JOB SPECIAL .......................BOLSTER YOUR CV WITH FAILURE

YOUR CV WITH FAILURE





Having a failed startup on your resume could mean as much as a good B-School degree.
After all, the people behind startups are no strangers to failure. As companies learn to deal with the hyper-competitive new economy, the demand for such entrepreneurs is growing.

It was late in 2012 when Prasanna Krishnamoorthy realized he was done. He had failed. Wignite, a Bengaluru-based startup serving clients in UK, he had founded a couple of years ago, did not look viable any longer. There were many reasons, of course. The education policies of the Conservative government, the state of the UK economy , and a tightening job market came together in a perfect storm, at least for Wignite, which made student recruitment software.There was a personal angle as well.Krishnamoorthy's wife, Lavanya Tekumalla, wanted to quit her job and pursue a PhD. Without her income, things looked dire for the 35-year-old.

Krishnamoorthy was scared. “I sat down one night and sent out around 140 emails. To friends, ex-colleagues, acquaintances ­ anyone who could put me on to a job opening,“ he says.

They came through. By the end of the year, he had lined up around six interviews.Three of the companies that interviewed him made him formal job offers. One of them was from Amazon, the offer he finally accepted.

Today, Krishnamoorthy is the chief technology officer at Microsoft Ventures.

CHANGING ATTITUDES

A generation ago, outside a few business communities, people looked askance at entrepreneurs. Saying that someone was “doing business“ meant that the person wasn't quite respectable, that the person wasn't a stable income earner. And to fail ­ and acknowledge the failure ­ was all the proof that was needed to show that the aspiring entrepreneur wasn't quite “dependable“.

Today, for a generation that doesn't remember the big economic crisis of 1991, none of this is relevant. Startups are cool ­ the place to be, where people talk about angel funding, venture capital and multimillion dollar exits. What people didn't talk about was failure.

But that is changing. Companies are looking for people with startup experience, and failure is slowly becoming a positive, not a drawback. 

CULTURE OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP

Take the case of Paytm. Paytm pays failed entrepreneurs market rate based on the experience ­ including the years worked for the failed venture ­ or even a premium. Vijay Shekhar Sharma, the company's founder and CEO, says “In the startup world most employees need to be like entrepreneurs to discover the scope of the product or space they are working in.“ And being an entrepreneur ­ even a failed entrepreneur ­ can be a greater qualification than a degree from a good business school in such an environment.

Mayank Dhingra is a GM at Paytm, joining the company after two failed attempts at entrepreneurship. He's not too concerned by those failures. “For the startup to succeed you need to get 10 things right and we might have got only eight things right. It does not in anyway reflect upon our skills and companies look for such talent all the time,“ he says.

Piyush Shah, chief product officer in InMobi, himself a failed entrepreneur, says a third of his product team of 50 are failed entrepreneurs and he would like to significantly raise that figure. “I value them because, for us, it's not just about building products, but also competing against big guys and being able to deal with chaos, uncertainty , and ambiguity . Failed entrepreneurs have experienced all of that, and often in a global setting,“ he says. Such entrepreneurs know how to deal with people, how to hire them, fire them. “When you are doing a startup, there are enough people pushing you back, not believing in you. So you develop the ability to listen to what is right, you know that nobody knows the right answer, and you develop the perseverance to keep at it,“ he says. The startup Simplilearn takes this ap proach to an extreme. At Simplilearn, almost everyone from the leadership team is a former entrepreneur. Chief product officer Kashyap Dalal was the founder and CEO of Inkfruit.com. CTO Jitendra Kumar founded automated ad booking platform Reachwide.com. COO Gerald Jaideep co-founded wellness strategy firm Colorshots Consulting.Some of the other former entrepreneurs, currently working at Simplilearn, are Pritam Sarkar, who co-founded Vanguard Business School, Bengaluru, Jay Sharma, who co-founded software development company Medha Labs and Ankur Arora, who cofounded GyaanMantra, testing and assessment services for educational institutions.

FAILING FAST

Vijay Anand, VP of Intuit's India De velopment Centre, says that he doesn't regard failure as a bad thing. “We, in fact, encourage people to fail fast in our entrepreneurship programmes.“ Intuit itself hires failed entrepreneurs, he says. “They know how to manage risk. They have the ability to think boldly, compared to others.When we interview candidates, we ask them about their failures and how they have dealt with the failures and the associated risk,“ he says. “Every one is prepared to talk about their successes. Talking about failure is much harder.“

The problem is, however welcome a culture is, the fear of failure is deeply ingrained in our culture. Which is why the startup culture is doing what it can to shake the stigma, with events like FailCon, where entrepreneurs study and learn from each others' missteps. “Here, in Intuit, we celebrate failures,“ says Anand.

FRESH PERSPECTIVES

The new economy needs entrepre neurs. Not number-crunching, reportgenerating middle managers. Structures are flat, hierarchies are simple to non-existent, and the most valuable asset an employee can have is the ability to think quickly and function with a sense of ownership. The traditional method of acquiring talent like this is acqui-hire. In the new economy , where disruption and pivots are sacred mantras, companies need people who will drive the change, not people who react to change. “We are always on the lookout for people with drive and the risktaking ability, people that actively seek out change,“ says Pooja Gupta, Myntra's senior vice president of HR.

“There is growing acceptance among large enterprises to induct entrepreneurs who have tried and failed. These ex-entrepreneurs are valued as they become change agents challenging status quo and breaking stereotypes. In many large organizations, employees tend to become `templetalized', merely following instructions. But what entrepreneurs demonstrate is varying degrees of resilience, problem-solving abilities and (the ability to) bring in fresh perspectives into the business,“ says Hemant Upadhyay , leader of executive rewards practice at Hay Group India.

Kunal Abhishek works for Myntra now.He, along with his company , Native5, was acquired by Myntra in May this year. He is happy working for a larger setup, but wonders if all companies would be as openminded. “It depends on what stage the company is in and if it likes to take risks.Companies that cannot eliminate red tapism, and already have a steady structure, will find it very difficult,“ he says.

Additional reporting by Avik Das

Shilpa Phadnis, Anand J & Shalina Pillai

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