Enough about Passion and Changing the World: That is Not The Entrepreneur's Job

The old joke goes like this.

Question: What do you call a very polite, friendly, kind, good looking monster?
Answer: A failure.

Why is this joke (mildly) funny? Well, it's because it plays on our sense of values and how it may conflict with the specific role occupied by an individual. Yes, we like polite, friendly, kind, and good looking creatures.

But the role of a monster is to be none of these ... and so, defined by its specific role, such a monster would be a failure.

The same could be said for entrepreneurs.

An entrepreneur's job is to build lasting companies that makes lot of money. Period

• An entrepreneur's job is not to change the world.
• An entrepreneur's job is not to show passion for a product.
• An entrepreneur's job is not to do what he or she loves.

An entrepreneur's job is to build lasting companies that make lots of money. Period.

Sure there is nothing wrong with changing the world, or showing passion for a product, or doing what he or she loves. But at the end of the day, if that person has not built a lasting company that makes lots of money, he or she has failed as an entrepreneur.

Take sports. The job of a competitive swimmer is to swim faster than anyone else. Sure it's great if the swimmer feels passionate about the sport, but no matter how passionate one feels about it, if he or she cannot swim faster than the person in the other lanes, that swimmer has failed. The swimmer may be a very fine person, but as a competitive swimmer, the person has lost.

Entrepreneurship is a sport.

It is a competition.

The rules are very clear.

And that is what makes it so exciting ... It does not matter if you are black or white or brown or tall or short or fat. If you create a company that spews out massive profits year after year, you have won the competition. You have earned the right to call yourself an entrepreneur.

If you don't ... well you can be a good father, a poetic soul, a dreamer, a passionate person ... but you will not have won the entrepreneurship game. Like the monster, you would have failed.

There is nothing wrong with failing at entrepreneurship, just as there is nothing wrong with failing at competitive swimming, or anything else.

But the sooner an entrepreneur and young budding CEOs realise that there really is only one metric that counts in this game, the sooner we will get beyond the recent Web 2.0 silliness and thereby give birth to a revitalised start up environment where some truly amazing, long lasting companies will be created.

What Entrepreneurs Can Learn from Indian Street Delivery Workers

We are beginning to see a lot of bankruptcies and firings at Internet startups. This is obviously very sad.


However, almost all online businesses and startups which launched in the past 2 years deserve to fail.


Why? Because their only revenue model is VC funding, and their only long term strategy is to get bought out or go public before it runs out of money. Sadly enough this idiotic formula has proven successful during economic boom times, and as a result it has brainwashed a whole generation of so-called "entrepreneurs" who unfortunately can put up a website but could not run a real business if their life depended on it.


What type of real business do I mean? Take the dabbawalas, for example, of Mumbai ... street delivery workers. As Sagar Gubbi writes: "Take a stroll on one of Mumbai’s busy streets and you are likely to meet men clad in white attire and Gandhi topis (caps), scurrying past with cartloads of lunch boxes. They are Dabbawalas of Mumbai, well known for their six sigma-rated service quality. A dabbawala (a Hindi word that translates into ‘a person with a box’) is someone who delivers home-cooked lunch to office-goers and businessmen in Mumbai, at a nominal monthly fee.


A dabbawala’s service might involve only delivering cooked food from the client’s home or both cooking and delivering the food, based on the client’s preference. Sounds simple, eh? What’s stunning is the fact that dabbawalas deliver nearly 200,000 dabbas (lunch boxes) everyday, with six sigma quality, which means that there is only one mistake in every 6,000,000 deliveries!


The dabbawalas have existed for more than a century and have become an essential part of Mumbai’s social fabric. They travel either by foot or bicycles or suburban trains and barely use any technology. Their service is uninterrupted, even during Mumbai’s dreaded monsoon rains.


There are an estimated 5000 dabbawalas in Mumbai, most of whom are illiterates and come from very poor backgrounds. They are all shareholders of Nutan Mumbai Tiffin Box Supply Trust which has a turnover of nearly 450 million rupees (approximately $11.25 million) per annum. Dabbawalas have never gone on strike and four years ago, they allotted just 20 minutes to Prince Charles to meet them so that their customers are not kept waiting.


Their excellent teamwork and time management system has been featured as a case study by Harvard Business Review and they have presented their business model to various corporate houses such as Tata, Coca Cola, Daimler Chrysler and Reliance Industries. Riding on this success, the Dabbawalas are now planning to start a Supply Chain Consulting business.


The dabbawala story is an inspiring success story and demonstrates that simple ideas, when executed with discipline and dedication, can bring amazing results at the base of the pyramid."


The dabbawalas are profitable, have never taken external funding, provide incredible value to their customers, and they make only 1 mistakefor every 6,000,000 deliveries. How much better the world would be if every web 2.0 "company" could do the same?