By Sanjeev Jha
Founder-Partner, InvYramid
Scene 1: Date: September 17, 2014. Place: Board-room of one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies. Location: Mumbai. Participants: CEO, COO and me. Agenda: Strategies to devise new and innovative business models, to impact people at the bottom of the pyramid in Indi.a
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Scene 2: Date: September 17, 2008. Place: Chainpur, my native village in Bihar. Participants: Me, a client of my organization. Event: Interviewing a 75-year-old patient who had undergone a pacemaker implant.
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Scene 3: Date: September 17, 1994. Place: Chainpur. Event: I stepped out of my village for the first time in my life to fulfill my professional goals.
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I do not believe in numerology, but it is strange that the dates coincided just so in my life. My first leap of entrepreneurship was a business-research services venture in 2009, named Priority Research, which focused on simplifying business decision-making for our global business partners, through actionable intelligence built through on -ground insights. The intent was, and continues to be, to leverage the deep learning of human behaviour to understand unmet needs of potential customers and other stake-holders in the ecosystem.
The second leap was more from an itch to address an agonizing experience I went through personally, like many more working professionals. Therefore, I founded 30rupees.com at the end of 2011, a grocery-home-delivery service, intent on serving my society and creating employment for a semi-skilled workforce (20 of them from my native place). One of the biggest learnings in an environment of scarcity was to empower and train people and optimize/automate resources, to be more productive. To do more, with less!
I talk about my previous start-ups because InvYramid is like a coming together of all those learnings, as we leverage our understanding of buyer behaviour and our experience in on-ground validation, to make innovation faster and cheaper for our partners, and serve as a business accelerator.
I was recently invited as a panelist for a panel discussion at the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, at an event to kick off their first healthcare cohort. As I started speaking, and looked at the key entrepreneurs who were part of the cohort, waiting to be groomed by the incubation team including me, it reminded me of the first step I had taken in the entrepreneurship journey. All these people were in their mid-twenties, brimming with energy and enthusiasm.
One of them asked me, “Sir, how do you know that you are on the right path, and that you should continue?” I answered, “When every morning you wake up and feel happy and energetic, when your health supports you to work harder, when you are able to answer your folks on every question about your venture and your success... know that you are on the right path.”
My eyes filled with tears, remembering how I never had anyone to tell me these things in the first place... and had to learn the hardest way. But, as the saying goes, “a journey is as good or bad as your co-travellers are”. In my case, I am blessed to have my partners and colleagues.
Feedback: sanjeev_jha@invyramid.com
