This Indian Billionaire Stresses on Learning, Urges for Everyone to Find Their Inner Passion Having built three successful businesses, Turakhia wears the sale of his company Media.net to a Chinese consortium for $900 million marking it as the third-largest adtech deal in the world as a badge of honour
By Aashika Jain
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Divyank Turakhia, an Indian-born computer-programmer, businessman, billionaire, serial entrepreneur and investor with a net worth estimated at $1.76 billion as of September 2017, is someone who easily makes for a benchmark for success.
Having built three successful businesses, Turakhia wears the sale of his company Media.net to a Chinese consortium for $900 million marking it as the third-largest adtech deal in the world as a badge of honour.
Divyank started coding at the age of 8, his brother and he started building companies in their teens. In 1998, with a capital of INR 25,000 ($375), Divyank Turakhia started his first tech venture Directi with elder brother Bhavin Turakhia.
In 2014, Divyank and Bhavin sold four of their web presence companies – BigRock, LogicBoxes, ResellerClub, and Webhosting.info – to Nasdaq-listed U.S.-based web-hosting firm Endurance International Group, for $160 million. 2016 marked the sale of their Dubai and New York-based ad-tech company Media.net founded in 2010.
The billionaire is now on a break after 22 long years of working. In a conversation with Entrepreneur India, he spoke about how to build successful businesses, passion, his love for work and how to manage a business.
Never Stop Learning
The 36-year who reads between 800 to 1000 hours in a year spoke about how important it is to keep learning.
It is an ongoing process – you need to keep learning. If learning is not there, then it is the end of life and you have to keep learning in order to keep evolving and if you stop learning that's boring," Turakhia said in a chat.
Fuel Your Passion
He thinks everyone is passionate about something – find out what you are interested in, find it out and be passionate about it so that you can specialize in that field you have to spend time on it because there's is a massive difference if you want to be on top and specialize in something, if we spend eight hours in five days and spending actual amount of time that it takes if you want to really specialize, and I know people have succeeded because they spend every waking hour of every day, it doesn't matter it's a holiday or anything, doing that thing that is important.
Turakhia was himself very clear about being passionate about something and focusing on what he individually really wanted.
How to Manage Your Business
Turakhia says managing your business is different at different stages of the business. "When you are starting as an entrepreneur, for new entrepreneur the resources are different in comparison to scaling organization, so I would say at every stage you look at things very differently. A couple of things that are consistent and that is things take time to build, there are more successful stories it takes anywhere between 5- 10 years to build something constructive. There are no shortcuts! You need to be lucky but that should not be the strategy. A lot depends upon figuring out your core strengths and feasible resources you have access to do things differently, if some other company is able to make the profit, you can too," explained Turakhia.
He does believe in luck but should not be the strategy to managing the success.
"One has to be patient as things take time," Turakhia said.
