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In Entrepreneur Journeys, Volume One, serial entrepreneur and Forbes columnist Sramana Mitra offers you a seat at the table with an eclectic group of successful entrepreneurs and delivers an intimate look at how to build a thriving business.
As one entrepreneur speaks with another, readers gain access to case studies—conversations really—exploring the alleys of entrepreneurship in a way that only an experienced strategist like Mitra can probe and extract.Her synthesis of key learnings and incisive analysis add great depth to discussions on bootstrapping, disruptive business models, and addressing unmet market needs.
Entrepreneur Journeys is accessible through its story-telling narrative, and at the same time academic in its depth of insight.This is a book that is sure to please anyone interested in building a new business, but is essential reading for every technology entrepreneur.
“Inspiration awaits readers in this volume of interviews with entrepreneurs.[Entrepreneur Journeys] will provide great insight into the questions and answers behind a start-up business.It succeeds in sharing the enthusiasm and sense of adventure of these technological pioneers.”
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Sramana Mitra is a technology entrepreneur and strategy consultant in Silicon Valley. She has founded three companies, writes a weekly column for Forbes and the business blog Sramana Mitra on Strategy. She has a master's degree in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT.
Online Roundtables for Entrepreneurs: Sramana Mitra offers a series of free online roundtables to mentor and help entrepreneurs further develop their business ideas. In these roundtables, she also addresses financing strategy for each business.
During each 60-minute online session, entrepreneurs are invited to pitch Sramana their ideas in a three-minute presentation. She reviews the material in real time and provides feedback on each pitch, as well as addresses specific questions from the entrepreneur. Afterward, she takes questions from other participants. Each session is open to 1,000 people but only the first five to sign up have the opportunity to pitch Sramana and discuss their business in an interactive mode.
You can find more information about these webinars, recordings of past roundtables and registration links to upcoming sessions on the Roundtables page of her blog, "Sramana Mitra On Strategy".
"Sramana has gifted us with the first hand stories of industry legends who have succeeded with a combination of fierce resolve, self-reliance, and a willingness to buck conventional wisdom. The next generation of entrepreneurs has an invaluable reference guide on how their predecessors have succeeded." - Richard Rommel, Senior Vice President, Emerging Business, Best Buy
"Entrepreneurship is not a career. It is a way of life. And what better way to learn about it than to listen to people who have done it, successfully, and to learn about their lives in that fast lane? In a carefully structured set of interviews, Sramana Mitra gives the readers an opportunity to discover their paths, their successes, their setbacks sometimes, and the joys of meeting the immense challenges that have been theirs in a dizzying world where technical competence and management skills have allowed them to leave a deep and lasting mark." - Professor Elisabeth Paté-Cornell, Chair, Department of Management Science and Engineering, Stanford University
"Sramana Mitra is herself a symbol of everything that is great about America: a geek, an entrepreneur, an immigrant, a leader. In "Entrepreneur Journeys" she has taken on the task of modeling how entrepreneurs transform economies into resilient, growing systems that provide a future for our children." - Stewart Alsop
Entrepreneurship is not a career. It is a way of life.
For me, this journey began as a graduate student at MIT in 1994. The world watched Netscape go public a year later, and the Internet swept over us like a virus. As I wrote my Masters thesis, I also wrote my first business plan. We were, as a generation, shaping the Internet during those early years, and, my degree in hand, I was ready to jump into the unknown – from then on really, I have been jumping into unknowns at every turn.
Fortunately I’ve had great mentors – people who took an interest in my destiny, stopped along the way, and taught me a thing or two.
In turn, I have tried to stop along the way to pass on certain nuggets of my own learning. In the summer of 2006, as the technology industry resurfaced from the nuclear winter that followed the dotcom meltdown, I was invited to speak at a startup workshop. My session was supposed to focus on Positioning. At a Silicon Valley law firm, some sixty entrepreneurs packed a conference room to listen to me. I asked each to pitch his business idea in one minute, following which I gave feedback for another minute or two. My 90-minute rapid-fire session, alas, was not enough to accommodate all the pitches. In the lobby, even as we spilled onto the front steps, I tried to respond to some more, but it was hardly satisfactory. In fact, it has always frustrated me to realize that I did not have enough time in my day to stop for each entrepreneur who asked for guidance. Friends – seasoned entrepreneurs – have expressed the same frustration.
“Entrepreneur Journeys” is my attempt to capture that tribal knowledge accumulated in the private lives of great entrepreneurs – and give it shape, form, color, and a broad reach.
Imagine.
As you curl up in bed with this book of short stories, you are effectively transported across the table from each of the entrepreneurs, listening to their stories. You’ll learn, as I have learned, from their real-time experiences. All those dinners, lunches, coffees, teas, and glasses of wine from which so many stories have flowed – I invite you to experience them with me. Seated in the living room with Sridhar Vembu; lounging at Coupa Café in Palo Alto with Philippe Courtot; on the patio of Woodside Bakery, perhaps, your lunch companion is Russ Fradin.
Listen to their stories. Watch how they formulate ideas, navigate turbulent waters, create strategies, change directions, and make choices.
Listen. Learn. Empathize. Agree. Disagree. Develop your own point of view.
Most of all, I hope you find inspiration in these conversations – enough to help you become great entrepreneurs yourselves. For in entrepreneurship, I believe, lie solutions to many of the problems facing our modern world.
Sramana Mitra is a technology entrepreneur and strategy consultant in Silicon Valley. She has founded three companies and writes a business blog, Sramana Mitra on Strategy at www.sramanamitra.com and is the founder of One Million by One Million, a global initiative to help a million entrepreneurs reach a million dollars in revenue. [http://1mby1m.com]
Sramana has a master's degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has authored five books: Entrepreneur Journeys (Volume One) and Bootstrapping, Weapon Of Mass Reconstruction (EJ2), Positioning, How To Test, Validate, and Bring Your Idea To Market (EJ3); Innovation, Need Of The Hour (EJ4); and Vision India 2020 (EJ5). From 2008 to 2010, Sramana was a columnist for Forbes.
As part of the One Million by One Million program, Sramana offers online strategy roundtables to entrepreneurs every week. You can listen to recordings and register here: http://sramanamitra.com/entrepreneurship-strategy-roundtables. Each week, up to five entrepreneurs pitch and interact with Sramana, and up to a thousand people can listen. The One Million by One Million program follows the Entrepreneur Journeys methodology.
Enjoyed the book and found it worthwhile. The stories are inspiring and could have a significant influence on a student of entrepreneurship or an aspiring entrepreneur. To paraphrase a trite phrase; "Yes, you can!" The stories are more than inspiration though. The insightful questions and the thoughtful answers give much guidance, and general wisdom. The book occupies a nearly empty niche between lightweight collections of anecdotes and ponderous but often irrelevant academic research. A great opportunity to come close to sitting with masters and learning directly.
Sramana Mitra has become a different kind of voice in the tech and business world with her insightful interviewing style wherein she quickly establishes a deep sense of rapport with her subjects enabling them to confide the worries, passions, fears and inspirations which have driven their entrepreneurial ventures.
Another strength that shines through is Sraman's ability to let us hear the "voice" of the entrepreneurs she has interviewed and written about. With her own depth of personal expertise, she easily could have overwhelmed or dominated the conversations. Yet she shows great stylistic skill in using her own depth of experience (as an M Eng. (EE) and having been a successful tech entrepreneur and consultant) in drawing out and helping her subjects express the insights others would have missed or failed to recognize in the first place.
And if you have a secret love of history and geopolitics, you will enjoy the way she has spiced some of her interviews by drawing out the backgrounds of her interview subjects. A couple of specific examples for me included the interview with Philippe Courtot, or Marcos Galperin or Harish Hande.
THE REAL VALUE in this book however, is the portability of the experiences captured and documented by this inspiring writer. I personally have little core interest in the world of tech entrepreneurship (beyond being a grateful user) but the way Sramana has unveiled the thinking processes of her subjects has helped me reflect on their experiences and "port" their transcendent insights over into my own spheres of business interest.
I'm anticipating more great interviews and insights from Sramana, including how entrepreneurs will shape the development of Web 3....0, and healthcare and education at 'the bottom of the pyramid' (to borrow a phrase from CK Prahalad).
Highly recommend this book to anyone with a great idea but understanding the need to avoid the many landmines hidden along the entrepreneurial path. Also recommend this for managers in companies who want to maintain an entrepreneurial culture as their company grows, or anyone concerned about solutions for global issues.Read more ›
It was refreshing to read interviews with entrepreneurs of "lesser" known, but equally remarkable successes. As the economy forces many to seek new forms of income, I hope they are encouraged by these stories. Thanks to Sramana for giving them a voice!
Many Silicon Valley hi-tech insiders and engineers found companies and sell them for lots of money, only to realize that outside their local circles, they are not well-known, or perhaps their inventions have not caused any lasting changes. A good book can cause more positive change than many technological inventions, a fact that spurs some high-tech entrepreneurs to write, hoping to leave a mark on a broader audience. Ms. Mitra's first book, _Entrepreneur Journeys_, isn't about her life, but about other high tech founders and their experiences. The bursting of the tech bubble caused many good companies to fade away, but many of them still survive and operate with less publicity. Their products continue to be relevant, but the companies are no longer on the front page of any newspapers. Without Ms. Mitra's book, we would probably never hear about the founders she interviews, or their stories (including one enjoyable story of someone who almost stuck it to Microsoft--see Mr. Courtot's story).
Her access to lesser-known but inspirational entrepreneurs gives Ms. Mitra's book a good niche. However, it is obvious that her book should have been more carefully proofread. High tech entrepreneurs are successful because they act quickly and take risks. This passion doesn't always transfer well to writing or publishing books, which requires extensive re-writing and careful diligence. Here, spelling and grammatical mistakes exist throughout the book (e.g., p. 6, Lyndon Johnson is spelled "Linden Johnson"; p. 86, "death knell" is spelled "death nail"). If you can ignore these spelling mistakes, and you are interested in the origins of lesser-known technology companies, you will like _Entrepreneur Journeys_, Vol. 1. Ms. Mitra has positioned this book as the first volume in a set yet to come.... With better proofreading and better organization, subsequent editions should be rewarding to read. Ms. Mitra's first foray into a new area didn't lead to her best work, but with more experience, I wouldn't count her out.Read more ›
Entrepreneur's Journey goes into the depths of each founder's life, their motivation, continued driving forces and describes in great details their unique technical, business and marketing challenges. When I started reading the book I mentally compared it to the "Founders at Work" in which entrepreneurs are similarly interviewed. One will see however that the author of this book successfully poses very probing questions - that clearly displays a knowledge of technology and business and therefore helps engage the reader very actively, coercing them into analyzing the pros and cons of each decisions during the journey. It was a great read for my analytical mind that refuses to easily accept a decision choice without being explained the complex personal and marketing choices that went into it. (I found it interesting that the first two stories were interconnected - with respect to the optical communication meltdown !) The book is very current in terms of the technology and trends it refers to. It is also very useful to young entrepreneurs like me to help learn more about the evolution of technology and industry (and consolidations) in the last twenty thirty years. In this book one learns a lot about company culture, cost cutting, humility .. even the value of extreme skiing in entrepreneurship !
