Two chunks of copy made interesting neighbours on the contents page of a recent issue of a leading Indian business magazine. The first featured Indra Sinha, the reigning Godhead and Oracle of advertising, predicting in bold, hard copy, that the advertising industry would soon be dead-made obsolete by the Internet. And cheek by-jowl with this apocalyptic prophecy was a write-up on Ajit Balakrishnan, who had seized the day in the just-burgeoning New World of the Internet with his trail-blazing company Rediff On The Net. Interestingly, the net company carries two unmistakable stamps of its parentage, both of which happen to be from the soon-to-be-dead advertising industry. The first is its name, coined out of the advertising giant, Rediffusion, and the second is its creator, Balakrishnan, who is also one the original founders of the ad agency.

You'd think a man who has been one of the brains behind creating an advertising agency that not only made advertising history in India but also rewrote the rules of advertising would be happy to rest on his directorship. The company that will be billing around Rs. 500 crore at the end of 1999, having grown by an impressive 30% in an industry that is supposed to be in recession. (On the way, Balakrishnan stopped by to create PSI Data Systems, one of the more successful computer companies in India, of which he continues to be the Vice-Chairman and the largest individual shareholder). You'd think such a man would be ready to put his feet up and savour the dividends of his stock options. Not Ajit Balakrishnan. A compulsive, chronic risk-taker, hopelessly hooked to a high-octane game where you hunt for ideas which only you can see as brilliant business opportunities, but which, to most others, often seem like the delusions of a lunatic. And having found them, you convert them into hugely successful business ventures. Which everyone then looks at and says, "Hey, how come I didn't see that one coming?"

Balakrishnan calls himself a `serial entrepreneur', a label that fits well. You can almost see him stalking the jungles of commerce in search for one more seemingly impossible crazy idea to tame and conquer. Now and then stopping by to slay a passing dragon of a popular business dictum. And the wilder the idea, the more unattainable its quality, the greater the thrill of the kill. In fact, for Balakrishnan, the choicest preys are what seem like whimsical unicorns and quixotic wind mills that only hallucinating madmen would dare to hunt.

Serial entrepreneurs, it seems, are born never made. And in Balakrishnan's case, the signs were apparent fairly early on. The year was 1973. A small-town boy from Cannanore in Kerala, wide-eyed at the awesome vistas of opportunity that had unfolded in front of him because of an MBA degree from IIM Calcutta, joined a small, chronically creative advertising hot shop called MCM. And bumped into his first unicorn. At the time, it was believed that creative, path-breaking advertising could never translate into a successful, profitable business. And the advertising industry was dotted with enough examples to corroborate this theory. There were, it seemed, only two kinds of agencies. Large profitable ones that produced mind numbing, duller-than-ditchwater advertising (and still continue to do so, Balakrishnan reminds you sardonically). And small, impetuous, intensely creative little hot shops that burst like brilliant fireworks on the landscape with inspired, brilliantly fresh, incandescent advertising... and fizzled out just as quickly.

Financial viability and creativity, it seemed, just didn't go together. Fascinated, Balakrishnan, already a young business strategist at MCM (and not a bean counter, as the popular legend goes, and which he acidly dismisses as the rumour-mongering of illiterate AEs!), set about to take apart this belief and rewrite the theorem. "I used to spend hours and hours in the evening talking about it to Kersy Katrak and Bal Mundkur of Ulka. And 10 months is all that it took to unravel that mystery!" The unicorn was his. Having worked out how to successfully mix the oil of business profitability with the water of creativity into an inseparable magic amalgam, and with the collaboration of two other unicorn hunters, Arun Nanda and Mohammed Khan, Balakrishnan set up Rediffusion Advertising. And the rest, as they say, made advertising history.

"It was crystal clear to me.." It is a phrase that you will hear Balakrishnan use often. To explain, for instance, his unorthodox decision, after graduating from IIM Calcutta, to join a small advertising agency rather than become a perk - pampered boxwallah in one of the blue-chip British multinationals. Why, you ask him. "Because then and now, I see myself as being in control of my destiny." He uses the phrase to explain to you why risk - taking may scem a dangerous game, but only from the outside.

Somewhere, in all this, the thought crosses your mind that this may be a bit like gambling Suggest this to Balakrishnan and the reaction is swift, severe and sharp. Its almost as if you've reduced his grand vision of things of a one armed bandit. That too, the vision of a man who sees himself in control of his destiny, knowing exactly where he is going and how to get there. "I cannot even by a remote stretch of imagination think of myself as a gambler. Gambling is when you toss a coin with the full knowledge that you don't know what the outcome will be. In risk taking, you think you know the outcome, you've worked a lot towards it. Sometimes it

might not happen the way you want it to but that's not for lack of trying. A gambler takes pleasure in not knowing the outcome," he says. Then why is it called risk? In his thinking that's word which only the spectators use. Inside the bullring, things look totally different.

It was crystal clear to Balakrishnan in 1989 that he must shut down PSI's Rs. 15 crore state-of-the-art computer manufacturing factory that he had just set up in a record time of 10 months. Why, you wonder. Because the government was moving towards decontrolling the computer hardware industry and in the new environment, he could see, again with great clarity, that there was no way an Indian hardware manufacturer could compete on costs with multinationals who were expected back in. Of course PSI survived the closure and lived to tell the tale. And though Balakrishnan sold out controlling interest in the company to his French partner Bull, he with great prescience retained a 11 percent holding in the company and helped transform it into a software developer. With the share price topping the Rs. 1,500 mark in the last few weeks, PSI shareholders are joyously singing their way to the bank, including Balakrishnan, whose holding should now be worth close to Rs 90 crore. Another good reason for him to retire.

In 1995, when even to the most well informed, educated urban Indian, the Internet was technological mumbo-jumbo, about as unfamiliar as genetic engineering, it once again became crystal clear to Balakrishnan that this was going to be the future Mecca of business opportunity. The revelation came of all places in Oxford, in a particularly cold December. He had gone there on personal business but was stuck indoors for weeks with nothing much to do and so ended spending much of the time on the newly emerging world of the Internet. He came back and signed away as much as a million dollars of his own personal money on what could only be another unicorn of his delusions. "Four years ago, when I used to go around evangelizing the Net, they used to say, `the man's gone mad!' But it was so clear in my own head how it was going to unravel, year by year and where it was going to go..."

Rediff is today India's successful internet site offering the most comprehensive range of products from free e-mail to a search engine, from personal investment services to e-commerce, news, advise and much more, It is believed to get close to 30 million hits a month. Its investors include the likes of Intel, Draper and Warbug Pincus. There has been talk about an IPO sometime this year. The big question is about where it would be listed-on the Nasdaq or/and the Indian stock exchanges. Estimates about the value of the company have ranged between $100-200 million. It is a difficult guessing game considering the vaulting valuations of internet companies worldwide. Closer home Satyam paid Rs. 550 crore to take over the much smaller Indiaworld.com recently. Whatever happens there is no doubt that Balakrishnan will be rewarded handsomely.

"I never get out for the same reason twice!" Balakrishnan doesn't say that Gary Sobers did, when asked why he was the world's greatest batsman. Because each time he got out, he used to go back and figure out exactly why so that he would never repeat that mistake again. For Balakrishnan, it's an inspirational mantra. That failures are just learning experiences, nothing more. In fact, Balakrishnan says that he has grown more from his failures than from his successes. Every time he fails and he willingly admits that he has many, many times instead of seeing it as an indictment of his capability, he carefully dissects the mistake down to its bare bones so that he will never repeat it again. And therein lies the essence of serial entrepreneurship. That you use the mistakes of the past to create the successes of the future.

The failure of Klass, a company manufacturing state-of-the-art equipment to mark packaging that Balakrishnan set up in the early 80s, taught him that size does matter, at least when it comes to business opportunity. Never enter a market where the entire market is so small that even if you are the world's smartest businessman, you can only be a bit player. PSI taught him to know when to walk away. He knew, that the government decontrolled the computer industry, that he would never be able to sustain the huge amounts of capital that it was going to take just to keep abreast, forget getting ahead of competition. So painful as it was, he walked awaym, voluntarily bringing in international external financing, which meant giving up management control of a child that he had given eight years of his life to nurture. "`You're crazy. Who ever walks away from your own company!', my friends told me. But I had to, tough as it was to my ego. If I didn't, it would end up as a ghost of a company that would never succeed. Today all the investments that Arun and I and the other partners made in PSI are worth millions and millions of dollars," he says.

Hanging in there to make it work is a big part of the game... and makes the difference between a mere risk-taker and an entrepreneur. The difference is an important one. It separates the men from the boys, and more importantly, the success stories from the failures. If letting go is one side of the coin of what Balakrishnan calls good entrepreneurship, persistence is the other. And that's the tightrope, he tells you, which he constantly walks. Trying to figure whether it's time to move on, because the road ahead will lead straight to disaster. Or whether to persist, even when success seems a certain impossibility. Which is why he admits that they are tough calls. But make them you must.

Take Rediffusion, for example. The agency had to wait for a good three years before real recognition in terms of highly visible, national clients like

Jenson & Nicholson and Red Eveready came its way. By which time one of the founders, Mohammed Khan, had left. "His view was that Rediffusion wouldn't work. He lost patience." And how much time does it take to fetch the returns? "Oh, probably another 10 years after that. Because Arun and I used to pay ourselves lower salaries than most of our key executives. We hired good people, contemporaries who by then were earning big salaries in big companies. So when we hired them, Arun and I kept this a secret between us. We used to take just enough to get by. But that built the agency!"

Another aspect of Balakrishnan's personality that stands out is his continuing partnership with old friend Arun Nanda in all his ventures. Apart from a shared vision of business and mutual respect, they give each other enough space to do their own thing. While Nanda stuck to the knitting of advertising, recently being inducted onto the international executive board of Dentsu, Young and Rubicum, one of the world's largest agencies and Rediffusion's international affiliate, Balakrishnan has persisted with his vision outside. "It takes on a life that is different from you and separate from you... that's the wonderful thing!" he says.

For Balakrishnan, the excitement in a new venture is in the thrilling fear of knowing that you could lose it all, and to see an idea come. "A start-up to life atmosphere brings the best out of people. You are surrounded by highly creative energetic people who are all set on a pure purpose." That's the buzz that he seeks. And when the business begins to take on an identity of its own, he knows it's time to move on. The child is becoming an adult. And like a good parent, Balakrishnan lets go. Not only because he feels that that's the best way to let a business grow, but also because by then, the magic for him has gone. When the business takes on a certain size, he tells you, creativity begins to play second fiddle to administrative overheads. That's when it's time for him to move on to new things.

His views on himself however are a bit enigmatic. He insists that not only is he just starting out, but that he doesn't consider himself to be a successful man. "You can't call yourself successful unless you have built a brand and it succeeds in the world-wide scene," he says. And what about the wealth? "Well, what about it? Success cannot be measured by the Mercedes car that you have. I'm the son of a doctor, my grand parents were doctors - for me, success is contributing to society. It can never be wealth." You look at him disbelieving as you count the crores; he stares back, laughing a little mocking laugh, giving away nothing. Is he displaying a false sense of modesty? Admit it, you hector him, that you are in fact a rich, powerful successful man, otherwise why would I be interviewing you? He doesn't bat an eyelid (an old entrepreneurial trick, because if you blink, you lose remember?), laughs and gently persists in maintaining that the money doesn't count. It never did. (And never mind if the rest of the world is busy counting it for you!). And that the power doesn't interest him because he's not a powerful man.

So when will it be enough? Enough to hang up one's boots, he asks? You nod. When you have been able to create "one brand out of India which is respected world-class.... like Sony!" he says.

The serial entrepreneur is on the prowl again.