My journey as a novice riding the highs and lows of entrepreneurship!
What the other articles on entrepreneurship didn’t teach me — the highs and lows of starting a company as a first-timer.
What the other articles on entrepreneurship didn’t talk about — the highs and lows of starting a company as a first-timer.
“A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead” — Graham Greene
In July 2019, I took the hard decision of leaving the comfort zone of a job with a fixed monthly salary to move to a new country and start my entrepreneurial journey. Now that I look back, it felt similar to the initial hesitation of discomfort when entering a cold shower, or walking over the ledge just before my bungee jump. Once I went past it, I enjoyed the ride so much that I never regret taking the plunge. I was lucky to have cushion while managing my financial and family dependencies to join, Entrepreneur First (EF), in Singapore. EF is a talent investor which brings in 100s of solo founders every batch — all with one objective of finding their co-founder, pitching their team and idea to an investment committee, getting a pre-seed fund, and starting a company 3 months after joining. While leaving my last job, in my head, I assumed the ideal scenario of getting funded and starting a company by November 2019, but life had other plans!
The kick-off weekend at EF gave an adequate flavor of what was coming next. Having been a data scientist for the most parts of my career — putting on my headphones and coding or brainstorming with a close-knit team was a typical productive day. In contrast — the objective of the kick-off weekend was to identify my potential co-founder, after getting acquainted with more than 80 new people within two days, that came from 23 countries. Discussing with a diverse set of people ranging from pilots to PhDs, to discussing how AI could help discover the next best perfume was exhausting but exhilarating, to say the least.
Coming from an archetypal Indian family & being trained to be a good guy since childhood — it was difficult to accept the necessity to be borderline unethical during customer validation. In order to validate an idea in the healthcare space, we had to barge into chambers of doctors without an appointment, or use the infamous technique of sending personalized mass emails to doctors showing interest to collaborate with them, or surprise the doctors with our interview questions instead of reporting symptoms of illness after booking a consultation with them. Yes, most of the time we were thrown-out politely but the few insightful discussions were worth it!
I teamed up with Monika, a Ph.D. in Immunology, complementing each other while working on an idea in cancer care. We had good validation of our problem and a letter of intent from multiple doctors across 5 countries to use our solution once it was built. Our mentors at EF were super-confident of us & rated us one of the best teams in terms of progress & validation. We pitched our idea to the global panel of EF — only to get a shocking phone call two days later from our mentor breaking the news that we had not been funded by EF because it was a conflict of interest with one of their parallelly funded companies!
Before the pitch — we were naively over-confident of getting funded after our venture partners appreciated us for our seemingly flawless idea and pitch. From our presumptions funding & starting a company— to not being funded, customers being skeptical for not having the support of any organization & not having an office space was a huge blow to our conviction & confidence. We had reached out to many investors outside EF only to be turned down since we were too early in the journey for angels.
By this point, uncertainty was slaughtering us — but, we learned the most important lessons of our ride during that time
We learned the importance of criticism more than ever — the more we got criticism from a wide range of investors, customers, and peers, the more we learned and became stronger. It has reached a point where we ignore positive comments and reach out to people who are most likely to criticize us.
We learned to proactively keep our emotions on a check — being too happy, or too sad at any moment clouded our judgments, and you read an example of that in the above paragraph. It has reached a point where we proactively take time out to come out of any of the extremes of emotions before taking up the next task.
By December 2019 — we took a small break to visit home. Once we were back, we acknowledged our shortcomings and decided to bootstrap for 3 months based on our individual finances. We used this time to give our best on building the MVP and getting feedback on our thought process from as many experts as possible. By January 2020, we had pivoted based on the discussions, had a decent MVP, and got a positive response from multiple doctors we had reached out to in various geographies. This gave us confidence that we were on the right track. We were lucky to have Antler, the largest tech startup generator, like us as a team and accept us into the deep tech executive program starting in February 2020.
None of us know how the end is going to look like — but the journey to the end will never change and we learned the importance of enjoying every bit of it. In January 2020 while building the MVP, I took the liberty to enjoy a workacation in Chiang Mai, one of my best solo trips in recent times. Additionally, we visited a lot of doctors in February 2020 but made sure we treated ourselves with pani-puri and dabeli in Chowpatty even after being literally trashed by the doctors, or had a sumptuous dinner at Mannat, a punjabi dhaba, after having a positive conversation.
By the end of March 2020, we had pitched to the investment committee at Antler, a tech-startup generator, and were fortunate to have a pre-seed from them. We are excited to have Antler’s support us in our journey ahead to build Zealth-AI. There are lots of challenges coming ahead, with the most recent one being the black swan of 2020, COVID-19! We aim to come out of this tsunami stronger while building Zealth-AI. Whatever it is, will be a story for another time.
Huge thanks to all our peers, friends, and family to help us go through the ups and downs. Special thanks to our mentors at EF and Antler for believing in us.
Please feel free to reach out to Monika or me to help us move a step ahead in achieving the vision of building solutions for personalized cancer care by connecting us to any doctor/hospital in the field.
