An Invitation to Build
My first entrepreneurial stint was at the age of 11 when I along with two other classmates started selling floppy disks to the teachers in our school. These weren’t ordinary, empty floppy disks; these disks had an excel sheet with prefilled formulas to help teachers in tallying students’ marks. It saved them the time and effort of creating handwritten mark sheets (and probably the first step in automating administrative work). We ended up making a dollar profit for every disk we sold. I was the charming, all-rounder student (aka credible) who was able to persuade teachers to buy and adopt this little product that we had developed.
During my undergrad studies at LSR, I would spend every summer interning with a fledgeling startup just so that I could learn more, learn fast. At 21, I turned down a job offer to work with one of the Big 4 tech companies. Instead, I started a bootstrapped incubator for college grads who wanted to work on impact-focused businesses. We delivered on many firsts — India’s first SDGs (Social Development Goals) focused digital magazine, India’s first cause marketing agency, and many others. Not only did I work on shaping these business models and delivery of the service but also became the designated person for bringing in deals and strategic partnerships. What started as a project worth INR 50K soon became INR 50 Lacs. After 4 years, I decided to quit running my business to get exposed to the world of startups funded by VCs. I worked in the space of mobility and fintech, two growing industries, and led their customer acquisition and extended business growth vertical.
I recently quit my full-time job to start independent consulting and work on merging the field of design, communications and technology. In my entire professional career that spans over 9 years, few things have remained consistent and, hence, are now intuitive to me — identifying market potential, designing user-centric products, GTM strategy backed with fast execution, strategic partnerships and capital optimisation.
It was only natural for me to start up again. So a few days back when I was discussing with a friend about finding a “tech co-founder”, it struck me that if it was only about skillsets, then all I needed to do was arrive at an MVP, hire talent and give the product into the hands of users.
I have been intuitively harping on bringing a cofounder on board because of my belief in synergy. Some of the most iconic business partners — William Procter and James Gamble, Henry Wells and William G. Fargo, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal and many others — owe their success and legacy to the partnership that they founded.
I decided that my best bet would be to list down my fundamental reasons for finding a co-founder.
A wall that bounces the ball right back at ya! Imagine playing tennis or badminton by yourself. Without a co-founder, you must rely on yourself to accomplish everything. At some point, this stops you from taking up bigger problems. Bigger problems → better opportunities. For example, my experience of working with startups in early stages and highly competitive, trending industries such as mobility and fintech, puts me in a unique position of foreseeing signs which indicate growth (or lack of it). I can build a basic product using my experience or I could synthesize a very fundamental problem, using my domain expertise, that applies across all industries and stages of a business.
I chose the latter.
Flying solo may mean more “control”, but not having a co-founder robs you of the possibility of seeing the problem with a different perspective. By playing with a worthy opponent you get faster, stronger, better.
Carrying the weights. Building a company takes a toll — emotionally, physically, mentally and socially. The upside of taking such a risk requires a different mindset. However, all founders need help in sharing the highs and lows of building a business (it has been proven that humans are inclined to focus more on the losses than wins).
As founders, there’s a tendency to think of ourselves as people with an iron suit (can walk through walls, fly through stormy weather etc.) but little do we realise the effect it has on our wellbeing. Even today, I discuss, and now journal the lessons learnt from the failures of my previous startup with my then-co-founder. This exercise helps me create an objective view of events and further builds my capacity to handle the uncertainties that come with the job description of a founder. There’s a reason why an entrepreneur should be wary of burnout instead of market trends.
Laurel and Hardy. Coming to the crucial aspect of finding a cofounder with complementary skill sets — it’s hard more so when you don’t know the other person’s work ethics. If you don’t have the opportunity of starting up with someone you’ve worked with before, then rely on your network to get the message out (that’s what I’m doing right now). You can also bank on some of the programs that help you in finding co-founders. Typically, core responsibilities are split into business (sales, growth, funds), technology (product) and operations (depends on the domain), but these do change once you have clarity on the business and start approaching a product-market fit.
While I work on refining the business idea that I’m working on (a B2B SaaS platform — so original!), I feel a lot of things can change with the inputs of a co-founder including the business solution. As I navigate this path of finding a co-founder, help me in connecting with people who you know are on a similar path, perhaps it could even be you — the reader. I’m open to brainstorming ideas, products with breakthrough consequences and suggestions regarding my choice of GIFs.
Write to me — nautiyal.pushkina@gmail.com
Connect via LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/pushkinanautiyal/
