On stage at the 4th Young Entrepreneur Summit, the Su-Kam founder tells BW Businessworld that today’s work culture demands the intensity of an affair, not the settled comfort of a marriage.
When BW Businessworld filed its report from the 4th Young Entrepreneur Summit & Awards 2017, one line from the stage travelled further than the rest. “Businesses are more like an affair than a marriage in today’s world” — the words came from Kunwer Sachdev, founder of Su-Kam Power Systems, and they captured, in a single image, how much the practice of running a company had changed in the space of a generation.
A work culture that has changed drastically
Sachdev used the summit to make a simple, uncomfortable argument: the way founders relate to their own ventures has been rewired. Where an earlier generation built businesses to run for decades — slowly, patiently, in something close to a marriage — today’s entrepreneurs face a market that rewards obsession, speed and constant reinvention. The work culture, he told the audience, “has changed drastically,” and pretending otherwise is the fastest way to lose relevance.
Why the “affair” metaphor
The metaphor was deliberate. An affair, in Sachdev’s telling, is defined by intensity: it demands your full attention, it doesn’t tolerate half-effort, and it has no room for coasting. A marriage, by comparison, can survive on routine. Modern businesses, he argued, cannot. Founders who treat a company as something they merely maintain end up watching sharper, hungrier rivals overtake them; those who bring the daily urgency of a new obsession to their own product are the ones who build companies that last.
“Businesses are more like an affair than a marriage in today’s world.”— Kunwer Sachdev, Founder, Su-Kam Power Systems • BW Businessworld, 10 January 2018
Shared stage with a new generation of founders
BW’s dispatch placed Sachdev alongside a wave of consumer-brand founders who were rewriting Indian entrepreneurship at the time — the teams behind Wow! Momo Foods, White Rhino, Veeba Food Services and a rising maternity-wear label. The pairing was pointed. Here was one of India’s best-known power-electronics entrepreneurs, sharing a stage with founders barely half his tenure, and speaking their language: velocity, brand obsession, the refusal to be complacent.
A message rooted in Su-Kam’s own story
Sachdev’s credibility on the point came from his own operating history. Su-Kam had spent nearly two decades competing in the crowded, low-trust Indian inverter and power-backup market, where staying still — on product, on brand, on distribution — was the surest way to be replaced. That experience shaped the summit message: the founders who last are the ones who wake up every day treating the business the way a first-time entrepreneur treats a first launch, not the way a comfortable operator treats an established franchise.
Why the line stuck
Almost eight years on, the affair-versus-marriage line is still the sentence most often quoted back to Sachdev from that January 2018 appearance — because it names something founders recognise in themselves. Modern businesses do not sit still. They demand the temperature of an affair. That, in the end, is the argument BW Businessworld set out to record: an operator who has already survived one full cycle of the Indian power industry, telling the next generation what he had learned about not falling asleep at the wheel.