In my last post I wrote a small story about myself. There I mentioned about how I felt the need of having someone from Cognizant to available to talk and get some guidance and unfortunately could not get it.
In this post, I would like to tell one more short story of me and few of my friends when we were in college.
During our college days, I think in 2nd year of our engineering we had formed a group of 6 friends. All of us used to discuss on various topics every now and then and one of the topics, favorite of ours, was discussing about our future. What kind of job we would get, what kind of work we would do and what is in store for all of us. Pretty interesting topics !
During those days of college life, we all (well most of us) had a dream of having our own company. Being an entrepreneur and making it big in life. Well, great dreams we had. Entrepreneurship was one of the common topic that we used to discuss. Although getting job in final year through campus was a priority, the dream was still in-tact for us that one day we will become entrepreneurs.
So the days passed by, eventually all of us got placed through reputed companies during campus interviews and our discussions kept ongoing. We kept on discussing lot of ideas and kept on building dreams. We all had grand visions and some very nice plans of co-working together in building businesses.
Fast forward present, all of us are now grown up corporate work-horses. Bigger positions, fatter salaries and busier life is now the mantra for most of us. But unfortunately the fact is, none of us are entrepreneurs !
So, where did it all go wrong ? We all were supposedly bright and talented students, academically doing well, had passion for technology and few grand dreams.
Why could not we achieve our dreams of being entrepreneurs. Who could have and probably should have helped us in realizing our dreams. Who should have spotted the talent in us to motivate us / mentor us / guide us to the destination. May be .. just may be, one of us could have been the (earlier shall I say) Zukerberg !
I wrote an article about an year ago about lack of support for entrepreneurship and innovation in our education system, where I mentioned a general lack of enthusiasm of trying out something else when its ‘easy’ to get a job in India, especially if you are student of a decent college.
Further to what I wrote in my article, few facts I gathered in last year or so,
Institutes will support innovation and entrepreneurship only if its part of their curriculum. Otherwise not !
Corporate organizations will support student innovation only if they see eventual benefit to their companies
Government is helpful, but process is very tedious
Angel investors, VC funding is available but reaching out is not yet easy in India
The students, who want to be entrepreneurs, forget all about it once they get the job !
We are not taught to make mistakes and learn from them, we are taught to avoid it !
Someone is yet to write and publish “Idiot’s guide for being an entrepreneur in India”.
I am sure me or my 6 friends are not the only one’s whose dream probably has not yet been fulfilled. There are thousands of guys like whose dream started when they were in university college but could never fulfill them as of now due to some or other reason.
If you ask the question “What do you want to do in your future, a job or your own business ?” to an average 1st year engineering student. We have observed that 8 –9 out of 10 students (80 – 90%) eventually say they want to do their own business some day. The same number drops to 3-4 students (30 – 40%) by the time they come to their final year of education.
Unfortunately less than 5% of the people actually realize their dream. Less than 0.2% sustain in long term !
We do have a problem at our hands ! How serious, not too sure, but worth considering, definitely !
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