Entrepreneur Journeys

Since things are winding down for the holidays, I decided to take a look at the book “Entrepreneur Journeys” by Forbes columnist Sramana Mitra.

“Entrepeneur Journeys” is a collection of interviews with a range of tech entrepreneurs. These are almost like short stories — five to ten pages of recollections by founders and CEOs covering a range of topics such as funding, product development, their background and so on. Included are interviews with CEO Jerry Rawls of Finisar a fiber optics company; Sridhar Vembu, founder of AdventNet, the producers of the Zoho office suite; Steve Hafner, founder of the Kayak.com travel site; and serial entrepreneur Philippe Courtot among others.

It’s a good read, but in my view not nearly as insightful as Guy Kawasaki’s “Reality Check.” In fact, I would say my biggest criticism of Mitra is the fact that there’s really no tough issues in these interviews. They are mostly lob ball questions — interesting perhaps for the interviewer, but I get the impression she is too enamored with her subjects to be objective, let alone critical.

Here’s an excerpt from an interview with Sridhar Vembu on bootstrapping.

SM: Can you position Zoho for me?

SV: Zoho is an on-demand application offering. We are offering a competitor to Microsoft Office on demand, meaning online. We also have a CRM and an application creator online. We just call it the ability to work online. That is our vision — to provide a comprehensive suite for a mid-sized customer. We want mid-sized customers to be able to have their IT needs met online.

SM: This is a crowded field. On one hand, you have Microsoft Office and on the other you have Google coming out with their competing suite. With CRM you have Salesforce.com, Rightnow. With Project Management, you have eProject, Webex, Citrix, and all of these guys are going after the same space.

SV: There are obviously going to be a lot of players, and it is obviously going to be a huge market. There are going to be tens of billions of dollars available in the market.

SM: What is your strategy — different offerings, different pricing?

SV: There are two things we are playing on. The first is to have the most comprehensive offering. If you look at our suite, we have a full comparison to Microsoft Office. All of these differentiate us from each of the other players. SalesForce only offers CRM, which they are trying to combine with an application creation functionality. We already have it. That is one differentiation. Our main strength is that we have an incredible engineering team. SalesForce has maybe a 100-strong engineering team, we have 600 engineers in our office in India.

You can read another excerpt online at Seeking Alpha, though it’s pretty lightweight and not one of the actual interviews. So if you’re looking for inspiration, “Entrepreneur Journeys” does a good job. But if you want practical information you’ll use in starting or running a company “Reality Check” is the better choice.