Onwards and Upwards: My Exponential Learning Curve at Drip Capital

“Have you really thought this through?”

“Isn’t this too soon?”

“Will you be able to match up to the ask?”

I remember my heart sinking with every new question thrown my way from well-wishers. Barely three months into my first job out of college with a well-known brand, I had announced my intention of quitting the job to join a promising new fintech start-up aiming to disrupt international trade finance.

This was October of 2018. I eventually did take the plunge and joined Drip Capital, packing up and moving my life to Mumbai or ‘The City of Dreams’ as it’s called, quite fittingly perhaps.

As I write this today, it’s been 14 months to that date. 14 months of working across multiple teams, geographies and time-zones, being a significant part of several of Drip’s milestones and creating impact at work every single day. A learning experience that I would not trade for anything else.

Thus, I guess it’s about time that I can be unrestrained in my confidence at having taken the correct decision. As I look back and try to pen down everything that this place has taught me, this is probably the first lesson that comes to my mind — To be courageous and take every opportunity that comes one’s way, having faith and putting in the required efforts to make it work out eventually.

Next in line comes my trips to our offices in Silicon Valley, first-hand interactions with investors and banks and the many late nights spent with team members from around the world bringing deals to their finish lines. These have taught me what it takes to thrive at the front-line of the battle-field and how to not lose sight of the big picture while being attentive to small details at the same time.

Through my seamless transition from Analytics to Capital Markets, I have learned that it is possible to distend one’s abilities to work beyond their trade and do well at something they are passionate about. What started off as a data project in my initial days here, culminated in a role that allowed me, an engineer by profession, to carve out my own niche in the world of Finance. This transition, by requiring me to push my boundaries and go the extra mile, has taught me that in the face of adequate resolve, the seemingly impossible does turn possible.

A lot of the learning at Drip stems from the talented and driven people I’ve gotten a chance to work with, from teams as diverse as Sales and Engineering to the founders themselves. The problem statements have been varied, ranging from building out Drip’s analytics infrastructure from the ground-up to diving deep into the numbers coming up with ways to increase business to figuring out the correct debt financing strategies. However, seeing the leaders be team-players, turn the rudimentary concepts into well-defined business ideas, and remain steady in the face of conflict, shows me that the paths to success may be varied but they have a lot in common.

I had joined the rocket-ship hoping to learn and grow around a few bullet points of my job description. What Drip has ended up teaching me is a way of life itself. I look forward to more growth here in the days to come — as we like to say here at Drip, “Onwards and Upwards!”