Pranav Bhasin
...graduated from NSIT in 2000, joining Trilogy in its first 20 member team. At Trilogy, he got the chance to head various projects, but eventually decided that entrepreneurship was the field for him. In 2007, he started Lifeblob, a social timeline service.

1.What do you think are the qualities of a successful entrepreneur, and do you consider an .MBA degree is necessary for becoming a leading entrepreneur?
Don’t think of an MBA as a qualification. I believe doing an MBA makes you more risk averse. It induces fear, makes it harder to think out of the box. One of the things about successful entrepreneurs is that they don’t know what’s on the other side. You have a vision, a big idea, you have a team that’s passionate about it, and you’ll just go out and do it. If you do an MBA, you go into the depths of various subjects, that curbs your ability to think out of the box. You think “I know what’s going to be the outcome, so why even bother trying?”. Two qualities which I believe an entrepreneur requires are:
Ability to take a risk. There is no substitute for it.
Ability to execute fast. You need to listen to people, discuss ideas with them, but don’t get too attached to those ideas. Feel free to change or drop ideas if the need arises.

2. What embarked your interest towards starting up your own venture?
At Trilogy, the last project that I worked on was in Interactive Marketing. In traditional media, like Television/Radio, you just put out your ad, you don’t know how well it’s received, how many people see it. On the web, it’s possible to receive feedback. You know how many people click on your ad, what their profile was. This is interactive marketing. In order to market effectively, knowing about the environment we need to cater to is crucial. At that time, facebook, orkut etc were not really that famous. We felt that we can pick up real events in a persons life, and build a network around it, using these events. The real people, and the real instances in which they interacted, they would become a really powerful way of building this social graph, and an accurate way too, so we’ll know exactly who your friends are, and how much you interacted with them. We can build a very effective Interactive Marketing system on top of this.

3. What were the problems you faced in this direction?
The problems are fairly standard, everybody faces them :
Building the Team - This is the hardest part. Most businesses in US are started by people straight out of college. College is one place where you have a high concentration of a lot of smart people in a small area, who interact very frequently, so there is a very high likelihood of finding people who have the same risk taking ability as you. The team is the hardest and most important thing to build. You have to sit together no matter what the idea is.
) Building the Prototype – One of the mistakes people make is that they want to make the perfect thing, but there is no perfect thing in this world. You lose a lot of time trying to build the perfect thing. You should have frequent iterations.

4. Please describe a typical day at work.
This is the hardest thing to define, because everyday is different! We have a team of four, and we’re on 24 hours a day. We all have roles and responsibilities defined. I and one more person are responsible for marketing; the other two are responsible for developing the technology. We have plans in place for the next 30 days where everyone knows what they are supposed to do; in a start up you can’t hope to get more visibility than that!

5. Opportunities you would recommend students to explore while at N.S.I.T.?
Third year is a good time to do something in parallel with studies. In 1998, while in college, we started a portal called indiasmostwanted.com (myself and two others). We didn’t understand the business side at all, but we felt it’s really cool to build a portal.

6. Some points a budding entrepreneur should consider in this phase of global recession.
It’s best to try to start in college, as I’ve already mentioned, it’s easiest to build a team from there. Also, recession is nothing to be scared about, it’s actually better for start ups.
Many successful start-ups started in recession, even Google did. A lot of big companies fail because of their burn rate, because they can’t sustain it. You know that if you approach any investor at this time, they’ll need a lot more convincing, so that forces you to make a much stronger business plan. Be prepared to argue more, be more resilient, more patient.

7. What is your message to the young and creative students in campus?
Let’s start producing young entrepreneurs!