A Meet With Ashish Kapur: The YO! Enterpreneur!

If we talk about young Indian entrepreneurs, the subject remains incomplete without mentioning Ashish Kapur, the co-founder of Yo! China! The Indian chain of Chinese cuisine all over the country. To kick off its last exciting event for the academic year 2011-2012, Centre for Entrepreneurship and Development, FORE School of Management invited Ashish Kapur to talk to students about his journey of becoming a successful entrepreneur.

Ashish Kapur is an Electronics & Telecom Engineering graduate from McGill University, Canada. He is a recipient of the Scarlet Key Leadership Award and a graduate of GE Financial Management Program. He Worked with GE Capital across North America in Financial & Quality Management and is a Six Sigma Quality Black Belt. He conceived the concept of Quality Chinese Food at Value Pricing and founded Yo! China. Under his leadership, Yo! China has grown to be the larget restaurant chain over a five year period.

Ashish walked us through his story, almost telling the tale with as much vigour and taste as do the variety of foods in his restaurant. As captivating was his style of delivering his story, it was as gripping to know his eventful journey , the lows and highs of his business and how he got through all the challenges, winning against all the odds.

Among many strategic lessons that we learned from him, the most important was that of perseverance. Ashish Kapur, in his quest to become an entrepreneur in India, with no previous experience or family background in business, went through about 80 rejections before finding the funding from his first angel investors. A man of his intellect , personality and options at hand to switch to a safer better career could have easily took the other road in due course , but it was his perseverance , passion and trust in himself that led him to keep going until he succeeded. FORE School of Management is thankful to Mr. Ashish Kapur for sharing his experience with the students and infusing all the requisite enthusiasm that one needs time and again to believe in one’s idea through his journey of becoming an entrepreneur.