This is a guest post by Arifa Khan on World Entrepreneurship Day. Arifa is the Founder and Managing Director of Genius Incubator Limited. Arifa has an MBA from Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania with a Finance major, a B.Tech from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras in Chemical Engineering, and a Post Graduate Diploma in Business Management from XLRI in Marketing and Finance.

How do you turn this idea into a reality? This small business guide is meant to take you through those basic steps of getting your business off the ground.

Guts, instincts, brilliance – That’s what sums up Sramana Mitra, a strategy consultant, entrepreneur of three ventures, Forbes columnist, and author of four books including a series on Entrepreneur Journeys. Sramana found her dreams come true in the Silicon Valley.

She wants to leave a footprint, as evident by her final remarks in this interview. Sramana also writes extensively in her blog and loves interacting with entrepreneurs to know their stories and inspiration. She inspires and motivates entrepreneurs through her blog and books.

YourStory spoke to Stewart Townsend, Manager Startups and Emerging Markets EMEA at  Sun Microsystems about SSE and tech startups in general. He shares his views on entrepreneurship and talks about his involvement with www.thealternativeschool.co.uk a not for profit alternative education provider

I started life as a steel salesman, cold calling engineering firms and selling them rolled flat steel, it was a lesson in not taking things personally, but I decided after a while that it wasn't challenging and went to University at night and gained a degree in Business and Information systems, which meant I could get a job in IT....Sun recruited me as a graduate in 2001 and it's been a rollercoaster since, as a systems engineer, Solaris porting and migration, business development, marketing and recently running the Startup Essentials programme for EMEA.