Success Stories of Entrepreneurs which will inspire you.
These stories hopefully will inspire you through your startup journey and will keep you motivated. (these are not in any specific order or based on specific criteria)
1. N. R. Narayana Murthy
It showed that India could compete with the world by taking on the software development work that had long been in the West province. As one of six Infosys co-founders and CEO for 21 years, Murthy helped unleash the outsourcing revolution that has represented billions of dollars in wealth for the Indian economy and transformed his country into the back room of the world.
Your important lesson: An organization can start from scratch but a team of people must be formed to create a system of lasting value. “It’s about sacrifice, hard work, a lot of frustration, being away from your family, hoping that someday you’ll get an adequate performance from that.”
2. Dhiru Bhai Ambani
India’s largest private sector company. Created an equity cult in the Indian capital market.
Reliance is the first Indian company to feature in the Forbes 500 list. Dhirubhai Ambani was the most enterprising Indian entrepreneur.
His life journey is reminiscent of the rags to riches story. He is remembered as the one who rewrote Indian corporate history and built a truly global corporate group.
Dhirubhai Ambani alias Dhirajlal Hirachand Ambani was born on December 28, 1932, at Chorwad, Gujarat, into a Modh family. His father was a school teacher. Dhirubhai Ambani started his entrepreneurial career by selling “bhajias” to pilgrims in Mount Girnar over the weekends.
After doing his matriculation at the age of 16, Dhirubhai moved to Aden, Yemen. He worked there as a gas-station attendant, and as a clerk in an oil company. He returned to India in 1958 with Rs 50,000 and set up a textile trading company.
In 1992, Reliance became the first Indian company to raise money in global markets, its high credit-taking in international markets limited only by India’s sovereign rating. Reliance also became the first Indian company to feature in the Forbes 500 list.
Dhirubhai Ambani was named the Indian Entrepreneur of the 20th Century by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI). A poll conducted by The Times of India in 2000 voted him “greatest creator of wealth in the century”.
3. Karsanbhai Patel – Man behind NIRMA
The ‘Nirma’ success story of how an Indian Entrepreneur took on the big MNCs and rewrote the rules of business. It was in 1969 that Dr. Karsanbhai Patel started Nirma and went on to create a whole new segment in the Indian domestic detergent market. During that time the domestic detergent market only had the premium segment and there were very few companies, mainly the MNCs, which were into this business.
Karsanbhai Patel used to make detergent powder in the backyard of his house in Ahmedabad and then carry out door to door selling of his hand made product.He gave a money-back guarantee with every pack that was sold. Karsanbhai Patel managed to offer his detergent powder for Rs. 3 per kg when the cheapest detergent at that time was Rs.13 per kg and so he was able to successfully target the middle and lower-middle-income segment.
Sabki Pasand Nirma!
Nirma became a huge success and all this was a result of Karsanbhai Patel’s entrepreneurial skills.
The best case of – Give your consumer what he wants, when he wants, where he wants and at the price he wants, selling will be done quite automatically. This is the marketing ‘mantra’ of Nirma.
The company that was started in 1969 with just one man who used to deliver his product from one house to the other, today employs around 14 thousand people and has a turnover of more than $ 500 million.
In 2004 Nirma’s annual sales were as high as 800000 tonnes. According to Forbes in 2005 Karsanbhai Patel’s net worth was $640 million.
4. Dr.Arokiaswamy Velumani
Thyrocare’s Velumani: Owns no car, lives in a small quarter, but helms a Rs 1,320-crore company.
Velumani doesn’t own a car. He makes do with small living quarters above his large lab in Navi Mumbai but still ends up sleeping in the lab most nights. Born to a poor landless farmer in a nondescript and obscure village of Appanickenpatti Padur in Tamil Nadu, Arokiaswamy Velumani found himself at the bottom of the ‘ten slices of the pyramid’. Velumani was so poor that he sought government subsidy to go through school and college.
Today, he is the owner of the world’s largest thyroid testing company, that boasts of 1,122 outlets across India, Bangladesh, Nepal, and the Middle East! He started his career as a shift chemist at Gemini Capsules, a small pharmaceutical company in Coimbatore, in 1979 and earned a measly sum of ₹150 every month. The curtains came down on the company three years later and Velumani found himself without a job.
After 14 years of servitude at BARC, Velumani put in his papers. He decided to channel his expertise in thyroid biochemistry to set up testing labs that detected thyroid disorders. With Rs. 1,00,000 from his provident fund, Velumani, at the age of 37, opened a shop in Byculla, South Mumbai.
Thyrocare is worth ₹3,377 crores (in May 2016 ) and has made its debut on Indian bourses! Velumani owns a 64% stake in the company, which makes him worth ₹2,158 crores!
5. Mahesh Gupta Chairman Kent RO Systems
A mechanical engineer started in 1985, from a small room in his house with just 20,000 which he had saved from his job with IOCL. His first invention was in the field of petroleum conservation instrument where he earned fame and half a dozen patents to his credit. His turning point came with the establishment of KENT RO SYSTEM in the year 1998 when he charted out on a new enterprise after jaundice gripped his son in a posh colony of South Delhi.
Knowing that jaundice is a water-borne disease, Gupta researched and analyzed all the available water purifiers in the market. He was dissatisfied with available options and decided to make a better quality purifier. After several trials, he made his own water purifier and became confident that is product is good enough to be marketed. “Coming from an engineering background, making my own water purifier was not a difficult task; all I needed to do was export the components. – Mahesh Gupta
The experiment turned into success. And then I thought to bring it out in commercially in the market. I started from scratch with an investment of about 1 lac and a four-member team.
Today Kent has grown a 40% market share in RO mineral and has turnover 580 crore and 2,500 employees.
6. Sridhar Vembu
CEO of Zoho Corp. (formerly AdventNet Inc.), the company behind the Zoho suite of online applications. He co-founded AdventNet in 1996 and has been CEO since 2000. AdventNet has transformed itself from a modest beginning as a software company serving network equipment vendors to be an innovative online application provider.
It has maintained growth and profitability, without needing outside capital. Prior to AdventNet, Sridhar worked as a wireless systems engineer at Qualcomm, Inc. where he was fortunate to work with some of the leading minds in wireless communications.
Sridhar Vembu’s Zoho competes successfully around the world with some core products of Microsoft, Google, and Salesforce.com. Vembu shuns outside capital, but if Zoho were to be valued, it might be well over $1 billion.
He grew up in a very modest middle-class family in Chennai. His father was a stenographer in the High Court. Neither his father nor his mother went to college. He went to a Tamil-medium, government-aided school till Std 10, and then he did 11th and 12th in an English-medium government school. He did well at school and he obtained his Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University.
7. Kailash Katkar
Born in a small village at Rahimatpur in Maharashtra, Kailash Katkar worked his way to the top to be chairman and CEO of INR 200 Cr business. He is the man behind Quickheal Technologies Pvt Ltd.
He started with a job at a local radio and calculator repair shop and later went ahead in 1990 to start his own calculator repair business.
In 1993 he started a new venture, CAT computer services where around that time his younger brother Sanjay developed a basic model of antivirus software which helped in solving the biggest problem of computer maintenance at that time.
Later in 2007, it was renamed as Quick Heal Technologies. He achieved all this without any formal education.
8. P C Mustafa ( Coolie’s Son who Set Up 100 Crore Company with just 25,000 )
This is the story of a man who failed in Class 6 but went on to join the Regional Engineering College (now the National Institute of Technology), Calicut and the Indian Institute of Management-Bangalore. This is the story of a man who decided to become an entrepreneur and employ people from rural India.
Today, fresh idli and dosa batter made by P C Mustafa’s company ID Fresh reaches homes in Bengaluru, Chennai, Pune, Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Mangaluru and even Dubai.
Today, we produce around 50,000 kg in our plant. The total investment must be around Rs 4 crore (Rs 40 million) and our revenue is Rs 100 crore (Rs 1 billion).
When we became a Rs 100 crore company in October 2015, we celebrated in a grand scale. We have grown from producing 10 packets a day in 2005, with just my cousin managing the kitchen, to 50,000 packets a day with 1,100 employees in 10 years.
9. Nitin Godse
Godse hails from a poor family of a farmer based out of Akole village from Ahmednagar district, where he recalls his father earning a meager monthly wage of Rs. 400
He worked hard and did graduation and later an MBA course in 1994-96 from Pune University.
Ranked as one of the top 5 companies, the company specializes in on-site piping and tubing installations, subcontracting, supplying a variety of onsite services like pipe and tube supply and fitting, on-site manual welding, orbital welding, helium leak check, instruments supply and erection, and such others.
The turnover of the company is touching Rs 50 crores and the company has 200 employees on its own payroll. Excel Gas plans to install 20 gas plants in 4-5 cities by 2016-17 with an investment of Rs 100 crores.
10. Ramesh Babu, the barber who owns a Rolls Royce
Bangalore resident Ramesh Babu, is a star in his own league who runs the business of cutting and styling hair. He is an ordinary businessman, with extraordinary wealth. He is a billionaire and owns a rent-a-car fleet of 67 alternative cars.
At the moment his fleet consists of around 200 cars, vans, and mini-buses, including imported vehicles—a Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost, Mercedes C, E and S class and BMW 5, 6 and 7 series. He has a fleet of imported Mercedes vans and Toyota mini-buses.
“This is more of a passion,” he says. As for being a barber, “I will continue to be one as long as my hands are healthy.”
Amazingly, Ramesh charges Rs 75000 a day for the Rolls and his usual clients are corporate bigwigs and visiting Bollywood and Tollywood stars.
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