‘Cost advantage should go’
Saurabh Srivastava, founder, IIS Infotech, and chairperson, Infinity, on what helps entrepreneurships thrive in India

By Meha Mathur
Dr Saurabh Srivastava is one of India’s leading IT entrepreneurs, angel investors and venture capitalists. He chairs Infinity, India’s leading seed stage VC fund and has co founded India’s largest Angel network — Indian Angel Network (formerly Band of Angels).

Dr Srivastava founded one of India’s most trendsetting IT companies, IIS Infotech (now called Xansa). Xansa plc is a US $ 800 mill IT company listed on the LSE. He has been a serial entrepreneur, founding several successful companies in IT. His other interest is in entertainment through Kaleidoscope, one of India’s leading movie and television companies.

Dr Srivastava is a co-founder and past chairman of NASSCOM, the Indian software industry association, and chairs its community service initiative — the NASSCOM Foundation. He is the Founder and President of TiE Delhi and, till recently, on the global board of TiE, the world’s largest organisation devoted to Entrepreneurship.

He is on the Advisory Board of the Imperial College, Business School London, an adjunct professor of entrepreneurship at IIT, Mumbai, holds a masters degree from Harvard University , USA, and a bachelors in technology from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. He has been conferred honorary doctorate in technology by the University of Wolverhampton, UK and recently the Lifetime Achievement Award as well as the award for pioneering IT industry initiatives in India as a NASSCOM founder.

In an interview to Educare, he pats Indians for their risk-taking ability and innovation. Excerpts:

Suddenly entrepreneurial vocabulary has come to pervade the media space. What does it speak for a change in the mindset among Indian people?
We were a very entrepreneurial country. Two or three hundred years ago we used to account for 25 per cent of world income. But because of colonisation slowly we became a nation of babus and bureaucrats. So entrepreneurship and business became a dirty word. That is changing because we are finding a new India and its success and growth is not coming from anything else but from new entrepreneurs.

You have said that we are ‘naturally entrepreneurs’. But we are averse to risk taking and we abhor failures.
We have been a nation of traders, of people who have been very mercantile-oriented. It’s not that we don’t take risks. A large majority of the country is self-employed. A small section of people are in jobs. The problem was, earlier, that there was no way really of stepping out and succeeding as an entrepreneur unless you had your own money. So we only had big business houses. But the moment you have external capital — venture capital, seed’s capital, angel investment — then you can take a risk because your chance of success exists.

You are an IITian. What was the entrepreneurial spirit in the institute when you were a student, and has any shift taken place?
When you go there suddenly there are so many people who are all very bright so it forces you to compete. So in that sense IITs are unique. You cannot succeed by just rote learning. The system is such that you have to know what you are talking. You have to gain knowledge. The competition is tough but the friendship and bonds are very strong. I learnt to become an entrepreneur, founded the college newspaper, took seed capital from the senior batch, created an organisation of 40 people, and ran a newspaper which made money. It was called The Spark.

We ran a TV station because we were gifted a TV station by an American University. Again we were an organisation of 30-40 people, and we were doing more hours of programming than Doordarshan was. I am talking of 1966. So I learnt how to build an organisation, and how to pass it on. Because obviously when we left we didn’t take it with us.