[TechSparks Mumbai] Leadership lessons from Ambarish Datta, MD and CEO, BSE Institute

Mumbai’s Dalal Street was completely packed as all vehicles led to the BSE complex today. The hall was brimming with energy, and people sat in rapt attention listening to one speaker after another. By the time Ambarish Datta, MD and CEO of BSE Institute, took over the stage to speak about leadership essentials, the audience was already captivated.

Ambarish believes that every entrepreneur is a leader in himself/ herself. He started with a little history of BSE. "It is the oldest startup in the world," he said. Ambarish spoke about how BSE has evolved from its early days to become the largest stock exchange in India where a transaction takes place every 200 milliseconds on an average.

It is also the only stock exchange in the world which runs an accelerator inside its campus.

In his talk, Ambarish spoke about three key points entrepreneurs often ignore while starting up. Entrepreneurs focus on building great things but miss out on seemingly intangible things related to staring up.

1) Difficulty in managing relationships - Ambarish said we often forget to learn how to manage relationships. Relationships not in the conventional sense, but the relationship between our startup and work life, the relationship we have with our employees and the relationship we have with our colleagues and our investors. It takes a lot of effort. It is a transactional element. Many of us are good with the product development and ideas, but struggle with creating and managing relationships. We must develop this as a part of our journey. This is a skill which can be learned over time.

2) Don't be afraid of randomness - Another strong point which Ambarish made was about randomness. We often come up with plans and start executing them. But things never go as planned in a startup. There is always something waiting to go wrong. And once things go wrong, most of us press the panic button. Ambarish advised entrepreneurs to embrace randomness and be ready for it. Never go with a mindset that tells you, ‘for the next one year, I am going to do XYZ’, because once we begin with a fixed mindset, we fail to notice the changes around us and then worry when things do not work out as planned.

3) Reverse the cycle - Ambarish said that while interviewing entrepreneurs for the Zone Startups Accelerator, he often came across a scenario where entrepreneurs talk about the ‘What, How and Why’ of their product. Ambrish states that we must reverse the cycle, and first think about why we are building the product instead of what we are building. The right way should be, ‘Why, How and What’.

Taking about the Accelerator in BSE, Ambrish said, "Zone Startups Accelerator does not take even a single penny or equity from startups." Emphasizing on skill development, he said it is better to create 100 entrepreneurs who will create 100 jobs, and these in turn will create 100 more jobs thus creating an army of entrepreneurs.

A big thanks to all the sponsors and partners for supporting TechSparks 2014 – Sequoia Capital, AWS, Intel, DSOA, Verisign, Stanford Ignite, Target, Intuit, Brand Capital and Ola.