STARTUP SPECIAL Thank God I Failed
3.
SANDEEP AGGARWAL
Well Clued in
The last salary package that Sandeep
Aggarwal drew was $1 million (roughly `6.4 crore) per an num as managing
director at Caris & Company, a boutique investment bank. But he was not
satisfied. “I didn't want to live with the regret of not trying the third
time,“ recalls the 42-year cofounder of ShopClues, an online marketplace started
in 2011.
Entrepreneurship is an addiction and
it took a good nine years for Aggarwal to realise it. In February 2002, he
started Korind, a BPO consulting company. After running it for over two years,
he shut it down in November 2004 as he felt partners weren't committed enough
and funding wasn't coming.
Aggarwal went back to his family
business of merchant banking, was at it for a few years before taking up a job
with Charles Schwab in San Francisco. After four years of being an employee, he
started AapkaBroker. com, an online broking firm, in January 2008.This time the
timing was wrong. Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy in September and the
global market went into a tailspin. AapkaBroker shut down in a year.
Once again Aggarwal fell back on a
private sector job. But after two years, he used $1,00,000 (`64 lakh) from his
savings to start ShopClues.The Gurgaon-based startup has raised seed capital of
$2 million and got funding of over $130 million so far from investors such as
Tiger Global. Last April, Aggarwal started Droom, an online marketplace for
used automobiles, which has raised over $5 million from investors.
So after two failures, he now has
two more startups, both well-funded.“Commitment is the single biggest
requirement to be an entrepreneur and I realised it after the first two
failures,“ he says. “Entrepreneurship is a constant test of one's conviction
and I have passed the test. I became mentally tough.“
ETM26JUL15
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