“If you are gutsy and smart, you will get through in life and that’s what progress is all about,” said Ronnie Screwvala, founder, UTV Group, Unilazer Ventures and Swades Foundation.

Delivering the keynote address at TiECon Chennai 2015, he said entrepreneurs should be gutsy and smart to succeed. Guts does not just mean having courage to take decisions but also to say “I am going to solve this” when there is a problem, he said.

Last year, he took over a kabbadi team when Anand Mahindra told him that he was planning to start a professional league for the sport. “Over the next six months, we completely converted a game, which was otherwise played in red sand and mud, and we put it on the mat. We put some glamour and dressed up our players. In kabaddi today, 30 per cent is female viewership while in cricket it is 10 per cent. The fun was in being disruptive,” he said.

Timing

According to Laksmi Narayanan, member, TiE Global Board of Trustees and Vice-Chairman, Cognizant Technology Solutions, timing is very important for an entrepreneur to succeed while issues like idea, team, funding, selling a concept and building a brand come next.

Serial entrepreneur Will Gross, who was involved with over 100 start-ups, said that in a study, timing topped the list over idea and funding. Some of the companies failed because entrepreneurs came up with their ideas at an inappropriate time but the same idea worked at other times. The period of recession after 2008 helped entrepreneurs bring out new ideas, he said in the study.

More and more companies, individuals and teams are collaborating with one another at local and global levels. An extreme part of collaboration is crowd sourcing. One can crowd source ideas, funds, talent and sales. Collaboration is the new theme driving ideas and helping entrepreneurs to be successful and driving new models, he said.

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