ENTREPRENEUR STARTUP SPECIAL The Up Side of Down
Myntra cofounder Mukesh Bansal writes about his
journey. Do you have it in you to be another Bansal?
Starting up is not a starting point but an important milestone in
a journey that an entrepreneur has already made.For me, the starting point of
starting up was finding out that I wanted to create a business. This happened
when I was studying computer science at IIT-Kanpur and devouring books by Akio
Morita, the founder of Sony, and Sam Wa l t o n , t h e c r e a t o r o f
Walmart. I was fascinated by how they created companies that have stood the
test of time.
And then campus placement happened in 1997. I was selected by
Deloitte Consulting, which offered me a job as a systems analyst. It was
furthest from my dreams and nowhere close to the world of entrepreneurship I
wanted to inhabit.
Two years later, when I moved to Silicon Valley , I had decided
that I would work only for small companies. In fact, I tried building startups
thrice -all of them were part-time efforts, and they all failed. I worked at
four startups -two of them failed, one couldn't scale, and another didn't even
get off the ground.
My first startup was built in Mountain View, California in 1999.
We had rented an apartment. It was an online exchange for people to find
freelance jobs, very similar to Freelancer.com and eLance.We tried it for two
months, but there was no traction. We decided to shut it and move on.
While I was seeing failures all around me, Silicon Valley and its
startup culture were also teaching me a lot. The ecosystem there is founded on
the notion of great engineering and meritocracy. I worked with some really
bright people, some of them CEOs at only 22.One of the important lessons I
learnt was ambition. No one is afraid of always dreaming to change the world.
They are not afraid of challenging anything, any notion. Another lesson from
the Valley for me was about being flexible and adaptable. Your assumptions
could be wrong so you need to be open to making course corrections, no matter
how hard they may seem. You have to find balance and not get stuck to a path
you charted when you began.
Eight years after I left India I decided to move back and apply
some of the lessons I had learnt by cofounding Myntra with Ashutosh Lawania and
Vi n e e t S a x e n a . E n t r e preneurship to me is about building
something from scratch and creating a work culture that lasts.
Family and social support play a crucial role in entrepreneurship,
and I have been quite lucky on that front. My family has understood that life
as a startup entrepreneur is a hectic affair and they have encouraged me at all
times. On the whole, I would characterise myself as an independent-minded
person, and that helps too.
My career has mostly been about failures -I failed at
entrepreneurship thrice. Even Myntra had failures. But there is nothing
negative or demotivating about failures. You fail a lot, and you keep moving to
the next one. Failures happen for a number of reasons -flawed business models,
poor execution, wrong hiring and so on.But it has never affected my
self-belief. I always knew I could do better.
(Mukesh Bansal is the co founder and CEO of fashion portal Myntra
and the head of commerce at Flipkart)
ET12JUN15
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