Valuable Lessons Learned Working at a Startup
How working at a start-up shaped my perspectives
My blog series is about my learning and experiences working for early-stage startups and entrepreneurship experiences and how it changed me as a professional. My journey might help you learn about my outlook in the early stages of my career and how that helped me grow, the lessons I learned, and the challenges I faced working for startups.
Flashback 2008, I was fresh out of college with a job offer from a prestigious Civil Engineering company in APAC. After 5th semester of my college, I knew I did not want to pursue Civil Engineering as a career. However, It was always fascinating for me to learn how successful entrepreneurs build global enterprises. Someday I aspire to create something ground up and help other startups achieve the same. If you have got exposed to the startup community, you would know that many entrepreneurs don’t build businesses only for money. It is usually more about passion for building and solving problems at scale.
While pursuing an MBA was also an option, I always felt that getting hands dirty and experiential learning makes more sense. Working for a startup not only seemed like the next logical step but a risky one too. Who gives up campus job placement after all? Yes, I did!
Back in 2008, Bengaluru emerged as a hub of many early-stage startups that started to create waves across the country. Today’s unicorns were just early-stage developing startups that got ‘angel investment’ or ‘Series A’ funding back then. In hindsight, my first job at a startup was an intelligent risk as I got my hands dirty too early in my career, which opened up opportunities I never imagined when I started off.
My first rendezvous with startups was at HealthcareMagic.com, where I was an early employee in early 2009. The venture got a modest $2.5M funding from Accel Partners. It later went on to get sold for $18M to an American insurance technology firm called Ebix. I was the 9th employee when I joined there!!
Here are the lessons I learn at my first startup stint -
Lesson 1: Surround yourself with people who are already doing what you dream of achieving.
I had many interesting interactions with the co-founders and talented colleagues who changed how I looked at problems, gaps in society, solving problems at scale, and creativity.
I got to participate in (heated) brainstorming conversations that were strategic to the business’s long-term success. Then, the team tested and executed the ideas and executed many as a team. These experiences gave me an understanding of teamwork, collaboration, leadership, and ‘leverage.’
Lesson 2: One who addresses Small Problem with a Scalable Solution creates a ‘Unicorn’!
I wanted to get to the bottom of this — where do great ideas come from? What makes a great business plan? Why some early-stage businesses succeed and others don’t? The answer I figured changed my perspective on how they build great companies.
Every great idea fundamentally is a result of empathy and solves a significant problem for someone. Value creation is all about learning other’s issues and being able to solve them at scale.
In the process, I learned that the solution (business model) should be so scalable and straightforward that even a 6-year-old kid could understand. Simplicity scales! The ‘scale’ here could mean solving it for 1 million people or 1 billion, depending on the audience for your solution.
Lesson 3: Do that one thing well. Focus!
While solving complex problems, it’s human to get distracted. After all, there are many problems and many ways to solve those problems. So the challenge is to identify one most scalable and profitable model and stick to how your target audience would remember you. Initially, the Ideal strategy is to hold to the core idea and stay focused on solving the core problem — create your own ‘Blue Ocean.’ LinkedIn, Facebook, and Airbnb are few excellent examples of the same.
Lesson 4: Stay in touch with ground reality! Chase truth, if possible, with data!
Sometimes common sense is more important than data or machine intelligence. Being in touch with ground reality is more important than relying entirely on trends and projections. Ask the right questions to your customers, get enough data to analyze, and deliver at scale.
Even though monetization is the second priority for many startups chasing user base and valuations, few generate revenue from initial stages to bootstrap cash flow and achieve profitability by optimizing costs. Moreover, it did make sense.
Lesson 5: The timing of execution of the idea is as critical as the idea itself.
There are numerous examples of the startups that disrupted the way the world works, and they happened when the world was ready for that change. You might have great ideas, but the world may not necessarily be prepared for your solution. For example, imagine if YouTube had launched its video streaming services when internet speed was dismal. Likewise, few of the best-selling Apple products, such as the iPhone and iPad, were well-timed from the smartphone/tablet ecosystem’s evolution perspective.
Of course, one can also be behind the time in effectively executing a great idea.
As Steve Jobs once said, “Dots only connect backward”; today, I think working for startups was one of the best decisions of my life.
My father once told me — Battles are won on the battlefield, not in classrooms or playgrounds, get your hands dirty before it’s too late!
Want to learn more about how I got my startup idea?
