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An Evening with Mr. Sabeer Bhatia
 In what was a once in a lifetime opportunity, some of the students and e-cell members of Bengal Institute of Business Studies got the chance to listen to one of the most successful entrepreneurs of India, Mr. Sabeer Bhatia, co-founder ‘hotmail.com’ at an interactive session organized by TIE Kolkata at the DPSC Centre of Excellence on 19th December 2011.
The other guest speaker was Mr. Janpat Jain, partner Lazare Potter & Giacovas LLP, a business law firm in New York. He spoke about some of the legal issues which an entrepreneur should keep in mind while starting a business in the U.S. He started his presentation by sharing that the true spirit of entrepreneurship should be as Rabindranath Tagore stated “Ekla Cholo Re” even when no one else is willing to join you or help you. He stated that ‘life, liberty and pursuit of happiness is the enduring American ideal’ and the people are in a constant search of excellence. He also advised the entrepreneurs interested to do business in the U.S. to give importance to contractual agreements and not rely too much on verbal agreements. However, certainly the limelight of the evening was Mr. Sabeer Bhatia, who started his speech by sharing his entrepreneurial journey and how he started with hotmail. He stressed upon the fact that the job of an entrepreneur should be to solve the problems of the common man. If the entrepreneurial idea solves the problem of a large number of people, the entrepreneur turns out to be big and successful. He stated his own experience with hotmail, when 19 venture capitalists rejected his idea, to elucidate the fact that a young entrepreneur needs to have plenty of patience and perseverance to achieve something big in life. He shared some of the sentiments of the American people about how supportive they are to young entrepreneurs and how they are prepared to take risks with them. He also said that while India has done a great job of developing the IT services business, it has failed in world class product development for the software industry. Illustrating the case of Apple where he started his professional career, he said that with just 8,000 employees, which is the one-tenth of the number of employees of Infosys or TCS, its market cap is eight times. That is in terms of total value per employee, it is 80 times more valuable than the Infosys or Wipro. Stating that India has talent and audience market for innovation, he said, "Once we have a few successful entrepreneurs, I think that will open the door for thousands of others to come and develop great products…whether it is in the internet or mobile platform." On JaxtrSMS, co-founded by him and Mr. Yogesh Patel, an application that allows users to send free text messages anywhere in the world, Bhatia said, "We arealready in 210 countries. We think we will cross one million users, including 300,000 in India, at the end of this year and if we continue at this rate of growth, we will hopefully cross the 100 million users by the end of next year." He said that successful entrepreneurs have to take 4 things into consideration-
Sounak Roy |
