From One Entrepreneur to Another

Dear Sir,

It’s been long since I actually sat back and had a long thought before I actually composed a mail and there is every possibility that this mail might get a little too big , a little too incoherent and most likely never get sent to you. And before I start sounding like a psycho stalker, just for the record, I want to clarify, that I was among the 120 odd faces you saw in my college earlier today. And even while you spoke , I held on to every word and not to sound pompous but this must be the first time in ages I was hanging on to every word for as a founder of a start up myself, everything made absolute sense to me.

I come from a very small town in Jharkhand called Sahibganj. Born and brought up there we had a prismatic view of the world outside and like they now say about the small town people they are ever hungry to make it big and make it fast. I was someone who made it a habit to top all along his school life for that is what my parents expected me to do and then I went to MIT Manipal and made really good friends. And this time the friends weren't geeky or for that matter even chilled out bozos, they were just regular guys with a difference. We didn't believe in rat races, we were a bunch of non conformist fools. We wanted to be different and were in a hurry to be different. And all of us shared other similarities, we didn't believe in formal education and hence the world perceived us to be either losers or failures. We weren't hippies who didn't care at all, we were more into acquiring a separate set of skills that we thought we needed to make it big. So I started reading up on professional content writing instead of mugging up the intricacies of Induction motor. Someone else I knew became super busy keeping a tab on all the recent technologies in coding even though he kept failing in "Microprocessor coding 8085" which was a part of his archaic curriculum since he knew all along that for his dreams to come true Microprocessor 8085 wasn't relevant. And then there was this guy who loved graphics designing so much that that he found Photoshop more interesting that attending lectures or for that matter even writing exams.

The next natural and logical step was starting a start up and I m pretty sure you know that kind of reaction and feedback you get when someone who is perceived to be a failure talks about setting up a start up. We weren't different. We faced a barrage of ridicule amongst our peers, the faculty mocked us and parents simply didn't know what a start up was. Like you I come from a family of teachers. I was asked by my parents if i was taking the start up route only because I knew in my heart that i couldn't land myself a normal job. This triggered two things in me. I sat for the first company that visited our campus and got through and I dropped out of college. Like you mentioned today, the word "failure " fell on our ears but what we heard was a challenge put before us and we didn't back out.

We made a prototype of the Indian railway website and it worked like a dream. We built in on an idea that this is how a website should have been in the first place. We took into account a lot of customer focused initiatives in the website and we were talking about the importance of Usability in design when the actual official site was a typical example of "sarkari" mindset. Since the data pertaining to the current availability of the reserved seats were not in the public domain and were in the exclusive domain of the CRIS, and they had very stringent criteria of sharing those data ( 20 lakhs deposit, 5 crores annual turnover companies only) we tweaked the code a little and hacked into the current database. I don't know about the present but at that time Indian Railways was the one keyword that attracted most of the hits on Google search in India. Slowly because of the better services we provided and by excellent word of mouth communication and mass scrapping in Orkut we generated enough stream of money from ad-sense to keep us afloat for some time.

We had proved to ourselves that we could do it. We went ahead and got the firm registered. Some of the skeptics were now doubtful of their very own skepticism while some were simply not in a mood to relent. My parents could still not grasp the fact that i had kicked my job and had dropped out. Manipal is not a very cheap place but we started to make ends meet on our own. We had long realized that there was a serious dearth of quality website makers in India and we wanted to fix it. We were focusing on high end corporate website because as we realized there were over 500 small time website makers who would make a template based website for as little as 5000 bucks. We didn't want to end up like them. We got our first contact for what was then to us a princely sum of 75,000 for a corporate website and day in and day out we gave it our best shot. We realized two things about the venture then, team dynamics was difficult and that customers weren't sure what they wanted. Till date the website is under construction because we were never sent the exact specifications or other details about his products.

We had to balance perfectionism with realism and this is where we failed miserably. A design that looked awesome a night before would look pretty average the other day and we kept chasing the elusive quality called perfection and ended up frustrating ourselves. We tried to limit ourselves to service websites that we would build for us which would have a different revenue model but projects even though they were good would never take off. Meanwhile the same faculty who once mocked us for trying our hand at something so different would now give our examples. We were asked to develop the placement website of MIT Manipal and we were also the first company to be incubated by MIT Manipal. We used to be approached for college fest websites and branding. We used to go all over the places to deliver seminars and organize workshops educating the students about the technology shifts and sharing with them the idea of a start up. So in some ways everything was a learning curve.

But we failed. The search for the eternal quest for perfection led us to the point where we simply didn't know what our best was. Self doubts crept in and finally we decided that to take a break, learn new things and in future come back together again. But like you said am glad we failed. It was a great learning curve and while here I see my classmates running after grades and placements, I, on the other hand am still not in the rat race. The only reason i m here is to learn the stuff that will help me in the long run and while I aim to work in some firm for couple of years before I take the plunge into a start up again, it really doesn't matter if the odds are ever stacked up against me because I know I don't really need to be dependent on anyone to make it big and if there is anything I most treasure from my tryst with a start up it is this.

Listening to you go on about your experiences today brought back a lot of these memories today. And I am seriously sorry if my rant took your valuable time. At some level I felt we connected and hence the need to reach out to tell you my side of a story, a very tiny speck as compared to your success story, but a story nevertheless.

Behti Hawa Sa Tha Woh

"So what we have basically in mind here is that we generate power from all the mobile signal waves around us and create a self-sustained model of power generation that will basically require no maintenance what so ever" and so he drawled off after half an hour of monologue. The last bit registered, I was the electrical and electronics engineer, he was only a computer science engineer, I had to say something. Something didn't add up. Agreed that I wasn't a very good engineer but then he wasn't either. I absolutely had to say something. So all the while frantically waiting for some brain wave to deliver to me some long forgotten concept, I uttered the word that comes naturally to me in scenarios like these, impossible and for good measure added, It can't be done only to regret it the very next moment for I was subjected to an hour long lecture about how it was theoretically possible. My mind drifted off to the first time I met him.

I don't believe I was ever an extrovert. When it comes to meeting new people i generally pretend to be reserved and pensive. People generally take the hint, assume I am arrogant and leave me alone the first time they meet me. But this guy was different. Stupid to a fault, enthused like a child, the first words he uttered made me wonder if he thought I was his brother from another mother. Even as he failed to take the hint and kept coming at me like a barrage, my first impression about him was one that remained constant over the years. Here was a guy who was genuine and one of a kind. Over the next couple of weeks, since we had a lot of common friends we kept running into each other and things took off. We realized that we had a lot of striking similarities and endless intellectual discussions ensued. Both of us loved to talk and knew when to stop and hear. Both of us were adamant when it came to defending our beliefs. And among many things both of us had a rebelling streak. We were anarchists, treated every institution with contempt because we questioned the very reason of their existence. Why should engineering be any different? Neither of us attended classes, neither of us studied for the exams, both of us registered for the make ups, neither of us were ever homesick, both of us spent our vacation pretending to "prepare" for the make ups and doing everything but that and both of us either didn't go to write the make ups or walked out of it in 5 mins. We used to compete with each other over the number of backs we had. And term after term the same story would repeat.

We had our differences. He was committed to a cause, I was a drifter. He wanted to change the world, I wanted to bypass it. He knew what he was doing, I simply faked it. He could become annoying like hell when he would come up with impractical, impossible ideas and then defend it with everything he got. He was always an optimist, I was the cynic. He saw bright colours where all I saw were shades of Grey. In things that mattered, he would take a long time and evaluate every aspect very minutely. I always trusted in my impulse. He would believe in backtracking his steps if he wasn't sure of his approach, I was cocky enough to try and make new paths to connect with the wrong one so that I wouldn't have to beat a retreat. He was a perfectionist and was always seeking the elusive perfection. I was the realist who believed that that we ought to manage with what we have got.

The traits we had compounded each other’s strengths and mitigated our weaknesses. And hence when he asked me if I was game to start a start-up and outlined his vision I didn't really have to think about it. After we landed our first client, excitement was in the air and we were experiencing the heady feeling and I was pushing for the best apartment in Manipal that had a sea facing swimming pool of the terrace, it was him who refused to get drawn in in the madness and pulled me pack to the reality. He always said that all he wanted to do in the firm was pure coding and no managerial job should come to him and yet everything came to him and if they didn't he went into everything. And then the madness began. Quality vs Quantity debates ensued. Night after Night we found ourselves arguing about almost everything. He kept searching for the best possible quality while deadlines after deadlines were ignored. Clients who wanted a website were told their logos weren't good enough or that they should re think their marketing strategy because we didn't see a website as a separate entity but as an extension of the brand. It was him, who constantly pushed us to learn new things, sometimes he did succeed, often he failed but he never lost hope. We knew where we wanted to go but couldn't seem to find the path and ended up confusing ourselves and had to finally call it off hoping that we would all come back on a later date and start afresh.

For someone who had so much pressure on his shoulders, I hadn't come across one individual who had so much faith. The consensus about him was always the same; the guy's a genius if only he knew where he wanted to go. The problem with him was there were always parallel thoughts he wanted to pursue and then get confused and don't try any. There were nights when i found him in his room, lights off, quietly strumming the guitar, some soulful beautiful but sad tune but to the world he never let on an iota of worry. To the world He was always the foolish, bumbling energetic, enthusiastic fool that I had first met.