He was hosted by the Entrepreneurial and Venture Capital Club at the ISB. In his talk titled 'In Pursuit of a Dream', he traced his entrepreneurial journey and his vision of integrating the aspirations and resources of the 'Other India' and translating the dream of a common Indian to fly, into a reality.
From a village child who went to a regional medium school, barefooted, and then underwent a short stint in the Army (where he took premature release), Captain Gopinath shared other interesting tales with his audience, such as his first "business dream" was as an entrepreneurial farmer, when he took over a barren, un-reclaimed land and converted it into a model, high- yield farm. "I had nothing and everything in front of me, but a basic instinct told me I couldn't go wrong," he said, recalling his first brush with entrepreneurship when he experimented with poultry, dairy, silk-worm rearing to setting up a bio-gas plant on his farm. In spite of a lack of funds and countless hurdles, Gopinath recalled, his simple philosophy of "Life is full of sunshine" kept him going.
"Energy and passion is most important, capital will flow in if you have the integrity and the persistence to follow your dreams," he said.
It was Captain Gopinath's "indomitable will" and "inventional courage" which helped him start a helicopter company in the year 1997. A period before that, shared Captain Gopinath, there was not a single helicopter in India for public charter. "It was my dream to make helicopters as accessible as a taxi," he said. Today it is the largest helicopter company in the country with 8 bases.
Around the same time as his helicopter enterprise took off, the country was awakening into a "new, resurgent, optimistic nation". It was during one of his trips from Goa to Bangalore on a helicopter that he witnessed a drastic change in the rural landscape – "dish antennas sticking out from mud huts." It was a time of aspirations for New India and Captain Gopinath realised that to build a successful business, it needed to be inclusive of the 'Other' India. Airline tickets were outside the aspiration of the Indian middle class – Captain Gopinath translated this aspiration into a scalable business plan – to tap the 250 million odd middle class in India. "Here was an opportunity to change the economic landscape of the country – there were around 500 airfields in this country that were unconnected, there were these small towns that were straining for connectivity – we decided to tap this potential area, and translated it into a scalable business model," he recounted.
Today Air Deccan has 45 aircrafts flying 350 flights every day, bigger than Indian Airlines in scale. It also has the largest route network in the country covering 66 cities.
"Listen to that inner prompting and have allegiance to that one dream, hold on to it" – that was the mantra to the future entrepreneurs at the ISB from one of the leading entrepreneurs of new India.
