Why I went to MIT Bootcamp
At about 7:30 AM on a Saturday, 125 participants from 40 countries with varied backgrounds turned up at the gates of the IED, Rio De Janeiro. People here came from varied professional backgrounds — heads of established companies, teachers, marines, engineers, non-profit professionals, young college-going students and so many more. They all, in polite terms, had stars in their eyes. They wanted to bring their ideas to fruition and had decided that entrepreneurship with all its attendant risks of pushing people to the limits, affecting their mental health, and making people eat humble pie was the way in which they would like to bring their ideas to fruition.
Carol, a fellow bootcamper and I had traveled together to IED from the Yoo2 hotel where we were staying. We had met the night before at the hotel rooftop and had speculated about what the days ahead might hold. After a few minutes of speculation, we decided to just enjoy the beautiful Rio beach view from the rooftop. It was a good call, because we did not see the beach for the next 7 days, except through the tiny window in the main hall of the IED.

As we filed into the hall on the first day of the bootcamp, we collected our welcome kit, and saw the schedule.

It said 7:30 AM to 3 AM for the next 7 days. Since age has caught up with me a bit, I scrunched my eyes and made mental calculations to see if they had got it right. They had — the schedule, as it was laid out, did cover 20.5 hours daily for the next 7 days. I quickly calculated what that meant in terms of sleep — 21 hours of sleep across 7 days. At that moment, I was reminded of my husband’s evil grin, the night before I left for B-school. I had confidently told him that I would be super disciplined, get up at 6 AM and sleep at 11 PM. Having gone through the same grind, he had just grinned. That grin came back to me as I wondered if this was going to be as grueling as B-school (it turned out to be much more grueling), if the program is going to be worth it and why on earth I had applied.
The last question was easier to answer — Every 5 to 7 years, life makes me wonder where my career is going, and if I have achieved that sweet spot between my talents, my interest areas, my values, what the world needs and what the market will pay me. During this bout of reflection, I had (amongst a lot of other things) decided to start something on my own. But to start something, I needed a process. You see, I am a process’o’holic. Let me explain that. In my days as a software programmer, I had read this brilliant quote by Larry Wall.

The laziness here is an “advanced laziness” which makes one want to get rid of all repetitive tasks by automating them and also makes one want to see if the problem had been solved before and what are the best practices to glean from it. This quote resonated so strongly with my inner lazy self that day, that I made it a principle of life. Today, if I have an hour to do a task, I usually spend 30 minutes figuring out the best way to do it, 20 minutes to do it and 10 minutes to automate parts of it or make it a habit so I never have to do it or think of it again. From the everyday tasks (laundry to capsule wardrobes to cleaning home to stowing our innumerable digital photographs) to the strategic (thinking about an ideal career to thinking about news to ideating to investment), I am ‘lazy in advance’ for everything.
And so, when it came to entrepreneurship, I wanted to do the same. I wanted to figure out the best practices around building a business and apply them to my own startup. At this point, I should mention I have an MBA degree and most people assume that MBA would teach one everything about how good businesses work and one just needs to apply it. Yes and no. Let me explain that using an image from Bill Aulet’s book on entrepreneurship.

Business school is about the spectacles on the right (and that figure should really be smiling!..I loved business school). It taught me how to see the world through the perspective of a company. It gave me a foundational understanding of the components that go into making a business work — marketing, strategy, finance etc and drilled into me the principle “Understand every aspect of your business well, and optimize it in a manner that competition can’t replicate it”.
But business school did not give me immediately applicable frameworks for starting up. It did not teach me how to design a company from scratch for a customer or tell me how successful entrepreneurs went from Step 0 to where they were today. And my “advanced lazy self" was not too happy about not having a process. I started perusing websites covering entrepreneurs, but even that was not useful, as each case seemed to be so different and there was no single process I could replicate. In my frustration, I had toyed with the idea of getting old editions of the Harvard Business Review, read up all there is about entrepreneurship and make my own toolkit. It was during this time, that I saw the MIT bootcamp announcement on the profellow.com newsletter. Everything about it was enticing. It was MIT, it was Brazil, and it promised me a process vetted by the best in the field. I couldn’t ask for more! I applied and I got in.
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As I stared at the schedule that day, I reminded myself that if I went through this, I would save myself a lot of work in the future. And either way, it was too late. I was here, and I would have to go through this sleepless week.
We filed into the big hall that defined our life for the next 7 days. I was seated next to a Spanish man who lived in a container home he had built with his wife (my dream!), a Brazilian who had set up his own juice company and an Indian who had set up something I didn’t totally get a hang of. That interaction clued me in to the diversity I could expect over the next few days. It also clued me in to the fact that there were catastrophes waiting to happen. And it did happen. Some people had too much experience to want to listen to other members of their teams, some people had no experience of working in a resource-crunched environment where time was of the essence. Some people came in wanting to work only on their ideas, while others came in with grand problems which they refused to whittle down to manageable parts. All these are to be expected in any professional environment. What I didn’t expect was that all these personal quirks would be magnified a hundred times by the fact that cultural differences were huge, considering there were 125 people from 40 countries and the fact that sleep deprivation brings the worst out in the best of us. My own team consisting of a Brazilian, Greek, Pakistani, Indian and American got off to a fabulous start, but by the end of the 7 days, we were ready to not see each others’ faces ever in our lives. Our coaches had warned us that the fourth day would probably be a day when tears would be shed. They were off by a day. There were tears on the fifth day. There were also hall-room conversations about how incredibly frustrating it was.

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This was then. Since then, I have had the time to reflect on those 7 days (and to catch up on sleep). Looking back, I realize I like my team and I can stand to see their faces again :). But more importantly, I marvel at how amazing the process was. All of us came to the bootcamp with our own ideas, had to discard those ideas, and figure out one which the whole team felt invested in. This meant we were all starting from Step 0. Each group then went step-by-step through the 24 steps of disciplined entrepreneurship (based on Bill Aulet’s amazing book), which were structured in a way that kept the focus on the customer always. And that to me was the key difference between B school and Bootcamp— The bootcamp taught me that successful entrepreneurship is about looking at the world through the eyes of the customer. It took the customer as the starting point and taught me how to design a company around that. Business school, on the other hand, assumed the company was the starting point and it taught me how to build a great company. They are complementary and I wouldn’t recommend one over the other. At the end of the 24 steps, teams came up with products, services and business models that were frankly quite mind blowing! We as a team also had our share of wins — We won some of the early competitions. We were also appreciated a lot for the final pitch, as we had identified a problem and solution that resonated with a lot of people. We lost the finals deservedly to some of the best pitches I had seen.
The key message that I have learnt is that entrepreneurship is not a game of luck or genius. Though those have its uses, entrepreneurship is more about the discipline of following a smart process, giving it your all and having a team that is invested in an idea as much as you are. Importantly, the camp also taught me that having a process does not mean you lose speed. It was amazing how much work we packed into those 7 days. It gave me a new perspective on what is possible and how much urgency is needed in a startup. Overall, the discipline of the 24 steps is profoundly empowering, because suddenly it demystifies the process of taking an idea to fruition.
Today, I am back to India knowing that I have the backing of a fantastic cohort of people who share the same vocabulary, have the same dreams, have gone through the same process, are already doing inspirational things and are constantly encouraging each other. As I read watsapp messages of people in my cohort and across all cohorts, detailing the interesting things they are doing and the awards they are winning; and my husband compliments me on the sense of urgency he sees in me where he only saw confusion before, I think I made the right decision. I am still nervous about starting up and failing. But after having gone through this entire process and having done so much in 7 days, I can’t wait to get started…failing be damned.
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