Ashish Mohapatra of OfBusiness said at BT Mindrush 2024 that perseverance and creativity can help companies overcome rejections. The IIT Kharagpur graduate faced an astonishing 73 rejections before finally taking off with a B2B business valued at over $5 billion.
It wasn't easy, Mohapatra said during the first panel discussion at BT Mindrush. “The reason we faced rejection after successfully passing the first round was firstly because we were an India-specific platform and did not have a global solution. Also, we were not a technology-first company. , and finally, because we had a big focus on pivoting. We got quick returns, but it didn't work for investors who were expecting scale.“
OfBusiness operates as a marketplace for small and medium-sized businesses, offering products such as steel, non-ferrous metals, chemicals, agricultural products, polymers, energy products, textiles, construction materials, and leather. “We are a B2B platform that supplies large volumes of bulky raw materials to end users, especially small and medium-sized enterprises, bypassing all the traders in the middle,” Mohapatra said.
Here are Mohapatra's three tips for entrepreneurs: Never change yourself. Never give up, persistence is the key. Third, he says you need to build a business or team that focuses on the problems you encounter on the ground, rather than a replica of what has been tried before.
BT MindRush started in 2013. Since then, the event has established itself as one of the most popular events on the Indian corporate calendar. The winners were determined based on BT-PwC India's Best CEO rankings. The study used a robust methodology to evaluate the nation's top 500 most valuable companies by market capitalization for revenue, earnings, EBITDA, and total shareholder return growth. After applying even more stringent filters, the names of the top three CEOs in each group, overall and by category, were placed in front of the judges to select the final winner.
This year's jury, led by Uday Kotak, founder and chairman of Kotak Mahindra Bank, includes Rajat Dhawan, senior managing partner at McKinsey & Company in India, Ramnath Krishnan, MD, ICRA, and India First It consisted of RM Vishakha, MD, MD and CEO of Life Insurance, and Amit Tandon. , founder and MD of Institutional Investor Advisory Services.