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One of the most amazing stories in entrepreneurship originated from the revolutionary fervour of a man in Bengal. Nani Gopal had to flee Calcutta to avoid the British police and came to the US, where he took a job as a salesman & married an American schoolteacher
His son, young Amar supplemented his family income by repairing radios. “We put up signs in all the little hardware stores where my father used to sell his imported goods,” “The signs said, ‘We repair radios...
...So people would drop off their radios at the store and I’d take them home and repair them, and we’d give the store 10% of the invoice. I had a little pact with my father that if my grades remained good, I could go to school only four days a week..
and he would write an excuse saying I had a headache or something. The teachers all knew this; it was always on a Friday and so on Monday, they’d ask me, ‘How many radios did you fix, Bose?’”
Amar Gopal BoseBose went on to study at MIT & after he graduated and joined MIT as a professor in 1964, his mentor Y W Lee advised him to start his own electronics company.
Lee said about the name “...we don’t want to be tied to a specific technology or industry because we don’t know what we’ll do in the future. The name should be pronounceable in many different languages and easy to trademark. And ideally, it’s one syllable.”
Everyone laughed because they knew what he was suggesting without saying it: “Bose.”
Bose started his company focussing mainly on high end products for the military. His noise cancelling headphones were originally designed for army use. Soon his audio products were making waves
Bose started his company focussing mainly on high end products for the military. His noise cancelling headphones were originally designed for army use. Soon his audio products were making waves
Today, Bose has revenues of over 3.5 billion, and before he passed in 2013, Amar Gopal Bose donated a majority of his shares to his beloved MIT to help sustain their research.
And it all started with one revolutionary in Bengal!
Amar Gopal Bose, born Nov 2nd, 1929.
And it all started with one revolutionary in Bengal!
Amar Gopal Bose, born Nov 2nd, 1929.
