Job well done Mahesh!

Being a self funded technology startup, we have actually experienced a lot of these points first hand.

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Mayank
CoFounder – ApnaBill.com

i agree with the iit bit… try hiring a iitian for a startup n see his demands…

i have spoken to a lot of ppl about his talk n most of them loved it… some i am sure would be implementing it in the coming weeks…

I would like to disagree with Mahesh here. This seems to be becoming a fashionable thing to say lately. I don’t particularly like generalizations and this argument suffers from one.

It relies on the premise that iitians are in general complacent and do not feel the need to “prove themselves”. That may be true for a small minority but my experience with most of them has been otherwise. The iitians do have things to prove and that too, at a much bigger scale. I am an iitian and I do not think getting a degree from that college was a major achievement of my life. It was simply cracking an exam. We found ourselves in a position where the whole country had great expectations from us and not living up to them would actually be a disgrace.

You see, we iitians are “expected” to be the best. Mediocrity is simply not acceptable. Not to us. And more importantly, not to anyone else. So we strive hard to prove ourselves yet again, and this time to the whole world.

Go to the IITs and talk to the students. There is hunger for success which infects everyone at the campus. They won’t be happy with getting a PhD from IISc. They won’t apply to IIMs anymore because IIMs are not good enough for them! Instead they want to go to the best universities in the world for research, build the best products, get the best jobs -> because of their skills and talent and not because of their degrees. Just to prove that getting into IIT was not a fluke accident.

Because of the sheer competition in the batch, this hunger to prove themselves on the world scale is more prevalent in iits than small colleges. While an average guy from an average college may be happy getting a job in Infosys and the likes, the simple fact that these companies hire in masses makes them unacceptable to an average iitian. I remember we used to call them “bher-bakri company” :-)

I am not trying to belittle the other colleges but just trying to remind the pitfalls of generalizations like this. Lets find the best candidates, irrespective of their degrees. As Guy Kawasaki says in his hiring tips: “Ignore the irrelevant.”

Agree with everything else. Point 4 and 5 are really interesting original thoughts. :-)

cheers
nilesh

Which seed fund does he manage, and some success stories on investments please. Not the stock market ones, the real ground up ones.

Mahesh is confused in his own recursion. The man seems to have lost something quite badly and it smells like money to me :). Often the losers emit tautological statements which have a profound impact on people, though momentarily before they recover and realize that they just heard some sound.

The guy is misleading folks in his state of confusion.