Eternal Optimism — The story of how I chased my dreams

by Nithin Kumar Gadiparthi

All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them.

Walt Disney

I hail from a small town called Nandipet, near the Nizamabad district of Andhra Pradesh. Growing up, I was always good at academics, even though I couldn’t afford the best of schools. The situation at home was never ideal. My father shifted through multiple jobs, trying to get food on the table. When he wasn't busy at the farm, he was a driver. The way he led his life had a deep impact on me growing up. I don’t believe he ever knew how he was going to make enough money, but he always had sense of calm about him. He was the eternal optimist. He always believed that something would work out. Not that I ever believed in luck, through what he did, how hard he worked everything always did work out.

Once I became old enough to help, he shipped me off away from home. He wanted me to have nothing to do with what his life was. He told me this life is not for you, you have been born for bigger and better things. Most of my friends joined their fathers and helped them in whatever way they could. My education was a huge burden for my father, but he insisted. I don’t know how he knew things would work out, but he just believed it would. During these formative years of my life, I had the good fortune of finding people who were willing to take care of me financially. Their help did come at a cost, interference, lack of freedom and the strictest discipline, the ideal cocktail for beating the creativity out of you. However, it taught me the value of hard work.

During those times my father never wanted me to know about the suffering at home. There was an incident which had a lot of impact in my life , once my father met with a major life threatening accident. I was told about it only after his recovery that was around one and half months after the incident. After seeing him in the hospital I was in tears and I asked my family why was I not been informed? They said they didn't want to me to lose focus. I was deeply disturbed by their reply. From then on I decided that one day I’ll be the person that my father wanted me to be.

I had a few rich, but slightly distant relatives. They paid for my education, with that they also got to make all my life’s decisions. I’m eternally grateful for their help. They wanted me to study in an IIT even though I wanted to be a doctor. Back then, I didn't even know what the acronym stood for. The family had laid out a career path for me — Do an Undergrad at IIT, Get a Job, Earn Money. Amid much fanfare, I ended up being the first person from my village to crack the dreaded JEE and ended up in IIT Gandhinagar.

My first week of college I was petrified, here I was, this scrawny kid who had never been allowed to see too much of the world. I spoke one language, Telugu, which was not the medium of instruction, not even the medium of communication amongst my peers. I was fascinated by what I thought of as ‘aliens’ who spoke this language I had only seen in textbooks. I had even memorized some of it to pass my exams, but had no clue what it sounded like. I made it my mission in life to master this craft, because somehow I was enamored by these people and how they behaved.

I wasn't too good at college, I never really understood how any of this helped me in life. I was more like the kid in a candy shop at college. There were so many things that I got to do that I had never done before. I tried my hands at dancing, singing, acting, marketing, research, politics and just about everything else. I came across this thing called sports. To me it was just a way of slacking of that I used to get punished for. Here were all these people who put on expensive shoes and prepared like they were going to war. Exploration had become my purpose in life. Discovering the things I had missed out on all this while.

When I was doing all of this, people told me I would not get a good job at this rate. Somehow it was that eternal optimism because of which I couldn’t be bothered. I just knew something would work out.

I did sit for placements; for whatever reason the first company I applied to gave me a job. Everything was going according to the plan that people had decided for me. I had a job at a large multinational firm. What else could one ask for? But something was missing. I knew this was not something that I could see myself doing for the rest of my life. This was not what my father had made all these sacrifices for. I told my father that I was not happy with what I had got. Without any hesitation, he told me to do whatever I really wanted to do. He had faith that I would make the right choice

I remember having nothing to do after my placements. I wrote the names of all of the famous people that had inspired me and what they had achieved. I stared at the text written on my cupboard thinking, what if I am unable to fill the blank beside my name. I used to roam around room to room, talking to my friends. I used to ask them what they had planned for their lives. I remember this one particular conversation. My friend, just like me was frustrated. He said that he had a job offer, a masters admission, but none of it excited him. He mentioned in the passing that he was thinking of starting a company. This was it, why didn't I think of that!!!!!

Let’s start a company, why not, what could possibly go wrong? It took me less than an hour to make up my mind. This is what I wanted to do. We said fine, who else wants to do this? We asked two more friends if they wanted to join us and in about 2 hours we had GridAnts. However, we did not have an answer to the next question: what was the company going to do? We knew it would do something that would impact a lot of people, but what? Who cares we said, we are smart enough we will figure that out. The only thing we knew was we were going to build software that was distributed and it had to be intelligent. This literally has to be the strangest display of this eternal optimism that has shaped my life.

No money, no idea, no experience, no help but we decided that we wanted to do this. We were now 21, legally adults, we all collectively decided to stop taking money from our families. IIT Gandhinagar was generous enough to give us an office and internet. Four months later we were able to convince someone my co-founder knew, to let us build software for them. The job paid 25 thousand rupees. We were excited with the start, but that’s also where all the problems began.To accept the money, we needed a bank account. For a bank account we needed a company, to establish a company we needed 1 lakh rupees! Wow this sucked, even if we got 25 thousand, we would be 75 thousand in debt. So begging and borrowing money from friends we did manage to scrape it all together. We figured we’ll find a way to pay them back.

Things didn’t get any better after starting the company. We never had any money, but had a ton of debt. At one point we were so strapped for cash that we did not have money to pay for food. We would go to the mess, eat food and hide behind the people leaving, just so that nobody saw us. Two months of not paying for food- we were scared if they ever saw us, they would make us wash the dishes for a month.

At the same time there was a financial crisis at home. My family needed financial support and I was of no use. I felt guilty for quite some time. I couldn't help my family. I couldn’t ask for any more money from my friends. I still kept going, knowing that something would work out. I rarely went home. I was too embarrassed to go home and face the question my family always had- “Did anything work out?”

A month later, something magically clicked and we managed to get a large contract and for a while things were looking up. We had found a product somebody wanted, they were willing to pay us well. We repayed all our debt. But there was just one problem, nobody else wanted it. We were in the wrong market. People were going crazy for the same technology in the United States, but not enough buyers in India. Though our financial troubles had temporarily been solved, our business was nowhere close to safe. Somehow there was always a sense of calm. We iterated through maybe 10 different ideas. Every time we met people we pitched them a different idea. Nobody including us was ever sure of what we were doing but somehow we were never worried, we knew we would come up with something. The thing that made us stick together as a team was our disregard for adversity. We could stare failure in the face and not blink.

Fast forward a few ideas, and a large amount of money spent. We were at cross roads again, we had hired some people and were trying to accelerate our progress. We had started burning a lot of money. We needed funding. After pitching to about 20 different investors, nobody wanted to put money in us. Their logic got was, you’re too ambitious, too young and inexperienced; such a business cannot be built from India, this is not Silicon Valley. An investor said nobody needs your product it is worthless to build. Another said that everybody knew that it was needed, and Google would build it before us. Then came a meeting where we were sure something was going to work out. All the previous meetings had gone well. This was the final hurdle. In that meeting we were even told, stop wasting your time, nobody is going to give you the money you need. Move on to doing something else. If you ask for 1/10th the amount, maybe we can give it to you.

We had another meeting immediately after. Nobody had gotten any sleep the previous two days preparing for the meetings. There was still this sense of calm that everything was going to work out or maybe I just remember it that way. Maybe we were all shaking in our boots but nobody said anything. We walked into the meeting, we had the money we wanted. This was a huge deal, this would turn our fortunes around. We had a deadline to reply to their offer. There was a problem, we would have to give up twice as much equity as we had calculated. The terms were unfavorable, they had sensed our desperation. It was a difficult decision to make.

We ended up rejecting the offer. We just felt that our work over 2 years was worth a lot more. Along the way, we had lost a cofounder to family troubles and poor health. We didn’t have the time to talk to our friends. Our families rarely heard from us. We had spent 2 years of our lives and had nothing to show for it at the end. Here we were three 24 year old kids and we had rejected this offer. I still wonder how we we made that decision.

I can’t describe how and I can’t mention who but in the next few weeks there were 5 people who wanted to invest the entire amount we needed at terms favorable to us! We got the money and could now execute according to plan. What else would one ask for? Our optimism had definitely paid off.

Today we are expanding our team, about to launch our product and going all guns in creating an amazing tech product. Now I can contribute to my family and help them financially. We know what we are trying to do is audacious and there is a 90% probability that we will fail. Even then we have this sense of eternal optimism that things are going to work out. I don’t know how, I don’t know why I just know it is.

My advice to young people is there is nothing stopping you from chasing your dreams. Wanting financial stability before chasing your dreams is ridiculous. I have heard so many people say that they will earn money for a few years and then do what they want. I think this thought process is wrong. How can you ever succeed if you are not passionate about what you do? I have not achieved anything yet; by no means am I successful. The only thing I have managed to do is chase my dream! I will continue to chase my dreams, till I achieve them.

This is not an endorsement saying it is okay to gamble your life. It does not advocate the fact that success comes easy; it is impossibly difficult to succeed if your goals are lofty enough. All it says is that irrespective of your circumstances, it is incredibly easy to try. Despite my circumstances, I will chase my dreams. I will always be eternally optimistic.