An exciting read forwarded to me by my team inspired the blog for today.
Tauseef Shahidi goes into depth about how India’s unicorn founders are very similar to each other. He profiles India’s 100+ unicorns since 2005 (50 since 2011), discovering interesting facts. For example, 1 out of 5 unicorn founders did not graduate from an elite Indian college, but 2 out of 5 unicorn founders have a bachelor’s in technology.
An interesting statistic that caught my attention was 28 unicorn founders were less than 30 years old when they began their startup journey. They took an outsized risk with the careers, but the decision paid off handsomely for them.
That is the message that the Indian parents and our startup ecosystem should impart to student creators like Mask Mike maker Kevin Jacobs or astrophotography enthusiast Prathamesh Jaju. These young creators have potential, but that promise could get lost in the pursuit of institutionally taught knowledge that cannot keep up with a rapidly changing business scenario.
Therefore, it makes immense sense for youngsters to express their entrepreneurial creativity as early as their career cycle. Besides, the early risk can get covered in a working lifespan of 50-60 years (probably longer as we all age).
As Bezos said in his 2018 interview to Mathias Döpfner:
“Life is full of different risks. So I think that when you think about the things that you will regret when you’re 80, they are almost always the things that you did not do; they are acts of omission. Very rarely are you gonna regret something that you did and it failed and didn’t work or whatever….”
Jeff Bezos
