An excerpt from the story by Gopika Nair:
His summary of the journey is unusually calm. “No regrets. Always look forward,” Jain thought after thinking for a few seconds. “Entrepreneurs have to be optimistic. Your odds are completely against you.”
And then, unexpectedly, he names his two best decisions. “One is the arranged marriage to my wife,” he said, followed by a laugh. “She has been the backbone throughout my life.” The second was selling IndiaWorld when he did.
When I ask him how he looks back on 35 years of building, selling, pivoting and starting again, Jain does not romanticise the arc. He reduces it to a simple tally. “I look at it as sort of two and a half successes and probably 30–40 failures,” he said. IndiaWorld counts as one. Netcore is another. The political experiment, perhaps half. The rest, he shrugs, were attempts, ideas tried, tested, discarded.
Failure, he insists, is routine. “Just as you don’t let success get to your head, you don’t let failure get to your head,” he said. The numbers, then, are not the point. What matters is the habit of returning to work the next day, of finding the next problem, of building again.
