Success Story of an Indian Entrepreneur Samir Bhatia, CEO, SME Corner #Chet Chat

No, it really is my pleasure. I mean, I thank you so much for inviting me on your very popular show.

So I was a very studious kid, aspiring kind of sports person who wanted to play cricket and stuff like that. I then what I had to do is buy a lot of equipment because that's the only way I could get to play cricket. Because if I brought my bat and my ball and a lot, then I was allowed to play with everyone. So you can imagine how good I was, but I did try to play some of that as well. But yeah, well, when I grew up, that is what I was bad at. They were like, okay, thank you.

At age 8 or 9, I had decided to be a doctor, as my remark shot of getting into the top science colleges, and I did not get in. And I was very dejected. I was walking down the street when an old man accosted me and said, 'Young man, have you got admission anywhere? What are you studying?' And I said, 'I'm really looking for admission.' And he said, 'You know, I am the principal of this commerce college. I just love your face, I like everything about you. If you want admission, can you walk with me to my chambers right now and I'll give you admission?' Wow. Okay, this was like providence or whatever if you believe in that. And I was like, 'What's happening with me? I'm not interested, this guy's asking me to come and do commerce.' Yeah, this is one of those going with the flow.

I actually did one year of industrial training as part of my CA, and I think that was very, absolutely valuable. Yeah, help us good for people watching the show. Firstly, the one that I've done there, I immediately or they're doing their CA, they must invest in doing industry training. I think it is absolutely worth its weight in gold.

So banks are a great place to learn and grow. I think it provides a very, very good professional environment, especially for somebody who's a chartered accountant. They're so set in their mind on what they want to do. Okay, sometimes it's not so good because here you're kind of closed to learning, you don't know what your real aptitude is. So joining a bank is great, but join with a very open mind and don't mind your career with. I started my career in the financial control division, which was absolutely the most thankless job because you have to do budgets and MIS and a lot of numbers, and the most unglamorous of all the banking roles, right? But I'm happy doing that because I thought that actually was a great grounding because by the time I was out of there after three years, I had learned everything about every product and every division in the bank.

Absolutely, and I think digital is like a great example of what no one would have thought. I never thought that after working for 30 years I would actually be learning digital, you know, past the age of 50. But Citibank was actually a great place, a great organization to learn, learn to work very hard, learn to survive in a highly competitive environment. It is, as you know, foreign banks and even local ones as well, the environment is very, very competitive and it gets really hard. You need to be really tough to kind of work there and succeed. Looking for multinational banks gives you insight into what's happening all over the world, and of course, I got to travel to exotic countries back in those years, going to Africa and those parts of Africa which were exciting and exotic.

And then moving on to HDFC Bank. HDFC Bank was again a phenomenal experience. I was part of the startup team. They had the best boss ever, Mr. Puri. I learned a lot from him, a very inspiring person, great visionary, a great learning experience, and also very satisfying. Which is why I'd like to actually tell a lot of the younger people that it's okay to join a small company or a company which is starting up. You don't necessarily really have to join a very large organization because you might be a small fish in a big pond. If you join in a smaller place, you get to learn a lot, you grow with the organization, and also highly entrepreneurial. You will actually be shocked and surprised to tell you that we had absolutely loved doing it because it was that sense of ownership and a sense of feeling that we had the best thing. I think they get to share the founder's vision on a very close basis, they get to know and have a very good mentor like you said. You've got an opportunity to learn around that. Yes, sometimes in very large organizations, you have someone one level above you, and then it's a very set thing that is given to you. You have to do it that way; you don't have the flexibility to do things any different.

So just as a founding employee, I kind of got the license, got the joint venture together, got the capital, and set up the company. I love creating stuff; I love the set of things. So there came a point in life where I thought that maybe I should actually do something on my own for myself, and also for solving a big problem that I saw around me. As I worked in banks over the years, it's that small businesses really don't know who to go to when they want a loan. And you really don't have the time to give a lot of paper to traditional banks to get their loans approved. And hence, we birthed the concept and idea of setting up SME Corner. I must tell you and confess that when I started off, I didn't know much about this world.

Okay, so for coding, what made a platform successful? User experience, UI UX, I just did not know any of these terms. And there came this monster called digital marketing. I've always seen marketing in the old world and never seen digital marketing. But then I became a good student, like I always was, like I told you from before. I always get to learn, always happy to learn. And here is something that I should tell every single entrepreneur: one of the things as an entrepreneur is that you have to be really humble and really accept the fact that you do not know everything and you will not know everything. Even a very young person, like a 25-year-old, can actually teach you a lot. Every day that I say I do not know something, I actually try to inspire them and say, 'Do you not want to learn something new? Do you not want to do anything different again?' Something so that you feel excited, you feel rejuvenated, you feel like a young person all over again. This is a potential disciple of the culture within your company, a culture of learning before. I know everyone wants to share it. One of the things we really promote here in my company is cross-functional learning and training. No one has a job which is restricted to his or her own job. It's great for all of us actually.

In a startup, it's your money when you start, so you're very careful with what you are doing, what you're spending. And there's just no one to do stuff for you, so you do stuff yourself. There's a lot of administrative, smaller work also that you need to do. The second is, as a large institution, you can open doors very easily. For smaller entrepreneurs, that can get really challenging, which is why the need for mentors, the need for advisors for startups. So identify your strengths, identify your gaps in your strengths, and then invite people around you who can help you with those gaps. No startup goes without its ups and downs. Recognize that if it's not working, dump it. Do something different or do something differently. So the idea is how soon you are agile and when it's a tightrope walk. I tell you, it's like you have to literally, every step is like you are trying, because you think, 'I've already spent four months,' and it never stops. You see some of the big names today, they're after a huge high, after being valued at billions of dollars, going through challenges today. This world will always have challenges and will always have to be in constant disruption, and it comes from the unknown. So it's a nice tight rope. But I am a person who loves the challenge.

Running brings out in me the discipline and resilience. I recall one year, we had a change of shirt and would work through the night and the next day. We worked 100 days without Saturdays or Sundays, from April 1st to July 10th. I used to work like that, and one day I actually fell unconscious. I was so unhealthy and so unfit that my body couldn't take it anymore. I was hospitalized for 3 days. When I came out of it, I said, 'This is not a great way to be,' and I was in my late twenties. Temperamentally, running a marathon has allowed me to face almost any difficult situation and any problem that comes in my professional way with great patience. In a marathon, you have to train the mind. Nothing like that. I think that's been very helpful when you asked me about challenges and how to overcome them. Running helps phenomenally in all of that. Like we all say, it's not a sprint, it's a marathon. I tell my team also, do everything right, make sure everything is okay. It's not a six-month or one-year horizon; it takes five years to build a great company. And that all comes from my running.

We are solving a big problem that exists today: small businesses want finance and capital, they don't know where to go, and they end up having to submit a lot of papers. With reasonable certainty, we can tell them whether we will lend them or not, subject to verifying and meeting them once, and we can give them money within 3 days in their bank account. For a small business, that is a real boon. We're trying to use a lot of the new stuff that is happening in terms of artificial intelligence and machine learning. We're trying to make this a very scalable company, take out as much of the human subjectivity in underwriting and decisioning as possible to make it scalable. Over the next few years, we have a lot of work to do, but I think there is a lot of scope for what we are doing.