Abhishek Rungta

Yesterday, I was attending an interactive session with Mr. Vinod Dham (Yes! the same guy who invented Pentium chip and Flash memory).

It started with a nice inspiring story – How Vinod accidentally stumbled into engineering and ended up building the fastest processor in his time. He shared with us – How he got into his second career as a management expert and further diversified into venture capital business, which needs a totally different skill set and mind frame compared to a pro engineer.

During the entire informal discussion he held with various TiE – Kolkata members and IIM – Kolkata students, he shared his insights about the IT industry and role / challenges India seem to play in this new evolving eco-system.

He quoted a businessman whom he met during his visit to Chennai few years back:

“Revenue is Vanity, Profit is Sanity, Cash-in-pocket is Reality”

The emphasis was on building profitable business, keeping the fundamentals in mind and making sure that the business should generate positive cash flow and profits to stay in business. Many companies forget this fundamental law in the blind run to “make it big”.

Business starts sinking when-
– market valuation takes a priority over the value that you are adding to the consumers
– turnover starts taking a priority over profitability
– projection/paperwork starts taking priority over cash-in-hand

It reminded me the most influencial interactive session I had with Mr. Ajai Chowdhury, Co-Founder of HCL Infosystems (again in a TiE event) where he emphasized on the importance of being street-smart and how cash flow defines the destiny of the business more than anything else.

His tip, always help me keep things in check. I hope it does the same for the aspirants of the renewed dotcom craze!

Take care.