Click here to Download Stay Hungry Stay Foolish PDF Book by Rashmi Bansal having PDF Size 2 MB and No of Pages 349.
Identify what kind of work you want to do. I love the hotel business – food, making menus, everything to do with the business. If you love the business you take up, you will definitely make a success of it. Learn the business you want to get into for a couple of years. Raising money is not so difficult today.
Stay Hungry Stay Foolish PDF Book by Rashmi Bansal
| Name of Book | Stay Hungry Stay Foolish |
| Author | Rashmi Bansal |
| PDF Size | 2 MB |
| No of Pages | 349 |
| Language | English |
| Buy Book From Amazon | |
About Book – Stay Hungry Stay Foolish PDF Book Download by Rashmi Bansal
There are VCs, or at least angel investors. There is even lease financing, for example, unlike my time! Your family life may get affected – for example you can’t take long holidays and when you do take a holiday, phone calls and emails may follow you. But if you enjoy your work, you won’t feel it is an intrusion.
If you believe in a product, don’t give it up half way through. Be on it. And you will succeed one day. And the results will be good. Second, have patience during difficult times. Don’t lose your balance, and try to carry the team with you. Third, when you are launching any business, whether it’s a new product or an existing product, if it’s a new business, plan for 50% more money than what you think you require.
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At least 50% more to stand by. So in case you have difficulties half way through, you don’t have to close the business or run away. You have some money to put in, to carry on and see the bright side of it. Stay Hungry Stay Foolish PDF Book Download For a mid-size company, having multi-locations for the plant is not advisable because mid-size companies are owner driven companies.
Multi-locations creates problems in terms of management focus. There is a lot of scope in manufacturing. In India our manufacturing base is only 37%, whereas in all advanced countries, the manufacturing base is 65-75%. If any economy has to become strong in the long term, it can become only with the manufacturing base, not the service base.
Service base is only temporary. This will not create long term employment and if the economy has to become strong, it has to go into manufacturing. Stay Hungry Stay Foolish PDF Book Download If you are getting into manufacturing a unique product and if you have a passion for the product, venture capitalists will finance it today.
Getting the direction is probably a matter of time, and working hard – when you keep working you realize what makes more sense. There were no specific attempts at creative problem solving, but when the problems did get solved, typically that happened when the atmosphere was conducive to out-of-the-box thinking.
So yes, some attempt at creative thinking would be useful. Know what you want – I take my time when it comes to important decisions, but once made, I almost never give up. I do take the opinion of other people, but when the decision affects me directly, then I alone make the decision (e.g. deciding not to take up a job was against the wishes of almost everyone around).
In my undecided phase I happened to meet a serial entrepreneur from IIT. I told him I wanted to start off on my own but was not sure whether I should take up a job or not as backup. Stay Hungry Stay Foolish PDF Book Download He said if you are sure that you want to start up then taking a job should be the least of your concerns. Start off, that’s it!
That’s when I realised that there’s only one way of jumping off the cliff – you just have to jump off it! Cash flow is underestimated by most people – the amount of cash flow. If it is possible, be a little overcapitalized. There are lot of CEOs who are good product guys, they are great operations guys.
But they don’t know finance at all. In times of adversities, these are the people who suffer the most. I think being financially savvy is a required part of the business. Never have equal partners. You start off as equals, but then one does more, one does less, one is the public face, the other is not, and then slowly the whole thing disintegrates.
I have witnessed it happen in my family between my father and uncles, and with many other partnerships as well. So there should be a ‘first among equals’, who has a slightly higher equity share. Stay Hungry Stay Foolish PDF Book That’s what Mr Narayana Murthy advised us and that’s what I advise my clients now. Also, there shouldn’t be too many partners.
When we started off, we were supposed to be five people in the company – Venkat, I and three others. But the other three did not join and I think that was a good thing to happen because five people would have been difficult to manage if the environment became hostile. These days I advise people – two or four partners is okay, but ideally not more than four.
The only other thing that I would like to add is that have the staying power, the emotional staying power. Business will not be as per what you had planned, there are going to be hardships. Stay Hungry Stay Foolish PDF Book I have seen a lot of businesses close up because after a lot of hardships, at that key point (like the third year which was the worst year), we never thought, “Oh, is it worth it?” We just kept going on.
But if you are working at Hindustan Lever or any such organisation, worried about status, worried about the house in south Bombay and all that, the choice is then very tough. I think the loss of status is what really hurts. Everyone knows entrepreneurship is about risk. But how much risk are you willing to take?
This is a question Nirmal Jain had to answer in the year 2000. He was willing to risk everything he owned to save his company – India Infoline. It was only a few months after the Gujarat earthquake, when one evening Nirmal and his partner Venkat thought out aloud, “Even if we lose everything, we should walk out of this and start something else or take a job.
And we should think we survived an earthquake. Stay Hungry Stay Foolish PDF Book At least we saved our lives!” As it turned out, India Infoline survived and prospered. And how! I arrive at the NSE complex in Goregaon for our interview, only to find I am at the ‘wrong office’. There are several India Infoline offices in the same location.
“Yeah it’s confusing at times. You see, at one point we used to operate out of one small office. But now we’ve outgrown even the two larger offices we have here…” grins Harshad Apte, Nirmal’s close associate. Being in the right place at the right time is a crucial ingredient for success in any enterprise.
I am in the right place but it’s not the right time for an in depth interview as Nirmal needs to attend an AGM in less than 45 minutes! But life is about making the best of any and every situation so without further ado, we plunge right in. Stay Hungry Stay Foolish PDF Today, virtually nobody I know will work for 20 years for any one company.
That is over. However, I think there are some companies, and Citi is a good example of them, where a 4-5 year stint can be extremely helpful because you pick up discipline, networking skills, navigational skills, cost disciplines, audit disciplines. All of which are invaluable. I think people who, immediately after graduation, start their own companies tend to be naive about cash, bank loans, negotiations, about networks.
Unless you have a truly fantastic product idea I would not advise you to take the plunge at age 24. And in your sales pitch, the first point should be about your weaknesses, not your strengths. Stay Hungry Stay Foolish PDF You should tell people what you are not – you are not large, you are not this, you are not that.
Okay, people think – there is some honesty, these people are speaking the truth. And when you try and showcase stuff you have done, customer references are very important. Sometimes people are unwilling to give written references, persuade them to give telephonic references.
But there is nothing like a customer reference for a small company. Nobody trusts what you say in your PowerPoint. Remember IIMs have a weakness. They teach you marketing, finance and systems but they don’t teach you the importance of HR. Also they don’t teach you how to raise money.
There is a method to raising money. You have to be able to go and present your ideas to various kinds of institutions. You have to systematically study who are the people out there with the cash. You have to be willing to work as a partner with people. You have to be diplomatic.
And understand one thing: you are not the greatest, you are not the best. You are putting together the team, you are co-ordinating. Someone else is giving the money, someone else is actually working and it’s an idea – you are all trying to make it happen. Any good entrepreneur would have good people working for him or her or would be stuck at a low size.
The control freak will remain a dukaandaar. You open a shop and say, I must know where every penny is going. I would say a couple of things. It is so true working for a while really makes so much of difference before you start your own enterprise. It doesn’t matter where you work.
When you actually work and you deal with nuances of day to day situations, decision making and dealing with people, you imbibe a knowledge which is really helpful when you start being an entrepreneur basically. I think, for us, much of what we have done has not followed a well scripted plot.
And this could be true for several entrepreneurs. Stay Hungry Stay Foolish PDF You work with a broad game plan. Depending upon the availability of resources and the opportunities that present themselves at each point in time, you flexibly modify your plans and move along. You alter. But you ensure that you keep moving broadly in the direction that you want.
If you say, this is my scripted plan, this is what I am going to do, if it doesn’t end up happening as per that script, you will be tremendously disappointed. On the other hand, if you are open and flexible, you will have opportunities that you never even thought of. There was nothing called XBRL when we started, and it is becoming a huge opportunity. Like a colleague of mine was saying, you need to keep the sails open and then wait for the wind to blow.