Three words for entrepreneurs – Vijay Anand, CEO and Founder, The Startup Centre

• Solve a real problem, build the required skill-sets, and talk about your ideas – these are the three bits of counsel that Vijay Anand, the CEO and founder of The Startup Centre, offers to wannabe entrepreneurs.Solve a real problem – I think lots of people are chasing a problem which doesn’t exist. For instance, if you are building a solution for a retail problem, go ask them; meet a couple of retailers and ask them if this is the problem they really have. If you are not willing to interact with the customer, tomorrow you will build a product, and still you have to go talk to them. So, validating the problem is very critical.
• Build the required skill-sets – You cannot be saying that you are a college student and you don’t know how to do. Today, there are so many ways to learn.
• Talk about your ideas – I think lots of people are very scared about their ideas getting stolen. I think the more number of people you talk to about what you are doing, the better it is for you; the idea gains in shape and depth.

Ideas

If you look around to read more about the fear Vijay refers to, you would find plenty of advice on why you should talk about your ideas. Start putting your ideas out for public consumption, because you really get credit for good ideas that you say often and in front of lots of people, says CBSNews. “Think about that: It’s hard to steal someone’s ideas when those ideas are out in public.” Even if your idea is 100% original, the idea alone isn’t valuable, it’s the work of revealing emergent properties that makes the idea valuable, reminds Daniel Solis. More importantly, he observes, in a design context, that your ideas could well be stolen, from someone else. “We can’t escape the design milieu of our times, we can only respond to it, iterate it. We are adrift on the flow of style, whether we realize it or not…”