NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Tuesday, August 21, 2012

OUT OF COMFORT ZONE

My entrepreneurial journey started in 1974, when I quit my routine, comfortable job to launch a new business, Wescom Switching, in the US. In the process, I learnt a lot—managing large groups of people, production, quality control, human relations, finance, marketing and sales—a perspective that I never had as an engineer. We spent around six years building the business and sold it to Rockwell International in 1979.

RIGHT VALUES

It is important to make money in business, but not at the cost of ethics and values. I started a lot of little companies in US with friends—some were successful, some were not. Never gave a dime, never took a dime from anybody. Never did anything wrong, never took advantage of anybody. After three years with Rockwell, I returned to India to work with the government to launch the Centre for Development of Telematics (C-DOT). After nearly a decade in India, I had a heart attack, warranting a bypass surgery; in early 1991 Rajiv Gandhi died. I ran out of money and was forced to return to the US. There, I built a business in hardware, sold it and moved on to the mobile wallet space in 1995 with a new venture, C-Sam. I have around 35 patents in that area and we are filing another 20 patents soon.