Entrepreneurship Lesson - Conversation between a father (farmer) and his son (IIT/Google background)

A farmer from Madhya Pradesh (India) and his son (who had passed out from IIT and has worked in Google at Mountain View for 8 years), are having an interesting conversation. 
Son is considering starting-up a high-tech product company.

Son: Father, I want to leave job and do my own start-up.
Father: So do it, what is the issue? I have never worked on others' farms. I love working on my own.

Son: I feel it is a big risk, I do not know what will happen?
Father: It cannot be bigger risk than what happens to our crops, we are fully dependent on nature god for rains.

Son: That is ok, what about taking care of family health - I will have no insurance for my wife and kids? What will I do in emergency?
Father: I and your mother had no insurance for whole of our lives. When you were child, we did not miss going to a doctor despite no-insurance, so why are you worried?

Son: Ok, what will happen to my monthly salary?
Father: I get no monthly salary. Many times I have financial losses for 2 years due to poor yield or price, I take loans and repay. You can talk to govt or other parties; you are educated and should be able to get bigger loan/investment than what I get for crops.

Son: That is Ok.  How will I get people to work for my company. It is very tough to hire good people in India.
Father: Please hire only few key people like what I do. I outsource major farming activities like seeding, harvesting and ploughing.  My key people focus on the selection of crops, selection of right seeds, and they timely arrange water and fertilizers. My in-house team focuses on just core; rest is outsourced/executed through contract workers.

Son: I am very worried, how will I sell my product?
Father: If you produce good quality product, people will come and buy. Last year we produced high quality Basmati Rice; all produce got sold on phone. Why can you not do that for your product?

Son: I will not have office space? Where from to work?
Father: I manage my work from my home for so many years, why you need office space when your work is small at this point.

Son: I am not aware of legal side of business, Not sure if we should register the company or not.
Father: Start small. When I just had one field - we had no tax to pay. In fact I registered my first field after 6 months of use.

Son: I have only 200,000 USD (1 Crore Rupees) savings, I feel it is too less to take care of family's future needs and to invest in company.
Father: You are farmer's son. A farmer does not have even 200,000 Rs(4000 USD) savings in his life time. He still does his work, takes risk - some time he succeeds and some time he fails. I am not sure as to why you are having these doubts. You must rise & start your venture ASAP!!

Relevance of Steve Jobs for India

Loss of Steve Jobs has created great void in global digital world.

Steve Jobs changed the world by many innovations like Design, Music, The PC, iPad,
Ads, iPhone, Apps Ecosystem, MacOS and Apple itself.

For most technologists, business men, and CxOs, Steve Jobs has been a role model
across the world.  Best business schools in business cover various aspects of Steve
Jobs and Apple Inc in dozens of  business cases as part of business management
programs.

I live in India, and these days I travel a lot deep inside country. I spend some time
interacting with people who belong to, what many people say, Bharat or real India -
where 70% to 80% of people live. These are towns, villages and small cities
consisting of 700 M population.

I ask people in my visits: do they use Mac? Have they seen anyone using iPhone
or iPad in their town or village? Do they know Steve Jobs?

I also do dipstick checks if they know Nokia, or if they know Google and so on.
There have been less than 1% cases, where my question on Apple or Steve Jobs
has resulted into any affirmative answer. In fact, people in India know more of
Google, and more of Nokia than that of Apple.

It is quite clear that Steve Jobs and his products have no real impact on India and
its vast majority of consumers at present.

Does it mean that Steve Jobs was elitist? Does it mean that his legacy has no
relevance to vast  majority of the world population living in developing world?

Answer lies in finding out if other legends like Henry Ford or Mahatma Gandhi
created any impact beyond boundaries of their countries either in their life time
or later. When Henry Ford brought automobile to America; countries like
India, large part of Asia and Africa had no impact for a very long time.
However, Ford's legacy lies in a fact that world created hundreds of
automobile companies in Japan, Korea, India and everywhere else, decades later.

It is hard to believe that common people across the world would have been part of
automobile revolution decades later, had Henry Ford not innovated the consumer
automobile for America.

Great Innovators create hundreds of thousands of followers, who incrementally take
original innovation further, and make it relevant to various sections of society.

I have no doubt that Steve Jobs has no direct large impact on India at present. But
he is very closely followed by thousands of urban technology entrepreneurs of Indian
origin living in India or outside. Somewhere deep within these people, lies an urge to
innovate like Steve Jobs, to make the world better place. Many of them, for sure,
will try to make their innovations relevant for their country, towns and villages.

It is this entrepreneurial urge among thousands of Indians, that would create massive
innovation, and impact on real India. And that would be the right time to say what impact
Steve Jobs had on India or for that matter on developing world!!

Does experience outplay education/degree?

Yesterday my team interviewed a candidate who comes with Masters degree in Computer Science from a reputed US university. After long hours of discussion with candidate, team told me that candidate needs at least 6 months of un-learning and then 6 months of learning to be relevant for us.

I enquired the team why a bright young chap who has spent 24 years of his life in learning at reputed schools/colleges/universities in India and abroad still needs to learn before he is useful at work. Very often it puzzles me as to why education is not delivering the relevant knowledge? Why 1-2 years of experience outplays 4 years/5 years degree? There could be many views on this question; here is what I would like to share:

1. Experience leads to learning that is directly relevant to modern times - need of current or near future industry
2. Experience leads to higher retention of knowledge
3. Experience makes people experiment/do mistakes/learn from it/see the practical use
4. Environment in company/industry does not test you how much you know but how much you have applied and contributed

Question arises why education systems globally are not able to provide learning equivalent to the one that comes from experience? Can we provide experiential learning in schools and colleges? How to create situation where we can say that 4 years degree in sociology is giving equal or more relevant learning than 4 years work in field? Can we explore some other disruptive paradigms? Let us brainstorm.

Will computers take over teachers?

 Let us first understand which humans tasks have been replaced by computers over last 50 years:

1. Reservations of flights/trains/car rentals
2. Payment of bills of all types
3. Directions and route-maps while driving
4. Resource and business management in enterprises (ERP, CRM etc.)
5. Communications (From face-to-face meeting/letters to mails to chats to text to video conference)
6. Controls and automation in factories and power stations.
7. And hundreds of others

All of above are repetitive tasks happening at multiple places. These used to be done by humans in past, and now by computers. Now let us see what is current teaching process:

1. Lecture on topic (same topic every year, almost same topic in every school, county and country etc)
2. Home work and class work (Again same stuff by every child)
3. Questions and answers (80% of questions asked by children would fall within all questions asked during previous 3 years)
4. Critical analysis, creative thoughts on new applications of subject matter

If you see 1,2 and 3 above, these are repetitive tasks and would certainly be replaced by computer based on history of last 50 years in other industries. The 4th one does require immense intelligence to be contextual which at present is not possible by technology.

It is gross wastage of human energy that millions of human teachers across the world
teach the same stuff, let us say concept of addition or concept of force or concept of time.  Rather, the best 10 explanations of the world could be recorded and reused in millions of schools.

Humans are best in doing new stuff. Machines are best in doing repetitive stuff that has large volume.

Hence teachers' repetitive tasks will and should be replaced by computers. Human teachers then can focus on creativity, innovation, critical thinking, inventions, individual attention and anything else that is new.

Thanks and Regards,
Rajeev