"Think Big, Fail Big, Fail Spectacularly; They'll Remember You," Gautam Gandhi At TechSparks A'bad

Monday July 16, 2012 , 3 min Read

As the great Mozart said : It's not a lofty degree of imagination or intelligence that makes a genius... love... love is the soul of a Genius! So in your speech, lace every word, every thought, every action, with Love! The audience will be spellbound!

This is the quote Gautam received on his flight before delivering the speech and the motivation behind changing the format of his speech, focusing more on love :)

"A few years after passing out from Carnegie Mellon University, I went back to deliver a speech and amongst the crowd was my father. Some time into the speech, he stood up and walked away!" began Gautam Gandhi, Head of New Business Development Emerging Markets, Google on Saturday at IIM-A's IMDC auditorium, the venue for the Techsparks 2012 Ahmedabad Roundtable. "My father couldn't stand me for more than half an hour and I was wondering how the others were bearing me!" he went on and mysteriously, the audience by then was already in clutch and in anticipation of what was to follow. And in clutch they were, because what followed was a flamboyant speech full of anecdotes and learnings from his experiences of starting up multiple times; succeeding sometimes while failing at other times; all of which was eagerly taken in by the young entrepreneurial Ahmedabad crowd.

Starting with the evergreen Fisherman and Businessman story which is worth retelling every time, the talk filled with entrepreneurial spirit had multiple takeaways which are beautifully summarized by these insightful tweets (follow #tsparks for all the action)

Don't run after money. Sell a genuine problem; life becomes much more gratifying.
In order to succeed, you should be given a chance to fail.
If your dream is not worth laughing at, its probably too small.
Writing something down is an act of permanence. Write what you want to do. Have a mission statement in life.
Write a business plan for your life first and then use it to reach your goals.

Questions from the audience ranged widely including everything from motivating oneself to keep going to the right way to scale up successfully. Vishal Mehta, Founder at Infibeam and also having local experience besing based out of Ahmedabad had a flurry of questions to answer. The Panel also had Sachin Kelkar from Intel and Aakash Goel from Sequoia Capital. Talking about a question in particular which raises a debate at every startup event, "What do investors look for?" Gautam had an answer which was witty but at the same time pointed out exactly what an entrepreneurs solution should have: