By Sanjiv Goyal Featuring Arjun Malhotra
In this article, you will learn about:
- How to go from engineer to entrepreneur.
- Entrepreneurial trends and opportunities created by COVID19
- Business and life success from a CEO who has seen it all.
- The skills every entrepreneur should hone in 2020.
- What will happen to higher education?
- Why you should attend the PanIIT Global Summit on Dec 4th and 5th!
A Story For the Books
Arjun Malhotra has done it all. Throughout his colorful and adventurous story, he has said yes to the challenges of life and turned them into golden opportunities. He started as an engineer, then went into sales and marketing, and then started his first company in 1975 with several more to follow. A distinguished IIT Kharagpur alum and Conference Chair, he even represented his alma mater nationally as a basketball player. Is there anything he can’t do?
I asked him to share his experience as an entrepreneur and IIT alum for the IIT 2020 Global Summit Impact Video Series. He gifted us with sage advice curated over a lifetime of adaptation, innovation, lucky breaks, and massive success. Let’s look inside the mind and the habits of one of the greatest entrepreneurs to come out of India.
The Winding Road to Entrepreneurship
How Malhotra fell into entrepreneurism is a serendipitous tale complete with plot twists. As many high achievers do, he had life after undergrad all planned out. He would do his Ph.D. at Stanford and then go work for NASA. Straightforward enough, right? But of course, as with any great story, there was a girl.
Malhotra’s soon to be father-in-law told him he couldn’t in good conscience marry his daughter to anyone without a confirmed job. Malhotra put off his studies for a year and applied for a job from a newspaper clipping his mother had sent him. Though he wasn’t too keen on the job, the ad said: “Interviews are like exams. The more you do the better you are at them.” A sucker for sound logic, Malhotra filled out an application and sent it in.
He was selected for the job, got married, and soon found himself being transferred into a sales and marketing role. Somehow one year out of college he was handling national sales for a completely new product in a big company.
When the company had difficulty breaking into the computer market because of political red tape, Malhotra and a few colleagues decided to go into business for themselves. As the saying goes: Those who can’t intrapreneur, entrepreneur. The rest is history.
The COVID Survival Guide: Entrepreneur Edition
While it’s impossible to know how things are going to turn out, there are some shifts we can predict with a high likelihood as a result of COVID19.
There are some industries that COVID is creating a big advantage for like online learning, outdoor activities, delivery services, AR/VR, and AI. Those types of industries will grow very quickly in response to sudden increased market demand.
Some industries will experience growth while undergoing major changes. This would include industries like education and healthcare. According to Malhotra, telemedicine was at 6% of medical interactions; because of COVID, that number has risen to 44%.
Though these numbers may drop after COVID, we will never go back to the way things were. The pandemic has forced businesses and consumers alike to adapt quickly to things they may have been uncomfortable doing before, such as having a doctor’s visit over Zoom.
Lastly, there are those industries that will have to re-engineer themselves completely if they hope to survive. This includes hospitality, entertainment, restaurants, public transport, and retail. These are the spaces that will be reimagined. These are the places that have to adapt to going online and being contactless.
As Malhotra sees it, everything is an opportunity it’s all in how you frame it. For example, if you own a business a useful question to ask would be: What do I have to do to take a bigger market share than the one I had before COVID? In what ways do I need to change or improve my business model to meet the needs of my consumers right now?
Being an entrepreneur is about mindset, never giving up, thinking through problems, and making informed guesses. There will always be risks when trying to predict the future or shape it, but that is all part of the fun and excitement.
Staying With the Problem
Let’s think through a problem the way Malhotra would. He posed the following thought exercise to identify entrepreneurial opportunities: Get curious and follow your questions to their logical ends. Again, we will see the power of asking the right questions and staying curious. These are two pillars of engineering and entrepreneurialism.
He started with this question:
If higher education goes online, what are the implications of that shift?
If people are comfortable with higher education being done from home and online, we can ponder a series of effects:
- Parents will question paying high administrative and operational fees and those will likely diminish or disappear.
- Students will no longer have to pay for room and board, which lowers the cost for the student as well as the university.
- There are some things you can’t do online like labs that will need to be taken into consideration and done safely.
- There would be nothing stopping schools like MIT or Harvard from having two million students online. Right now they are limited by the capacity of their campuses, but online they wouldn’t be limited by physical constructs.
- Universities would no longer be limited to the professors and faculty in their city or country. Online learning could be outsourced to anywhere and anyone in the world.
- Perhaps smaller universities might become irrelevant because why go to a small university when you could have the same experience learning from home and get a degree from Oxford or Cambridge?
- If students start living at home through college, they will want some semblance of privacy and independence so perhaps homes with separate apartments on site will come into vogue.
This is how you begin to identify opportunities, predict needs and frame problems as solutions. For each problem, a niche opens up, a solution is asking to be born.
Think through a problem in terms of your industry. What impacts has COVID already had there? Sit with the implications of those shifts, and ask: What will I have to do as a business owner if this becomes the environment? What will I have to change? What are the opportunities?
If College Goes Online, Is A Higher Degree Really Worth It?
I never used my civil engineering degree directly. I caught a lucky break and became an entrepreneur. Ultimately, I would say any degree or course of study is only as valuable as the skills you learn and the people and viewpoints you are exposed to. Though I didn’t go into a civil engineering career, the problem-solving skills I learned during my time at IIT and the personal connections I made there have been invaluable to me as an entrepreneur.
The ability to break problems down to their variables, work with a team, stay with a problem, and the inspiration and confidence I gained from watching others do the same- that’s what I took away from my college experience. Every part of your journey informs the next steps. Nothing is wasted.
In the age of YouTube and Google, which weren’t available to Malhotra and I when we were at college, deciding to get a higher degree will be increasingly a matter of personal preference rather than a necessity. But whether you go for a higher degree or not, the important thing is to develop problem-solving skills and be able to work well with others.
Malhotra learned these “soft” skills from playing team sports. I learned them pulling all-nighters with my classmates for difficult exams. However you do it, make sure that you put yourself in situations that challenge you to develop in these areas. Those spaces may look different from traditional college experiences in a post-pandemic world, but they are vital.
Malhotra’s Advice to Entrepreneurs in 2020:
- Follow your passion.
- Work with people who are smarter than you and learn from them.
- Constantly ask: How can this be improved?
- Never give up.
The most important thing — and I’m hearing this from nearly everyone I have been interviewing — is to follow your passion. You have to have a purpose and a desire to change the world for other people, not for a stack of paper.
“I always tell people: Don’t start a company to make money. If you do that it’s unlikely to work. The analogy I give them is: Money is like girls. If you chase them, they will run away from you.”
Malhotra says if you are lucky enough to find people smarter than you and they agree to work with you, listen to them. Be an ever-curious student of life and be comfortable taking on a beginner’s mindset.
Final thoughts: “An IPO is like getting married, the real problems start after that. So enjoy it until then.” Apparently, Malhotra does stand-up too.
