Hustling is key, says Uber CEO

Around 500 students and faculty attended Travis Kalanick, founder and CEO of Uber, to have a fireside chat with former UTV top honcho Ronnie Screwvala at IIT-Bombay’s convocation hall in Powai on Tuesday.

The UCLA drop out insisted that every entrepreneur needs to have the mindset of not a winner, but a champion. “A champion is someone who puts every ounce of energy into the field. When you get knocked down, get back up... until you get success. You keep putting everything that you got and every ounce of your energy in that idea.”

The entrepreneur said he ran Uber with one motto, always be hustling. In Hindi, he roughly translated it to jugaad. “We use a word in our work culture called hustle. I learnt that the Hindi word for it is jugaad and in India I have always been jugaading. The jugaad will get you a lot of funding. In the U.S. we say turn lemons into lemonades, but if you are constantly jugaading you can make lemonade from thin air.”

At a time when India is trying to make its mark in the start-up arena, Mr Kalanick said, “Research, development and innovation are about the three Bs — Bay Area, Beijing and Bengaluru. Innovation in India will no longer be restricted to the Silicon Valley. I first came to India in 2007 and have seen the eco-system grow in the past 10 years.”

“The economy is flourishing in a big way since the past decade. By 2020 it’s going to be just about smartphones. We came here in 2013, our growth rate then was 4% today it is 40%. I don’t know what my mission will be five years down the line, but today it is to build transportation as reliable as running water.”