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Stay Hungry Stay Foolish

Twenty-five IIM graduates who chose the hard road of building businesses.

by Rashmi Bansal

Stay Hungry Stay Foolish tells the stories of 25 MBAs from IIM Ahmedabad who left secure, lucrative jobs to become entrepreneurs. Through their journeys, the book illustrates the motivations, struggles, and lessons of building ventures in India. It became a landmark in Indian publishing, selling hundreds of thousands of copies.

It was one of the first books to make Indian entrepreneurship aspirational and relatable, profiling founders by background and temperament rather than abstract theory. For an Indian founder, it offers grounded, local role models and the recurring lesson that conviction matters more than credentials.

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