Ashwin Upadhyaya’s Blog

My friend, Sunil and I chat often on startups. The discussions have always been useful and interesting to me. These might be interesting read for you too.

• S: When you are starting up, always ensure you have enough liquidity. Make your plans based on cashflow. The rest of the plan will start falling in place. If you make your estimate based on your potential or any other factor, you will land up in a crunch – Whereas he knows this from his MBA, I know this from my previous failures. Different ways of learning, great knowledge anyway.
• S: More importantly you need to have a strategic mindset. Think really big and put appropriate systems and processes in place right from the beginning. – This is a tough one. First, we started off with an inverter business. We thought it was big then. We thought we could be a top player in that market. Then, we thought of power plants. We thought this was huge. We could produce power now!! However, even that was small compared to what we are pursuing now. Of course, there could be bigger than the biggest things. There may not be any limit. But that is what you have to aim at.
• S: When starting up, you need to think of building a company that will last a hundred years. Not one which will shut shop in 5 years. – Again, a tough one to put to practice. How many years is facebook going to last? How many years has Intel lasted?
• S: Luckily we have realized what we want to do in our life. – Took me a few years at a regular job to find this out. Took him an MBA and a few years at regular jobs too. I guess, it is the same with most entrepreneurs.
• A: I think this startup thing is contagious. You prove that it works. Another few will start. – I’ve seen this happen with so many people around me. Some have started, some about to start and others want to do it some time.
• A: All people who are really jealous of entrepreneurs become entrepreneurs themselves.

PS: S => Sunil, A => Ashwin