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When Phaninder Sama and Charan Kumar Raju announced their exit from even management roles in redBus.in, the online ticketing company they had founded eight years ago, they joined a growing breed of serial entrepreneurs.
Most stay in a management role for some time after selling their companies. Sama and Raju became chief executive and head of engineering, respectively, after selling redBus to Ibibo Group for Rs 780 crore but quit in six months and used the cash for a start-up.
Krishnan Ganesh built Customer Asset, one of the first call centres in India. He sold it for $193 million in 2002 to the ICICI group. This was renamed Firstsource and acquired by the Sanjiv Goenka-promoted CESC in 2012. Ganesh moved on and created the world's largest online tutoring company, Tutor Vista, and sold it to the London-listed publishing company Pearson for $213 million in 2013. He is now building a technology-enabled home health care service Portea Medical.
But many have stayed in the companies they had founded after selling out. Ganesh says businesses require a different mindset at the start-up, growth and maturity stages and there are just a few entrepreneurs who have done very well in all the phases.
He says there is nothing called the "right way of entrepreneurship," highlighting Bangalore-based Little Eye Labs being acquired by Facebook for $15 million early this year. Its four founders have moved to the acquirer's office in the US.
There are also examples from other sectors. In 2012, when Japanese firm Dentsu acquired a controlling stake in the Mumbai-based advertising firm Taproot, the founders remained committed to running the firm.
"Advertising is a relationship business and it would have failed if we had moved out," said Santosh Padhi, co-founder and chief executive. Examples of founders staying back are more common in businesses leaning on technology development or creativity. Little Eye Labs uses analysis and monitoring tools to help improve mobile applications. At the time of acquisition by Facebook, it had only seven employees, including the four founders.
"If the business requires championing by the founder, the founder stays," says R Suresh, managing director at the local arm of global human resources consultancy firm Stanton Chase.
This is true in the case of Rakesh Malhotra, founder of inverter maker Luminous Power Technologies, who, despite selling a 74 per cent stake in his company to French company Schneider Electric for Rs 1,400 crore in 2011 remains the chairman.
Malhotra belongs to a rare breed that wears both hats. "I am not necessarily running it on a daily basis, there is a full-time chief executive, but I stay on the board with the co-founder as we have a strategic involvement," says Malhotra, without disclosing if this was part of the sale agreement he had with Schneider.
"Requirements of businesses change when they reach a certain level and a motivation for monetisation is the entrepreneurial urge," says Malhotra, who after being relieved of the daily operations of Luminous, has built a water purifier business Livpure.
He is about to start two more businesses, one for motorcycle batteries, Livguard, and another to convert farm waste into green fuel, Livgreen.
