Rohan Verma, director of MapmyIndia, gives us a take on the oft-fought debate—on whether a management degree is an asset when building a business. As an MBA student at London Business School, and on a sabbatical from CE Info Systems, the parent company of MapmyIndia that his parents Rakesh and Rashmi Verma founded, Rohan tells us why studying works for him. 

I haven’t really thought much about being an entrepreneur who is also studying. I wanted to be an engineer and build things. It’s why I went to Stanford University to get a degree in electrical engineering. I didn’t go to become an entrepreneur. The fact that I am now one is really because I believe that location-based services offer something new and useful to consumers. I do believe though that entrepreneurs have a defined shelf life. To combat that stagnation, they should ideally keep learning. I am at the age where I have the luxury to do so because my parents, as founders of the business, are still running it.See, if you do take the time out to study, it has to make sense for you both personally and for the company. You can’t take time off to study if you’re the only founder. Then, you better stick around and work with your team. Because I don’t have that limitation right now, I can focus and prepare myself for the future. I know there will be ideas that I will get while studying that I want to implement in the company—the MBA makes sense for that.

An MBA opens up networks—whether it is investors or potential employees.

I don’t want to look back at some point  and regret that I don’t have the tool kit or the necessary expertise to follow my ideas. Yes, taking the time out to study may not be something everybody would like to put themselves through but if there is anything that defines me most it is being a passionate, curious entrepreneur.There are a lot of jokes within the start-up community about MBA graduates. It’s not an impression I subscribe to but I don’t completely disagree with it either. Running a start up and being an entrepreneur require different kinds of outlook. Building a business can’t really be taught. You’ve got to have an entrepreneurial mindset inherently, you need to get down and dirty, and you need to go through the struggle. An MBA is certainly not an automatic qualification as many people might tend to assume. So, perhaps a lot of the jokes are justified. To me, education has little to do with the glory of a degree, or the brand name of an institution. It’s what you manage to extract from the opportunity.

As an entrepreneur, I have found that my education at the London Business School (LBS) has presented me with valuable insights on how to scale up a business, which otherwise one would have to pick up solely from experience and perhaps, at the cost of the business that you are leading. For example, many entrepreneurs tend to focus all their energies on the product. As a tech entrepreneur who had no grounding in finance, knowledge of the finance function through the MBA has helped me appreciate the various nuances of running MapmyIndia that I hadn’t focused on as much before. Also, one of the biggest skills that entrepreneurs amass is the ability to tap into networks. They reach out to businessmen, family and friends, their mentors, and their professional networks. A degree, especially an MBA, automatically opens up that kind of network from a varied pool of people. At both LBS and Stanford, I’ve been lucky to interact with people from diverse backgrounds; these interactions would not have happened otherwise. This unparalleled opportunity for unique collaborations is also why a lot of businessmen go into executive education programmes—you interact with your peers in an environment where they are open to learning and meeting new people.

As an entrepreneur, I have found that my education at the London Business School (LBS) has presented me with valuable insights on how to scale up a business." - Rohan Verma

In fact, the first round of venture capital funding into MapmyIndia came because one of my professors at Stanford, who was also on the board of Kleiner Perkins Caulfied, showed an interest in the company. More recently, at LBS, a fellow executive education student expressed an interest in joining our company. We were looking to expand abroad so this came at a perfect timing. I connected him with my father who interviewed him and this person is now on board. Another instance that comes to my mind is from when my parents were visiting my wife and me at LBS. A professor suggested they talk to the MBA students about building MapmyIndia. One of our entrepreneurship professors at LBS, John Mullins, who attended the talk, went on to write a book called The Customer Funded Business. He picked up MapmyIndia as a case study. This kind of global exposure for the company may not have been possible had I not been both student and entrepreneur at the same time.

But if I had to pick sides, I still believe that it’s much more fun to be an entrepreneur than a student. I would much rather be in India right now, working on growing MapmyIndia. See, you have to be where the action is; organisations are shaped and moved in real time. You cannot rock the boat if you’re not going to work everyday and are not working alongside the people who are going to turn conceptual ideas into reality.That is not to say that your company cannot grow in your absence. Good companies should work towards making themselves operationally replaceable. What I mean is you can’t have a vision, and hope for it to be realised if you’re not there—you have to let your employees take over both the planning and the executing. You can’t be a remote boss—that doesn’t work. In fact, a few months before I had to come for my MBA, we consciously decided that people who were reporting to me would either work independently now, report to my father, or be shifted to different verticals.