The Day I Threw Out My Prepared Talk — And Told The Room To Change The Market Before It Changes Them
Some of the best talks I have ever given were the ones I did not plan. This is the story of one of them — a keynote that was born in a green room in the middle of a rainstorm, and ended up on the pages of The Economic Times the next morning.
The Day The Conference Almost Didn't Happen
The Start-Up Summit at Henry Maudslay Hall in October 2017 got off to the worst possible start. Delhi was under heavy rain that morning, and the organisers were quietly panicking — roads were water-logged, half the delegates were stuck in traffic, and several of the invited speakers had not yet reached the venue.
A few of us, though, had reached early. I was one of them. So instead of the usual pre-event rush — final rehearsals, mic checks, running through slides — we found ourselves with time on our hands. And that, in a way I did not expect, changed the entire day.
The Green Room Conversation That Rewrote My Talk
In that quiet green room, a few of the other early-arriving speakers and I started talking — the way founders always talk when there is no audience and no agenda — about how we actually run our businesses. Not the LinkedIn version. The real one.
And as I was talking, I realised something about myself that I had never quite put into words before. My entire style of running Su-Kam was to disrupt my own market before somebody else did. Every year, I would launch a new model or a new technology that would quietly replace one of our existing running products — even when the older one was still selling well. Even when there was no reason on paper to change anything.
“If we don't change our own market ourselves, somebody else will change it for us. And when that happens, it is too late.”
The Fights I Used To Have With My Own Sales Team
Inside Su-Kam, this way of thinking had cost me a lot of internal arguments over the years. My sales people would come to my cabin, frustrated. “Sir, why are you launching a new model? The old one is running fine. Dealers are happy. Customers are happy. Please don't confuse the market.”
And I would sit them down and explain, patiently, the same thing every time: the market is never as stable as it looks. There is always someone, somewhere, working on the thing that will make our current best-seller irrelevant. If they get there before we do, we lose everything. If we get there first — even at the cost of eating into our own sales for a while — we get to define the next chapter. Let us change the market before it changes us.
Over the years, that line became almost a house rule at Su-Kam. Not everyone loved it. But every time we did it, the company came out stronger on the other side.
I Threw Out My Prepared Talk
Back in that green room, the other speakers heard me out and something clicked for them. They appreciated the thought — not as a slogan, but as a lived operating principle. Two or three of them told me the same evening that they had never heard anyone frame disruption from the inside like that before.
So, in the twenty minutes before my session began, I quietly decided to change my topic. The talk I had prepared — a fairly standard Su-Kam-journey narrative — went into the bin. I walked on stage and instead spoke about the one thing I actually believed most deeply: that the founder's job is not to protect the business the way it looks today, but to keep changing it before the world does that for you.
The Response In The Room
I have given many talks in my life. I honestly did not expect this one to land the way it did.
The room, which had come in tired and drenched and irritated with the delays, sat up. People started taking notes. Founders in the audience were nodding along in that particular way founders nod when someone is saying something they have privately felt for years but never quite been able to articulate.
When the session ended, I got gheraoed — that's the only word for it — by young entrepreneurs, students, and even a few fellow speakers, all wanting selfies, questions, follow-up conversations, business cards. It took me a long time to leave that hall. Several people told me later that I was probably the most solid speaker at the summit that day. I don't know if that's true. What I know is that it was one of the most connected conversations I have ever had with a room full of strangers.
The Story ET EnergyWorld Ran The Next Morning
The Economic Times' EnergyWorld team was in the room. The next morning, the story went up with a headline that took the phrase I had used from the stage and made it official: “Change the market before it changes you: Su-Kam MD Kunwer Sachdev.” They led the piece with my point about IoT and AI — that legacy Indian manufacturing had to move on connected products, or risk being made irrelevant by nimbler entrants.
“All our products leverage the Internet of Things along with Artificial Intelligence and can be controlled even through Mobile Applications for analytics of the product.”
What I Took Home From That Day
Two things, really.
The first is that the best talks are almost never the ones you rehearse. They are the ones where you finally say out loud something you have been quietly living for years. The audience can always tell the difference between a founder reciting a script and a founder confessing an operating principle.
The second is that “change the market before it changes you” stopped being an internal Su-Kam phrase that day and became something I now think every Indian founder should sit with. Because the market will change. That is the only thing you can be certain of. The only real question is: are you going to be the one changing it — or the one being changed by it?
Sources
Kunwer Sachdev
Founder, Su-Kam Power Systems · The Inverter Man of India · The Solar Man of India
Startup mentor, angel investor and serial entrepreneur. Built Su-Kam from a Delhi component-supply business into a ₹1,200+ crore power-electronics brand across 70+ countries. Now mentors India's next generation of founders. Based in Gurgaon, Haryana.