Beyond Cheerleaders: The Making of a Serial Entrepreneur
Don’t fall for the “Cheerleader Effect” . Find out how this serial entrepreneur grew three businesses just five years out of college.
Prodality, founded by Parag Shah in 2010, is a holding company that helps entrepreneurs transform innovative online solutions into sustainable businesses in exchange of an equity stake in the partnership. Parag is also the current director of Foodsby and BookBottles.
I make the mistake of asking Parag Shah to come to a coffee shop that closes just before we’re supposed to meet. I’m in a slight panic, wondering where else I can take him or if I should offer him my half-finished coffee, when I see him walking up to the right floor. Parag sees me weakly waving at him from a bench across the shop and laughs when he realizes what I’ve done. I try to explain the situation anyway and he brushes off my slip up, completely unbothered. “Know any place we can go?” he asks. There aren’t any other cafes close by so we start walking aimlessly inside the building as we continue to talk.
Parag describes himself as a serial entrepreneur — a claim backed by the impressive list of companies he’s lead and developed in the last five years. Since his college graduation, Parag has founded a holding company called Prodality, and two web solutions companies that work to improve the reservation and delivery aspects of the foodservice industry. He tells me about how he’s always felt this desire to build things and how his smaller ventures in high school and college gave him the opportunity to identify and analyze pain points in foodservice. I look hard at Parag to see if he’s making any of this up but he starts talking about how he hopes to explore new industries and I resign to his ambition. Parag is the type of person that doesn’t really seem to be bothered by anything — he possesses a certain cool that suggests either a) he can see everything that’s thrown at him from a mile away, or b) he is a robot. I ask him how he plans to explore new industries while juggling three companies at the same time, and he smiles back in a way that looks both flattered and content. Definitely a robot.
What or who do you credit most of your success to? Why?
My mentor in college and a couple of my friends — really anyone who’s taken the time to meet with me and hasn’t been afraid to be critical. I think most people today like to surround themselves with cheerleaders, which makes sense because it’s easy to hear good things about yourself, but limiting your company to only cheerleaders doesn’t really help you grow or find your way because you never learn what your pain points are. I believe that to grow and improve yourself you need someone who can be critical of you, even if it’s hard.
What is the strongest argument you’ve heard against something you deeply believed in?
That’s a hard one, but it would probably be the idea of starting my first company in high school. My parents were against the idea at first because they were worried it would take my focus away from school. It was a bit discouraging not having my parents support my idea and for some time I considered it to be the breaking point between us. But once I actually started the company and began working for it, things kind of started falling into place. I felt like I was learning things that I couldn’t have learned in school and that made it easier to keep going.
What’s the last cool thing you’ve learned about? Can you teach it to me?
Right now, I’m learning how to code in technical development. I’m not sure I know enough about it yet to be able to teach it to you but it’s a personal passion so maybe in time I will be able to. I’ve taken different classes on codeacademy — I can do basic HTML, CSS and I’m trying to learn AngularJS, which have all been very interesting. I don’t think that I’ll ever be as good at technical development as my CTO but I think it’s important that I at least understand it, so I’m trying to do that now.
If you could change anything about the way you were raised, what would it be?
That’s funny because if you’d asked me that question 10 years ago, I would have had a completely different answer. I guess I wish there’d been a greater focus and support for getting more real world experience just because I think there’s so much to learn outside of school, but I guess that might also be more of an issue with the education system than my parents. You know, looking back I would say I was raised really well.
Whose life do you keep track of in social media, if any? Why?
Right now, Elon Musk. I think what he’s doing for the world is fantastic, and after years of hard work I think people are finally giving him more of the credit he deserves. I love what he’s doing at both Tesla and SpaceX — he’s a visionary in the truest sense of the word. I would consider myself lucky to even have 1% of his success in my life.
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