any sort of personal political promotion.

The Enlightenment and Renaissance movements in western Europe were the first to challenge these entrenched systems and gave birth to the twin concepts of egalitarianism and democracy. In these countries, the individual was now the central unit of human society and safeguarding the monarchs domain became increasingly difficult. An enclosure movement, which demarcated lands for the crown and wealthy nobility, established the contractual basis for the right of private possession (initially, only for the upper classes) and presaged the resource ownership (land, labour and capital) mechanism for free markets (and capitalism) to flourish eventually.

Individualism, which was a by-product of these historic processes, meant that more members of a populace believed that taking calculated risks would lead to large payoffs for them. This entrepreneurial spirit, so long suppressed by tyrannical rulers and their social rules of patronage, unleashed the competitive spirit of modern-day free enterprise.

As was witnessed with successful city states in Europe in the Middle Ages, recent (technology-based) entrepreneurial activity is often pioneered in concentrated geographic settings called hubs. These hubs usually emerge organically and as a direct result of the clustering of risk-friendly human and venture capital systems in a market environment regulated by government entities. Inhabited by able-minded and experienced individuals, entrepreneurial hubs, when exposed to the right business, political and scientific climate, initiate enterprises that have a profound impact on global society. The most famous examples are Silicon Valley and Israel, which have emerged as technological hubs, due in large part to numerous entrepreneurs who were drawn there to start cutting-edge hi-tech businesses.

Bangalore, the host city of this book, gained a similar reputation right before the turn of the millennium.