Discovering the ABC's of entrepreneurship - Guharajan sivakumar
Manage episode 371157510 series 3493194
We are back everyone. We hope you enjoyed the interviews so far on season 2 of the EITF project. This is our final episode for season 2 part 1, and we have a very special guest on the show. We have Guharajan Sivakumar, the founder and CTO of Aprecomm, an exciting start up based out of India, doing incredible work with building intelligence solutions into routers, to make WiFi better! Before we dive deeper into Aprecomm, we will introduce Guhan to you.Guhan started his career as a junior developer at Ecosmos technology Mysore in November of 2002. Beyond that though, he talks about how he joined Mysore university in order to learn about drivers and driver code, but since it was such a new topic at the time, he had to hit the books. Eventually, what he learned was knowledge that he could share with his professor from the university. Guhan joined Altosys software technologies in 2003 as the team lead for real time embedded solutions.Guhan says in his interview, that he has always been passionate about Knowledge transfer, and so while he pursued his career in the corporate world, he was always looking for small challenges to solve on his own. To this end, he started a company, that sold science kits to kids in school, so they could learn the subject in a demonstrative way, rather than in a theoretical manner. An amazing and creative idea, which helped a lot of kids learn the subject in an easy way.Guhan eventually joined Atheros (now Qualcomm) as the lead engineer working on the earliest versions of Wi-Fi technology, before he founded Aprecomm.We noticed in Guhans interview, that throughout his career, he has always been curious, to look beyond his everyday job, and experiment with new ideas. He talks about some of the ideas he has had, and still has! Excellent ones! He also talks about what it takes to eventually build a company from ground up, the realities of business, valuation, funding, startups, etc. Selfishly speaking, We learned a lot about entrepreneurship from this interview, and Guhan gave us a lot of ideas for EITF!An inspiring one, that will give every budding entrepreneur a sudden surge of energy.With this last one for part 1 of season 2, Karthik, Charu and Nandini sign off. To get more updates, follow us on our social media platforms, and read our latest blogs at www.eitf project.blogspot.com.Follow us on our social media platforms: https://linktr.ee/eitfproject?utm_source=linktree_profile_share<sid=d33c3044-d6c1-415b-9696-28d1eb5fa554
Chapters
1. episode 6 trailer (00:00:00)
2. Introducing Guharajan Sivakumar (00:02:47)
3. What was the first accomplishment and first failure you had at work? What lessons did you learn from both? (00:05:25)
4. What did you have to unlearn during the course of your career? (00:16:41)
5. What did you learn from your previous startup failures, that has helped you build Aprecomm's business plan? (00:19:52)
6. What factor drives your motivation to start a new business? Are you always starting with what sets your business apart? (00:25:15)
7. Do you think about scale and perform risk analysis before you start a business or during? (00:26:57)
8. How important do you think, market research is? (00:28:39)
9. How do you know when to pivot? (00:31:38)
10. Smaller comapnies are usually not ready to take up early opportunities. What is one such opportunity that came your way that you couldnt handle in your early stages, and how can have you grown to handle such impromptu opportunities? (00:33:46)
11. How has decision making play a role in your life as a founder? (00:39:10)
12. What factors should small companies consider before they approach investors for funding? (00:41:19)
13. What is your take on valuation? (00:44:17)
14. Guhan's take on ChatGPT (00:45:51)
15. Guhan's definition of success! (00:49:04)
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