Entrepreneurs and Investment

If I had a dime for every aspiring entrepreneur that I met, who told me that if only the investment was in place, they would start off!!

Entrepreneurship is a journey and not a destination. So my question to most entrepreneurs is; When would you have sufficient funds to run your startup? Its 7 years in and Flipkart is still raising money to meet their financial requirements.

One of the facts of being an entrepreneur is that you are never going to have enough money to meet all of your financial obligations. No matter how much you have, you could do with some more. Balancing financial resources is a fact of life for every entrepreneur and there is nothing, no amount of fundraising that would change that.

So my advise is; If you really believe that what you are about to do is going to create value, start building the enterprise. There has to be some degree of initial planning, but one cannot expect all of the pieces to be in place before starting out!

If you are building something and you are 65% of the way there, the chances of you finding someone (even your parents/relatives) who is willing to back you are much greater than if you have built 0% of it.

Entrepreneurship is a plunge much like quitting smoking. You jump into it and see how it plays out. You cannot know all eventualities and consequences and be prepared for every challenge (including the financial ones) right at the outset.