I was interviewing a student from VIT Bhopal for an internship. Somewhere in the conversation, she mentioned a course called Technology Entrepreneurship. I asked her to show me the syllabus.
It read like a list of things I wish someone had told me three decades back.
I finished my engineering degree knowing electronics and how to write code. I did not know how to read a balance sheet. A profit and loss statement made no sense to me either. Taxation was worse. So I read what books I could find and worked it out as I went. There was no other way to run a company. I have written about this in my book, The Founder Catalyst.
What stayed with me was not the mistakes I made while catching up. It was the time it took. Every hour I spent understanding the numbers was an hour I did not spend on the product. I was an engineer who wanted to solve problems, and a good part of my energy went into things nobody had taught me.
Her syllabus talks about customers and whether they really want what you are building. It talks about protecting what you build. It talks about money, about incubators and government support, and about selling across borders. I learnt each of these the hard way.
A large client once came to us because of a small tool we had built. They were using it in ways I had never imagined. About twenty years ago, we built a content management system for news and media companies. We charged a licence fee on top of our services. The market did not like it. We ended up giving the system away as part of the service. I found out what customers would pay for only after the product was built.
My first product was EasyPass, a shareware security tool that found buyers in over fifty countries. One of my early collaborators took a copy of the code and began selling it as his own. I learnt of it only afterwards. No one had taught me anything about intellectual property before that day.
Around 2007, I expanded into the US and the UK at the same time, and I borrowed to do it. Growth came before the reserves. It was a close call. Today’s founders step into a far more supportive ecosystem than the one I began in. Incubators, angel networks and government schemes exist now. That support helps only a founder who knows about it.
Let me be fair to the classroom. It is not the field. Forty-five hours of lectures cannot teach what a first customer saying no will teach. Students will still learn the hardest parts by doing them. But there is a difference between meeting these ideas cold and meeting them as old acquaintances.
These are the engineers who will join your teams over the next few years. A college like VIT Bhopal now teaches this in a full semester course. They will arrive with cash flow, customers, patents and markets already in their vocabulary. I expect the questions in your review meetings to get better.
Founders have something to offer here. Internships and mentoring hours give students the practice a lecture hall cannot. I head the mentoring programme at TiE Chennai. We see young startups welcoming the initiative and finding it useful. I suspect students would feel the same.
An engineer’s attention is the scarcest thing a young company has. I spent a good part of mine catching up on basics. If a classroom can spare the next generation that effort, they can put it into the problems they care about. I learnt these words by making mistakes. They will learn the words first, and spend their mistakes on harder problems.
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