koolhead17
India’s biggest problem is not overpopulation, GDP, or COVID.
But why is someone in their mid-30s not married?
This question keeps coming up in meetings, during temple darshan, or when meeting with elders or friends.
I wonder if our favourite pastime has become gossiping about marriage.
Expecting your team members to understand the bigger picture of the organisation is a tough ask. As a company grows and its size increases, we divide the organisation into major compartments. As a result, the hired team members become so engrossed in the tasks they are assigned.
As a glue, it becomes more important for founders to ensure the team knows about the bigger picture.
Building a startup is like a flowing river stream.
When it starts from the glacier, it has a strong current with no defined course. Over time, when it reaches the plains, it becomes more predictable, steady, and controlled. With the passing of time, the same applies: it meets the sea and becomes a world.
The journey of building a startup is no less than a river. In the initial days, it is full of energy: seeking PMF, hiring like-minded people, and taking all the risks. The chances of failure are extreme. After a few years, it becomes more predictable, but the operations, passion, and perseverance of the founder are what result in the team delivering and taking the company to newer heights: aiming for an IPO.
As a founder, if you are settled and not seeking urgency: whether in closing sales or shipping: your team will mirror you.
They will gradually become complacent, and deliverables will start taking months instead of weeks.
We humans are creatures of habit.
It takes very little time to adopt others’ behaviour when you are part of a team.
It becomes of utmost importance for a leader to ensure the team understands the importance of urgency.
Sometimes our overconfidence leads us to lose more relationships, business, and connections than we gain. We live in a society, and we are tamed to live in a herd. No one likes getting hurt by others’ actions.
As an overconfident individual, you will turn to burn bridges and leave connections hanging. In the short run, you can gloat about your smartness, but when things are haywired, you will be the first to bear the brunt of all your actions.
As a founder, you have to grow a thick skin. You are responsible for all the failures, while success will be shared by everyone. The sooner you realise it is your responsibility to run the company, the more aware and stoic you will be about everything. Running a startup is not for the faint-hearted. The media is selling fake entrepreneur glorification. There is no work-life balance either. Most founders don’t end up getting rich either.
In short, there are more negatives of being an entrepreneur than the fluff media glorifies.
Unless you are aware that you are in your idea and enterprenuerial ride for the long term. Unless you realise it is very lonely at the top. Unless you realise the default outcome is failure and rejection. Unless you realise you are a lone man staying till the end. Please don’t start a startup.
If you ask me, why did I start? After working for 10 years, I realised I cannot work for anyone else. I had too many complaints about things around me. So instead of complaining, I took life into my own hands.
At every step of our lives, we create an aura, an identity of ourselves. It can be how others see us or how we see the world around us.
These are just a few examples I have listed, but observe yourself. You will be carrying a dozen other identities.
We carry ourselves in layers. Our identity changes as we progress into a newer journey of life. We are the same soul kept in various new roles to play.
As we age, we end up becoming more connected to ourselves: likes, dislikes, and many other beliefs become de facto. We tend to focus on what really matters to us more than what others will think.
Our bullshit detection keeps on improving, and we become wiser in staying away from what we don’t want. This inner self tends to make us calmer within. We are least bothered about externalities and tend to focus on the internal. The glamour, consumerism, and all other distractions end up taking a back seat.
The closer we are to self, the more we have time for ourselves. As a result, we can spend time on rebuilding ourselves: our hobbies, unfinished readings, and writings.
In earlier days, we would call it retirement. With Capitalism taking the hot seat, the retirement concept has gone alien.
Time and again, we’re asked how we came up with the idea of building Taghash. I always tell them that we were lucky to have an initial set of believers who genuinely felt the pain. It was their expertise and nuanced understanding that helped us build the product to where it is today.
We’ve followed this fundamental principle all these years: finding our first set of customers and co-building with them.
The advantage of this approach is two fold:
I understand that this is completely different from the traditional playbook of raising capital, evangelizing through marketing, and hoping customers will come.
The entire narrative of category creation, market leadership, and building something so “sexy” that people flock to it: something Apple perfected in the Steve Jobs era.It has largely faded with time.
In short, identifying your core offering and your true market will be the real differentiator.