This is the best time to start a start-up, says Kris Gopalakrishnan

Better eco-system is required to nurture entrepreneurship, he said

Infosys Vice Chairman and co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan has called for a "better eco-system" to develop entrepreneurship in the country. He said, to nurture entrepreneurship not only laws and government policies are required ,but also a mindset to accept failures.

Speaking at a panel discussion at 'Shaastra 2015', an annual technical festival hosted by the IIT Madras students, he said that this is the best time to start a start-up and India is the right place to start, since it is huge market.

India is a wonderful laboratory and market to start a business and to nurture entrepreneurship not only laws and government policies are required, but also a culture that accepts that 95% of start-ups will fail, he said.

According to him, every industry, including automobile, healthcare, finance and others, will be re-engineered and will see a change in the next 20-30 years, which offers good potential for start-ups in the country, said Gopalakrishnan.

He urged the students to involve people outside and the investors in the business and said entrepreneurs need to put limited money into the business and the balance should come as risk capital from the outside investors.

"It makes difference between entrepreneurship by necessity, which is seen a lot in India, compared to entrepreneurship by choice or design where the society invests in a business to create new product or service", he said.

Anand Rajaraman, founder, Junglee Corp, which was bought over by Amazon later, also echoed Gopalakrishnan's view stating that this is the best time and to be an entrepreneur in India. Traditionally, Silicon Valley used to be the base for start-ups which later turned out to be billion-dollar companies. "Since 2013 it has changed and for the first time there are more billion Dollar companies outside the Silicon Valley, mainly from China and Europe," he said.

From India there were three companies including Flipkart and Snapdeal .

Rajaraman, who was a drop out from Stanford said that recipe for success is execution and marketing, which companies like Google did. Rajaraman has invested in over 100 companies, including Facebook. After selling Junglee Corp, in 2000 he founded Cambrian Ventures, which backed companies later acquired by Google.