Entrepreneurship pioneer and technology leader Kanwal Rekhi, widely regarded as the Father of Indo-US Entrepreneurship, shared his views on risk-taking, leadership, and long-term value creation while promoting his new book, 'The Groundbreaker'. 

His reflections followed his interaction with students at the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar (IITGN), where he emphasised the need for entrepreneurship to be seen as a primary career choice for India’s youth.

In a freewheeling chat with Mathrubhumi, Rekhi spoke about entrepreneurship as a mindset, the importance of risk-taking, and lessons from failure drawn from his own journey. He also reflected on India’s evolving startup ecosystem and the ideas explored in his new book, The Groundbreaker.

Interview excerpts: 

  1. Your new book 'The Groundbreaker' launches in India this week—what problem or mindset gap were you most driven to address through it?
    “India has finally ignited its entrepreneurial movement, but 200,000 entrepreneurs is just a drop in the bucket for a nation of 1.4 billion. So the whole idea is to see that number grow by an order of magnitude—reaching a million by 2030 and ten million by 2047. This book is designed to inspire people to view entrepreneurship not just as an option, but as their primary career preference.”
     
  2. Who is ‘Funda Singh’ in the book, and why is that mindset still relevant for Indian entrepreneurs today?
    “Funda Singh is an alter ego I used in the book to represent my insistence on understanding the fundamentals of a given situation or a given problem. Similarly, entrepreneurs must fully master the basic mechanics of their business: how they differ from the rest, who their customer truly is, the scale of the market, and the reality of their competition, before they succeed in their business. One must answer these questions fully before one can perform well.”
     
  3. You write about moving from a traditional Indian upbringing to Silicon Valley’s meritocracy—what’s the hardest mental shift founders must make?
    “The traditional Indian middle-class ethos is built on security, safety, and the ‘secure job’. Silicon Valley is the polar opposite; it’s about taking risks, abandoning the old to embrace the new, and constantly chasing the next best thing. For me, being an immigrant already required taking a leap, so the adjustment felt natural, but for many, breaking away from the ‘pension mindset’ is the greatest hurdle.”
     
  4. Looking back, which failure shaped you more than success—and how does 'The Groundbreaker' reframe failure for young founders?
    “The layoffs I witnessed in the early 1970s were my greatest lesson. They taught me that you can never truly depend on a job for your future because, in a job, your destiny is in someone else’s hands. I realized then that a job is only as secure as the company, and companies are never permanent. That realisation pushed me to take matters into my own hands.”
     
  5. From building The IndUS Entrepreneurs to mentoring startups today, what has changed most in India’s entrepreneurial ecosystem?
    “India’s entrepreneurial ecosystem now has the basic ingredients you need. There are angel investors, there are VCs, there are mentors—all in the ecosystem for entrepreneurs to find. When that system started, there was no experience, no angels, no VCs, just a handful of people talking about it. Today, the system has a very sizable number of people who have seen the full lifecycle of a startup, and that collective experience is now available to the next generation.”
     
  6. India is at an inflection point with AI—what advice does the book offer founders navigating this fast-moving disruption?
    “AI is the latest wave in a long history of disruption. It makes hard tasks easy and renders old expertise obsolete overnight. The core message of the book is that you can never sit on your laurels or rely on past knowledge. In technology, a new wave will always come to replace the old; your only defense is to be out there learning every single day.”
     
  7. If a first-time entrepreneur reads just one chapter of 'The Groundbreaker', which one should it be—and why?
    “I don’t want to single out anything because there’s lots of learning along the way. While the early stages of validating an idea and building a team are crucial, the most difficult transition for any founder is ‘The Making of a CEO’. Moving from the person who started the company to the person who can lead a mature organisation is the hardest shift an entrepreneur will ever make.”