I went to listen to the guy who has quite a lot of brands: IIT > Wisconsin > Harvard > Apple > McKinsey > Goldman Sachs > Ebay > Baazee, associated to his fame. YES, I am talking about
Avnish Bajaj who came into the limelight in 2004 when he sold Baazee to Ebay.
I must have attended atleast over 100 such talks in last 4 years, but this one was one of the special ones!
Here are some useful excerpts from his Talk:
1) Do take your studies seriously! This doesn't mean, just scoring good grades. Even if your grades are pathetic, but you focus really hard on ensuring a good learning - you may still be better off than most of your studious peers. So what matters more in the long run, is the learning and not just a number.
2) It's a fashion statement: "You don't need to be educated to be a successful Entrepreneur". And, we jump on to the examples of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Larry Page, for a quick defence. At the same time, we ignore so many thousands (a huge majority) of such drop-outs who fail to make it big in life, in short "unsuccessful"!
3) He also pointed out that "you all" (audience mostly comprising of IIT students) have a platform set in life and each of you are going to be successful in life. It's just that you need to keep faith in yourself and keep working hard.
4) He believes that it's mainly the team which decides the success of any business, ofcourse, with the leader/CEO keeping the vision and showing the path.
Q&A SessionOne gentleman in the audience asks: "It is often said that the great people are the ones who create something original and not just copying! In a sense, Baazee was started inspired by e-bay because at that point of time, there was opportunity in India. Do you regret, when you look back, that you should not have copied it?" In the meantime, Avnish listens to the question quite patiently and gives an answer, with a big smile on his face: "I look at it as an arbitrage and not copying" he continues,"I think that 95% of the entrepreneurs fall in this category where they observe the results of other existing businesses and then finetune their models, as the risk is lower in this case, while, there are only a few great people in minority like Steve Jobs who push their agenda and dream singlehandedly. (example: before the launch of i-Pod, many players also tried to come up with a similar product in the market, Sony being one of them, but they all failed badly. Inspite of that, Steve Jobs stuck to his dream of coming up with a portable music player and ensured that the product reaches all parts of the world and sells). And, I am not that great!"
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