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An
Entrepreneur Ought to be Mobile and Fluid, and be Able to Take Quick &
Decisive Calls
A
formal education is not a prerequisite to be a successful entrepreneur. But
you must be daring and innovative
Entrepreneurs have often held a rather base opinion of college education.
From Steve Jobs and Bill Gates to Paul Allen and Larry Ellison, the list of
the world’s richest entrepreneurs and innovators is littered with the names
of those who couldn’t be bothered to get a formal degree. Kiran Gopinath
certainly subscribes to that credo. According to the 41-year-old founder
and CEO of Ozone Media, one of India’s leading digital advertising
networks, the lack of formal education should never be a barrier to professional
success. “By the end of my third year of engineering in Nagpur, I pretty
much knew I was never going to be an engineer. Therefore, it didn’t make
sense continuing my studies,” he says, with a degree of satisfaction.
Gopinath’s current venture — Ozone Media — is often tapped as one of the
leading operators in the burgeoning space of digital advertising in India.
In 2008, the now seven-yearold venture raised $4 million in its first (and
sole) round of institutional funding from venture capital firm IDG
Ventures, at a time the global economy was going into a meltdown. “We are
lucky to have a fantastic set of investors who have backed us in spite of
the financial crisis. It hasn’t been easy, but we have not only managed to
stay afloat, when not a lot of other ventures could, but grew as well,”
Gopinath said. While Ozone Media is the entrepreneurial venture he is best
known for, Gopinath’s journey goes back even further. “Most of the
companies that I have worked with since my engineering days were pretty much
like startups, whether in the telecom sector, outdoor agencies or in the
Internet space,” he said. Introduced to the world of Internet while working
at DBS Internet, a venture that sold web-based solutions, Gopinath soon
branched out to form his first entrepreneurial venture — an Internet
advertising startup called Webshastra — in 1999. “I got together with my
co-founders at Webshastra and launched the company because the Internet at
that time was such an exciting space to be in,” Gopinath said. The year
1999, however, was also when the infamous dotcom bubble burst, with the
Nasdaq composite crashing spectacularly, wiping a number of tech ventures,
entrepreneurs and investors off the map. Barely days before the crash,
Gopinath and his Webshastra cofounders managed to raise $1 million from New
York-based private equity major Warburg Pincus. The honeymoon, however,
didn’t last long. “It was surreal. We raised funding from one of the top
global PE firms, and then the market crashed. It was a scenario that was
repeated when we raised funding for Ozone Media a few years down the line,”
Gopinath said. The light at the end of the tunnel was barely a sliver, and
hard decisions had to be made. Webshastra, which at one point had 43
employees and offices in Delhi and Mumbai, had to scale down staff to seven
after a year. Webshastra was acquired by US-based search engine marketing
agency Position2 in 2006, and Gopinath kicked off his new venture, Ozone
Media, which now operates in the US, Canada and South-East Asia, and counts
Mercedes and Citibank among its clients. “It’s been an
exciting journey so far. Ozone Media has been
profitable after its first year itself, but it is a work in progress, even
as customer demand and the industry continue to evolve at a quicker pace,”
he said. Last year, Ozone Media rolled out its flagship product Re-Target,
a platform that can assist e-commerce companies acquire customers by
assembling banners in real time and serving them in a more focused manner
to the audience. “You have to look for opportunities, and innovation plays
a big role in creating opportunities. An entrepreneur must be mobile,
fluid, and take quick and decisive calls. That is the essence of
entrepreneurship,” he said.
(As told to Biswarup Gooptu)
Kiran Gopinath
CURRENT DESIGNATION
CEO, Ozone Media
COMPANIES FOUNDED
Webshastra in 1999; Ozone Media in 2008
ONE THING I’D DO DIFFERENTLY
Invest in technology and build products earlier than when I finally
started to
THE MOST EXCITING SPACE TO BE IN
The Internet space
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