You need unstoppable people in your team.
The team is what makes a startup — especially in a crisis like COVID-19. A Three-Part series from our employees in their own words.
As promised in our post on “Hardware is Hard”, we are doing a complete 3-part series on Teams, and their importance to a start-up. In this post, we write about how we survived the COVID-19 lockdown. And below you will find links to three articles written by our teammates on their experience at Orxa in their own words.
“Whether you think you can, or think you can’t — you’re right”
The first quarter for @OrxaEnergies started with a big HIGH! We had just finished the unveil of the Mantis at India Bike Week 2019 (check out the video below). We received amazing public response, excellent media coverage, and enough critical feedback to get us energized & ready to tackle our 2020 targets head-on.
And then COVID-19 hit!
Boom! By the mid of March, it was clear to everyone here that we’d have to take some serious precautions for our employees. We started off with a staggered 50% schedule for the team. We wanted to make sure everyone was safe, but work would still continue. Some of our teammates chose to go back to their home towns. Most of them opted to stay back in Bangalore.
By the end of March, India announced Lockdown. It would be one of the strictest anywhere in the world. We went into the lockdown with the rest of the country on 24th March. We had no visibility when it would end.
We were very very worried…
… since then, it’s been a crazy 85 days.
We have been starting back to office pretty slowly- started off with opening our assembly line in early May and our R&D office with a skeletal team on rotation. Most of the team was still on 100% WFH. By end of May, we started with 50% of the team coming in to office. By June, most of us are now back.
Frequent sanitization of all surfaces, hand sanitizer bottles for all tables, masks — these are now the new normal. But, we were so glad to see each other again!
“Diligence is the mother of good luck.”
At Orxa, we do quarterly reviews for all teams. We did one in March end. We’re preparing the next for June end.
This June review, we are amazed at the productivity of the team over this lockdown. Like some of the team members said, over March, April & May, they felt they were 2x to 4x more productive than usual. (I don’t know if this is a good sign or not…. )
Of course, there were glitches in the WFH— a remote desktop’s connection would go off, someone’s internet connection would sputter, online meetings would struggle for call quality. Despite all that, the team fluidly coordinated with each other — peer reviews of electronics systems, design reviews of the mechanical components, coordination with manufacturing partners …
“The secret to successful hiring is this: look for the people who want to change the world.”
Just goes to prove that the quality of the team is the secret sauce to the startup. Such a team propels the company ahead. Such a team recovers together, and fast, from all the blows the company will certainly face. So pick this team well.
“If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.”
Three of our team mates have written here in their own words, their experience of working here, their journey, what brought them to electric vehicles and to Orxa and what they think about working here:
- Akshay Tippanavar , was our mechanical intern last year, and now is part of our special projects team. Read his story here
- Shahzer Rahman, our mechanical intern who joined us on New Year’s Day 2020 but had to spend half his internship in remote working. Read in his own words his journey from BAJA to Mantis here
- Tarun Bajaj, drove down to India Bike Week 2019 to meet the Mantis before he joined us full time. Read about his journey from Bangalore to Spain to Italy and back to Bangalore, via Vagator here.
Do you want to help Akshay, Shahzer, Tarun, and us build crazy, high-end electric motorcycles and rapidly electrify all transport? Join us by dropping a mail at careers@orxaenergies.com, or browse -
..and check which JD fits you the best!
We are excitedly looking forward to having more bike and machine enthusiasts on the team! Don’t make us wait!
Orxa Energies’ mission is to rapidly electrify all transport. We build performance Electric Vehicles & the associated Energy Ecosystem. We believe that battery swap will rapidly electrify shared mobility. Our first vehicle is the Mantis — a fully-electric performance motorcycle, designed to fit seamlessly into your lifestyle.
We also build powerful Battery Packs that manage the specific challenges of performance vehicles — longevity, thermals, weight, and volume. Our battery packs are already in pilots with our customers.
We previously wrote about the issues faced by hardware startups in a software-obsessed startup ecosystem (link), and about our survival guide for other hardware startups getting into this space (link).
