Why Should You Become An Entrepreneur?
From a millennial entrepreneur who is shaping the future of work
We are focused on building a Workforce As A Service (WAAS) where team members are remote and work on-demand. I am Ravi Vadrevu — Founder of Kriya AI.
My co-founder and I built our company using the same technique and we are now ramen profitable.
We are sharing this experience through our newest AI assistant, Leo, which helps you build an internet company in five months through WAAS.
Backstory
Three years ago I quit my cushy full-time job after the company I worked for was acquired. The acquisition came with a healthy payout, so I started pursuing my passion for building a business, with my then business partner.
While employed, I had worked on dozens of ideas on the side and one of them seemed to have potential. It had taken me a year to build the prototype, which I worked on in the few spare hours I had each day in my stressful, startup job.
When we made the decision to go it alone, the average reaction of my friends and family was “Think carefully before you…," “Do you really know how to run a business?”, “I don’t think your idea is venture fundable," “You will be single for a while because you won’t have time for dating.”
To say that I was taken aback would be the understatement of the century. I even started having doubts, wondering if I was signing up for a life-altering career disaster.
Interestingly enough, I noticed that none of the questioning people who seemingly cared for me were in any way interested in the problem we were trying to solve.
After 6 long months of blood, sweat and tears — literally — we were able to get a few early investors to back our idea. That was a thrilling time, because it was my first confirmation that the startup and investment ecosystem actually works. However, the process was so complicated and certainly not easy.
Yes it was also thrilling time, because it was my first confirmation that the startup and investment ecosystem actually works. However, the process was so complicated and certainly not easy.
The Big Idea
We wanted to build an employment platform for millennials that would rival LinkedIn. We believed that the LinkedIn recruiting process was clunky and old-fashioned. Millennials, we argued, wanted a much slicker process to landing their dream jobs.
We managed to grow the community from 0 to 100K users in a few short months and in the process learned some hard-hitting lessons from co-founder relationships (we eventually parted ways) to people management.
We made many mistakes and learned many lessons, but I was exhausted. I fell down to a point of giving up. All my savings dried up.
I had two paths ahead of me: go back to the mundanity of a job or keep trying to find that elusive entrepreneurial breakthrough. At the time, I realized that I wasn’t clear on exactly what I should be trying.
The ground rule for entrepreneurship is to find an immediate pain point to solve and build a sustainable business as the solution.
The whole process quickly flashed like a movie reel in my mind:
- You have a flash of inspiration about a business;
- You custom develop it while working on the side to cover your expenses;
- You raise funds to enable recruiting the best talent;
- You perform experiments to test the market;
- If the results are good, you repeat #1;
- If the results are bad, you cut the burn;
- You lay off the employees and repeat #1.
When time is the most scarce resource, these seven steps are the entrepreneur’s nightmare. They require a ton of time, given human limitations of needing time to eat and sleep.
As much as they’d like to, even the most driven entrepreneurs can’t sustain more than 18 hours work a day. Stress is higher when you first start out, and it gets even higher when you realize your idea isn’t working and you have to find a way to pivot.
I was certainly in pain after my first entrepreneurial venture ended, but I had no clue what the pain killer might be. I wanted to pick one of the most painful things I’d experienced and see whether I could solve it.
The Second Big Idea
One of the profound realizations I had in building my first business was that the startup recruiting process is broken.
Entrepreneurs basically have two models: Push or Pull. You can either:
- Push your job specification out to freelancer platforms and wait for a deluge of sub-standard responses from people with questionable skills, which you then have to wade through and make a decision, or;
- Pull interested candidates into your company using either traditional recruitment agencies or job boards.
Both processes are time consuming and prone to error, so this is the pain point I decided to solve. But, I wanted to build an idea from scratch without having to raise funds and recruit a full-time team.
First, I needed technical help to build the product. One of the smartest freelancer engineers I’ve had the pleasure of working with — Vibol, from Cambodia — believed in my idea so strongly that he offered to work for free. He saw the passion I have for turning the dream into a reality and wanted to be part of it.
Our goal was pretty simple: make recruiting more real-time and focus on the experiments and results. I approached an ex-colleague from my first company, who instantly loved the idea and offered help marketing the solution.
He believed in the idea when there was no funding, hopes, or any kind of guarantee any of it would work, but I knew — from bitter experience — that this is a big pain point for startup entrepreneurs. Fortunately, it has worked. Sure we’ve experienced ups and downs in adoption and traction, but this is natural in any business.
Workforce As A Service
Fast-forward a year and we’ve built an AI platform, Workforce As A Servicewith 350+ remote workers like Vibol getting projects in real-time from companies large and small.
One of the remote workers, ex-team lead at Upwork, built our AI engine and recently joined our company to make our vision a reality. We met him eight months ago through our platform and we’re delighted to have him on-board.
What’s Next?
After polling our customer base recently and chewing through their feedback, we’ve realized that we have to design a new system that would work inside out effectively.
After all, we are building the future of work — no easy feat! Anything that comes in the way of testing, experimenting, and growing is an opportunity for someone else.
After much deliberation and discussion, we’ve aligned our focus towards launching WAAS AI assistants that can solve particular problems with the help of our underlying platform.
These are the two avenues we’re building to support the future of work:
Trunks is where companies can instantly hire pre-vetted knowledge workers on-demand per project.
Leo is entrepreneur focused. We’ve designed and built a five-month process where anyone can become an entrepreneur by going through a methodology supported by knowledge experts from across the world.
We are using our own WAAS platform to run Trunks and Leo as independent product lines, with my partner Greg and I focusing on each of them.
This is a big shift for us, and it’s only possible because we have a lot of talent available at our disposal, instantly. This is why WAAS is such a powerful model — truly the future of work.
We are fortunate to be living in an exciting time where the whole world is looking for decentralized execution. This is one of the fundamental reasons for the rise of cryptocurrency and the elimination of middlemen through blockchain developments.
Recruiting and freelancer work is becoming decentralized too, and we’re proud to be leading the way.
Linear Organization Structure
Our organization structure is linear, agile, independent, and mission driven
We are excited about this future, and hope you are too. We’ve chosen to fundraise from the public as well through equity crowdfunding, an exciting new funding option made possible by the Jobs Act of 2016.
The Real Reason
Given the uncertain nature of the success or failure of any experiment, entrepreneurship pushes you to face many different situations in life, most of which can’t be anticipated.
We now live in a VUCA world: one which is Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous. I am documenting some of the ups and downs we have and are facing while building Kriya Inc. You might want to follow along in our community.
And this brings me to the real reason you should become an entrepreneur — the single reason you won’t find in any of the thousands of listicles you’ll find in a Google search.
Entrepreneurship is a commitment to autodidacticism. An autodidact is immune to replacement by automation and artificial intelligence.
Let’s face it: whether we’re comfortable with it or not, tech and automation developments are going to slash work forces across the globe — both blue collar and white collar.
The experts all have no doubt about this, and so you have a choice: become a statistic or become an entrepreneur.
What does autodidacticism have to do with entrepreneurship?
An autodidact is someone who commits to life-long self learning. Our education systems are all broken and what is taught today is out of date tomorrow in a VUCA world.
The only way to stay ahead is to self-learn, without the guidance of masters (such as teachers and professors) or institutions (such as schools). And starting your own business is the quickest way to dive into a process of self-learning — especially in our current turbulent times.
Some of the ups and downs we came across during our company:
- Your idea is not venture fundable — This is when we started out, we didn’t have any AI.
- “I love how easy it is to meet someone who’s ready to work” after receiving an offer from Adam Draper for BoostVC tribe 9. That’s the only money we’ve ever raised. And we are fundraising from the community.
- “It’s a bad idea”- not owning talent in house is such a bad idea that no VC would ever write you a check.
- “I would love to invest” — One of our first customers verbal committed 150K USD without asking a single question.
- “You should go back to workforce”- One of my friends looking at the uncertain times.
- “I will help everyone become an entrepreneur”- birth of Leo
Every success or failure pushes you a bit further. Kick ass on the failure and feel the success high. But realize that nothing’s permanent.
That’s why you should become an entrepreneur — to learn about life and become a better person.
