I'm going through some emotional turmoil. No idea why I'm sharing it here. Perhaps because it said "What's on your mind, Saurabh?" on the text box.
As a single parent I need to have a lot of time available for my kids. And being available is just that - being available. I don't necessarily need to spend all the available time with them. As they get older they have their own things going on. But they like to come up to me a few times a day and speak and share. And when they are sharing I need to be present - not just physically, but also mentally and emotionally.
I have decent work life balance. Most months I am able to have a lot of time for the kids. And myself, of course. But our work has seasonality. Our government and corporate customers make all their capital goods purchases between Diwali and Holi. Things start getting really busy by December. Thankfully I have very capable team that takes care of most of the madness.
But this month things have really peaked. Apart from the usual busy season, there is the fundraise that I am working on. For bureaucratic reasons, it has dragged on, as we jump through hoops to pick up equity money. I am responsible for setting up operations in Goa, and things are way behind plan. We are hiring. We are launching a consumer product for rural India, and there is a lot of marketing work involved - work that I am not adept with. A whole bunch of people in the Gurgaon office have been sick; they think it is the weather but I know it is the pollution.
And then there are the conversations with investors. It is these conversations that have put me off of a fundraise for 14 years now. A few years after we started up, Sequoia and other such funds would just cold call us. And then when you start talking, they always find a reason to put you down. Right now I have a sheet in front of me with the list of confirmed investors. Those are the shortest conversations I have had. Some of them didn't even talk to me. They were just like, here, take my money.
The longest conversations are with people who don't end up investing. And it is OK for people to ask a lot of questions, and to not want to put money - startup investing is high risk. But there is this tendency among Indians, to insist on elaborating over all the issues they find with your business. Even Indian VCs in the US do that.
People need to stop for a minute and think. This is my work. This is my life. I've put 14 years into it. Do you really think you know better, because you calculated some ratios and they do not meet industry norms. If we've taken 14 sweet years to sort out the business before raising money, would we not have scrutinised every relevant aspect of the business by now?
The whole point of the first few rounds of investing is that you are betting on the passion of the founder(s), and on the potential for those ratios to change dramatically, because the entrepreneur believes in something or understands something that the world at large does not. If every idea and dream was computable at inception then the large corporates would just gobble up every idea, right? Why would you need the upstarts?
But perhaps the turmoil was triggered not by all this, but by the creation and my subsequent addition to a WhatsApp group of my college classmates. I do not last in family or school groups, but this group has intelligent people who might not bring up politics. The subject of reunions is something that Hollywood has discussed ad nauseam. Here in India, we do not think about it it as much.
Reunions are a mental health disaster. They take you back to a time when you had a lot less worries, and a lot more dreams. You are reunited with people, some of whom you had carefully avoided for a long time. Folks who had not been nice to you. Folks that you had been unfair to, because twenty years ago you did not know better. But most of all, it is the whole "grass is greener on the other side" aspect.
I (re)introduced myself in the only way we humans seem to know - by putting my best foot forward. Shared pictures of my kids, talked about my life in Goa, talked about my work. My life is great.
And I created a certain wistfulness.
That was not my intent. These are people who I spent 4-5 years with. I have no intention of making them feel that their life is not as glorious as mine. Because my life isn't great. It is OK. It is not bad. It could be a lot better. If you just look at my health, then yes, I am a lot better now than when I was earlier, but I still need to meet a pulmonologist and an ophthalmologist and an orthopaedic as soon as I can.
And then other people made me wistful. I wish my kids were still cute and small like the other kids. I wish my kids had a pet. And then, the real kicker. I wish I had a corporate job. I remember the time I was at Intel and found it hard to fill the eight working hours in my day. And yet, here I am solving PCB fabrication and metal forming and myriad other problems.
So what is this state called? This dissonance. I am simultaneously delighted that I have real engineering problems to solve, and disheartened that I am not a small cog in a large corporate machine with no real responsibilities. I am happy that I have no assets to maintain other than my startup, and wishful that I had also invested in property and built a nice big apartment somewhere.
Am I Cypher from The Matrix? Should I fall back into the comforting cushion of lies that megacorps lay out for us? Most days, I know the answer. Today is not that day.
As a single parent I need to have a lot of time available for my kids. And being available is just that - being available. I don't necessarily need to spend all the available time with them. As they get older they have their own things going on. But they like to come up to me a few times a day and speak and share. And when they are sharing I need to be present - not just physically, but also mentally and emotionally.
I have decent work life balance. Most months I am able to have a lot of time for the kids. And myself, of course. But our work has seasonality. Our government and corporate customers make all their capital goods purchases between Diwali and Holi. Things start getting really busy by December. Thankfully I have very capable team that takes care of most of the madness.
But this month things have really peaked. Apart from the usual busy season, there is the fundraise that I am working on. For bureaucratic reasons, it has dragged on, as we jump through hoops to pick up equity money. I am responsible for setting up operations in Goa, and things are way behind plan. We are hiring. We are launching a consumer product for rural India, and there is a lot of marketing work involved - work that I am not adept with. A whole bunch of people in the Gurgaon office have been sick; they think it is the weather but I know it is the pollution.
And then there are the conversations with investors. It is these conversations that have put me off of a fundraise for 14 years now. A few years after we started up, Sequoia and other such funds would just cold call us. And then when you start talking, they always find a reason to put you down. Right now I have a sheet in front of me with the list of confirmed investors. Those are the shortest conversations I have had. Some of them didn't even talk to me. They were just like, here, take my money.
The longest conversations are with people who don't end up investing. And it is OK for people to ask a lot of questions, and to not want to put money - startup investing is high risk. But there is this tendency among Indians, to insist on elaborating over all the issues they find with your business. Even Indian VCs in the US do that.
People need to stop for a minute and think. This is my work. This is my life. I've put 14 years into it. Do you really think you know better, because you calculated some ratios and they do not meet industry norms. If we've taken 14 sweet years to sort out the business before raising money, would we not have scrutinised every relevant aspect of the business by now?
The whole point of the first few rounds of investing is that you are betting on the passion of the founder(s), and on the potential for those ratios to change dramatically, because the entrepreneur believes in something or understands something that the world at large does not. If every idea and dream was computable at inception then the large corporates would just gobble up every idea, right? Why would you need the upstarts?
But perhaps the turmoil was triggered not by all this, but by the creation and my subsequent addition to a WhatsApp group of my college classmates. I do not last in family or school groups, but this group has intelligent people who might not bring up politics. The subject of reunions is something that Hollywood has discussed ad nauseam. Here in India, we do not think about it it as much.
Reunions are a mental health disaster. They take you back to a time when you had a lot less worries, and a lot more dreams. You are reunited with people, some of whom you had carefully avoided for a long time. Folks who had not been nice to you. Folks that you had been unfair to, because twenty years ago you did not know better. But most of all, it is the whole "grass is greener on the other side" aspect.
I (re)introduced myself in the only way we humans seem to know - by putting my best foot forward. Shared pictures of my kids, talked about my life in Goa, talked about my work. My life is great.
And I created a certain wistfulness.
That was not my intent. These are people who I spent 4-5 years with. I have no intention of making them feel that their life is not as glorious as mine. Because my life isn't great. It is OK. It is not bad. It could be a lot better. If you just look at my health, then yes, I am a lot better now than when I was earlier, but I still need to meet a pulmonologist and an ophthalmologist and an orthopaedic as soon as I can.
And then other people made me wistful. I wish my kids were still cute and small like the other kids. I wish my kids had a pet. And then, the real kicker. I wish I had a corporate job. I remember the time I was at Intel and found it hard to fill the eight working hours in my day. And yet, here I am solving PCB fabrication and metal forming and myriad other problems.
So what is this state called? This dissonance. I am simultaneously delighted that I have real engineering problems to solve, and disheartened that I am not a small cog in a large corporate machine with no real responsibilities. I am happy that I have no assets to maintain other than my startup, and wishful that I had also invested in property and built a nice big apartment somewhere.
Am I Cypher from The Matrix? Should I fall back into the comforting cushion of lies that megacorps lay out for us? Most days, I know the answer. Today is not that day.