Suhas Gopinath – a young entrepreneur’s story recounted at TIMSR
2nd August, 2011: the 600- capacity auditorium at the Thakur Institute of Management Studies & Research, Kandivili, brimming with eager management students; Sharing the journey of his entrepreneurship with them: founder and Chairman of Globals Inc, an IT company that operates across 11 countries. At 24, the speaker is barely distinguishable from the spell bound audience.

At the age of 14, Mr Suhas Gopinath overcame his first hurdle by incorporating his company in San Jose, California instead of Bangalore as Indian laws do not allow a person below 18 to do so and steadily he built it to encompass several countries across the globe. This feat won him recognition as the world's youngest CEO by CNBC and e-Business, Canada, BBC, Washington Times, and the Limca Book of Records, among others. Inevitably, several other accolades followed in the form of his being designated as the resource person for Entrepreneurship at IIM Ahmedabad, a place on the Advisory Board of IIT Bombay’s Entrepreneurship Cell and his being declared a “Young Global Leader” for 2008-2009 by the World Economic Forum, Davos.
At an adolescent age when most people are yet to figure out what they want to do in life, Mr Gopinath could identify areas that held opportunities and created an entrepreneurial niche for himself. The story of how he offered to take care of the local internet café in Bangalore in the afternoons in return for an opportunity to surf the net for free is only first among the many striking stories of hidden opportunities identified and monetized by a young lad.

In a business world entirely dominated by adults, being so young created several hurdles for Mr Gopinath as many people would not take him seriously. Mr Gopinath shared several anecdotes on how an entrepreneur cannot take a ‘NO’ for an answer but must turn every ‘NO’ into an ‘YES’, whether from a potential client who claimed that he did not need Mr Gopinath’s website services, or an older employee who would not wish to work for someone half his age. Innovative solutions were found to overcome every such challenge. Employee resistance to working for a young boss was overcome by making the organization flat rather than hierarchical. Innovative strategies were adopted for enlarging the scope and scale of the business to penetrate the non English speaking markets. For this internationally acclaimed entrepreneur, passion for technology, focus on skills rather than college certificates, insightful application of marketing and operating strategies, an enduring role model in Bill Gates and above all an indomitable fire in the belly spell much more than age and formal qualifications .

Mr Gopinath’s talk and the interactive session that followed left the students with much to introspect on and be inspired by a unique entrepreneurial success story