The Art of Serial Entrepreneurship – A Conversation with Mukund Mohan
September 2, 2008 :: Steve FisherBeing an entrepreneur takes a certain personality makeup that includes stubborn optimism, visionary leadership and a passion to solve a problem or fill a need that no one else has done or that you can do better. Mukund Mohan is one of those people. He started his “Entrepreneur’s Journey” back in the mid 1990’s building a company that was sold to USWeb and then another one that was sold to VerticalNet. Despite the ability to take time off he joined Mercury Interactive in 2001 and stayed until 2006 to dive back into the entrepreneurial pool. About six months ago he started his latest venture, BuzzGain, which ready to launch in about a month. I was able to spend some time with him recently and here is a transcript of our interview:
Steve: What is your philosophy on being and staying and entrepreneur?
Mukund: Do what you enjoy doing is my basic tenet. It should not feel like work. I really enjoy companies at the “napkin stage”, the “will this even work stage” or “does this even make sense stage”. So starting new ventures is a lot of frustration at times, but its fun for me.
Steve: Your personal blog, Best Engaging Communities, is about social networking and building communities. How did this come to be as your passion and focus?
Mukund: I really enjoy being with an interacting with intelligent folks. With social networking I found that it was a lot easier to keep in touch with groups of people I interacted on a fairly infrequent basis. These were folks who were innovative in their field and highly entrepreneurial, hence busy. It became a passion when I found the social networking application to be a huge productivity tool as opposed to a time sink.
Steve: What is BuzzGain and why did you create it?
Mukund: BuzzGain empowers companies and individuals to “Do it yourself PR”. One of the things that is challenging for small to medium size companies is that PR firms in general are expensive. Many charge $5-10K per month and their results are not easily accountable. Another challenge is that companies are looking for traction of all types and getting an article in a magazine is at times not as actionable as getting a direct link from a blog. Leveraging social media to reach not only the A-list bloggers but the B and C listers when grouped together can produce tremendous traction or “Buzz” for you company and can reach the audiences you are looking to reach.
Steve: Did you raise any capital for this particular venture?
Mukund: Yes. We are privately held and raised one round of funding.
Steve: What would you like to see happen over the next 18 months for BuzzGain?
Mukund: Since 25% of our profits go towards children’s education causes, we’d like our company to support 100 kids in 18 months. From a corporate perspective, we are focused on the market acceptance of our solution. Customers using our offering on a daily basis and lowering their cost of awareness or “buzz” and lowering their cost of new customer acquisition are two other metrics we are tracking.
Steve: What kind of things should an entrepreneur do to keep excited and engaged in their venture during the inevitable tough times?
Mukund: The best thing you can do is to get a cofounder or two. That’s the best way we have seen people take the ups and downs in their stride. You can always pull the other person up when one person is not having a good day or week or month.
Steve: Finally, what do you think are the top five characteristics of a successful entrepreneur?
Mukund: I tend to focus on 3 things.
1) Drive (or passion): There has to be a reason you are going to get up at 5 am on days to do a demo for the 12th time to a client. Something has to motivate you to keep working on your product to make it better – after the first time its not usually money any more.
2) Discipline: The ability to set goals and put a plan in place to achieve them on a consistent basis is how I define discipline. My experiences have taught me that over 50% of the success with a startup in the first 12 months is due to preparation & showing up.
3) Humility: If you are going to start a company your ego will get bruised at least a hundred times in the first year. I define humility as the virtue that keeps your ego in check and does not hurt you.
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