Since December

My random musings while working in a startup

For those who don't know me, I am hoodwink73. and I chose to dropout a year and a half back.

The upshot, I stayed at home for a year, discovering contemporary education and most importantly, myself.

The pseudonym thing, I love it and thank the Internet culture for it. For me it has always served as a placeholder for all the new things I wanted to be.

At the knock of a year, I joined Airwoot, an Indian startup, trying to revolutionize customer engagement through social media. At Airwoot, I like to call myself the frontend human.

Mostly, if you are joining a startup, it's a conscious decision to deviate from a much ordered way of life. The incentives are different. Definitely you take vanity in the valor to attempt a novel thing. But for me the greater incentive was to take a deep dive into the unknown. As a romanticist might say, a new sun everyday.

A word of advice, my friend, if you are thinking about the glamor, its an just imposition, an illusion by the present economy and media. Everybody has their own story to write and their own dues to pay. So, better not try to find any incentives here.

Yes, you get up every morning and get work done, probably like any other job in the world.

But that’s not the important thing.

I believe, a startup means much more than everyday work.

Its an exploration into your faith, into your competence, into your dreams, into your persistence.

There will be many unknown things, sometimes circumstances lurking around, you may fall but you should struggle to stand.

A startup life is from the heart.

What better way to live than to extend your boundaries, day dreaming yourself to be limitless and invincible.

Lately I realized, you never work for a startup, you participate in it. You should held yourself responsible, not only for your share of work, but also for the product or the service you offer in its entirety.

Its about a group of people working towards a collective vision. Its about getting to know people, sharing your passions, your stories with them and on the way learning to respect their efforts, ideas and vulnerabilities.Its about learning to trust.

But above all, a startup celebrates the spirit of a simple human being. Today, I might not know something but I see a problem and I hope to solve it. The reworking of this hope into a solution which helps some stranger or the community has long benefited human culture.

Benjamin Franklin is a source of great inspiration to me and my entrepreneurship spirit. If you read The Autobiography Of Benjamin Franklin, its hard to believe all the things he was. At the age of seventeen, he ran away to have a life of his own. He started his work in printing shops and grew himself to be a printer, a writer, a scientist, a philosopher, an inventor, a diplomat. But his writings doesn’t invoke any extraordinary sense of intellect or position him as a prodigy.

Rather it invokes and highlights the simple domestic sense of curiosity in him. He wanted to be in a good company and have good discourse, so he created Junto, a group of “like minded aspiring artisans and tradesmen who hoped to improve themselves while they improved their community.” The members of Junto read a lot of books, but books were expensive at that time. So, he invented libraries.

Indeed, he too was a great intellectual and in later years he contributed great thoughts to philosophy and science but its this essential sense of solving trivial problems, what got him started.

We tend to limit ourselves, place ourselves in a hierarchy of impact we can have and the insular society tends to reinstate that. But the truth is, a simple man who can keep his surroundings clean and benefits the community in simple ways is much more valuable than a boastful learned man who sits all day smoking pipe or minding his own business. So, we are not limited by opportunities to solve problems, its just the thought that we are not good enough or the problem is too trivial that limits us.

By allowing ourselves not to feel small, we open avenues and we embark on a journey.

A bit of detour there, but the thought is, working in a startup, its more than getting the job done and benefitting just the concerned startup.

A startup is a way of life. You learn to solve problems, feel empathy for others, persist through failures. And all this qualities you acquire might some day evolve into a selfless act for greater good, something that crowds economic motifs. And we need these selfless acts of innovation and engineering.

That said its a long journey but a short one to be ignored. I leave you with a quote from one my favorite movies. It might not make all the sense but its something from my journal and I take comfort in it often.

…the sea’s only gifts are harsh blows and, occasionally, the chance to feel strong. Now, I don’t know much about the sea, but I do know that that’s the way it is here. And I also know how important it is in life not necessarily to be strong but to feel strong, to measure yourself at least once, to find yourself at least once in the most ancient of human conditions, facing blind, deaf stone alone, with nothing to help you but your own hands and your own head…