Dream with your eyes open

From modest beginnings in Mumbai’s Grant

Road, surrounded by the energy and
unbridled potential of country always on
the verge of greatness, Ronnie Screwvala is
a first-generation entrepreneur.
His early days on television and in theatre
inspired him to pioneer cable TV in India
and build one of the largest toothbrush
manufacturing operations, before founding
UTV, a media and entertainment
conglomerate spanning television, digital,
mobile, broadcasting, games and motion
pictures, which he divested to The Walt
Disney Company in 2012.
For his innate ability to merge creativity
with commerce, Newsweek termed him the
Jack Warner of India, Esquire rated hm as
one of the 75 most influential people of the
21st century and Fortune as among Asia’s 25
most powerful.
On to his second innings, Ronnie is driven
by his interest in championing
entrepreneurship in India, and is focused on
building his next set of ground-up
businesses in high growth and impact
sectors. His more recent commitment to
being a first mover in sports has made him
lend his support to kabaddi and football.
He is passionate about social welfare, and
with his wife Zarina, through their Swades
Foundation, has given single-minded focus
to empowering one million lives in rural
India every 5-6 years through a unique 360-
degree model.
He lives in Mumbai with Zarina and
daughter Trishya.
Contents
Thanks to
Entrepreneurial Chronology: The Last
Twenty-five Years
1) Form Grant Road to Breach Candy
2) Opportunity Knocks, Open the Door
3) All the World’s Stage
4) The Outsider
5) Even if It Ain’t Broke, Fix it
6) Tipping the Scale
7) Failure is a Comma, Not a Full Stop
8) Stay the course
 9) Trucks and Trends
10)The world isn’t Flat---and Who cares?
11)Exit Stage Left?
12)Second Innings
13)Dream Your Own Dream
Appendix: Some Frequently asked
Questions
Thanks to
I never thought I would write a book, but
when I finally got around to it, less than a
year ago, the experience turned out to be
exhilarating and cathartic. To go back in
time and recall all the incredible people I
have had the privilege to work with or
partner; to go down memory lane to relive
the magical as well as the scary moments-
the highs and lows- has been sensational
and brought to the fore so many learnings,
till now tucked away in the past, which stay
with me as I embark on my new journey.
Thank you, Wynton Hall, for being such a
great partner and collaborator in the writing
of this book. You understood me so well
from the start and you brought structure to
the chapters and tonality to the narrative
that makes this book an easy read.
Thank you, Patrick Smith, for your incredible
eye for detail, never missing a silver of a
point and for putting it all together.
Thanks to my wife, Zarina, and my daughter,
Trishya, to whom I have dedicated this
book, for your patience and support-for
bearing with me during all those days and
late nights when I was locked in the study,
for the many dinner table conversations
that veered towards the chapters of the
book, and for the many times I would rush
in and request you to drop everything (as
you so graciously did) to read the few
paragraphs I had just written and was
excited about.
Thanks to some of my close colleagues and
fellow entrepreneurs as also to all of
Trishya’s best friends for your valuable
feedback, detailed and diverse, on the early
drafts, which no doubt helped me improve
the book.
Thanks to Amrita Pandey, a colleague, who
in the ten years I have known her as she
worked at UTV, would enter my office room
every two years to nudge me to write a
book, only to be shooed away…. Till one day
about a year-and half ago, when we were in
a group, brainstorming on executing the TV
show Sharks Tank in India, she once again
brought up writing a book and, for the first
time, I wrote down on Post-it: Book?
Thanks to my trusted colleague and
executive assistant, Zenobia Tamboli, for her
guidance, correction of facts and her
commitment through the multiple drafts of
the book.
Thanks to Rupa Publications, Kapish Mehra
and Ritu Vajpayee-Mohan, for breaking
boundaries in publishing this book, and for
holding my hand through the whole
process, from an idea to a book on the shelf.
It is the growing spirit of entrepreneurship
and leadership in India, coupled with the
new wave of optimism, passion, aspiration
and ambition, that inspired me to
contribute in my small way and write this
book.
Entrepreneurial Chronology
The Last Twenty-five Years
I am sharing my career arc in headline from,
not because this book is about my career
per se, but rather to offer a point of
reference. In each chapter, I draw on
anecdotes that connect my real-life
experiences, both the good and the bad, to
the book’s message. These stories aren’t
always presented in chronological order.
My entrepreneurial journey spans twenty-
five years till date. My first serious business
venture was pioneering cable TV in India in
the early 1980s before stumbling on to
manufacturing toothbrushes later in the
decade; that business Lazer Brushes, grew
to be one of the largest of its kind in India.
My early theatre and front-of-television
days, which began as a hobby, attracted me
to the media and entertainment business.
In the early 1990s, I incorporated UTV with
a vision that, at the time, was not so
ambitious-to create television programmes
for various channels. Over the next five
years, we grew in imagination and ambition,
created various divisions, and started
offering a range of services: form making
advertising films and documentaries, to
providing in-flight entertainment
programming for multiple airlines dubbing
for most Hollywood live action and
animation content in India, and setting up a
large post-production and special effects
studio-even while continuing to create
television shows.
Up until then, I had not raised external
funding-neither for cable television nor for
toothbrushes or UTV-mainly because the
ecosystem wasn’t mature enough then. And
there was another reason guiding this
decision. I wanted to bootstrap without
being answerable to external investors at a
time when I focused on growing businesses
where predictability was low.
However, by the mid-1990s, I changed my
business model. Seeking scale and needing
capital, we took on our very first investor,
Rupert Murdoch. Soon after, Warburg
Pincus, one of the top three global funds,
also took a stake in UTV. Our subsidiary built
a state-of the art post-production studio
and, Our subsidiary built a state-of the art
post-production studio and, later, a massive
animation facility, for which we managed to
bring three investors on board-Hinduja
Finance, infrastructure Leasing & Financial
Services (IL&FS) and Mitsui of Japan.
In the early 2000s, we embarked on three
major initiatives, amongst many others
always in the works. For one, we expanded
the UTV footprints across Southeast Asia,
specifically to Singapore and Malaysia, to
create television programmes and later,
even a channel. Second, back from a trip to
the US, and inspired by what Sam Walton
and Walmart were doing, as also the
success of the home shopping channels,
Home Shopping Network (HSN) and QVC. I
decided to pioneer ‘Home shopping’ and ‘as
seen on TV’ in India. For our home shopping
business, separate from UTV, we were able
to bring on board marquee Silicon Valley
investors, Draper and Walden. Vijay TV,
from liquor baron Vijay Mallya, which we
grew for two years; we then partnered with
Star TV for a 50:50 joint venture to
broadcast across all four South Indian
languages.
By 2006, the scale bug had bitten us, UTV
pivoted to a mostly consumer-facing
business; we began our expansion towards
a broadcast television network, a movie
studio and, eventually, games and mobile.
Our kids’ channel, Hungama, led to al long
and fruitful partnership with The Walt
Disney Company. Soon after, we launched
Bindass, India’s first youth channel, and a
bouquet of three movie channels under the
UTV brand. I personally started a business
news channel-Bloomberg UTV trying up
with Bloomberg, the number one global
name in business data.
UTV’s foray into movies started with a few
duds; we learnt well from these setbacks,
evident in the successes of 2003-2004-
Chalte Chalte, Swades and Lakshya. But our
real infection point was the 2006 breakout
Rang De Basanti. With our fair share of ups
and downs, we created, produced,
distributed, or co-produced more than sixty
movies over the next decade.
Looking for the next big thing, we also
diversified in to games=console, multi-
player and mobile-for the first time
acquiring rather that building. With the sole
exception of Vijay TV, everything I’d done
until then was built from the around up and
organically.
In February 2012, The Walt Disney Company
acquired UTV, I transitioned as the
managing director of the combined entity,
Disney UTV, till December 2013, when I
moved out of the media and entertainment
business and into my second innings.
Introduction
Made in India
Entrepreneurship is a journey, not an
outing.
Your cannot make a deal with yourself by
saying, ‘I’m going to try this out for two
years and see.’ Entrepreneurship is about
living life on your own terms.
Dream huge. And when you do, dream with
your eyes open.
Failure fascinates and intrigues me.
I’ve never understood why people are so
afraid to fail. Or why they hesitate to stretch
for that next rung on the ladder of life just
because they might topple over.
Failure is a part of life. Everyone fails. I know
I have. More times than I can count.
I am routinely asked questions about my
various entrepreneurial experience, and
most want to hear about the successes.
Why don’t they ask about the failures? It
would give me more to talk about.
Joust one early example; My first Bollywood
film, dil Ke Jharoke Main, was such a flop
you’ve probably never seen it. Nobody saw
it. Or at leas o one will admit to it. But the
lesson I learnt producing that film propelled
me forward in that part of my business and
gave me the learnings I needed to thrive,
not just in cinema, but in managing
creativity and believing in my own
convictions and gut.
After growing UTV for a few years in the late
1990s, we wanted to expand into
broadcasting and the movie business. What
we ended up with in that first effort was a
prefect storm of questionable movie-
making, one that traded on every
Bollywood stereotype under the sun: a
villain, a hero, a love interest, six songs and
three long hours of celluloid.
Here’s how bad it was: I refused to see the
movie in the preview theatre, I had a system
built in my bedroom so I could watch and
cringe alone. Back then in the movies, I
lacked the wisdom to follow through on my
intuition. I was labelled the odd guy out, a
South Mumbai Parsi with a perceived
tenuous command over Hindi, surrounded
by people who kept saying, “This is the
formula that works. I sat with the director
of Dil Ke Jharoke Main several times to
persuade him to consider a few cuts. By our
last trip to the editing room, it dawned on
me that no matter what we did, the film
was going to bomb.
My ‘oh god’ moment in the movie was a
scene of a cobra drinking milk a scene that
drag on ….and on. I couldn’t for the life of
me figure out why it was in the movie,
except that the director insisted that the
cobra was a good luck charm.
What the hell, I thought, if it’s going to be a
disaster, I may as well go with the popular
consensus. Who knows? Maybe it could
work.
So how did the cobra’s good luck charm
work for us?
The film cost INR 100 million to produce
(about INR450 million in today’s terms). We
lost it all.
What does a person take away from such,
or any, failure?
In business, as in life, failure can be a
stronger motivator that success. Get that
failure out of people’s minds quickly and
focus in moving forward, and you won’t see
that experience as ‘the end of the road’
We countered failure every time with the
complete conviction that, no matter what
else happened, we would succeed. That
attitude got me through many of the lowest
moments in my professional and
entrepreneurial career.
I wanted to write a book for those who
share my passion for entrepreneurship,
leadership, winning and dreaming of a
better future. I believe in India’s
entrepreneurial spirit because I have seen
and experienced its unbridled power. I
believe in the boundless potential of our
still nascent ecosystem. I want my country
to realize its full strength on the global stage
as a world leader in ideas; I want to see a
nation of people who think big, innovate,
work hard and follow their dreams. And I
believe you-and we-are the future of
entrepreneurship in India.
All through my career, the entrepreneurs,
leaders and intrapreneurs from companies
in India and around the world-who I’ve
been fortunate enough to know, meet, learn
from, or mentor-are inspiring, generous
and, above all, cool. They love and savour
the rush that comes with flying as high as
their wings will carry them.
For me, this book is all about demystifying
failure, inspiring success, raising ambitions
and dreaming big. As I brainstormed the
book’s title with a few colleagues, one
asked, ‘Ronnie, what’s your view on the
notion: “if you can dream it, you can do it?”
My immediate reaction was, ‘sure, but you
need to be wide awake, then and always.
And you need to do it with eyes open, not
closed…’ Then, I knew we had the title for
the book.
My sharing here is about staying real,
practical, feet-on-the-ground and focused.
So Dream With Your Eyes Open is the
perfect blend of the 30,000-foot view, when
you’re flying and thinking big, and the
ground view, where you’re walking the talk
and making it happen.
If you’ve ever had an impactful, disruptive
product or business idea, been curious
about owning your own business, or have
already taken the first steps on your
entrepreneurial path, this book holds
insights for you.
If you’ve been running your own company
for the last seven-odd years, and scale,
brand and value creation are some of the
issues you confront, keep reading.
If you think your parents or family would
freak out if your dared to suggest ditching
your safe haven-your professional job-to
pursue your dreams of owning your own
business, relax. Better yet, share this book
with them.
If you’re an experienced professional ready
to take a plunge into your own business or
simply dedicated to continuing as an
effective leader in the company, read on.
In all these cases, this book shares
experiences, failures, successes and
anecdotes that can provide you with
insights and give you a fighting chance
when it comes to team-building, mentoring,
growing a business, surviving and
succeeding in a David-versus-Goliath world.
Dream With Your Eyes Open is as much for
those who are a decade or more into their
entrepreneurial journey as for the fence-
sitter and the ones just embarking. It
doesn’t matter if you are twenty, thirty or
forty-age is not a deterrent. After all, I’m in
my fifties and looking to start all over again,
talking on more challenges and
opportunities in my second innings. It’s
never too late, or too easy.
Harnessing India’s enormous
entrepreneurial energy in an age of
opportunity hinges on a simple but
axiomatic truth: The future belongs to those
who realize that the goal is no longer
teaching talented people how to get a job
but how to create thriving business as
entrepreneurs or
intrapreneurs/professionals in a company if
we master this, India will soar. If not, we will
languish. Either way, the old way of
thinking-that a solid education ensures a life
of stability and security-is quickly
evaporating.
Creating a successful, growing business is
not nearly as daunting as you might think.
Sure, it requires grit and hard work. But
that’s true of any worthwhile endeavor.
Why should that stop you?
The good news is , you couldn’t have chosen
a better time to kickstart or grow your
entrepreneurial ambitions. This statement
may seem counterintuitive, since every
three years we hear of rising youth
unemployment or a sluggish GDP, some
global slowdown, or clouds of war. But
there’s a golden glow in the midst of such
gloom. I’m optimistic that this next decade
will bring opportunities to the determined
and the bold. Today is not the age for sitting
on the fence and wasting precious time.
After all, the size of our population and the
energy and momentum of our economic
ecosystem mean millions of low-hanging
entrepreneurial fruits, ripe for the picking.
Many people contemplating
entrepreneurship assume they have to
conjure up grand, complex, original ideas
like Twitter, Google or Instagram. But the
reality is, many of the most successful
entrepreneurial ventures out there today
are equally disruptive, innovative and
scalable, or involve fairly straightforward
products or services.
So many sectors just starting up have
incredible headroom-from health and
wellness, to agriculture and education (with
or without technology), to Indian
consumption, to all those unimaginable
sectors, markets and demands that will
open up from rural India as we integrate
those areas into t he whole ecosystem.
These businesses may not sound as sexy as
a Silicon Valley startup, but they stand to
create wealth for those confident and
driven enough to recognize and seize these
opportunities.
As I started writing this book, I couldn’t help
but wonder why, after six decades and more
of independence, we still remain a
developing country, lagging behind most of
the world’s economies. We are quick to lay
the blame on the government, our
environment, the world order-everything
but ourselves.
As leaders, entrepreneurs, innovators,
scientists, professionals or sportsmen, we
need to communicate and evangelize our
passion. On the world stage, we consistently
undersell ourselves. Instead, we must stand
firm in our conviction that the quality of any
product, service or idea that comes out of
India has to be world-class. What I’m
advocating is nothing less than a mindset
and DNA change for each one of us. Achieve
this, and nothing can stop us or slow us
down.
In the following chapters, I talk about
innovation and scale; staying the course
after setbacks (what most think of as
‘failure’); what it feels like to be the outsider
and yet succeed; the importance of spotting
trends, building brands and creating value;
and planned (or unplanned) exits, among
many other topics. I end with a Q&A, listing
the most common questions I hear when
discussing entrepreneurship on a daily basis
with both aspiring entrepreneurs and those
with years of experience under their belts.
Throughout, I share my personal
experiences, my learnings, a few of my
successes and some of my many, many
setbacks.
It has been a fabulous journey so far. And
it’s a journey you can take, too, as long as
you have unbridled confidence in yourself
and in your ability to succeed, and as long
as you find viable solutions to the inevitable
roadblocks and move on.
Entrepreneurship is about living life on your
own terms. Time is short. Even with the
right ideas, a tireless work ethic, the gift of
the gab, a solid network, the ability to hire
well, family support and funding-even with
all those variables working in your favor-
things can go sideways in the blink of an
eye. There are no guarantees in business or
life.
But if I had one bit of advice to give every
colleague, leader, CEO, entrepreneur of
founder, I know what it would be:
Dream huge.
And when your, dream with your eyes open.
 From Grant Road to Breach Candy
Risk isn’t about rushing headlong into uncertain
situations. That’s just foolish behavior. Risk
means pushing the envelope when others want
to take the safe route, and caring more about
potential rewards than possible losses.

In the 1970s, Mumbai (then Bombay) was a

whirl of motion, noise and colour. A million
kirana stores lined the streets (this hasn’t
changed much), with honking Ambassador
cars, trolley buses and autos jockeying with
cycles for space on the narrow roads. There
was music, art, literature. People with big
ideas and hopes for the future. Then, as
now, the city was a crucible for a young
entrepreneur with dream.
As a boy, I soaked in every aspect of vibrant
Mumbai like my life depended on it. Back
then, India was much more a manufacturing
and agricultural economy, and I paid special
attention to the economics of business-how
family businesses were on the rise, how
money changed hands, how businesses
appeared one day and disappeared the
next, how out of five shopkeepers selling
exactly the same hardware, one succeeded
where the others failed.
My childhood at Grant Road, next to
Novelty Cinema, , was lower middle-class-
we weren’t wealthy, but we had what we
needed. We lived in an apartment situated
on the first floor of the five-storey Arsiwala
building, nearly a century old and in
constant need of repair, it had one long
corridor with three rooms that held my
brother, parents, two aunts and
grandparents. The apartment’s sleeping
area was indistinguishable from its other
rooms. I recall begging family members to
switch with me so their bedroom could
become the de facto living room for a while.
I lived there until the age of sixteen,
privileged enough t go to a school where
most of my classmates came in cars while I
waited forty-five minutes for B.E.S.T. bus to
arrive.
Instead of undermining my confidence, my
childhood instilled in me philosophies and
ways of thinking that stuck with me later
when opportunities kicked into wrap speed.
Risk was a word I knew, but couldn’t define.
I was keen to observe adults who traded
goods on the street every day, shouting
offers back-and-forth. Ideas washed over
me like the July monsoons (though that
didn’t mean my eyes weren’t also open for
the neighborhood’s attractive young girls).
That ecosystem spurred my first
entrepreneurial experience. All of us local
kids from the building got together and
hung a drop curtain, and with handbills,
invited audiences for the four play-cum-
concerts we put on in the evenings, rotating
the performances in our various living
areas. I enjoyed bonding with my friends,
and their parents were thrilled to have their
kids doing with my friends, and their
parents were thrilled to have their kids
doing something productive. Everyday in
the building paid to watch us. Their kids
were in it, how could they not? And at the
age of ten, I earned my first round of
money. It wasn’t much, just enough to hire
a cycle to earn me a date with a girl who
lived just behind us a Balaram Street.
Those first shows led to other projects, each
a little more complex than the last. My
family’s small veranda overlooked the
cinema-at that time one of the city’s top
movie halls. Because no one had television
then, red-carpet premieres were a huge
spectacle. Bollywood advertised its films by
gathering everyone for twice-a-month
events and waiting for the stars to come
out. Newspapers did the rest, splashing
flashy front-page photos of the industry’s
most glamourous personalities- Amitabh
Bachchan, Jitendra, Rajesh Khanna,
Sharmlila Tagore, Helen, Nutan, Manoj
Kumar, Waheeda Rehman and a host of
others.
The roads around our apartment were
chock-a-block for every premiere, and our
veranda was the ideal vantage point for
anyone who wanted to see the glory of
Bollywood. Realizing that there was a
market for balcony sets, I sold tickets to
people who wanted to gawk and point at
their favorite. stars and snap pictures they’d
proudly show their family and friends.
I was tempted to make more money by
offering snacks. My grandparents frowned
upon food service, the first setback in my
entrepreneurial career as a ten-year-old.
Still, they and my parents humoured me
and were pleased by my ambition-even if
they drew the line at fifteen strange people
on their veranda.
Small stories, sure, but those are the
moments that shaped my entrepreneurial
spirit. No magic formula, no groundbreaking
idea, no inside family track or connections.
But my childhood at Grant Road was a time
of infinite possibility; it whetted my appetite
to break out, dream big dreams and,
sometimes, watch them unfold on a scale
larger than I could then imagine.
Without doubt, the greatest moment of my
adolescent entrepreneurial life was a rock
concert organized in the mid-1970s when I
was eighteen. According to our parents,
rock-n-roll was a sign the world was ending,
Still, young India’s interest in Western music
was on the rise. Calcutta was considered a
center for the country’s music culture at the
time, though no show of any magnitude had
been produced. Some friends and I wanted
to bring attention to Bombay.
We invited four groups from across India to
come to the city. It was an ambitious
project, the first multi-city music fusion
show the country had ever seen.