Author: Atul Khekade
The author is a partner of Netz Capital, a venture capital fund and advisory focussed on global companies primarily in industries such as technology, infrastructure, real estate and green energy. 

Ten years ago when I started with my first start-up, I longed for good guidance from some experienced entrepreneur who could impart frank advice on entrepreneurship and how to become rich.

However, being a first-generation entrepreneur, at that time I was unable to find anyone around me who could steer me in the right direction.

Autobiographies of great business leaders do inspire you but do not necessarily guide you on what exactly needs to be done.

After starting two companies -- and being involved with some more -- and watching them grow to a multimillion-dollar level, I feel like sharing with you some of my learnings for those starting their career in entrepreneurship. Especially, at a time when the nation needs more job-creators.

By default, most of us are stuck with media that provide information which is superficial. So, I would like to put my learnings around a few basic points which one can think about while starting and running a business or even selecting a company to join.

A good and successful idea can often be found with deep introspection rather than by reading external sources. Only those ventures attain success whose creator is passionate about it and works on the idea in spite of the market's highs and lows.

Starting a business and running it on a day-to-day basis can be a terrible task if you do not love what you are doing. Business is not really about setting targets and chasing them, but building a business is about being able to do something on a continuous basis with total involvement.

Hence, it is very important to choose to create a product or a service that you would love using yourself or love being involved with; something that you would keep doing, even if you did not earn much money from it initially.

You are going to be successful at something only if you put positive energy into it on a daily basis. So you really have to find within yourself what you really like to create that can be used, tested and liked by not just you, but even your friends, parents, relatives and the population around you.

Creating a finished product needs a lot of iteration and creating something that you use yourself gives you both the passion and energy to create a product that is well tested.



When you identify an area to work on, it is also important to constantly think of its business model. This is not something that you can get right at the first attempt or, in some case, even after several months or years.

If you wish to create a long-lasting business that can go big, look for a product or a service that is just not about selling and earning a margin. It needs to create a dependency on you by the people that use it. It is a very competitive world out there and any product or service can be replaced by a more powerful and smarter competition.

The core of software is its APIs, the core of traditional industry is its infrastructure. The core of Internet is servers, domains. The core of media is reach and multilingual and multi-geographic existence. The core of transactions and trading is banking.

If you study the nature of corporations throughout history, you may notice that companies that offer core infrastructure are long-term survivors.

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