Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish - Review, Problems and More...

Stay Hungry Stay Foolish:

Rashmi Bansal with her motley compilation of 25 write-ups on as many Indian entrepreneurs. Rashmi apparently, drew inspiration for her book from Steve Job's famous Standford University Speech. However, except the title of the book, there is no other similarity between the two.

Review:                                  

This book tells the stories of entrepreneurial ambitions of 25 IIM-A alumni and how they realized their dreams even as the hard times threatened to do them in.

The author deserves credit for having smartly cherry-picked the 25-profiles. This eclectic mix comprises of those who always knew they had a penchant for entrepreneurship and those whose first choice was not entrepreneurship but as and when opportunities came knocking, they grabbed them with both hands.

The book brims with stories of people who laughed in the face of temptations and gave up their plum jobs only to follow their heart. Several of these entrepreneurs took 'kiss-of-death' decisions sometimes, more than once in their lives to achieve their true calling. So far, so good.

Basically, the books tell us that there is a way to become successful and derive personal satisfaction from your work. Just bring the same kind of energy and passion to your existing job that you see entrepreneurs featured in the book exhibits in their work. These entrepreneurs belong to diverse industries like IT, Retail, Finance, Consulting, Agriculture etc and IIM-A batch ranging from the class of 1970 to class of 2004 and started out at different stages in their careers. The only thing they have common is their ability to dream big and pursue their dreams.

We get the inside view of how a business like Edelweiss Capital or Mphasis was born and built and in the process, we gain an understanding of some of the hardships, experiences, challenges, faced by an entrepreneur. Be it the story of Vinayak Chaterjee's Feedback Ventures morphing from a market research company to India's leading infrastructure advisory and engineering firm or Deep Kalra's story of building India's leading Travel Portal MakeMyTrip.com, each of the stories are equally unique and prove there is no consistent formula or strategy for success. So while small is beautiful without scaling the actual vision cannot be realized and while pays to ride a wave in an upturn, belief in one's ideas is as important to see through the trying times. And yet there are some common threads. The entrepreneur evaluate "Is the business is inherently scalable? Is the market opportunity large enough?" They "..are smart people, they manage the risk-reward equation very well" they do not give up. They build teams that can sustain the business.

Written in a conversational format, the author, Rashmi Bansal an IIM-A alumnus herself thinks aloud before having a conversation with the entrepreneur. We then get to hear about the vision, struggle, team building, success story and advice for young entrepreneurs in the very own words of the entrepreneurs. So it's no surprise that the book is filled with gems.

Problem/Missing Points in the Book:

Problem with this book is not the stories, rather it is the treatment of these stories. Some of the Stories have been shoehorned into the book as if the author wanted to capture 25 profiles, one way or the other, e.g., Story of Chender Baljee(owner of Royal Orchid Hotels) gets over in less than four-and-a-half pages leaving a lot to be desired.

I was really looking forward to the nitty-gritty of the struggles these entrepreneurs had to go through. But the author had contrary views she decided to wrap it all up in frivolous one-liners such as "Cafeteria mein baithe the...unhone bola 50 lakh invest kar denge".