Entrepreneurship has to be a love affair

Following is an excerpt from a samvaad (dialogue) session of Acharya Prashant at IIM Ahmedabad, his alma mater.

Questioner: Sir, you yourself are an entrepreneur, so how would you define entrepreneurship, what would you define as value creation by an entrepreneur and subsequently what advice would you give to budding entrepreneurs out here?

Acharya Prashant: See, there is an entrepreneurship that is just an extension of what you have been all your life, right? Most people present in this room at this time would have been quite competitive all their life. I too have been that way, and I know the campus. I have lived here for a duration longer than you have been here.

So, we have chased numbers, we have tried to edge ahead of the next person. Success for us has been something quantitative, the number has to be good enough, the number has to be better than the average, if possible higher than everybody else, right?

So, there are percentages that we chase, then there is CGPA, before that percentile, then CTC. Now there is a kind of entrepreneurship that says, you know, start the company, see which sectors are hot and booming and when you reach a certain stage after n rounds of funding, sell it off, right? And add a few more zeros to your personal bank balance, that’s one kind of entrepreneurship. It…