Ashish’s World!

Every few months, I try to sit back and analyze the various things in my life (professional and personal) that I have been doing and making sure that I am having fun. The fact that I stopped having fun, and felt stagnated was one of the few reasons that led me to leave my job at Microsoft and move back from Redmond to India a year and a half back. I have always found this introspection exercise to be a very good one, for everything - from professional life to the personal life.

Lately, I was noticing that my patience level was going down and I wanted results quicker than usual. And if it didn’t happen the way I wanted it to be, I was getting annoyed causing inefficiency. Don’t get me wrong - I just don’t like it if I think I am not able to give my 100% to Tekriti and would rather be pro-actively doing something to fix it rather than letting it continue and subside on its own. On doing some soul-searching, I got a few more lessons in Entrepreneurship which is something everybody should keep in mind:

• Hiring: Every lesson in entrepreneurship has to start with Hiring. The biggest reason for any business to fail is the lack of smart and dedicated people. And, if you are a startup and looking to be more than a boutique shop, you have to think about hiring people who can grow as middle-level managers very soon. Hiring freshers has its advantages (Tekriti, personally, has benefitted immensely from the smart freshers we hired) but we delayed hiring experienced people for quite some time. Having a middle-level management will free you from the daily activities needed for execution, and gives you enough time to think about your strategy and other stuff. Not only this, they are the ones who become responsible for creating a team around the expertise he / she brings in.
• Hedge your bets: When you are starting something, you are basically betting on your ideas and execution plan. At the same time, we all hate to admit that however sound our idea is, there is always a chance of failing. In fact, chances of failure in any startup is greater than the chances of success. So, what do you do about it? Either you choose to ignore the risk or try to minimize the risk by diversification. So, the focus has to be in creating a product or a suite of products rather than creating a feature. This does not mean that the feature companies aren’t successful - Flickr, Delicious are successful, by all means. You will just need that bit of extra luck too, in that case.
• Get a partner to start with: Get a partner that you can trust to start the business. There are more downs than ups in the business and you need somebody to pull each other up in the rough times. Not only this, a solid partnership can also help a lot in doing multiple things when you are trying to ‘hedge your bets’. But it is very important to have a partner you can trust. There are more than a few things, including the finances, where you need to rely on your partner.
• Don’t build for acquisition: Getting acquired by a large company instantly labels a company as being successful and is something very few of us will let go or don’t have in the back of their mind. But if you know that you can’t sustain yourself without being acquired, there is a problem. In fact, you might land up in a situation where you are not even worthy of being acquired in that case. I remember Dr. Ashok Jhunjhunwala telling us once that “Try to build a company in which Venture Capitalists will want to invest in, and that doesn’t mean that you are necessarly looking for funding.”
• Try to create IP, even if you are a services company: This is something that I have learnt over time from experience. Tekriti started as a software services company. Our bulk of the revenues still come from services work and we hope to start earning some revenues from the products that we are building this year. But there is a big difference in a company that does plain services work and a company that has some Intellectual Property and can customize that for their clients. We have built a media publishing product codenamed as TekMedia (in alpha stage now) and one of the way that we want to use that is as customize and integrate within the services work that we do for our clients. We have showed it to a few people and they have shown interest not only in the product but also customization around that (media publishing being just a feature in it) - which is good for our services business.
• Social circle outside work: This is very hard to follow but very important and can be hugely responsible for inefficiencies. When you are starting - all you do, think, eat, sleep (remember the Coke Ad) is your venture and I was no different here. I have always been a very passionate person towards something or the other but the level of commitment and passion I have for Tekriti is unmatched. And every other thing was secondary to me - my personal life, my family, my social circle and that too by a big margin. This is where I went wrong - it is a fact that all these things will be secondary for an entrepreneur but we should try to strike a balance as much as possible, even make that extra effort. I have been learning that it is very important to keep your social circle outside work. If you are already staying with your family, you automatically get that social circle with your family playing a major role. But if not, you need to be that extra thoughtful. This is something my parent, my relatives and my well-wishers have always cautioned against - only to know that I won’t listen to them in this case. But then it’s never too late to fix anything.

People stop being productive when they stop having fun. It is a big loss if that happens to anybody including the fellow entrepreneurs.