Sometimes there is enlightenment on a mountaintop: A start-up origin story
Those three hours under a cloudless Himalayan sky had been hypnotic, sitting on that granite boulder with the waters of the Paro Chhu burbling around me. The only distraction was the occasional ibisbill, curved red beak picking through riverbank pebbles looking for lunch.
Meditation had always been elusive to my discursive mind, yet there I was in Bhutan, glued to that spot on a cool October Sunday in quiet, calm contemplation. The tumult of the prior years melted away as I reflected on my past and future with a clear mind. The focus was addictive, a literal flow state.
It was in those hours that an ephemeral thought evolved into an idea that turned into a decision that would change my life. This was the moment of conception of my start-up, Mezzobit.
It all began months earlier in 2012, when I was invited to lead a digital bootcamp for NGOs in Bengaluru. Teaching had become a key avenue for me to pay it forward, as I designed and taught classes on digital product and strategy at NYU, Yale and internationally. And because I’m a sucker for travel — invite me to a wedding halfway around the world and I’m so there — I both jumped at the opportunity as well as started scanning the map of Southern Asia to see where else I could zigzag.
It was high time for a road trip.
My last few jobs were as an executive at companies experiencing seismic shifts — getting spun off, incurring major losses, radical changes in business models, and combinations thereof — and guiding them through to the other side with enhanced orgs, processes and cultures. I had been a “fixer” for a long time: one of my first management jobs was as the replacement for a department head who had just been sent to federal prison for embezzling millions.
And while I had plenty to be proud of in positioning these companies for future growth and building new products, “restructure, rinse, repeat” had taken a psychic toll. At the same time, life had recently become much fuller and joyous with the arrival of my first child.
So with the blessing of my lovely wife — who gracefully traded a week of solo parenting for a potentially saner, calmer Joe — I drew up a barnstorming post-teaching itinerary. I’d explore Kolkata and New Delhi for a few days, and sandwiched in between was the main destination with its strangely appropriate tagline of “The World’s Happiest Country.”
Happiness for its 725,000 citizens is even enshrined in Bhutan’s constitution, but there’s ample assistance provided by an abundance of natural beauty packed into an area the size of Maryland. Subtropical forests and grasslands on the southern Indian border quickly give way to towering Himalayan peaks, with the tallest, Gangkhar Puensum, straddling the border with Tibet. To avoid the overtourism that has befallen Nepal, Bhutan strictly limits visitor visas and requires most foreigners to hire licensed guides.
In the weeks leading up to the trip, it was heads-down prep at random NYC cafes with David, my teaching partner. As we were banging through slides, David casually mentioned that he was soon trading in his consulting shingle to launch a start-up focusing on mobile data. More details flowed during later meetings.
A tiny spark that I had carried for years began to unconsciously glow a little brighter.
Having first coded as a tween, I’d always had a strong builder gene and achieved the most bliss at work when engaged in creation, interspersed among the less joyful bits. I had done lots of building on someone else’s nickel, but also harbored entrepreneurial aspirations of my own for years, warehousing dozens of domain names linked to germs of business ideas.
But I never could get out the gate. Maybe lack of passion around any one idea, risk aversion, not finding the right partner — who knows?
Thinking little of the start-up conversations, I plowed forward to complete the task at hand, and before I knew it, I was celebrating a successful bootcamp over dinner with my new friends from around India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. The next morning, I was on a plane to explore Kolkata in the throes of the Navaratri festival and two days later, touched down at Bhutan’s sole international airport in Paro and met my guide Namgay.
The contrast with frenetic Kolkata couldn’t be more pronounced, as if downshifting from fifth gear to first. Lunching on ema datshi — chilis and cheese at nearly every meal! — surrounded by tables of warm, laughing Bhutanese, I felt the edge coming off my tightly wound New Yorkness. Even more so after a day of exploring Buddhist monasteries, overnighting in a farmhouse and marinating in a dotsho, a traditional hot stone bath.
Midway through my short stay, I arranged a solo bike trip between the capital Thimphu and Paro, a rolling 35-mile ride tracing the valleys carved by the Wong Chhu and Paro Chhu, which joined at the Chhuzom bridge celebrated by flurries of prayer flags. Back home, I often spun through the country hills north of New York seeking solitude, and hoped the perfect weather, Himalayan vistas and lack of homicidal motorists would further enhance my zen.
Quickly settling into an unhurried rhythm cycling west out of Thimphu, the glacier-fed river and two-lane road snaking along in tandem, I was first wide-eyed at the stunning backdrop. Happy, indeed. The cadence of pedaling and regular breathing further cleared my mind, and I began to reflect on the richness of experiences over the past week.
The water to my right beckoned as the miles wore on, and I pulled off near the halfway point for a closer look. Scrambling down the walls of the ravine through patches of rhododendrons and juniper, I hiked along the Paro Chhu, reminding me of the Adirondack trout streams I fished in during my youth. A large boulder jutting off the south bank provided a panoramic view, so I took my seat and soaked it in. With the road hidden above me and not another sign of civilization in sight, my mind again began to wander.
Even at the time it seemed laughably cliché to me — Kamar-Taj was certainly around the next bend — but such mystical grandeur began to beckon deep thoughts. My four-plus decades on the planet — some good, some not — provided plenty of grist. I started mentally paging through my relationships, family, journey through life.
Which brought me to work, and to a certain extent, purpose.
I was successful on paper, with a resume listing four different CXO titles and significant teams, P&Ls, and impacts at each stop. But in retrospect, it all seemed so transitory. I still hungered for a singular experience, both in terms of the mark it would make on the world as well as on me. To create something new, but also to push myself in all dimensions and leverage all parts of my diverse background.
Committing to the level required for success also demanded authenticity, a purpose in which I fully — almost maniacally — believed. As intensely focused as I was while a hired hand, I’d have to be 1000x that as an entrepreneur. To be ready to withstand no a thousand times while waiting for that one yes.
And having been a leader in an array of dysfunctional organizations, I also wanted to create the sort of culture that I longed for but never experienced: egalitarian with a focus on quality of ideas and results, not on rank or politics; transparent and honest, with a bias towards overcommunication; and connecting everyone to customers and the problems we’re solving for them to drive a sense of shared purpose.
It was time to act, to stop regretting the road not taken and push through whatever obstacles — real or imagined — that stopped me before.
As the afternoon wore on, I switched to problem-solving mode, zeroing in on a vision that also leveraged my strengths, an unsolved problem that I had repeatedly experienced as a digital leader: how to empower enterprises to better understand and control their data relationships. Done right and at scale, this could change how data flows on the Internet (checkmark on “big idea”).
Having briefly considered this years earlier, I already had a name and domain in the can: Mezzobit, a neologism combining Italian for “middle” with the word for the most atomic element of data.
Excitedly I began sifting through an endless torrent of questions underlying what would become Mezzobit. But having passed the emotional tipping point and feeling a renewed sense of purpose and contentment, I knew these answers would come in time. I climbed off the boulder and reached into the streambed for a water-smoothed reminder of my epiphany and talisman for the journey ahead.
Back on my bike, I pedaled the remainder of the way to Paro, more in the moment than ever.
After arriving back in NYC, I infected a former colleague with my enthusiasm and drafted him as a co-founder. We started building shortly thereafter. Months later, just before our first product launch and with another cofounder on board, we took the leap of turning our side hustles into unpaid full-time jobs while still bootstrapping.
The intervening years until Mezzobit’s profitable sale were undoubtedly the hardest — and most fulfilling — of my career, not to mention the founders lending the company six figures of savings to accelerate early progress. To paraphrase Marc Andreessen, entrepreneurs experience the heights of elation and the depths of paranoia, often within the same hour, but you need one to appreciate the other. Popular culture fetishizes start-ups (a la Shark Tank) and wildly overestimates their chances of success, but it’s on the mark on how they transform founders.
Having closed that chapter of my life, I’ve often retrieved the Bhutanese river stone for inspiration, rolling it around in my hand while pondering what’s next.
Another start-up? Maybe, but not now, as years of 9–9–6 squeezed important moments from my life that still need restoration. Luckily, my strong belief in paying it forward and advising entrepreneurs — as the kindness of others was instrumental to my success — lets me vicariously experience the energy, one step removed.
Like many former founders, I’m now excited by the potential of joining someone else’s party, finding another team, idea, product, and culture that’s just a couple steps shy of greatness and using my experiences to get them to the next level.
But first, maybe another road trip.
