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.