1. SUCCESSFUL ENTREPRENEURS

2. SRIDHAR VEMBU
CEO of Zoho Corp. The company behind the Zoho suite of online applications. He co-founded AdventNet in 1996, and has been CEO since AdventNet has transformed itself from a modest beginning as a software company serving network equipment vendors to a be an innovative online applications provider.
It has maintained growth and profitability, without needing outside capital. Prior to AdventNet, Sridhar worked as a wireless systems engineer at Qualcomm, Inc. where he was fortunate to work with some of the leading minds in wireless communications. Sridhar Vembu’s Zoho competes successfully around the world with some core products of Microsoft, Google and Salesforce.com. Vembu shuns outside capital, but if Zoho were to be valued, it might be well over $1 billion.
He grew up in a very modest middle class family in Chennai. His father was a stenographer in the High Court. Neither his father nor his mother went to college.
He went to a Tamil-medium, government-aided school till Std 10, and then he did 11th and 12th in an English-medium government school. He did well at school and he obtained his Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, and PhD in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University.

3. KARSANBHAI PATEL
It was in 1969 that Dr. Karsanbhai Patel started Nirma and went on to create a whole new segment in the Indian domestic detergent market. During that time the domestic detergent market only had the premium segment and there were very few companies.
Karsanbhai Patel used to make detergent powder in the backyard of his house in Ahmedabad and then carry out door to door selling of his hand made product. He gave a money back guarantee with every pack that was sold. Karsanbhai Patel managed to offer his detergent powder for Rs. 3 per kg when the cheapest detergent at that time was Rs.13 per kg and so he was able to successfully target the middle and lower middle income segment.
Sabki Pasand Nirma!
Nirma became a huge success and all this was a result of Karsanbhai Patel’s entrepreneurial skills.
The best case of – Give your consumer what he wants, when he wants, where he wants and at the price he wants, selling will be done quite automatically. This is the marketing ‘mantra’ of Nirma.
The company that was started in 1969 with just one man who used to deliver his product from one house to the other,today employs around 14 thousand people and has a turnover of more than $ 500 million.
In 2004 Nirma’s annual sales were as high as tonnes.According to Forbes in 2005 Karsanbhai Patel’s net worth was $640 million and it’s going to touch the $1000 million mark soon.

4. DHIRU BHAI AMBANI
India’s largest private sector company. Created an equity cult in the Indian capital market. Reliance is the first Indian company to feature in Forbes 500 list Dhirubhai Ambani was the most enterprising Indian entrepreneur. His life journey is reminiscent of the rags to riches story. He is remembered as the one who rewrote Indian corporate history and built a truly global corporate group.
Dhirubhai Ambani alias Dhirajlal Hirachand Ambani was born on December 28, 1932, at Chorwad, Gujarat, into a Modh family. His father was a school teacher. Dhirubhai Ambani started his entrepreneurial career by selling “bhajias” to pilgrims in Mount Girnar over the weekends.
After doing his matriculation at the age of 16, Dhirubhai moved to Aden, Yemen. He worked there as a gas-station attendant, and as a clerk in an oil company. He returned to India in 1958 with Rs 50,000 and set up a textile trading company.
In 1992, Reliance became the first Indian company to raise money in global markets, its high credit-taking in international markets limited only by India’s sovereign rating. Reliance also became the first Indian company to feature in Forbes 500 list.
Dhirubhai Ambani was named the Indian Entrepreneur of the 20th Century by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI). A poll conducted by The Times of India in 2000 voted him “greatest creator of wealth in the century”.
Dhirubhai Ambani died on July 6, 2002, at Mumbai.

5. P C MUSTAFA
 ( COOLIE’S SON WHO SET UP 100 CRORE COMPANY WITH JUST 25,000 )
This is the story of a man who failed in Class 6, but went on to join the Regional Engineering College (now the National Institute of Technology), Calicut and the Indian Institute of Management-Bangalore.
This is the story of a man who decided to become an entrepreneur and employ people from rural India.
Today, fresh idli and dosa batter made by P C Mustafa’s company ID Fresh reaches homes in Bengaluru, Chennai, Pune, Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Mangaluru and even Dubai.
Today, we produce around 50,000 kg in our plant. The total investment must be around Rs 4 crore (Rs 40 million) and our revenue is Rs 100 crore (Rs 1 billion).

6. MAHESH GUPTA
CHAIRMAN KENT RO SYSTEMS
A mechanical engineer started in 1985, from a small room in his house with just 20,000 which he had saved from his job with IOCL. His first invention was in the field of petroleum conservation instrument where he earned fame and half a dozen patents to his credit.
His turning Point came with the establishment of KENT RO SYSTEM in the year 1998, when he charted out on a new enterprise after jaundice gripped his son in a posh colony of South Delhi.
Knowing that jaundice is a water-borne disease, Gupta researched and analyzed all the available water purifier in the market.
He was dissatisfied with available options and decided to make a better quality purifier. After several trails, he made his own water purifier and became confident that is product is good enough to be marketed. “Coming from an engineering background, making my own water purifier was not difficult task; all I needed to do was export the components. – Mahesh Gupta
The experiment turned into success. And then I thought to bring it out in commercially in the market. I started from scratch with an investment of about 1 lac and four member team. Today Kent has grown 40% market share in RO mineral and has turnover 580 crore and 2,500 employees.

7. KAILASH KATKAR
Born in a small village at Rahimatpur in Maharashtra, Kailash Katkar worked his way to the top to be chairman and CEO of INR 200 Cr business. He is the man behind Quickheal technologies Pvt Ltd.
He started with a job at local radio and calculator repair shop and later went ahead in 1990 to start his own calculator repair business.
In 1993 he started a new venture, CAT computer services where around that time his younger brother Sanjay developed a basic model of antivirus software which helped in solving the biggest problem of computer maintenance at that time.
Later in 2007 it was renamed as Quick Heal Technologies. He achieved all this without any formal education.

8. NITIN GODSE
Godse hails from a poor family of a farmer based out of Akole village from Ahmednagar district, where he recalls his father earning a meager monthly wage of Rs. 400
He worked hard and did graduation and later MBA course in from Pune University.
success stories of entrepreneursNitin laid the foundation of Excel Gas and Equipments Pvt Ltd on 31December, 1999.
Ranked as one of the top 5 companies, the company specialises in on-site piping and tubing installations, subcontracting, supplying a variety of onsite services like pipe and tube supply and fitting, on-site manual welding, orbital welding, helium leak check, instruments supply and erection and such others.
The turnover of the company is touching Rs 50 crores and the company has 200 employees on its own payroll.
Excel Gas plans to install 20 gas plants in 4-5 cities by with an investment of Rs 100 crores.

9. Ferrucio Lamborghini
Ferrucio was originally a farmer who made tractors. His business was very successful and he was among the most wealthy in Italy. He owned Ferrari among other super cars. The Ferrari used to give him constant trouble. Being a mechanic, he tried to fix the problem and found out that his Ferrari had the same clutch as used in one of his tractors.
"All my Ferraris had clutch problems. When you drove normally, everything was fine. But when you were going hard, the clutch would slip under acceleration; it just wasn't up to the job."
Ferrucio went to the service guys regularly to have a clutch rebuilt or renewed, and every time, the car was taken away for several hours and he was not allowed to watch it being repaired. The problem with the clutch was never cured, so Ferrucio decided to talk to Enzo Ferrari. He had to wait for him a very long time.
'Ferrari, your cars are rubbish!' Ferrucio complained. Il Commendatore was furious. "Lamborghini, you may be able to drive a tractor but you will never be able to handle a Ferrari Properly.'  This was the point when he finally decided to make a perfect car. Yes, Lamborghini.

10. Soichiro Honda
Soichiro Honda was a mechanic at a garage. His job was to tune cars to prepare them for races. Honda founded Tōkai Seiki, a piston rings manufacturing company in 1937.
This company won a contract to supply piston rings to an established automobile company - Toyota. But soon after, he lost the contract due to the poor quality of the products. He took time out to better understand Toyota's quality control processes, and by 1941, Honda was able to mass produce piston rings acceptable to Toyota.
Toyota took a 40% stake in his company, but Honda was demoted from president to senior managing director. Tōkai Seiki's manufacturing plants were destroyed in US bomb attacks in Honda sold the salvageable remains of the company to Toyota and used the proceeds to found the Honda Technical Research Institute in October 1946.
He worked with a staff of 12 men in a 172-square-foot shack. They built and sold improvised motorized bicycles by building their own copy of Tohatsu engines, and supplying these to customers to attach to their bicycles. Honda Motor Company grew in a short time to become the world's largest manufacturer of motorcycles by 1964.
Honda thereafter entered into mini pick-up trucks & finally into the car segment and today is a serious competitor to Toyota.

11. Colonel Sanders
At 65 years of age, Colonel Sanders received his first social security cheque of $99. He was broke, owned a small house and a beat up car.He made a decision that things had to change. His friends used to like his chicken recipe very much. The fact that this was the only novel idea he had, he decided to act upon it.
He left Kentucky and started his travels to different US states to sell his idea. He would tell restaurant owners that he had a chicken recipe which people liked and he was ready to give it to them for free, in return for a small percentage on the items sold. He got rejections after rejections, but did not give up. In fact, he got over 1000 rejections.
He got 1009 NO’s before he got his first Yes. With that one success Colonel Hartland Sanders changed the eating habits of the whole world with Kentucky Fried Chicken, popularly known as KFC