Hi Friends, I am Shankar Balachandran, Applications Engineer working on an opensoure ERP platform Openbravo. You can know more about me through my twitter and facebook pages. I read another post here on Medium about the pressures in startups for the early employees. That made me smile a bit as I have been through it and I thought I should share my experiences working as the first employee of a startup.

Early 2009 around May, I was doing my final year in Master of Computer Applications in one of reputed universities called College of Engineering, Anna University . I was pretty satisfied with my life thus far having had no major issues in life and enjoying my college life as it happened. And then the being the placement coordinator I was the first to get placed, in a good company with a basic salary package. But somehow I was not satisfied with what I was doing at that time. I was going to join heard of people who were ready to jump up the IT bandwagon in India and I was going to part of a huge empire of potentially highly qualified working as a minor part of the Indian outsourcing industry. Not the pay was not good, it was great which was the reason it was happening.

Now, somewhere in my fantasy world, I always imagined myself as a leader. May be it was my mind’s way of overcoming my inferiority complex due to my dimunitive looks, but I did not complain. I had held whatever positions I got along in schools and colleges and I was thinking I was ready to be an Entrepreneur. But no more than couple of notes in my purse, and with no concrete ideas in my head (I just wish I had noted down the abstract ideas that was pouring all the time in my head), I decided to take it easy. That’s when I met a person who was a serial Entrepreneur with more than 8 years of experience in handling rough times through startups.

We immediately hit off. I was captured by the aura of the man and his confidence in what he was doing and his dedication to his work. Till this date, I can swear he sleeps only 3 days a week. And even he seemed be bit by my enthusiasm and charm. We were talking things in coffee shops in various localities in Chennai for few months, when he was also interacting with couple of other people about starting a new company in Chennai. A person was already working for him for couple of years and I met him a few times and he seemed to be an enjoyable person to work with and I was very much pleased with the challenge of working in complete projects instead of just working on modules.

Then in late November he informed me that he was going to start a company in Chennai with couple of other founders called Fugo. He offered me a job with a salary of 15000 INR which honestly was shocking to me because I was expecting at least half more than that (which I got after 1 year of working there, so no hard feelings now). But somehow I knew that this is what I would love and I jumped on the opportunity. I was the first developer there and I take pride in knowing that it has grown up to 50 odd developers now. I joined the company during the final semester of my college itself, working four hours a day in the evenings and full time on weekends.

The night before I joined the company, the other experienced person who was supposed to join with me did not accept the offer and he was moving to a different company. It was quite a shock to me, but I understand him a lot better now. The first day I joined the company, I was welcomed into the company by the 3 founders and what we did was we took a plain PC and started installing ubuntu linux into it and few other applications needed for Openbravo ERP to run like java, ant, tomcat. This was my first day at using linux and probably the same for the other founders too (except for one who coding skills still gives me sleepless nights).

We started in the afternoon and we could not complete the setup and have the application up and running for few hours. We took a break and went to a nearby McDonalds, took something to eat and came back and was doing it till 9.30PM and we had it working. To say it was the most satisfying burger that I had eaten thus far would be an understatement. There was real joy among us and though I wanted to hifi with them, I controlled myself on account of there age and the fact that there was thin line separating them from me. They were the founders of the company and I was an employee. So I just shared my smile and ended the first day at work. I have never been to big corporate IT cons, but I am not sure whether someone working in the big IT consulting companies in India would have had such a pleasure.

This is what startups are all about. The kick that we get being part of building something for the future. The knowledge that we are important to the growth of few other people and there are people who actually value the technical skills more than soft skills which is more necessary in the big cons. More on working in startups and the troubles in the next blog. Would like to know any views or points you guys wanted to add here.

Cheers.