BENGALURU: The key to success in businesses is to invest in its people and hire rightly. Start-ups should focus on growth as well as profitability, said Infosys co-founder and non-executive chairman Nandan Nilekani.
Speaking at the Startup Summit by xto10x, which was held recently, Nilekani said start-ups should focus on lowering customer acquisition costs. He spoke about building a company from scratch and navigating a scaling journey that can withstand the test of changing economies as well as changing times.
He shared his journey of building Infosys Limited at a time when the concept of funding did not exist. There were no angel investors during that time. All our goals were in revenues and not in market capital. We kept upping the game in terms of what we want to get, and 40 years later, Infosys is now a company with revenues of $16 billion, he said.
On building resilient companies, Nilekani said, “We started Infosys completely bootstrapped in the 80’s. Without the internet, we had to build our company and its network manually. But we always went ahead with a strategy in mind of how to grow our company from x to 5x to 10x and further.”
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The Infosys co-founder also spoke about Account Aggregator framework and ONDC (Open Network for Digital Commerce), which intends to democratise e-commerce.
xto10x, a scaling platform for growth-stage start-ups, was founded by Binny Bansal, Saikiran Krishnamurthy and Neeraj Aggarwal in 2018.
Binny Bansal, co-founder-Flipkart and xto10x said, “The first 4-5 years of the Flipkart journey was always focused on moving ahead – we were at ‘x’ and how could we move this to 2x-3x within the next year. As we scale, we understand that we will need to set forward looking ambitions and then work backwards on making plans to reach the goals."
Speaking about building resilient companies, Harsh Mariwala, founder and chairman Marico said the business environment is dynamic, throwing up opportunities, as well as threats. One must study how everything can be converted into opportunities.