Entrepreneurship talk at Amity

Humans have gone from rocks to metals, caves to skyscrapers and hunting to supermarkets. It didn’t happen overnight. It took millions of years and thousands of generations, each one improving upon the previous one. What we see today is what survived and what worked but what we don’t see today is all that didn’t work.

Humans worked there way out from committing mistakes and trying until they get things right. Every generation committed their own share of mistakes and taught the next one about what to do and what definitely not to do. So is the case with entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurs teach and learn from other entrepreneurs about how to grow a business. A recent example of this was at the Startup Guru event conducted on the 19th of January at Amity University Gurgaon. Gaurav Gupta, the founder of SquareBoat, gave a talk at the university’s incubation centre, about his learnings from four years of leading a startup.

The lecture was divided into three parts, namely Early learnings, Mid level learnings and Late stage learnings. Starting with Early learnings, he described how things like taking full ownership of one’s startup and each of its problems. He emphasised that in the early stage, what’s important is to make sure that a startup sees another day, therefore one needs to build a strong team of like minded people while keeping a low burn rate, be diligent and disciplined about one’s work and never say no to multi-tasking.

In the second part of the presentation, Mid level learnings, he talked about his learnings from second year onwards. According to him, once the startup has gone through the turbulent phase, one must think of getting more done and delegate work to other members of the team. The key here, as he said, is to experiment with everything yourself before delegating it to others, because this way you’ll be able to manage your team better and would know the challenges that your team members will face while doing the same work.

In the final part of the presentation, he cautioned the audience that running a startup never gets easy, it fluctuates between tough and very tough. Therefore, you one must really commit to one’s startup, always keep one’s clients business above his, and deliver not just good but great work. The reason behind his success was that he kept a track on everything. This, as he mentioned, kept him aware of the where he is and where he is heading. Lastly, he advised everyone to keep no hierarchy between one and one’s team members, because people are everything in a team. Make them happy and they’ll make you happy.

To sum up his words, running a startup is more about controlling oneself than controlling others. The road ahead will get difficult, but make sure you on the right one.