Entrepreneurship Diary from IIMB Chapter 1: Ploughing a lonely furrow

G.Sabarinathan, PhD¹, recalls the story of Asvini Kumar, an alumnus of PGP’81, from a time when there was no template for growing the kind of services business that his venture, Thinksoft, was, and believes entrepreneurship seems to have been always ingrained in the alumni and students of IIMB.

On June 23rd, I wrote a brief post acknowledging a few unicorns that I knew of that have an IIMB connection.  Here is that post in case you are curious as to what I wrote.  https://www.linkedin.com/in/sabarinathan-g-7541a9175/recent-activity/shares/

My post on Open set me thinking and recalling the story of entrepreneurship at IIMB. The earliest entrepreneur I can recall is Asvini Kumar of PGP 1979-81 who became well known for starting up Thinksoft Systems (Thinksoft), a software services company specialising in the testing of banking and financial services applications. 

Asvini’s entrepreneurial journey

Thinksoft is not where Asvini started his entrepreneurial run though.  In fact, he never took up a job after his PGP as far as I can recall.  Instead, he and a few of the other techie types from his batch started Abacus Systems.  

Asvini Kumar

Among other things, Abacus helped set up IIMB’s first computer centre.   The centre was housed where the financial and data labs and the new classrooms now are.  A sort of a basement operation, that used to be reminiscent of the secretive outfit at Blechtley Park, where Alan Turing and his colleagues used to decode German messages during WW2.  Except that IIMB’s computer centre was a much less exciting and much more mundane activity.

I cannot quite recall what happened to Abacus. Nor do I know why or how Asvini chanced upon Thinksoft.  What I do know is that its early days were a struggle in many ways.  A soul less gritty than Asvini and less fiercely free spirited, would have thrown in the towel and taken up one of those well-paying jobs that were beginning to show up in Bangalore.  It was the mid-late nineties, mind you.

The entrepreneurial “ecosystem” circa early-mid nineties

It was also the time when entrepreneurship was less understood. One did not have the online resources that seem to guide the entrepreneur today, from how to scale all the way down to how to handle a break up in relationships, while building an enterprise.  Venture capital (VC) funding was not easy to come by.  Infosys was yet to become the lodestar that it turned out to be.  HCL and Wipro were just building their software services businesses.  Until then they had been slugging it out, selling PCs to the biggest and most difficult buyers – government departments. TCS was mainly doing domestic solutions. Its sister, Tata Burroughs, later rechristened Tata Unisys, was exporting manpower, but on a much smaller scale.  In short, there was no template for growing the kind of services business that Thinksoft was.

The idea of entrepreneurship evolves 

Back in those days again, academics and practitioners both had strange notions of what made for entrepreneurial success.  Interestingly, both focussed on the traits of the entrepreneur.  

For example, the bible for an early stage investment professional like me at that time was David Silver’s much celebrated book on VC.  Silver’s book was set in the US context.  

Among many of Silver’s pithy prescriptions in the book I recall one that was particularly amusing and rather typical.  The successful  entrepreneur, according to Silver, was middle aged, had a slight paunch because he did not have time for fitness and sported a trimmed beard.  And here is another one.  One way for a VC investor to know if a portfolio company was not doing well was to observe the founder’s smoking habits.  If he smoked too much, his venture was likely not faring well.  And, yes, in Silver’s world starting up was an all-male pursuit. 

Practitioners and academics have come a long way since then. My friend and colleague Suresh Bhagavatula explained to me helpfully one day that the focus in academics has shifted to the entrepreneurial process from the founder.  That has interesting implications.  Those processes can be successfully adapted and transplanted to the context of larger organisations to make their management more entrepreneurial in its orientation and approach.  That makes modern theory more portable than its founder-centric predecessors.

Practitioners have come up with ideas like the Lean Start-up, pivots, minimum viable product, principles like fail fast- fail cheap, tools like the Lean Canvas and whatever else may have come along the way.   All of these have helped de-risk start-ups a great deal.  And, learn from their early mistakes and quickly steer the venture in the direction of success.  Indian entrepreneurship has adopted these quite effectively.

In that world of the nineties, devoid of the support systems and the understanding that we have today and the institutional support mechanisms such as incubators, accelerators, demo days, mentoring sessions, networking fora and whatever else have you, the likes of Asvini ploughed a lonely furrow. 

A Bollywood style ending for Asvini

Asvini’s persistence paid.  Thinksoft went public in 2009, nearly 18 years after it was started up.  The public offer gave a decent exit to its only VC investor – mind you, India was largely a Series A market back then as Thillai Rajan reported in one of his annual studies at IIT Madras.  In a public securities market that was still like the wild west, at one point Thinksoft’s share price ran away, in ways I guess the company never expected and possibly for reasons they did not understand.  And eventually, like an Indian movie with a happy ending, Asvini sold Thinksoft to SQS Software Systems AG, giving himself the much needed respite he was looking for from knee-numbing monthly transatlantic travels to meet Thinksoft’s clients.

Entrepreneurship @ IIMB

The moral of the story is that entrepreneurship seems to have been always ingrained in the alumni and students of IIMB.  Some of them, if not all.  And, that number seems to be growing.  IIMB’s students and alumni embraced the risky ways of entrepreneurship, well before the advent of contemporary de-risking mechanisms such as outsourcing even core activities, turning capex into opex and so on.  

But now, as much as then in the days of Asvini and Thinksoft, as my younger friend and guru Sachidananda Benegal told me once, giving it a nearly spiritual spin, the decision to take the plunge comes from an “inner calling”.  The de-risking techniques, increased availability of funding and support from a sophisticated ecosystem notwithstanding.

Those like me, who did not sense that calling, have stood on the shores, watching others take the plunge.  I instead became a “swimmologist”, to borrow from my late colleague and good friend Professor Manohar Reddy, who teaches entrepreneurs to swim, although I have not even wetted my toes in the waters of entrepreneurship. 

There are many more that have followed in Asvini’s footsteps, quietly building valuable businesses.  Their story would be worth narrating in their own right.  Hopefully, someday, those other stories of entrepreneurship from IIMB would also be told.