Four first-generation founders share why entrepreneurship is now a celebrated career, and how big dreams, perseverance and self-belief overcome fear.
From Last Resort to First Career Choice
Mr R Ramaraj
Co-Founder and Former CEO, Sify Technologies Ltd
This session is about placement, so I hope I have your attention. Is entrepreneurship a career choice today? How do you decide whether to try it now or gain a few years of experience first? What qualities must you have?
Fifteen years ago, if you could not get a job through placement, you started a business. It was the last alternative, not the first. TCS, Infosys and the IAS were what society accepted. Today that has reversed completely, and startups are on the front page of every newspaper. Three things changed.
First, the government. We got political independence eighty years ago, but prosperity for all is still some distance away. Prosperous countries, from small ones like Israel to large ones like the US, have thriving entrepreneurial ecosystems. So we now have friendly policies, available capital and incubators in your own colleges. Research shows an enabling ecosystem raises your probability of success by almost 80%. There are even small grants, so you can try your idea at no cost to yourself.
Second, role models. Business once meant large family companies, run by the second, third or fourth generation. First-generation entrepreneurs were very few. Everyone on this stage is one. We had no big bank balance and nobody supported us. If we can, why can’t you?
Third, and biggest, is society. Fifteen years ago, if you told your mother you wanted to be an entrepreneur, she would have locked you up. Today every mother is proud to say her daughter is the founder of a startup. You will be celebrated at home.
So what is in it for you? One is an idea, a problem you want to solve. Most people become entrepreneurs because they can make a difference, whether to the small world around them or to the whole world. The other is wealth. Even moderately successful entrepreneurs make at least four times what a fantastic job would pay you. As more of you make money, the tide rises and the country becomes prosperous.
Now, the first product you will ever sell is yourself, at placement. How you write your CV, how you present yourself and how you position yourself are all marketing. It is your job to create your brand, and nobody else will do it for you. The enabling environment is there. The rest is in your hands.
What holds many of us back is the degree of aspiration. We are scared to dream big, so we think small. If you don’t aim for the sky, the mango won’t fall. Ask these three your questions, so that you can judge whether you are ready now or later.
Think Business From Day One, Even Rockets
Mr Srinath Ravichandran
Co-Founder & CEO, Agnikul Cosmos
I grew up a space enthusiast in Chennai, where you can watch rocket launches with your bare eyes. My mother was a physics teacher. But conservatism about getting a job ran strong in my family, so I could not pursue the aeronautical degree I wanted at MIT. I studied electrical engineering at the College of Engineering, Guindy, and worked for two years. Then I saw my friends moving into finance. Around 2006 the normal route was an MBA after engineering, but that felt too far from what I wanted. I found financial engineering, which applies engineering mathematics to finance, and did my master’s at Columbia in New York. The next ten years were on Wall Street.
My hunger for hardware never went away. SpaceX was making noise in the US, and India was pulling off remarkable missions. Mangalyaan and Chandrayaan came around 2015, and ISRO launched 104 satellites on a single rocket, a world record at the time. I decided to try something in space. I had enough degrees to find a job somewhere, and that was my backup plan if nothing worked in ten or fifteen years.
Those years in finance had also drilled something into me. Passion is essential, but if you are not thinking about making money, you cannot scale. It stays a hobby. Space agencies had always started with small rockets as test programmes, never as businesses. Getting to a working product needed thousands of crores. But in 2015–2016 I realised that with around 300 to 400 crores, one could build a business selling launch services on small rockets. I gave up finance and searched across India for an academic partner. Professor Satya Chakravarthy of IIT Madras said yes, and I came back to India.
My big learning is that you need a little luck, which you cannot control. But you can control everything else, so think of it as a business from the very beginning. It could be rockets or anything else.
What holds people back is the fear of failure. What will my friends say? What will my family say? What will my finances look like? We think about it far too much in our heads. No one cares beyond a certain point, and there are enough opportunities to come back. Be smart about the risk you take, but don’t let judgment become a showstopper. We also undersell ourselves, perhaps a South Indian trait, and I have been a victim of it myself. If your product has value, it will sell. Believe in yourself. Sitting in a room making the full plan will not work. You have to dirty your hands and get started.
Doing What You Love, Every Single Day
Mr Dinesh Arjun
Co-Founder & CEO, Raptee.HV
Ten years ago, in 2016, I went back to my school after college, and my maths teacher asked what I planned to do. I said I wanted to start a business. His first reaction was that I could have quit in the eighth grade for that. In just six or seven years, that attitude has completely flipped, and it is a good thing. Even recruiting has become easier. When we started hiring, candidates said their parents didn’t want them working for a no-name company. That has changed.
Raptee is my third venture. I always wanted entrepreneurship for one simple reason: I wanted to do what I enjoy all day. In the early days we worked seven days a week, and, for whatever reason, expected our employees to come in seven days a week too. The four co-founders are all engineers who did Baja and Formula Student competitions in college. We asked whether we could make this our career, do it day in and day out, and make money doing it.
We did not start as a motorcycle company. We asked why there were so many electric scooter brands but no electric motorcycles. We knew nothing about branding or marketing, so we set out to understand why electric motorcycles are hard to build. We began as a powertrain company, working on motors, controllers and battery packs, and evolved into the motorcycle company we are today. The single reason we exist is that we wanted to have fun every day at work, building automobiles and taking them around the track. We have done that for eight years now.
Why did fear not stop us? Strangely, conservatism is both what holds us back and what keeps us going. In Chennai, and I would say Tamil Nadu, we have a sense of financial contentment. If you ask my mother, she will say she is the richest person in the world. She always tells me never to say I don’t have money in my pocket. Money comes and goes, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try different things.
We have been pre-revenue for eight years. Our electric motorcycle uses a brand-new architecture that has never been done in automobiles, so no regulation existed. We had to lobby the certifying body, get it approved and then roll it onto the road. My co-founders still sometimes ask whether we can just stay in our own bubble instead of aiming at markets where Bajaj and TVS play. That conservatism is still there. But it hasn’t stopped us from building 200 patents. One of our investors keeps repeating a line to us, and we have written it on our factory wall.
Dream Big, and Wear Failures as Badges
Mr Anand Bharadwaj
Co-Founder, Sweet Karam Coffee (SKC)
I will begin with a tribute to the original management guru, Thiruvalluvar. Think so big and so noble that even if you fail to achieve it, the sheer quality of those thoughts will make you successful in life. Entrepreneurship is not a career. It is a journey, and it begins with thinking big and seeing what others cannot.
Fifteen years ago, if you had told me I would build a global South Indian food brand and be featured in Forbes Asia’s 100 Startups to Watch in 2026, I would not have believed you, because I didn’t dream that big. What you are today is the consequence of past choices. What you can become is the outcome of your dreams. Don’t link who you are now to what you can become. I come from a humble middle-class background. My father is a postman and my mother is a teacher. I studied at the College of Engineering, Guindy.
When we started in 2013, almost 50 to 60% of Indian snacking was dominated by western snacks. People thronged the western aisle and ignored the Indian one, because the packaging looked boring and people didn’t trust the ingredients. North India had professional players like Haldiram’s and Bikaji, but there was no voice of the South. We wanted to build a brand with cleaner ingredients, contemporary storytelling and packaging as cool as western snacks, one that could take our flavours to the world.
For the first six years we had no funding, just a dream and two to three thousand rupees. We could not afford an outlet, so we went online first, while everyone else goes offline and then online. We built a trial e-commerce platform and got home chefs from our locality to make products for us. Responses came first from Chennai, then from Bangalore and the rest of the South. We built one category at a time and moved one geography at a time. It took six years to reach one crore in turnover. In the next six, we reached 300 crores. Our philosophy is to keep building what is right for the brand and the consumer, not what is easy.
Make sure you love what you build, because you can’t build something you don’t love. Keep your purpose larger than your goal. Our purpose is to put South India on the world food map, and the goal is a global South Indian food brand. When the purpose is larger, the goal follows, and fame, recognition and money arrive as by-products.
Perseverance is the fuel. Give failure a positive connotation. A speed breaker or a diversion board on the road is not a failure, only part of the journey. If you never fail, you are not experimenting. So keep failing, and wear your failures as a badge of honour. Your thoughts are so big that even if you fail, their quality will make you really big.
