On a crisp Saturday morning of April 2010, around fifty people made their way to an office in the periphery of Bangalore to listen to a talk by an accomplished founder, who has taken a dominant position the mobile payments space in India.

The theme of the talk was Idea Validation, but Sanjay Swamy painted a broader picture than just Idea Validation. His current success of becoming the largest provider of mobile payments in India, which is the fastest growing mobile market in the world is quite remarkable. Founded in 2006 and targeting more than 15 million customers by 2010 tells us aobut mChek's growth story.It was really remarkable to finally meet a person, who put a complete picture of what entrepreneurship is and how one does actually go about doing a startup.

The first thing to strike my mind was, here was an executive, who was talking about how his thought process was, rather than a perfect twenty twenty hindsight story, that is told by most successful founders. his first slide was "Not every problem is a solved problem", i.e. just because a problem was solved by some one else, it does not mean that one cannot solve the same problem in a better way. This is how most entrepreneurs think, "there has got to be a better way".  The whole approach to a startup or the essence of a company could be decided in either of the two ways. one is, finding a big problem and trying to solve it, second is when an idea strikes you. Now validating an idea that is based on a problem that you can see is much easier than trying to validate an idea that just strikes you as better way.  Now how does one know, if an idea strikes you and it is a viable business idea. It could be that you are trying to do something and you find it very hard to do it. You could be searching for something for two to three hours on Google and you say to yourself, "I can't believe that nobody has solved this" or "there has got to be a better way".

The moment when the idea for mCheck was formed in Sanjay's mind was, in 2003 he was traveling by rickshaw and he asked the driver what time it was, the driver instead of looking at a watch, removed his cellphone and told time. This was the moment of epiphany when he realized that mobile phones would become part of almost every Indian's life and mobile transactions would be needed. his thought was "Some day every one will be making payments with cellphones". His main value proposition was that mobile payments between two untrusted parties would need an intermediary to establish trust between them to enable the transaction.

The next most interesting thing that he told was, how to pick from one of the many moments of epiphany/ideas most founders have. The solution is that you have to be consumed by the idea, if you think about the idea night and day, it then consumes you . Does the idea keep coming back to you and does it haunt you. Does it make you think on how you would go about implementing it. then you have got a likely winner. This also means that you are way ahead of what most people are thinking about currently. Being ahead of most people could be that they laugh at you, as most people did in the pre dot com days when Sanjay wanted to  launch a service for sharing new born baby pics. This was even before baby.com domain was available and a similar service was later sold for 110 million dollars. So being ahead of conventional thinking at the time, can greatly help entrepreneurs.

The next most insight full thought was that "The amount of crap you have to clean is huge". i.e Acting on your idea and doing that things necessary to make it happen will involve a lot tasks that most people would not be willing to do. i.e you need to clean huge amounts of crap in getting that idea into shape. Also if you think you have only some easy tasks that are junk, it is then that other junk will hit you. Now why is this point important, it is important, as this tasks that nobody are willing to do, actually open up opportunities for entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs are willing to clean huge amount of junk in getting an idea into action.

There was a question from the audience about how does one know the major trend or growth will pan out with in the lifetime of the startup or funding runs out. It was the most insightful answer I had heard in a long time. Now to answer this, think about the UID project being done by Government of India. It is a system to track all transactions of an Individual with the Government and each person in India would get an unique ID. Something like SSN in US. So the entrepreneur has an idea or oppertunity to build services on top of UID. He can look at the trend and say that in 2 months I can start building applications on top of the platform. But the underlying platform gets delayed by 6 months, now what happens is that you end with 10 other companies trying to do the same service, as it got delayed and more people got aware of the opportunity.  So it is a risk the entrepreneur has to take by investing early and then trying to capture more of the gains. Higher the risk, higher the reward. One has to scale the investments with the expected events, so that you still in the game and it does not wipe you out if the external events do not pan out.

some of the memorable quotes in a single sentences from the talk are
* Worry about success, as running a company is not just fun
* Take money from someone you don't know, as it might strain your relationship
* You should estimate or know when your cash flow is positive
* what is the path your startup will take toward becoming self sustaining in terms of time and steps.
* Be honest with what it will require.
* Don't be scared of others failure, but don't ignore them. Reach out and ask them why they failed.
* Some times problems appear much more huge than they actually are
* it is those companies that were early and executed well that have gone on to become hugely successful

The talk was conclude by saying that one has to just take the leap, jump off the cliff and has to just do it.