SEVERAL OBJECTIVES WERE behind the idea for this book. But before I begin, let us understand how people perceive the idea of what a start-up is and what it means to be an entrepreneur. What is the difference?
If you get down to the basics and study the etymology of the words, 'entrepreneur' is derived from two words-one French and the other, English. Entreprenerd in French means to undertake, while 'enterprise' in English is an establishment, organisation or a business unit. Therefore, an entrepreneur means a person starting an enterprise.
People want to become entrepreneurs to be their boss and do something big, generate wealth and generate employment for others too. In that sense Henry Ford, John D Rockefeller, Ray Crock, Aditya Birla and Jamshedji Tata started as entrepreneurs: they set up an establishment, created wealth, generated jobs and contributed to the GDP of their respective countries. Subsequently, the conglomerates many of them founded even became multinationals in the times to come.
Now, let's look at what a start-up means.
The term refers to a company in the first stage of its operations. Start-ups are founded by one or more would-be entrepreneurs who want to develop a product or service for which they believe there is a demand. These companies generally start with high costs and limited revenue, which is why they look for capital from a variety of sources, such as venture capitalists (VC) or private equity (PE).
There is, therefore, a very thin dividing line between the two terms-extremely blurred boundaries, one might say.
This word start-up was unheard of in the 1970s or 1980s. It all started with the advent of the telecom industry, the birth of computers and their consequent merger. Both these, in a sense, flattened our planet. Business, to a great extent, was high-technology driven with advent of the computer, the different means of communication, the beginning of the internet and they are coalescing seamlessly into one monolithic communications system.
Phenomenal speed of data transfer and worldwide connectivity that changed the way we lived and the way we worked impacted basic business models in a big way. No one realised that the smoked stacked industrial economy was about to become a thing of the past.
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