Why some start-ups are confused about what they're doing

In Tech in Asia, Vijay Anand discusses a worrying trend he's noticed among entrepreneurs

An entrepreneur usually drops me a note asking for a perspective on an idea they are working on. 

And I ask them a few questions, but they don’t really answer them. They deflect and they go straight to:

How do I raise funding?

And that bothers me, because as someone who is trying to build the business, shouldn’t these questions be something you should try to find the answer to, before you go talk to investors about what you claim you do?
 

An example is an email I received yesterday about a venture in the pharma space. We’ve done work with Ranbaxy in trying to set up pharmacies in rural India. The response I got was that, this is exactly like Oyo Rooms and if Oyo Rooms is raising capital then so should he.
 

 

I asked him about the kind of margins the pharma industry has. What an average retailer makes? What kind of documents do you need to have in place to have a license? 
 

His answer: I’m sure that can be figured out. He worked for one of the hotel room aggregators as an intern for two months.

Thanks to some brilliant advisors in my life, I’ve figured out one thing. If an entrepreneur does not have what we call mentorship quotient, you smile, wish him well, and send him on his way. Only reality will teach them a lesson. If we say anything otherwise, we’d look like the bad guys and they’ll go write books about us. Spare advice where it is regarded and considered, not where it isn’t welcome.

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This has been sourced from Tech in Asia. You can read the full article here. Vijay Anand is the founder and CEO of The Startup Centre, an early stage accelerator that promotes global technology start-ups from India