After setting up the high-tech 10 exchanges across six continents in a span of ten years, engineer-turned-financial market wizard Jignesh Shah aspires to grow 100-times bigger business potential with ‘startup ecosystem‘ which he feels can create up to 10 crore jobs over the next decade.
Jignesh Shah this time wants to focus on a mentoring role and help youngsters with innovative ideas live their entrepreneurship dreams by providing them a platform for “institutionalization, globalization and scaling up” of their ventures.
“When I set up exchanges and launched different products, I was creating and innovating for a very elite class in financial markets. Today, I want to create something for the masses,” Shah said in a media interview recently.
“I created and nurtured a business that made India the world’s second largest marketplace in commodities trading and we were on the top in all businesses our exchanges did. And this feat was achieved in a political environment that was not very conducive,” the 52-year businessman said.
“We created 10 lakh jobs through our exchanges during a period of ten years (2003-2013). But entrepreneurship is 100-times bigger opportunity than what I had in the exchange space and it won’t be wrong to say that we can create minimum 1 crore jobs and up to 10 crore jobs in the next 10 years through this startup ecosystem,” he said.
Asked to explain what kind of ‘ecosystem’ he wishes to create, to which he replied, “It can be in agriculture, which attracts me the most today, it can be in genetics and it can be in robotics also. There won’t be any constraints.”
Referring to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s call for creating institutions that are of global scale, Jignesh Shah said his only regret in life has been that he was scaling global heights at a time when the political leadership of the country lacked this vision and a supportive environment would have made India the world’s largest financial marketplace.
The New Digital Ecology 