Flying Business Class: Two men, coffee and a start-up!

book synopsis/description:

Hi, I am an accidental entrepreneur. I started my first company at the age of 25 even though just a year before that, I was quite sure that starting a company would pretty much be the last thing that I would do. In fact, three years before I started, I had been preparing for the civil services exam!

I don'€™t know when and how this thought occurred to me; I wish I could say that I was selling T-shirts in college, but that would be wrong. In fact, there is no so-called '€œbusiness gene'€ present in my DNA though I actually did become a business person in 1996.

Anyway, I worked on a startup, failed, did another, failed again, and then started one more, which I eventually sold in a six-year time frame, from start to finish. In entrepreneurial parlance, I became successful exactly 10 years after I started my first company and could extract enough value from the startup that I sold to financially liberate myself from the cycle of '€œwork-leisure'.€

The book that you are about to read could have also been called 'Conversations and Friendship', as that is basically what it is about. I preferred to call it '€œFlying Business Class'€ as to me, moments are what define life. FBC is about the seven-year journey of a first-time entrepreneur and Flying Business Class is that special moment in his journey. It is a story about the struggles and triumphs along the curved roads. Though written in first person, it is NOT an autobiography and the characters and situations are entirely products of my imagination. As it is my first book, I have obviously picked a topic inspired by the journey that I have had over the last decade.

My current day job is to engage with and evaluate first-time entrepreneurs whom we could invest in or mentor, or both, for '€œMyFirstCheque',€ a seed fund that I founded a couple of years ago along with two friends. Apart from this I write,read, follow up on new ideas, and play with my kids on a regular basis!

Basically, I live pretty much the way I want to. What I treasure most is the freedom that has come to me after the risks I took many years ago and persisted with, even though common sense might have prompted me to give up and change my path. It is the freedom that money brings, along with the confidence that I am able to create value from scratch that makes me now live '€”at 40' €”the way I used to as a child - with sheer joy and insatiable curiosity.

As a student in Warren G Tracy'€™s class put it, "€œEntrepreneurship is living a few years of your life as most people won'€™t, so that you can spend the rest of your life as most people can't."€

Gautam Sinha

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