These days, entrepreneurship is more about establishing a new company, bloat up balance sheets with ‘imaginary’ assets and go IPO at rates more than what it should receive. Once the shares reach the high price, sell out, move on and start the next company. Shares of several companies which started out with huge promises including goPro are selling much below IPO, wiping out investor profits. And in the process of hyping up the market value of the shares, it does not matter if you wipe out competition, become a monopoly or destroy environment. Nowadays all these are called ‘disruptive’ companies ! Aren’t they ?
With these thoughts in mind, I stumbled across the google home page today, which was adorned with the doodle of Verghese Kurien.
It was such a great learning to read about this great entrepreneur, The following excerpt is from wikipedia,
He founded around 30 institutions of excellence (like AMUL, GCMMF, IRMA, NDDB) which are owned, managed by farmers and run by professionals. As the founding chairman of the Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation (GCMMF), Kurien was responsible for the creation and success of the Amul brand of dairy products. A key achievement at Amul was the invention of milk powder processed from buffalo milk (abundant in India), as opposed to that made from cow-milk, in the then major milk producing nations. This led Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri to appoint him the founder-chairman of National Dairy Development Board (NDDB) in 1965, to replicate Amul’s “Anand model” nationwide. He is regarded as one of the greatest proponents of the cooperative movement in the world, his work having lifted millions out of poverty in India, and outside.
Lifting millions of people from poverty….. Man that’s definitely an achievement. So families have a means to income now. Amazing isn’t it ?