Hobbies Not Just Pastime, They Can Generate Startup Ideas, Too
Research finds people
who engage in hobbies are likely to find creative solutions to problems at work
From the outside, Srikanth
Nadhamuni's home in a city suburb looks like any other. His garage, however, is
an exception. Four teak wooden pillars adorn the wall, giving the room a feel
of the maharaja days of old Mysore.
The CEO of startup incubator Khosla
Labs picked the pillars off a junkyard in Mysore, and spent weekends removing
paint, grime and fungi on the wood and carving it deeper to make the intricate
patterns stand out. The garage is now an entertainment centre for his family of
four.
“I love design. It helps me create
things nice and elegant,“ said Nadhamuni, who laboured eight months on the
restoration. “It is about fixing things. Much like coding.“ The pillars are
topped off with protruding wooden arches that he designed on Adobe Illustrator.
Between the pillars is a wooden door with intricate patterns, also designed
using the same software. Around the world, there are several such examples of
entrepreneurs with hobbies about as crazy as their ideas. Elon Musk, founder of
SpaceX and Tesla Motors, collects James Bond memorabilia. Mark Zuckerberg of
Facebook prefers eating what he kills. Henry Ford who built an automotive
empire liked to restore historical buildings.
Research confirms that the more
people engaged in their hobbies, the more likely they were to come up with
creative solutions to problems at work. The study , conducted by San Francisco
State University and published by the Journal of Occupational and
Organizational Psychology , also said people engaging in creative hobbies
regularly do better at the workplace. For India's startup entrepreneurs and
investors, too, tried and tested hobbies won't do.
Guhesh Ramanathan, who runs startup
incubator Excubator, got hooked to scuba diving 17 years ago and is now an avid
underwater photographer. “I think I've become pretty damn good at it,“ said
Ramanathan, a former Intel executive.Having founded and helped consult at many
companies, Ramanathan was itching for a change in 1998. He discovered this
hobby at 35 and decided to seriously invest in it. Plus, he wanted bragging
rights to being the only one in his friends' circle to be a certified scuba
diver. The effect was so overpowering that he combined his underwater lessons
with his work experience and penned them into a book: “Scuba Sutras“.
“The lessons for business leaders
come from many different places. What if I could get business insights from my
experiences with scuba diving?“ said Ramanathan.
Sanjay Parthasarathy, co-founder of
big data firm Indix, gets his lessons from his habit of collecting contemporary
art the past 25 years. His collection spans 700 photographs, sculptures and
paintings, the latter two focused on contemporary Indian and modern genres. He
showcased some of his collection at Seattle's Art Museum in December.
“My challenge is how come I'm not
spending all my time on it,“ said the former Microsoft veteran, who raised $15
million (. `95 crore) from Nokia Growth Partners, Nexus Venture Partners and
Avalon Ventures in June.
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Krithika Krishnamurthy
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ET6JUL15
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