Three words for entrepreneurs - Venkat Viswanathan, CEO, LatentView Analytics Corporation

Hunger, self-belief, and audacity. These are the three most important words for wannabe entrepreneurs, according to Venkat Viswanathan, CEO of LatentView Analytics Corporation.

• Hunger – Nothing comes out of you unless you are really craving for something, believe strongly in something, and want to succeed in a big way. It’s very hard for you to kind of overcome all the hurdles that you will see in the early stages of entrepreneurship. So, hunger is number one for me.
• Self-belief - This is about convincing yourself first before you go out and convince the world in terms of the changes that you want to bring to the world. Entrepreneurship is really just that. You believe in something so strongly that you need to convince the world about your belief. And, if you don’t believe it yourself, it’s going to be very hard for you to get this. Self-belief in my dictionary ranks, therefore, very high.
• Audacity – If you don’t think big, if you don’t really set the world as your playground, you are kind of short-changing yourself. I have seen this time and again; we are only limited by how large, how big we are ready to think. The world is ready to receive you as long as you are ready to think.

VenkatVenkat holds a Bachelor’s degree in Engineering from IIT, Madras, and an MBA from IIM, Calcutta. He has over eighteen years of experience in management consulting, technology, and global IT services management. Before founding LatentView, Venkat was part of the global leadership team for Cognizant’s Communications practice, where he was in charge of strategy and business development, and worked closely with field sales teams in winning key global service provider clients and growing the business to the $20m milestone, informs the ‘team’ page of his company site. At CII Connect, this year, Venkat received the 'Entrepreneur of the Year' award.

LatentView

Helping clients ‘develop and deploy result-oriented analytics solutions that enable them to make smarter decisions using their data’ is LatentView. “We are primarily a data analytics services business, combining business, data, and math, in the most optimal manner so that we can create impact for businesses,” says Venkat. “We are about six years old. Grown up in Chennai, and now we have got some of the largest business all over the world.”

The company is about 325-people strong, growing at more than 100 per cent every year. One of the fastest growing companies in the country, Venkat informs. “And it’s a very exciting space in terms of all the things we hear about SMAC (social, mobile, analytics, and cloud). We are right in the centre of all of that. Certainly interesting, lot of opportunity, good start we have had, and hopefully we will do very well in the coming years.”