Life of a Climber

if Angerpreneur hasn’t got himself inked, its because he hasn't found the perfect Mountain Climber tattoo yet.

So here’s the deal, one of the most prominent streaks that identifies most entrepreneurs - they simply hate being compared with others. They love to stand out!

Angerpreneur differs from other entrepreneurs on this count. In fact, he chose entrepreneurship as a way of life because one life was too short for him to be the mountain climber, the sky-diver, the wild life photographer, the traveller, the professional golfer, the poet, the restaurateur, the biker, the singer and the sailor. The only way he could enjoy the thrills that all these professions offer, is by turning entrepreneur!

But in a lot of ways, I believe the entrepreneur’s life resembles the mountain climber's the most.

Both take up tasks which others believe are unscalable

People who do not climb mountains, more often than not don't do it simply because they don't believe that it can be done. Reasons like fear of heights, lack of physical fitness or unwillingness to suffer the pain are all secondary. Foremost, in their minds they cannot even fathom that a mountain can be climbed and conquered. Its too mammoth a task for them! 

Entrepreneurs in this respect are like climbers. They sense opportunities in areas where apparently none exist. They love challenges which have large impacts or challenge established norms. In short they love doing not just the thinkable, but things that are to the normal mind - inconceivable!

Both enjoy enduring the pain

Climbers like to show-off their wound marks. They remind them of the arduous climbs they undertook and the injuries they sustained. They love talking about it and recounting the thrill of every fall which left behind a wound. The more gruesome the better!

This is an instinct they share with entrepreneurs. Both these people are survivors and take intense pride in picking up the odd-injury in the process of fighting odds.

If you don’t believe me listen to an entrepreneur talk endlessly about the the times when he couldn't sleep, didn't know how to pay salaries the next month, was cheated by an unprofessional vendor, had to put up with lazy employees or how he lived a mortgaged life. You’ll know what I mean.

Both are eternal optimists  

The longer and the more arduous the journey, the bigger is the thrill for the climber. On long climbs, most people would give up and return to base camp. Rough weather, icy winds and landslides can have an extremely demotivating impact on mortal souls. But a climber would prefer to stay put and weather the storm. It is prompted by a deep sense of optimism.

Entrepreneurs are a lot like that. They’ll surprise you with their ability to paint a rosy future for themselves and for others around, regardless of their challenged present circumstances. 

They’ll quit cushy jobs for the promised future. They’ll have business plans in place minus a predictable resource plan. They’ll go fishing for clients apparently way beyond their reach. 

Well so far Angerpreneur has enjoyed his climb. He’s cherished the falls, the injuries, the tears, the companionship of fellow climbers, the jokes and the thrill of the small peaks that came along the way. 

Looking forward to the rest of it with the eagerness of the climber! 

Angerpreneur's Nocturnal Adventures

One of those usual nights when Angerpreneur refuses to catch much sleep, while randomly scrolling through emails in bed, he realizes that he is a just few hours away from losing the domain name for their website. Well, he’d forgotten to renew the annual subscription!

Like most other last ditch efforts, this one of renewing the domain subscription also turns out to be successful. However, what also hits Angerpreneur – is the thought it’s been a goddamn one full year, since www.channelyst.in went live! Godspeed!

If you think this story was fun, wait till you hear the prequel to it.

On a late unearthly hour well past midnight, in the march of 2013, www.channelyst.in was born.  The circumstances and events leading to its birth are equally dramatic.

Having come back from a series of unyielding IT vendor meetings and maybe a clandestine round of drinks along with the co-founder – sleep was the last thing on Angerpreneur’s mind. While lying awake in bed and browsing through content on website design on the internet, one thing led to another. Before Angerpreneur even realized he was at his wits end trying to figure out the Latin and Greek on godaddy.com and hostgator.com.

Now I know that the godaddies of the world might take offence to that. After all they claim to be designing web designing tools and products for the laymen. But what they forget is that designing stuff for laymen isn’t maybe always sufficient. There are hardcore-technology-averse jerks starting up every day in some or the other parts of the world!

Your truly Angerpreneur just happens to be one of them.

But then, overcoming all inadequacies of technological know-how and guided by the indomitable spirit of startups – the website was finally created well before the sun came up. All this happened on a mortal Ipad, in the pitch darkness of the bedroom (lest the wife wakes up) and a marginally inebriated mind.

But what deserves special mention here is, the thrill of seeing your own website go up on the goddamn internet is to felt oneself to be believed! Only the ones who've felt it themselves will know what a kick ass feeling it is.

The first email link went out to the co-founding sweet bitch! Still regret not being able to see the expression on his face when he saw it for the first time. Got a proud smiley in the reply email he sent back.

One year hence, cut to circa march 2014 – even today the first email is shot off to the co-founding bitch! Got 2 prouder smileys this time in the reply email.

Love you co-founding bitch, we just turned one!

Life In A Lateral Orbit

So for all those of who’ve even been remotely considering entrepreneurship as an option at some time or the other – I am sure you’ve had your dose your stories about those who mortgaged their jewellery and their houses to build their startups. I still don’t have my heart-wrenching mortgage story yet and hopefully won’t have one.

I am better off without it!

But one things for sure, in a way, I have had to mortgage my life the way I knew it. And I am not even talking about lifestyle here. That’s a given obvious.

I think the first thing that’s changed dramatically is the composition of my friend circle. From being surrounded by my golfing buddies, corporate friends, some school and B-school friends and colleagues who keep flying in and out of countries - I find myself relating only to a completely different set of friends. All of a sudden I have no office-politics stories, no golf vacation stories, no fancy travel stories and hardly any views on politics and economics (which is staple conversation of the employed).

Also, these friends also find it difficult to sustain the conversation with me beyond the cursory – “How’s business?”

My choice of alcohol has changed strictly to the affordable Old Monk and the right side of the menu card has also begun attracting my attention. Bottom line, my friends who I enjoy hanging out with are also startups and my friends at work.

The other critical change in orbit happens with family. They begin getting used to missing you at most times. Till such time when they don’t really miss you as much. You usually begin going off the list of wedding invites in the family. Some of them remember that you were in the city that they traveled to, only after going home to their city. The number of calls on birthdays certainly go down.

Parents are funny bunch. They are somehow the only ones who don’t seem to change much and nothing much seems to change with your relationship with them. Anxiety is perhaps the only new variable at play here occasionally.

However, clearly max orbital changes happen with the relationship with spouse. He/she clearly bears the biggest brunt of the random tectonic shifts in your everyday life. The biggest learning that you acquire is to make the best use of time – quality over quantity. Every now and then you have to deal with his/her depleting patience levels. But then you really cannot let the only stable element in your life go wrong.

Angerpreneur, everyday struggles with all these orbital changes and yet again wishes somebody helped him brace for all these. Life in a different orbit!   

The A team

There comes a stage in the life of every startup when the second line begins delivering on its own. This from a founder’s perspective is true labor of love.

When we started this venture one of the first challenges was to gather together the motley crew that we managed to. Like most startups what we assembled together was a highly charged, motivated and passionate bunch of folks with limited domain expertise. The initial months were spent in the painful process of bridging the understanding gap. The next few invested in helping them learn the ropes on their own.

While all this was happening and you were also trying to swim through multiple operational challenges. Finalizing and then stabilizing the relationship with the accounting firm, grappling with hiring challenges for projects, running from pillar to post acquiring and managing clients and ensuring internal and external legal compliances is all bandwidth sucking rigmarole. All this while you were secretly hoping to discover the cheat guide to developing your second line team.

And then comes one day, when all of a sudden, almost miraculously – the second line begins firing!

This happened for us in the month of January. Hari and Syed just booked their first revenues independently – and handsome revenues at that. Vishal, forever our go-to-man, yet again rose to the occasion and helped build an on-ground team with lightning alacrity. This on ground team delivered phenomenally on 2 of our most critical operating parameters. On both of them we delivered in a month, what we had achieved in the last 7.

All of a sudden from not knowing where we were headed to feeling as if everything is falling in place – it’s a huge transition! The single biggest attributable reason for that is the sheer thrill of the A team delivering and showing strong promise of improving on it consistently here on.

But in the life of angerpreneur even the most superlative achievement creates another challenge. Now all of a sudden angerpreneur finds a tremendous release in bandwidth. Angerpreneur isn’t necessarily prepared to put it to constructive use!

p.s. Angerpreneur has on purpose spoken about team mates for the first time – result of detail-hungry readers. 

Who' the f#$k' Moved My Cheese

I am reminded today of a certain blockbuster publication called

Who Moved My Cheese.  Though I am yet to figure out why that book did as well as it did.

For some innocuous reason, the book was about a couple of odd mice and, as far as I remember, a block of cheese that kept moving. It was supposed to be an inspirational piece with something to do about how and why you should keep moving your targets in life.

But then I was always this bird-brain and even the most evident inspiration was rarely grasped. However, what remained very firmly embedded in my circuitry are the obviously hilarious caricatures of the mice shoving the cheese around.

In a very different context, I feel like my cheese just got moved.

So as a startup, with little credentials as a company behind you, most clients or decision makers at client places find it difficult to take the chance of entrusting their business with you. Hence acquiring a customer involves several rounds of meetings, credibility-building, cajoling, begging and most importantly zeroing in on a potential evangelist in the client organization. You end up travelling for client meetings multiple times to the same client place – often in another city. Uncomfortable bus rides, scourging the city for cheap hotels, living on cheap street food, waiting in the receptions, bargaining with the rickshaws are just a few of the ordeals that you undertake in the process of acquiring a client.

Once you’ve identified your evangelist in the client organization you, like the perfect eager-beaver, work towards building a relationship with him.  You suffer his stories, theories and all his worries with a smiling façade – pretending to be his perfect agony uncle. All of this is done in the hope that one day he’ll help you get the purchase order through and the cheque cleared.

But as I’ve always said – it a cruel world out there! Just when all your efforts invested in building the proverbial relationship with your sponsor were about to bear fruit – your cheese gets moved.

Your evangelist get transferred into another role.

In a very different context, you feel exactly like those odd-looking mice whose cheese not just got moved – but rather rudely got snatched away!

An Angerpreneur's Journal : Hiring for Dummies

An Angerpreneur's Journal : Hiring for Dummies: So where’s the guy who said that a recruiter’s job was a lame one! Whoever said it wasn’t a specialist’s role. If as an aspiring entrepr...

Hiring for Dummies

So where’s the guy who said that a recruiter’s job was a lame one! Whoever said it wasn’t a specialist’s role.

If as an aspiring entrepreneur, people told you that hiring the first lot of people to join your startup was the tough one. Well, they clearly aren’t your best advisors. They told you only half the story. The bummers who join you in the beginning are in most likelihood people who’ve known you for a while. They invariably come from your close circle of friends, family or colleagues. The familiarity on both sides makes the decision relatively less ambiguous.

The fun starts when you start hiring for quality folks without the use of referrals or word-of-mouth. So here we were, looking for some young talent with reasonable communication skills to make outbound market research calls!

Sounds simple enough to most, especially if you are in bpo-land Bangalore! Aren't

these kind of people supposed to be found here-there-everywhere in Bangalore. Clearly not, when you want to hire them for a startup. So you start out by buying a limited access subscription to a certain almanac called www.monster.com.

The customer support chick at Monster treats you like chicken shit itself, for buying a measly rs 3000/-for 3-day subscription. The experience makes you feel like you just walked into a fine-dine asking to be served the cheapest version of masala chai, basis the figures on the right side of the menu card. This is just the beginning of things to come. Hereafter you are bamboozled with a database which could throw up results in hundreds of thousands or just a few hundreds depending on how artfully you check on the list of filters. But then as a startup, you have already metamorphosed into the habitual housewife trying to maximize your bang for the buck. You end up undertaking the painstaking process of downloading thousands of profiles. Navigating through which, is another story.

Now you are finally ready to make your calls, trying to imitate the recruiters who called you all these years. But rude surprises, one after the other, await you Mr Co-Founder! From straight monosyllabic responses like ‘not interested’ to ‘I am overqualified for your job’ – you have a range of stories to hear. Some of them show interest only to fizzle out by not turning up for interviews. Some of them who don’t even have jobs currently give you hazaar attitude. One of the blokes actually wanted to end the telephonic interview by asking me, why he should join our company. No wonder the bugger was without a job!

By the way, startups are known for their mess. Recently I realized, we clean up only when investors visit or when people turn up for interviews. The last minute dash to stow away the clothes hanger from next to the interview table in hilarious. Sometimes it gets funny, with both sides equally eager to impress.

Lesson for all future co-founders – hiring is a much larger role than what you ever thought it to be. Hiring, for dummies, can potentially involve cold calling, scanning through endless lists, repeating the name of your company at least twice on every call, cleaning up for taking interviews, waiting for candidates to turn up and sometimes even offering them the last bottle of Coke that you had saved for yourself in office!