From Poverty to Billionaire: How My Journey Redefined Success and Failure for Entrepreneurs

As a child, I experienced firsthand the severe effects of poverty and illiteracy, especially upon women and children. My parents taught me the importance of education and that it was the key to improving an individual's life. Very early on, it made me understand that success is not simply doled out but must be earned through hard work, persistence, educational commitment, and even a little good luck and timing. I worked for Microsoft until 1996, until I had a different angle to view life. I wanted to be a billionaire and hence started off with a company—Infospace with my own funding. The company was listed among the most successful companies, and indeed I became a billionaire.

Understanding Success and Failure

Sometimes we never see what failure is and often fail to recognize it. Before defining failure, we need to discuss what success is. Success is not about how much money we have in the bank, but it's about how many people's lives we have impacted through it. Success is experienced when we do things that have never been done before. If we have to make things work, if we have to impact hundreds and millions of people, we have to do things differently. If we look at the problem as an infrastructural problem, we cannot impact it because it requires a lot of effort. When we convert this problem into a knowledge problem, we experience a lot of changes, thereby starting to impact the environment from a positive perspective.

Hence, it becomes important to realize what failure and success mean to a person and what they do with it. It is the duty of every entrepreneur to go through this process of growth in order to fulfill their dreams.

The Essence of Entrepreneurship

An entrepreneur is not merely a person who starts a company but someone who actually solves a problem. It's all about execution and a state of mind. A person who sees a problem is a human being, a person who finds a solution is visionary, and the person who goes out and does something about it is an entrepreneur. I am really happy to see the number of entrepreneurs in India, not only because of their ideas but also because of the passion with which their ideas are put across.

The only problem I noticed is that people here in India are constantly "reinventing the wheel." They keep repeating the mistakes their older generation made. We need to create an ecosystem where successful people help startups move their companies forward. The reason being, nobody in history has ever succeeded without the help of society. It is not only the successful people's responsibility but also their obligation to give back to society. Part of their obligation is helping as many entrepreneurs as they can.

Ways to Support Entrepreneurs

There are two ways we can do this. One way is to do it on a scalable basis, and the other is to do it on a local basis. If we are planning it on a local scale, entrepreneurs need each other to help resolve issues, and the successful ones need to provide mentorship to the growing entrepreneurs.