The best entrepreneurs bring expertise that is uniquely able to understand and mitigate risk in businesses, Uber founder Travis Kalanick said on Saturday.

“If people think that there is high risk associated with something, but you think that it is not too much, then go after it. The best entrepreneurs are good at understanding, mitigating risk,” Kalanick said at a presentation on ‘8 Lessons to Entrepreneurs’ at the ‘Start-up India’ initiative here.

As an entrepreneur, one needs to think something completely different than anyone else. “You must be resilient to the fact that everyone may think you are crazy,” he told the audience.

The part of making magic as an entrepreneur is being able to see the future before everybody else does, he said. “At Uber, there are four things we want to do. Give people their time back, bring calm to their daily lives, bring people joy, and give them some money or help them save money.”

“As we see the world going global, I believe R&D and innovation are about the three bays – Bay Area, Beijing and Bengaluru,” Kalanick said, adding that, “we are at that inflection point in India where innovation will get global”.

On a question from MakeMyTrip CEO Deep Kalra, who was acting as moderator, on how the Indian market was different and the tweaks that Uber had to put in place, Kalanick said, “In India, payment is different. This has been a big area for us in terms of changing how we do it globally.”

He added that Uber had started as a side project, without big ambitions. “It was started as a high-end service with luxury cars. But we soon realised that cheaper products meant more cars, drivers making more trips and, therefore, making more money. This was an interesting transformation for the company.”

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