n the present issue of EnSpace, we have attempted to look at the current events and happenings that have caused a stir in the world of entrepreneurship.

One such recent event, a sad one as well, was the demise of the famous Steve Jobs. A man who truly personified the word entrepreneur, who was a source of inspiration for millions, whose speeches and quotes would be remembered for long, left us this October. Enspace pays tribute to this great man.

This issue contains two interviews, one with Apurv Agrawal, a music student in the US who has come up with an ex-tremely radical startup which promotes freedom for music. The other, is of the legend, Kanwal Rekhi, one of India’s greatest entrepreneurs.

Statistics show that role models play a huge part in shaping the thought processes and actions of people. In fact, having a good role model inspires people to do better, motivates them towards greatness. Keeping that in view, we have start-ed a column called “Know Thy Entrepreneur”, which will cover brief descriptions of those who have made it to the big stage and how they did it.

Another famous incident that took place recently was the fall of Ruport Mudroch, which set out tremors into the entire media industry all across the world. The article in-vestigates Murdoch’s rise to power and how his personal agenda brought about the downfall of News Corp., the larg-est media house one earth.

Football! Well that word means so much to millions of people everywhere. It is considered to be the sport of man-kind and has tremendous outreach. Apart from the emo-tions and aspirations that the game carries it also moves around a lot of money. And by lot, we mean a lot. Today football is no longer just a sport but is also a multi-billion dollar industry. Take a dip into this bowl of green!

As experts speculate, India is rapidly growing into a global entrepreneurial hub. With the PIGS problem and the US debt crisis, more and more companies are directing there investments to Asia, particularly India. A wave of entrepre-neurship is riding India as is it said. And surfing at the top of this wave in the internet sector is Flipkart, India’s first inter-net company to be valued at a whopping $1 billion. Rightly so it deserves attention, and we have done just that.

As our journey to explore entrepreneurship and all its as-pects continues, we bring to you this next issue with an array of rich and informative articles. Hope you like it. The EnSpace blog has also been launched so that the readers can discuss and comment on the articles. Visit ecell.in/enspace

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Learn how the world’s most famous game has transformed into a billion dollar industry!

“Some people believe football is a matter of life and death. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.”- said Bill Shankly, ex Liverpool FC manager and Scottish international. Football, as beautiful as the game is, demands a multitude of resources, espe-cially money, more than any other sport.

Cristiano Ronaldo spending £150,000 on a number plate for a £340,000 Bentley or a Sheikh Mansour Bin Zayed Al Nahyan splashing £ 500,000,000 in landing the best players of the planet on the other part of Manchester instantly gives us an idea about the volume of this industry.

In the last two decades, professional football all over the world has gone through an astounding revolution. Television revenues have reached heights inconceivable few years ago, player salaries have increased exponen-tially, international teams of millionaire footballers have been marshaled, state of the art football stadia have replaced the old ones, commercial sponsorship and merchandising have increased beyond measure and many clubs have floated on the stock market. The growth of many European clubs has surpassed the econ-omies of the countries in which they are located. Ultimately, the players are the most important assets of a club and its fate lies with its manager. The mar-ketplace is the core of any commercial

activity and in football, there exists a ‘Transfer Market’.

The Transfer market is a collective term used to describe the catchment of players available for transfer, and also the money moving between clubs. The Transfer Market is active between the ends of the season, generally May, and August 31st, and again in mid-winter, in the middle of the footballing season. This phase is called the ‘Transfer Window’. In this period clubs replace injured players and the affluent ones fortify their squads in preparation for a bid for glory. The market is in many ways analogous to the stock market.

In football, the manager (sometimes called coach but he is much more than that!) is the backbone of the club because he juggles a number of respon-sibilities. He is responsible for the clubs activities on and off the field. He has to maintain a good interpersonal relation-ship with the players and staff. The way in which a manger treats his players and staff affects the performance of the team on the pitch. Leadership and motiva-tion are essential managerial attributes. The manger also has the task of assess-ing player performance, watch videos of their opponent’s game and prepare strategies accordingly. The manager is the boss during the game and decides the team formation; substitutions, talks to his players during half-time and these

By Rakshith Shetty, Second Year Undergraduate

decisions ultimately make the difference between success and failure.

The football business is dominated by “The Big-Five” – the 5 most followed leagues all over the world namely the Barclays English Premier League, The La Liga of Spain(Liga BBVA), The Italian Serie A, The German Bundesliga and The French Ligue de Football Professionnel. Rich clubs like Manchester United FC, Real Madrid CF, FC Barcelona, and now Manchester City joining the league, all credits to their oil rich owners from the Middle-East who now control the mo-nopoly of the game.

In July, 2009, Cristiano Ronaldo became the most expensive player in football history after moving from Manchester United to Real Madrid in a transfer deal worth £80 million (€94m, US$132m). In addition, his contract with Real Madrid, in which he was to be paid £11 million per year over the following six years, made him the highest-paid football player in the world at the time, and his buyout clause was valued at €1 billion as per his contract. (It is a clause in a player’s contract with their club which guarantees that the club will allow them to leave if another club makes an offer meeting some minimum value specified in the clause). Lionel Messi, currently the best player on the planet is valued at (£ 88 mn./ € 100 mn.), Wayne Rooney at £ 47.5 mn./ € 54 mn.!

The Business of Football

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The Deloitte Football Money League (produced by accountancy firm Deloitte) comes up every year with ranking of a club based on its revenue. Spanish giants Real Madrid topped the latest rankings with an annual revenue of € 438.6 mn (Rs. 2900 crores) followed by bitter rivals FC Barcelona (€ 398.1 mn/`2600 crores) and Manchester United at third place.

Football like any other commercial en-deavor has its own risks. Looking from a perspective, it appears to be simple, the more you win matches the more you earn, but nowadays money in foot-ball doesn’t come that simple. The club is no less than a company. A club has its sponsors, its own TV channel, ad-vertising campaigns, and to add to that, it is also listed on the stock exchange. Manchester United was the first British club to float on the London Stock Exchange and is eying the Singapore Stock Exchange this year to enter into the Asian market. Almost every top

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division club in England is listed in the LSE. Ultimately all these factors affect the performance of the club in the stock exchange. Matters as petty as a player getting involved in an ugly controversy or a spat could very well affect a clubs reputation and eventually the share prices. Media frenzy is always centered on this game and has enabled chan-nels to maintain a certain TRP rating at almost all times of the year.

Even though the Indian National Football team, called the Bhangra Boys, fail to impress on the international stage with their 3-digit rankings, entrepre-neurs like Lakshmi Mittal (Queens Park Rangers), Anuradha Desai (Blackburn Rovers FC), and the controversial Ahsan Ali Syed (Racing Santader, Spain) have announced their entry into this business.

The mechanics of running a club are as complex as any commercial firm. If run efficiently, a club can generate for-tunes and if not, the organization goes plummeting into an abyss of debts. It ultimately boils down to football, the

most popular sport, more of a global phenomena, involving the emotions of the millions, which for most of whom is a way of life. Business models for football are currently being researched into and it has opened up opportuni-ties for mathematicians, physicists and engineers to introduce unused areas of mathematics and statistics to finance. The parameters in this business being more dependant on the people and the team, in depth study and sampling will have to be done in order to come up with a successful model.

It is a relatively new industry with loads of opportunities for new entrepreneurs. It offers the people chance at a liveli-hood at the world’s most famous sport even if one is not a player. The quali-ties required to commodore a football team include confidence, fearlessness, the ability to identify opportunity, to work in a team and lastly to handle the pressure! These are the traits of entre-preneurs. Hopefully, we will see more people with new ideas in this industry as well.

EnSpace(E): What inspired you to develop such a novel approach towards music production?

Apurv Agrawal (AA): There were several things that inspired me to come up with Inspirus Records. It definitely only started off as an idea in my mind, without any shape or structure, and over a period of time became more concrete in its technical intricacies and as a working project. One thing that I strongly believe led to it was the fact that I had just started college, and was seeing the music industry up close and person-al for the first time. There were several angles of it that shocked me. I saw amazingly talented musicians having to quit school, and get jobs at the Subway right around the corner. It got me think-ing really how something as sacred and beautiful as music had been reduced to a mass produced commodity. With the effects of the recent economic recession still very apparent in society, it was im-possible for an independent musician/band to pay huge amounts of money to record and mix an album in a pro-fessional studio, and none of this added up. Just because they couldn’t afford it, was hardly a reason why they shouldn’t be allowed to share their music with the world. Being a musician myself, I would rather have a 1000 people listen to my music for free rather that just 10 people who paid for it. Around the same time,

I was surfing a million home-studio forums all over the internet, and I knew it was going to be the next big thing. Giving everyone a chance at recording an EP if not a full length album at the comfort of their home, was a brilliant idea. Some might say that it has given too much exposure and reach even to hobbyists, and I won’t disagree. But hey! What the hell, you know? We can always choose what not to listen to. Inspirus Records was born out of how empow-ered we all are now, with technology on our side and marketing tools such as the internet, there’s little that is truly impos-sible for us to do on our own. Another thing that was very clear in my mind was the fact that too much music was

being written and released for only com-mercial reasons. The music industry is a tricky one in that sense, as along with being a multi-billion dollar industry, it is also extremely reflective of differ-ent kinds of people and kind of sacred in its roots. That was when I decided to never mix the two sides together. No one should have to think of the business aspect, when they’re writing music, and similarly vice-versa. Inspirus Records was thus my idea of battling these issues in a very positive and constructive way.

E: Do you think this concept is going to be as viral as the ‘open-source phenom-enon’ was to the commercial- software world? Do you think the trend is going

Apurv Agarwal is a 2nd year undergraduate student at McNally Smith College of Music, St. Paul, Minnesota, US. He is pursuing Recording Engineering along with Guitar Performance and Music Business there. He is the founder of Inspirus Records (founded in his freshmen year), a record label that believes in –‘getting good and well-produced music to as many people as it can’. He is from Jaipur and has done most of his schooling from Indore.

Inspirus Records produces music albums for the bands, which sign up with them, for free. It is different in the sense that it plans to make money through special edition DVD’s, band merchandise and live shows rather than by sell-ing music albums.

Striking a Different ChordIn conversation with Apurv Agrawal

By Dhananjay Sethi, Second Year Undergraduate

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to catch on?

AA: Yes. I definitely think so. I believe that like any other free movement this would catch on very quickly and hope-fully make music more free.

E: Where do you want to see Inspirus Records, say 10 years down the line?

AA: More than Inspirus Records, I would love to see the whole industry on a more creative and approachable level. Completely ruling out the financial aspect of the music industry is not at all the focus here. Instead, I would like to see just a change in how the money is earned. Being brought up in India, I

usually came back empty handed after a trip to the music store, as because there is not too big a market, big record labels termed it un-economical to release a whole lot of music here. So, the only option I did have was to download the music for free. And let’s face it, paying for the music itself is a pretty absurd idea. People would rather pay big money for a great live show or a really special edition release for the 5th time from their favourite band, rather than for the music itself. And especially when it becomes a restrictive barrier, some-thing is just not right. So I guess just a change in the business model of the whole industry would be an amazing feat 10 years down the line.

E: What do you think is the future of en-trepreneurship in the field of music?

AA: I strongly believe that the future of the music industry is definitely a more musician influenced one. Instead of 10 big shot record label CEOs deciding what all music is and is not to be released to the public, I believe us, musicians, will have the power to decide. We will see a massive change in the workings of the industry itself. Once an artist has complete control over both, the creative and financial aspects of their release, it will transform the music industry into a very open ended and approachable one, while the only difference in the finan-cial structure will be how the money is earned. The future of entrepreneurship in the field of music is definitely the ‘Do-It-Yourself ’ way.

E: What does music mean to you?

AA: Music is how I cross-over to the other side.

E: Are you primarily focussing on pro-ducing music or making music?

AA: At the moment, I am recording my own solo album as well as promoting a Finnish Post-Rock band called Heavy Spacehero under Inspirus Records. So I’d say both. There a few projects and re-leases in the pipe line as well.

E: Thanks for your time. We apprecaite it.

AA: Anytime.

“This is my personal project that was born out of a simple idea and my love for ‘progressive/post-rock sounds’. Just like most of you reading this, I am a crazy college kid who has big dreams for himself, this company and most importantly, music itself. The main idea behind this label is the fact that I believe music was always meant to be free. I think in the midst of big corporate labels and today’s economy, the sole purpose of music, which is to inspire and influence people in a certain way, has been lost. Music has become a commod-ity more than an art. Like all of you, it hurts me. Inspirus Records is ‘the end of all that’,” says Apurv.

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THE

LIFEAND

OF

STEVEJOBS

TIMES

By Aditya Kulkarni, Third Year Undergraduate

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Albert Einstein is considered to be one of the greatest minds in human history. He revolutionized the entire scientific world with his out of the world ideas and bold futuristic thought processes. He was an intellectual marvel, an exceptional human being and a man of accomplishment. The year (1955), the entire world mourned the loss of this great man, was the

year that gave us another human phenomenon, Steve Jobs.

Steven Paul “Steve” Jobs was born on 24th February, 1955 in San Francisco, California U.S. He got the last name “Jobs” from his foster parents. His biological parents had put him up for adoption when he was just a few weeks old. His early influences were quite profound and not to mention different. He

would generally spend his time after school in the Hewlett-Packard company and was also later employed there as a summer employee as well. After his high school graduation (1972) he joined Reed College. Although he dropped out after one semester, he continued to audit classes there. He would sleep in his friend’s room, would return Coke bottles for food money and eat free meals at the nearby Hare-Krishna Temple.

Jobs seems to have had a special bond with India. He accredits his vision and thinking to the experiences

he has had there. In 1974, he took a job at Atari,Inc., with the sole motive of saving money to travel to India in his search for spiritual enlightenment. He went to India along with a friend from Reed College to meet an Indian Saint. Unfortunately, the saint died

before they reached his ashram. Still, their quest continued and he adopted Buddhism in

the process. After witnessing the poverty and utter chaos

there, he realized that there was no

place

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where one could go and achieve enlightenment. His words were “We weren’t going to find a place where we could go for a month to be enlightened. It was one of the first times that I started to realize that maybe Thomas Edison did a lot more to improve the world than Karl Marx and Neem Kairolie Baba put together.” During this time, Jobs experimented with psychedelics and claims it was one of the most important things he had done in his life.

Taking with him those rich life changing experiences that he acquired from India, Jobs came back to the US. After work-ing for a few years with his old employers at Atari,Inc. Jobs, along with Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne founded Apple in 1976. Apple faced a lot of challenges in its initial years not to mention the failure of their first product, the Apple Lisa. It was priced at $10,000 and was developed as a powerful personal computer with a graphical user interface for business execu-tives. In 1984, was launched the Macintosh, their first com-mercially successful product. Even though it was less advanced that the Apple Lisa, it was widely accepted by the audience.

Despite the success of the Macintosh, Apple was not doing so well. Sales had dropped tremendously and towards the end of 1984, Jobs relationships with the board of directors of Apple began to deteriorate. Jobs erratic work schedules and behav-ior finally forced the board to relieve him of his services. The same year, he founded his next company NeXT Inc.

NeXTJobs injected $7 million into NeXT just to find that at the end of its first year it was running short of money. Eventually, he attracted some venture capital and the company started work again. Its first line of products, The NeXT work stations were released in the market in 1990. $9,999 for a product designed for the education sector, it did not sell as it was considered to be an extravagant luxury. A revised product, called the NeXTCube was released the same year. With its innovative multimedia email system, sharing voice, graphics, images and video via email was made possible for the first time ever. Over the years NeXT came up with other products like the NeXTSTEP/Intel and WebObjects (later used to run the AppleStore, iTunes).

PixarAlongside NeXT, Jobs also acquired The Graphics Group (later renamed to Pixar) from Lucasfilm for $10 million. Pixar con-tracted with Disney to produce a number of animated films. Disney would distribute and co-finance these films. In 1995, their first film, Toy Story was released which received critical acclaim. Following the huge success of Toy Story, a series of such films were produced, 4 of which (Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, WALL-E, Up, Toy Story 3) received the Academy Award for best animated feature film. In 2006,

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The life and times of Steven Paul Jobs

two years after Disney’s contract with Pixar had expired, Disney bought Pixar in an all stock transition. The cost of the merger was $7.4 billion. Following this, Jobs became the single largest shareholder in the company with about 7% of the company’s stock.

Return to AppleThe 90’s we pretty much dominated by Microsoft. In fact, by 1996 Apple was being butchered by its competition. All the experts had advised the board to sell it and try and hedge their losses. In 1996, Apple bought NeXT for $429 million and Steve Jobs thus returned to the company he had co-founded. Jobs was the miracle Apple needed to get back in the game. Jobs introduced revolutionary new products like the iMac, the iPod and also the started the Apple store and the iTunes store. By 2007, Apple had branched out into the cellular market by introducing the iPhone which as we all know revolutionized the mobile industry. And just like that, Apple was back and that too with a bang. Under Jobs, Apple’s worth rose to an incredible $337 billion, which was more than a front end oil company, Exxon Mobil which was valued at $330 billion. For the first time in history, a tech company was valued more than a core industrial company. Unlike its competitors, who had spent more than $10 billion dollars in acquisitions over the past decade, Apple had spent less than a billion. Today, Apple is one of the most respected companies in the world. It is cur-rently ranked 35th in the Forbes fortune 500 companies list.

Resignation and DeathJobs was diagnosed with a rare kind of pancreatic cancer in 2003. He was treated over the years but the prognosis was quite poor. Following the deterioration in his health which began from January 2011, he resigned as the CEO of Apple in August 2011 but remained as the Chairman of the company’s board. On 5th October, 2011 Steve Jobs passed away in his home in California.

Steve Jobs was a visionary, a technocrat and one of the great-est innovators of our time. He had the ability to identify op-portunities in the most troubled times and what’s more is that he had the courage and passion to act on them. He has been accredited to 342 different patents in the US and has single handedly brought about revolutions in the computer, mobile and music industry. He relied on his morals, his ethics and most importantly on his instincts. This has reflected in the way Apple has operated, year after year improving their prod-ucts to provide their customers with the best experience pos-sible (something that he picked up from HP).

1955, the year that took away the legendary genius Albert Einstein gave us another legend, another man of accomplish-ment, Steven Jobs. Let us hope 2011 has something similar if not better in store for us.

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The Desi Billion Dollar Internet Company

By Siddharth Desai, Second Year Undergraduate

That India is an emerging service ori-ented country rather than a product oriented is now a cliché. The fact that several e-commerce start-ups have ar-rived and emerged over the last couple of years corroborates the argument that India has commenced to nurture Internet companies which can compete with those in Silicon Valley.

Ever wondered what happens when two IIT grads think of doing something simple, easy from home and that can get them enough money? Enter, Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal’s ‘FLIPKART’. A name that needs no introduction but for those who think books are not really their cup of tea, FLIPKART is the largest INDIAN online book store having sold more than 5 lac books in the past 2 years and has grown ten times over the last one year itself. Flipkart is an excellent example of first genera-tion entrepreneurs identifying an op-portunity in an age old industry and using INTERNET as a medium to give its renewed scope for thriving. It has come a long way from selling their first

book John Woods’ Leaving Microsoft to Change the World in a few months to selling one book almost every minute.

Valued at a whopping $1 billion, and being the first Indian Internet company to do so, it wouldn’t be naïve to hail Flipkart as the Indian Amazon.

Sachin Bansal and BinnyBansal(not related) passed out from Computer Science and Engineering batch of the 2005 from IIT Delhi. Coincidently, both hail from Chandigarh and even stud-ied in the same school. But they didn’t know each other well back then. It was only in IIT that their camaraderie flour-ished. They landed in different jobs in Bangalore before bumping into each other again at Amazon.

In the middle of 2007, both realized that Indian consumers couldn’t relate to the technologies built by Amazon and co for the US companies, and that the qual-ity of service provided by the ‘very few’ digital book stores in India was pathetic. Thus wanting to create something that

could cater to the Indian market, at a reasonable price and was easily deliv-ered, Sachin and Binny Bansal quit their jobs at Amazon and started working on their idea. As Sachin Bansal righteously puts in “Our business opportunity was to do better than our competition in terms of ‘service’. Hence, our main mis-sion was to focus on customer service.The only domain in the e-commerce business that could facilitate a quick start was ‘books’.”

Within two years since its found-ing, Flipkart, through mouth of word and social networking sites, became one of the top 100 Indian sites. What’s more, it’s credited to be India’s largest online book store with over 7 million titles to offer.

Thus, with an initial self-funding of INR 4 lac they took a plunge into the market.The low transaction size helped induce the customer trials. The Bansals having a strong technological background could keep the initial costs low. They initially started with about 50,000 titles.That Indians are averse to pay for ship-ping and more importantly pay for something they haven’t felt in their hands was understood well by Bansals. These strategies along with extremely low costs on the shelves really caught the attention of customers.

The Bansals still recall the times when the CEOs used to pack products to be shipped and entertain customer calls in the middle of the night all by them-selves. One can’t help but gain pride to be a part of something that has grown organically. Flipkart claims to grow at

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This is the story of two IIT Delhi computer science grads, who made history by founding the first billion dollar Indian internet company. Learn how a simple idea changed their lives forever.

a staggering 100 per cent every quar-ter since its founding. Says Sachin Bansal,“The first three months were very tough because we would sell only about five books a day. After the first three months business started picking up because of word-of-mouth advertis-ing. We hit our breakeven point in six months. It was still just the two of us, but we were still working out of the house so that is when we finally found our-selves an office. We also hired our first two employees. One job was to handle the operations and to pick up the books so that we did not have to do it ourselves every day. The other handled marketing initiatives. Both are still with us today.”It is remarkable that they never had a fall-out throughout these years. As BinnyBansal puts in, “Sachin is good at organization. I took care of catalogues and supplier relations. It (the roles and the responsibilities) evolved on a need basis. No conscious effort.”

The road wasn’t all grassy as it seems. Getting a payment gateway then with-out an office, telephones, etc was a major headache. They started with Paypal’s services. Another major chal-lenge was to tie up with book vendors (they didn’t have any offline book store) who wouldn’t trust a couple of novices. Suppliers were to be sourced, distribu-tors were to be enlisted and employees were to be brought on board.

Having realized the potential of their business beforehand they didn’t care about the initial costs incurred on cou-rier services for they weren’t ready to negotiate on the customer service front. They chose Bluedart and paid them retail rates. Said Sachin, “Prices will happen later. There’s enough competi-tion to ensure the prices come down.”Within two years since its founding, Flipkart, through word of mouth and social networking sites, became one of the top 100 Indian sites. What’s more, it’s credited to be India’s largest online book store with over a 7 million titles to offer. Ask them what clicked and they point out,”Free shipping adds a lot to the trust factor. This coupled with a clean and a user friendly interface helps in attracting customers.”

Flipkart has since then raised two rounds of funding from Venture Capital funds, Accel India (2009) and Tiger

Global Management up to the tune of US $ 10 million.

In 2010, it diversified into becoming a generic e-commerce website, selling mobile phones, laptops, music CDs/DVDs, movies, games and software. In December 2010, Flipkart acquired WeRead, a social book discovery tool from Lulu, a US-based on-demand pub-lishing firm. The stated goal was to give Flipkart a social recommendation plat-form for buyers to make informed deci-sions based on recommendations from people within their social network.As of June 2011, Flipkart had 1,500 employees on board and 5 warehouses in Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai and Kolkata. Also it had witnessed 2 million unit sales and 4 million unique visitors per month.

It underwent a major brand makeover earlier this year with a new interface and logo, and kick started its offline advertising campaign in addition to its aggressive online campaigns by putting out ads in the leading newspapers and on television channels to become one of the hottest Internet companies in India, signifying the huge growth the company was experiencing.

Word of mouth is ‘still’ their strongest method of advertising. “We still do not spend a lot of money on marketing.We have a very high customer retention rate. Those same customers bring us the best quality new customers, and most of those new customers become repeat customers.”

If sources are to be believed Flipkart is selling goods worth US $ 6 million per month. Flipkart is experiencing 4 mil-lion unique visitors per month. Repeat purchase rates are around 70 %. Sales of CDs and books are about one half of the company’s revenue. In the FY 2011

Flipkart’s sales report read a whopping INR 75 crore.

Having started with a 35% margin, today the Bansals are able to get any-where from 40% to 60% margins based on discounts from suppliers. “We start-ed by paying for all items with cash in advance. Today, we enjoy a credit line of three to six months.”

Ask them about their share in the market and the Bansals with a tinge of pride say,”The online market is about 10% of what the established retail book market is. We have more than half of the online book market. The remaining online book market is segmented among very small e-commerce companies.”

The experts say that the Flipkart found-ers make a team that understands cus-tomer delight, logistics and operations as well as they do technology. This is what has consistently made a difference. Flipkart is close to raising US $ 150 million in a Private Equity round of funding from General Atlantic Partners in one of the biggest ever deals for an Indian internet firm, making it the first Indian internet company to sport a bil-lion dollar valuation.

Bansals plan to use the funding to scale their operations. Now that Amazon (read world’s largest online retailer) is reportedly entering India in early 2012, this news becomes even more significant, considering that Amazon has previously, and unsuccessfully, tried acquiring the company, with Flipkart demanding a very high buyout price. Indian players see the huge potential in the e-commerce segment here and have been resistant to being bought out easily.

With the online retail industry in India pegged to reach $1.5 billion mark by 2015, sources suggests that e-commerce is just booming up in India and we may soon see many more Internet compa-nies achieving similar success.Asked to give some advice to the as-piring entrepreneurs, Bansals point out,”Devoting complete time and energy is one of primary importance in a start-up.Take the plunge. And have at

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The Rise and Fall of Rupert MurdochBecoming an entrepreneur is not a difficult task but one must be ready to digest failures as the mortality

rate in entrepreneurship is extremely high, even for the biggies!

By Kunal Mehta, Second Year Undergraduate

The story begins with a 22 year old Oxford graduate inheriting his family business, News Limited, and its main asset Adelaide News in Melbourne, Australia 1952. And it ends (or maybe It doesn’t) in Britain with the international phone hacking scandal that slinked to the murder of a 13 year-old school girl Milly Dowler and subsequently a public outcry and indictment of News corp.in the UK. So what happened in between, let’s find out. The Oxford graduate first gained control of Adelaide News and brought about a feisty attitude to this paper and soon it was a huge success. Using his business–savvy sense he bought papers like Sunday Times, The Daily Mirror etc. and made them popular. The Economist describes him as “inventing the modern tabloid”. He also expanded into the music scene and consolidated his position as an Austral-ian media magnate. His work with The Adelaide News was only the beginning of what was to become a global media empire. In the 60’s, he did the same with the Mirror in Sydney as well as the News of the World and The Sun in London.

In the 70’s he turned The New York Post from a serious, stagnant paper into the provocative paper famous for its salacious coverage of crime which it is today. Murdoch then decided to move into television, but US law mandated that only Americans could own US tel-evision stations; so he was naturalized in 1985 and thus started America’s 4th television network Fox Broadcasting. Murdoch acquired The Times and The Sunday Times in London in the 1980’s and he took on Hollywood by purchas-ing 20th Century Fox and Fox TV that same year. Asia was the next spot for Murdoch. He formed BSkyB in 1990 and during the 1990s expanded into Asian networks and South American television. His News Corporation also acquired HarperCollins (1989) and The Wall Street Journal (2007). By 2000 Murdoch’s News Corporation owned over 800 companies in more than 50 countries with a net worth of over $5 billion.And so on expanding under the able management of Murdoch today News Corp has become the 2nd largest media conglomerate in the world (2nd

to Walt Disney Company) and he himself has a personal fortune of $7.6 billion and is also ranked as the 13th most powerful person in the world by Forbes.

So what makes him such a successful entrepreneur? An undying devotion to his work, the knack of turning non-profitable businesses into successful ones, taking the right decisions at the right time, or as he says it himself ‘being a catalyst for change’. He himself said ‘The world is changing very fast. Big will not beat small anymore. It will be the fast beating the slow. So the buck stops with the guy who signs the checks’. When asked about how he maintains his reputation he answered ‘Our reputation is more important than the last hundred million dollars ’. This is a true businessman who understands that reputation equates to dignity and credibility. But most importantly, what we must take from him besides this would be to have a global attitude with a reticent character and not succumb-ing to knee-jerk impulses. You must be ambitious no doubt but at the same time manage your finances judiciously. These qualities are what make him the respected man he is. Today consider Rupert Murdoch’s empire: According to BusinessWeek,”His satellites deliver TV programs in five continents, all but dominating Britain, Italy, and wide swaths of Asia and the Middle East. He publishes 175 newspapers, including the New York Post and The Times of London. In the U.S., he owns the Twen-tieth Century Fox Studio, Fox Network, and 35 TV stations that reach more than 40% of the country. His cable channels include fast-growing Fox News, and 19 regional sports channels. In all, as many as one in five American homes at any given time will be tuned into a show by News Corp. either produced or delivered.” And taking advantage of

News Corp has become the 2nd largest media conglomerate in the world (2nd to Walt Disney Company) and Murdoch himself has a personal fortune of $7.6 billion and is also ranked 13th most powerful person in the world by Forbes.

this fact since his success in Australia, Murdoch has always used his media influence to back conservative political issues. It has been alleged that he many a times backed political candidates for business favors. Murdoch’s British papers strongly backed Margaret Thatcher, John Major, and Tony Blair, and his American mouthpieces have vocally backed the Republicans since Ronald Reagan. During the 2002 and 2003 build-up to the invasion of Iraq, all of Murdoch’s 175 newspapers editorial-ized for war. He even supported this by saying that it would reduce oil prices to 20$ a barrel and be a stimulus to world economy greater than any tax cut. Over the years critics have always said that his methods are very unorthodox and unethical to say the least. Well this is in stark contrast to our homegrown entrepreneur Ratan Tata who is known for his righteous and uncorrupt way of business. When Murdoch was asked about his support for his other business interests (read ‘politics’) he replied ‘It’s a libel to say that I use my newspapers to support my other business interests. The fact is, I haven’t got any other busi-ness interests’. In 2003, Murdoch even told a congressional panel that his use of “political influence in newspapers or television” is “nonsense”.

Well, but it seems his other business in-terests have led to a downfall of sorts for News Corp. In July 2011 Murdoch faced allegations that his company employees including the News of the World owned by News Corporation were engaged in phone hacking, police bribery, and exercising improper influence in the pursuit of publishing stories. He also faces police and government investiga-tions into bribery and corruption in the UK and FBI investigations in the US. It started in August 2006, when the News of the World’s royal editor, Clive Goodman and a private investigator,

Glenn Mulcaire, were arrested by the Metropolitan Police, and later charged with hacking the telephones of members of the royal family by accessing voice-mail messages. Also, in July 2011, it was revealed that the phones of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler, relatives of deceased British soldiers, and victims of the 7/7 London bombings were also accessed, resulting in a public outcry against News Corporation and owner Rupert Murdoch. Advertiser boycotts contributed to the closure of the News of the World on 10 July, ending 168 years of publication. And this was just the beginning. The British Prime Min-ister, David Cameron, announced on 6 July that a public inquiry would look into the affair after police investiga-tions had ended. The negative attention garnered by the scandal eventually reached the United States, where News Corporation is headquartered and oper-ates multiple media outlets. The Federal Bureau of Investigation launched a probe on 14 July to determine whether News Corporation accessed voicemails of victims of the 9/11 attacks. On 15 July, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced an additional investigation by the Department of Justice, looking into whether the company had violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.On 16 and 17 July, News International pub-lished two full-page apologies in many of Britain’s national newspapers. The first apology took the form of a letter, signed by Rupert Murdoch, in which he said sorry for the “serious wrong doing” that occurred. The second was titled “Putting right” what’s gone wrong”, and gave more detail about the steps News

International was taking to address the public’s concerns. Due to this mess even their $8 billion bid for BskyB was shot down by the British Parliament and public and their Formula One takeover plans were derailed. All this led to an ultimate face-off, a riveting theater, between a newly emboldened parliamentary committee and Rupert Murdoch, the man himself, the world’s most powerful media mogul, in a series of parliamentary discussions designed to get to the bottom of the phone hacking scandal that had engulfed not only News Corp but also Britain’s politi-cal and law enforcement elite. “I would like to say one sentence” Murdoch said, breaking at one point into a long answer by his son News Corp’s Deputy COO. “This is the most humble day of my life”. But his humility did not extend to declaring that he was at fault or he would step down from the company. Instead he said, “People whom I trusted – I don’t know who at what level have let me down – and I think they have behaved disgracefully, and it’s for them to pay. And I think frankly I’m the best person to see it through”. He said, “It was a matter of ‘deep frustration’ and ‘real regret’ that the facts had not come out sooner”.

We may say the downfall of this epic company and specifically the mega tycoon Rupert Murdoch has now begun.What is left to be known is who pulled the strings from behind?? Who is the root of this scandal??And will this ‘phoenix’ company rise from its ashes?? Only time will tell.

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and posed a big challenge to me this year.

I had never experienced this reaction before. I had up until that point, only good reviews and very cheery inter-acting faces donning the class. I had brought myself to believe that I could happily pontificate forever entrepre-neurship to a batch of young guys who will lap it all up without a question and all I had to do was to go at them full tilt with gung-ho statements. Clearly something was amiss. Lines of thought which were accepted and received very well few batches before became an anathema to this group. What was I doing wrong? Possibly, entrepreneur-ship as a topic was getting talked about and key points already in the student’s knowledge domain. I now under-stand this better, as I recently listened to Nandan Nilekani’s 2009 Ted talk, a posting brought to my notice by my current student. Entrepreneurship as an idea has arrived in the country. Hence entrepreneurship as an idea did not have to be sold but the course had to go to the next level!

I sat up and asked myself whether I was doing the right thing by merely advo-cating students to take up the clarion call of entrepreneurship. I asked myself whether the course and the path I was professing had the potential to even turn one head in a hundred in this di-rection. For if it did achieve even that much, then salvation is guaranteed. Like Khosla speaks, no problem no solution. I went into a total rethink and came up reassured that teaching entre-preneurship is the thing to do. So what if a few wise heads thought I was woozy in my head and past my prime in this game. Of course the questioning of the wisdom and the manner the course was being advocated led me to introspect

I have been at this exercise of trying to goad a mixed bag of sleepy eyed third /fourth yearites into ‘entrepreneur-ship-isms’ rather than ‘zombie-ism’ for over five years. I am at it as the literary Cervantes. Nevertheless it is my cross, one I willingly and cheerfully bear, for the pay offs are multifold. That’s the nub of entrepreneurship. It pays off big time once the first phalanx is bridged. Yes, there is no looking back on this narrow curvilinear mountainous road leading to a fabulous summit. This is a drive of passion, of total engagement and one of conviction. Plain and simple, an adren-aline pumping, drive.

Why this misplaced enthusiasm, of guiding a motley set into an area that might lead them away from promised fat corporate pay cheques, is a question I am slowly coming to grips with. As several years of running this course pass, I am sold further down this en-trepreneurship river. However, once in a while I do have few nightmares of being led up this creek without a paddle. Case in point; the last year’s batch, wrote this course off, as an abject failure. This aroused a feeling of total helplessness

and worry much more about delivery of value through a course as nebulous as “teaching entrepreneurship”. I went back all the way, to where it all started.

Why did I start this course in the first place? The urge to do this course came up as a possible answer to starting an elective that may be off the beaten track for the department students. I saw mostly drooping heads amidst hushed silence as swarms walked past most of us “faculty” through the department corridor. These guys were either onto something else or we were missing a trick here were the thoughts that occurred to me. I scoured the moody internet of our department and thought that through a course that I could own, I might get enthusiastic faces around. I was aided in this venture by an old student of mine, who after traversing the gilded path and negotiating fat corporate pay cheques, landed up to do his own thing. I briefly discussed with him and browsed web sites of few leading universities of the day, which had started on this course in recent times. I might also have been subconsciously influenced by all the comings and goings in the entrepre-neurship world. Needless to say entre-preneurship has been bandied about quite a bit in recent times and it would

Why am I Attempting to Teach Entrepreneurship to Material Engineers?Prof. N. Venkatramani is a B.E in Chemical Engineering and is currently a senior faculty member at the Metallurgy and Materials Science Department in IIT Bombay. He is one of the few professors who strongly promote en-trepreneurship among the engineering students and also runs a course called “Entrepreneurship In Materials

Engineering” to support the same.

Few real stories like the one nar-rated by my student, who had survived through the meltdown of 2008 and other allied issues, on his visits to town, stories of engineering challenges that his tiny firm been able to work out, in disciplines that he had never formally trained in whilst at IIT Bombay

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be a fallacy to state that I conjured up this course out of the blue. The current entrepreneurship rush also added to this resolve to do an offbeat course and I embarked albeit without the rearview mirror!

I did the usual search for course mate-rials, discussed with some cognoscenti and a syllabus could be written out for the acceptance as a course to be run. Yes we run all things through a mill, so what if it is a course on entrepreneurship? As I discussed the course materials in the class, I slowly became aware of the limitations of straight jacketing such a course. However I bravely soldiered on thinking that a fresh batch of students start at the same point every year. How wrong I was in this assumption is, I found out very soon.

Another thing that one learns in this en-trepreneurship landscape is that failure is woven into every venture. Even teaching it! Eventually all great things fail if no change is continually main-tained. Additionally, through sheer per-severance alone can one carry the day. Few real stories like the one narrated by my student, who htad survived through the meltdown of 2008 and other allied issues, on his visits to town, stories of engineering challenges that his tiny firm been able to work out, in disciplines that he had never formally trained in whilst at IIT Bombay. Admission of great happiness found whilst solving real world problems rather than a big stash of money earned. Riveting stories such as these bucked me up

and the entrepreneurship fire was truly rekindled. Another issue that had convinced me was that, entrepreneurship is a way to rapidly enhance the per capita and the national GDP. Just waiting around for the poor government of the day alone to do the entire uplifting of the huge mass of population is a concept beyond me. We had to act and act fast if we had to capture the window of opportunity that the world economy is now present-ing to us. To quote most people in this area, we have the correct demography on hand and this human capital must be deployed profitably into successful ventures to really reap the rich demo-graphic rewards. Large numbers of en-trepreneurs and varied enterprises are required and who better than the best qualifying students leaving the most hallowed portals of the country. I am given to activism and I was really happy to find a ready outlet for my conviction

through a course on entrepreneurship. Interestingly we lack so many things within the country that we do not have to struggle too much to find a market, once decent products and services are offered. Our experiments with reforms, of very tiny ones in the 80’s and the bigger ones in the 90’s, show very clearly in the accompanying GDP growth chart the kind of acceleration that we can ad-minister to the economy. A sour point in this otherwise rosy picture is the urban-rural divide so glaringly seen in the per capita income graph shown for the period 1980-2005. The economy can be made to go places, cities are happen-ing places and the rural urban divide is a huge problem! Surely we can surmount this great problem through our talented and willing to work hard youth of the country. We are at a situation where we only have to load and point in the right direction.

All-India Average Per Capita Income in INR, 1970-71 to 2004-2005 : (Amitabh Kundu, JNU)

Gross Domestic Product, India in USD

What was I doing wrong? Possi-bly, entrepreneurship as a topic was getting talked about and key points already in the stu-dent’s knowledge domain. I now understand this better, as I re-cently listened to Nandan Nile-kani’s 2009 Ted talk, a posting brought to my notice by my current student. Entrepreneur-ship as an idea has arrived in the country. Hence entrepreneur-ship as an idea did not have to be sold but the course had to go to the next level!

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EnSpace(E): Sir, what according to you is the right time to be an entrepreneur? Students at IIT’s generally have ex-tremely lucrative opportunities in front of them and hence postpone their entre-preneurial ventures.

Kanwal Rekhi(KR): Well, there is no ap-propriate time to become an entrepre-neur. It is something that will happen to you. It is not something that is to be forced; it is something that occurs and changes your way of thinking and pos-sibly your life. Statistically speaking, 27 to 37 is generally considered to be the golden age in a person’s life to become an entrepreneur, but of course there have been many exceptions.

E: As IITians, don’t you feel that we should be able to come up with en-terprises that are more related to technology?

KR: In fact, on the contrary, I would pledge the students to diversify. Entrepreneurship is not just about what you are supposed to be good at, it is about doing new things in various ways. Coming up with a great idea is one thing, but selling it, marketing it are completely different challenges and sometimes they prove to be much more difficult than generating the idea itself. Entrepreneurship is beyond what people are expected to do, it is about what one likes to do. So I would say that yes IITians would be expected to come up with enterprises related to some

technical innovation, but they should not be looked upon as just that and it is not at all wrong if they diversify into other streams.

Statistically speaking, 27 to 37 is generally considered to be he golden age in a person’s life to become an entrepreneur, but of course there have been many exceptions.

E: Many engineers go on to pursue MBA’s from good B-Schools and end up with high paying jobs in multinational

forms. Do you feel they are utilising their potential to the fullest?

KR: You see, MBA will make you all great managers of businesses. You will be very efficient at executing them. MBA’s don’t create wealth or businesses or employment, Entrepreneurs do that. Sure you need people to manage the show, but the creators are the ones who make the change. Entrepreneurship may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but if you are inquisitive and wish to make a change or do something on your own in this world , then I feel one must stretch beyond the bounds of an MBA.

Kanwal Rekhi is one of the most respected entrepreneurs in the world. He was the co-founder and CEO of Excelan, a company that manufactured smart Ethernet Cards and is also accredited for the commercial growth of the popular internet protocol TCP/IP. He was named Entrepreneur of the Year in 1987 by the Arthur-Young/Venture magazine. This extremely prolific personality is also the prime benefactor of a foundation in India that identifies

talented students without funds, and provides them with college tuition and living expenses.

Innovation that Created a RevolutionIn conversation with Kanwal Rekhi

By Aditya Kulkarni, Third Year Undergraduate

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Dharampal Gulati

It is a true story of absolute rags to riches, from a tonga driver to the Rs. 500 crore MDH brand! He is one of the few entrepreneurs who went against con-ventional advertising wisdom and has now become the face of MDH. MDH stands for “Mahashian Di Hatti” and the “Mahashian” is what Gulati is popularly known as. His journey begins in pre-partition Pakistan, where he tried his luck in various businesses but failed to succeed. Gulati was a fifth grade dropout from school and post partition, moved to Delhi where he operated a tonga for a living. It was not quite long before he figured out that this was not his calling and switched tracks to his ancestral business of manufacturing and selling spices. He started from a small shop. His recipe for success lies in success-ful branding and advertising his prod-ucts in media, right from its incep-tion. During the nascent stages of his business, he had issued ads in regional newspapers. His conviction was that for people to know his brand, he must sell it well. He has not hired any advertising agency and believes in running a tight ship. Nowadays, MDH concentrates significantly on TV ads with its founder featuring in each of its ads. Today, the brand MDH is inextricably linked with Dharampal Gulati as the brand ambas-sador and founder of the company. He is currently 86 years old and is often seen on our TV screens.

Richard Branson

Sir Richard Charles Nicholas Branson is an English business magnate,best known for his Virgin Group of over 400 com-panies. In school, he set up a magazine called Student when he was 16.

In 1970 he founded Virgin as a mail order record retailer, and shortly after-wards opened a record shop in Oxford Street, London. In 1972 he built a re-cording studio in Oxfordshire where the first Virgin artist, Mike Oldfield, re-corded ‘Tubular Bells’.In 1977 he signed the Sex Pistols and then went on to sign many household names from Culture Club to the Rolling Stones, helping to make Virgin Music one of the top six record companies in the world. Virgin grew rapidly during the 1980s—as he set up Virgin Atlantic Airways and ex-panded the Virgin Records music label.Richard Branson is the 5th richest person in the United Kingdom and 254th in the world according to Forbes’ 2011 list of billionaires, with an estimated net worth of approximately £2.58 billion. With around 200 companies in over 30 countries, the Virgin Group has now expanded into leisure, travel, tourism, mobile, broadband, TV, radio, music festivals, finance and health.In February 2007, he announced the Virgin Earth Challenge - a $25 million prize to en-courage a viable technology which will result in the net removal of anthropo-genic, atmospheric greenhouse gases.

Bernie Ecclestone

Bernie Ecclestone is president and CEO of Formula One Management and Formula One Administration and through his part-ownership of Alpha Prema, is also the ex-majority owner of Queens Park Rangers Football Club. He is believed to have a personal fortune of £2bn and most commonly addressed in tabloid journalism as “F1 Supremo”. This son of a fisherman is one of the biggest names in international sport. He owns Formula One Holdings, the biggest and most influential company in motor racing, and also has a long-running con-tract with the sport’s governing body, FIA, to sell television rights. This, gives him a huge standing and commands a great deal of respect from both sports-men and businessmen the world over.

His early involvement in the sport was as a competitor in F1. After his acci-dent, Ecclestone temporarily left racing to make a number of eventually lucra-tive investments in real estate and loan financing and to manage the Weekend Car Auctions firm. He returned to racing in 1957 as manager of driver Stuart Lewis-Evans, and purchased the assets of the F1Connaught team. In 1972 he bought the Brabham team, which he ran for fifteen years.

Under the terms of the Concorde Agreement he and his companies also manage the administration, setup and lo-gistics of each Formula One Grand Prix.

Know Thy EntrepreneurBy Yash Tambawala and Suryansh Shrivastava, Second Year Undergraduates

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EditorAditya Kulkarni

DesignPriyanka Jain, Raivent Nahar

Execution PanelSiddharth Desai, Yash Tambawala, Suryansh Shrivastav, Kunal Mehta, Rakshit Shetty, Dhananjay Sethi, Sanditi Khandelwal, R Navien, Achyuthan JR, Anand Bakode, Nimish Khandelwal

www.ecell.in