Making History! A Conversation With Mr. Sumit Chowdhury

Entrepreneur of 'My Life Chronicles'

PGSEM 2005-08

www.mylifechronicles.com

1)    Why did you decide to start My Life Chronicles

The idea came to my mind while speaking casually to a couple of my PGSEM batch mates at IIMB. It was Dec 2008. My father passed away from cancer in 1998 and I left home right after that. My elder brother had left home earlier. Being a very organized person my father used to write journals regularly and keep all letters and other paper records neatly filed. On my visits to home town years later, I could see that those diaries and folders were gathering dust and even being sold away to the raddiwalla. I could not do much while on a short vacation but wanted to at least scan and digitize the old photos and letters. This desire led me to the idea of preserving individual and family stories and then on to preserving institute and corporate memories. When I googled I found that there is an organization in the USA called APH, Association of Personal Historians who are already doing this for 15 years. That was the time I realized that we Indians are poor preservers of our past and that needed to change and change fast.

2)    Tell a little about yourself - education, work, family - the story so far.

Born and brought up in Steel City of Durgapur, I completed my secondary education from St. Xavier’s, Durgapur and Higher Secondary education from Bidhan Chandra Institution, Durgapur. I went on to complete my BE(Hons) from REC Durgapur and chose to work at SAIL, Durgapur. This was the time my father was suffering from cancer and I cherish the time I stayed close to him. Father passed away in 1998 and I moved to Bangalore a year later in 1999 following my IT dreams. Infosys was about 3500 people and still a close family when I joined the company. I remember sitting close to NRN's cabin in the Heritage Building, Electronics City. Infosys gave me an opportunity to broaden my exposure and knowledge by sending me on various foreign assignments. This happened pretty quickly in my career and the rich interactions with customers helped shape my thought processes. I got married to Tandra in 2000, an alumna from my college. We moved to Banerghatta Road, very close to IIMB. We still stay here. Tandra works in Novellus Systems. We have 2 daughters, Ananya of 8 years and Anwesha 3 of years. 

In 2003, I went through this phase where I had a major urge to do a PhD in Operations Management (Sunil Mehta's book inspired me). I took the GMAT and applied to a few universities in the USA. Georgia Tech found me worthy of a scholarship and invited me over. Reality struck me hard as I realized the full impact of the decision. Leaving my 6 month old daughter and family for a degree which takes 5 years, by a conservative estimate sounded impossible. Taking them along meant sacrificing settled lives and careers. I sent a painful rejection note to Georgia Tech and appeared for the neighborhood IIMB PGSM program interview instead. This was the same time I moved from IT Delivery to Pre-Sales and Marketing at Infosys, hoping to focus on academics for a couple of years. 2004-2007 was a roller coaster ride juggling PGSM assignments, Pre-Sales RFPs and family. However, this is the time that gave me the confidence and courage to attempt something different, to start on an entrepreneurial journey. I felt I was not ready and to get a different perspective I challenged myself to join a completely different work environment. I joined Honeywell, an industrial automation giant working on New Product Development projects. I kept working on my entrepreneurial ideas and goals till the time I left Honeywell to start My Life Chronicles 3+ years later. My Life Chronicles has been a labor of love ever since.

3)    How did you manage the risks, how are you paying the bills

Having a working and supportive spouse helps. It has been more than a year and I continue to depend on her to meet our bills. However, I am planning to start taking a small monthly salary from My Life Chronicles to ease the burden.

4)    Are you happy 

I am having the most enjoyable albeit the most hectic time of my life. I am no more known by Infosys or Honeywell but by My Life Chronicles alone. This is a fundamental shift in thinking and can give entrepreneur nightmares in the initial months and years.

5)    Would you want to go back to Honeywell

No, unless I am compelled to because of financial or other pressures.

6)    What next

My Life Chronicles, I would like to believe, is at an inflexion point. I will be joined by partners in the next few months, partners who see value in what I am doing and who would like to share the risk. While stories of individuals is where my heart lies, corporate chronicles is showing a lot of promise. I am working with CRISIL (A Standard & Poor's co.), a well-known brand with a tremendous reach across India and even globally. In the process, I have been personally interviewing Senior Management and Board members of large corporate and all of them have been very positive about the idea. Making high quality memoirs and chronicles affordable and easy, still remains my dream.

7)    Advise to those who want to take the Plunge

Follow your heart but have a safety net. Prepare for the worst case, take your family into confidence and take the plunge. The 'right time' will never come. The right time is now. You are not going to die if you take the plunge!

8)    What role and importance would you attribute to PGSEM in your journey so far?

Without PGSEM I would not have had the confidence to venture out. Through PGSEM I have come to know a few people who have helped me with their thoughts, suggestions and encouragement.

9)    How did you evaluate the opportunity in terms of the critical elements of success? The competition and the potential market? Did you make a business plan?

This is a new concept in India. There was no data available as such. We did some primary research which didn’t throw up positive results. It was more of gut feel and the passion to do something I enjoy that led me to plunge.

10)  Any specific learning’s you would like to share with the budding entrepreneurs.

Meet as many potential customers you can and listen to what they want. Meet start-up founders and understand/learn from their challenges/mistakes. Moonlight.

Second Hand Learning

Sitting in a PGSEM classroom can be quite an experience sometimes, purely for its awe-inducing value among other things. There is no doubt about the fact that our professors are extremely accomplished individuals who have a wealth of knowledge to share. But sometimes you realize it is not just their knowledge but also that of the world’s foremost authorities on certain subjects that is being passed on to you in class. And that fleeting moment of inspiration (before intimidation follows) is priceless.

For instance, yesterday we discovered that one of our professors has studied under Narendra Karmarkar at the TIFR. Last quarter, we were taught by a professor who has studied under Nouriel Roubini. And it is good to know that we are getting to hear the ideas of these stalwarts somewhere through our professors. While that has the danger of mental tunnelling occurring due to the influences/hand-me-down ideas, it is important to note that it is probably better than not getting to hear these ideas at all. This second hand learning from international authorities has been quite a fascinating aspect of the course, whenever it has presented itself.

A few weeks ago, the Internet was abuzz with reports of the advent of Facebook reducing the degrees of separation in the world from 6 to 4.74. In our case, we are one degree of separation away from some of the best brains in the world and that is a good spurt of motivation any day!

A Story-Lover's Delight

All of us have a list of reasons why we want to pursue business education. I’m sure this one doesn’t figure there, at least it wasn’t on mine. Now I wonder why.

Q1 is drawing to a close and so far, among other things, the MBA experience (and in that the PGSEM experience with its primary focus on knowledge) has been one big delightful storybook.  On the very first day itself, we were told the story of Marie Antoinette and how she was thought to be crazy just because she seemed to be proposing what was a primitive version of the Bottom Of the Pyramid concept! I sat in class wide-eyed like a child, having come into class expecting graphs showing demand-supply curves but listening to French history instead!

In the 2 months that followed, we’ve heard many stories – the story of how Japan’s history has brought it to the state that it’s in, the story of oil, the story of Classic Coke and the stories of many corporations in the form of case studies – some talking of businesses that broke new ground, some of failed ideas and some of phenomena that changed our lives. There were stories of simple kind hearted people who built great institutions like Aravind Eye Care and there were intriguing stories like those of the Cuban Missile Crisis (delivered in a two hour movie session with the film The Missles Of October : ) ). But they were all fascinating. For someone who loves listening to and telling stories, it’s been a pleasant surprise to find a treasure chest in the classroom.

The next time I recommend PGSEM or MBA in general to anyone, I am going to put this as the topmost reason why someone should go for business education. Before anything else, it becomes enjoyable just because it takes us back to the time when storytelling was a major part of our lives. And hopefully all these stories will influence us enough to be able to create big stories ourselves in the future!

How useful is the PGSEM

I have been meaning to reply to Yaniv's post (see http://iimbpgsem.blogspot.com/2005/11/how-useful-is-pgsem.html), but work's been devouring all my time and then some.
But here's a start - a small post admittedly, and I shall add more in the coming weeks. Another thing that I am going to do is to start posting to this blog photos that I have taken at IIMB during my more than two years in the program.

I think the PGSEM is a fantastic program for working professionals in Bangalore, and now Chennai also. I say Bangalore because this is a part-time program with campus requirements two days a week. The program is near-identical to IIMB's full time MBA program (PGP), the name and misconceptions notwithstanding. The faculty that teaches us is the same, which by and large is exceptional.

The program offers ample scope for someone to specialize in an area of their choice. Admittedly the depth of specialization is not as much as one would prefer, but hopefully this is something the current and future batches will work on (more about this in a future post). Consider this, if you wanted to focus on Finance, your choices would have been:
Core courses:
- Management Accounting (Financial and cost accounting)
- Corporate Finance
Electives (starting with the Jun academic quarter 2004-05):
- Banking, Financial Markets, and Systems
- Risk Management for Insurance Professionals
- Computational Finance
- Investments
- International Banking
- Corporate Valuation
- Global Financial Markets
- New Enteprise Financing
- Coporate Tax Management
- Mergers & Acquisitions
- Financial Risk Management
- Financial Statement Analysis
- Fixed Income Securities and Derivatives

I can think of a dozen courses that could have been offered in addition to the ones listed above, like Financial Derivatives, International Finance, Introduction to Capital Market Theory, Fixed Income Securities, Advance Corporate Finance, Indirect Taxation, General Insurance, Insurance and Pension Funds, etc... But one would accept that the above courses offered themselves would allow a student to get a good grasp of the basics (and more) of finance.

Similarly, if you wanted to focus on Marketing and related areas, the PGSEM has a lot to offer:
Core
- Principles of Marketing
- Marketing Research
Electives
- Business Marketing Strategy
- Business Data Mining and Decision Models
- Product Management
- Advertising Management
- Sales Force Management
- eBusiness Models and Strategies
- Management of Alliances
- Services Marketing Management
I think that PGSEM is weak when it comes to the breadth and depth in marketing courses. Courses that could have been offered but were not (will discuss this in a later post) include brand management, Consumer Behaviour, Retailing Management, Competitive Marketing Strategy, Sales and Distribution Management, International Business Negotiation Skills.

In my opinion, the value of the PGSEM starts to become apparent in the second year when I (and others) started to see the integrative nature of an MBA. No course really exists in a vacuum: you cannot design a sales force without knowing the kind of market you are working in, or the kind of organizational structure you have or want to put in place, not to mention how you are going to market and advertise your products...

More in the coming weeks...

How useful is PGSEM

Now that some of us are very close to completion of PGSEM program, I thought it would be great if we could list down some of the things that made this program worth the effort.

• One of the main value additions that I think I have got from the programs is the fact that it has given me enhanced understanding of some of the support activities (like HR, finance, sales, company law and marketing) so if tomorrow I end up in position where my day to day work is dependent on these functions, I would be able to better understand their input and at the same time figure out when they are just screwing with my head
• For somebody who has any kind of entprepreneurial ambitions, this program is of extreme value just in terms of the networking that it offers. Also the courses that are offered related to starting and managing an enterprise are good inputs to start the enterprise.

This is what I thought helped/would help me. What say others.