I’ve been thinking about writing a book for a long time, but instead of taking the plunge into an involved and long effort, I thought I’d dip my toes into the writing world one post at a time!
Like many of you, I have dreams and aspirations of making a difference. Except that instead of doing non profit work, or other service activities, I am passionate about business. I read voraciously, am always exchanging ideas with various people in my ecosystem and in general, collecting and storing away lots of useless information in the back of my brain. And very often I read something that triggers different ideas that I then connect across various domains…and voila, a thing like starting a business happens!
This newsletter will be episodic, and will be mostly about my experiences as an unconventional tech founder. Unconventional in the sense that I am not a techie though I am building a tech business; I am focused on a market very few people care about, solving a problem that a subset of that market worries about, and building a business the quasi old-fashioned way: making money while growing it. Granted, many other things about me are conventional and privileged: grew up in a middle class family, went to the top schools in India, top schools in the US, worked at “academy” companies…all waaaay more conventional experiences than most founders for sure.
But it has been harder than I expected - maybe I felt entitled to success because of my background and track record? Maybe because I thought I had “seen enough movies” to not make mistakes 25 year old founders would make? Maybe because I thought I had an amazing network in Silicon Valley (for that matter, across corporate America) that would come to my rescue? Wrong on all counts.
Knowing what I know now, I may not have started this business. But knowing that I have been way more privileged than most to get this opportunity to start something from scratch, I feel obligated to complete the journey and give back, pay it forward and invest in the next generation that comes after me.
So happy reading. I hope to publish weekly. And I hope you enjoy it.