I was touched by such passion and commitment. Every hardship seems worth it when you are working with such amazingly dedicated people. And how could we possibly fail if everybody cared this much about the company?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2YiUTh9dj4

I look at myself a year back when I was crashing a generous friend’s place in Bangalore. With a semester left before graduation, I was doing ‘research’ for the startup I wanted to found right out of college. I was working on multiple ideas, talking to numerous people to figure out which would be the winner. Its hard to evaluate your own ideas without bias, so I had two parameters to judge them on:
1. What market insight did I have that most people didn’t?
2. What execution insight did I have that people who knew point #1 didn’t?

GharPay scored high on both, which I now realize made me confident enough to start this. My years of obsession with internet businesses and microcredit industry paid off. I knew what ecommerce industry lacked and I knew how microcredit companies manage cash. I obviously had no experience in running a company but I knew how our biggest problems could be solved.

So if you are a young founder, be honest with yourself and figure out what is it that gives you an information advantage to start a successful business. Don’t be daunted by the fact that you have no experience in execution, you’ll figure it out. But if you have neither information nor skill advantage, then you just might be gambling.

I learnt this by looking at my father’s experience with the stock markets. He could never ever predict his winning stocks, because he simply didn’t know more about one company than anybody else out there. So how could he possibly win?

1. You and your team doesn’t have kids to feed or a loan to pay off. GharPay’s entire top team of five people take as much as an average 27-28 year old would be earning after working up the corporate ladder. And these are very best people that I know. I doubt I would have been able to recruit only the best from my friends had I been 30, when most of them would never be able to take a serious pay cut.

2. You are on the path to success very early. The best musicians, dancers and scientists started off really early. To really build a blockbuster company, you need to be really good at starting and running companies, which comes from real world experience only. Better to start early.

3.  You are foolish enough to tackle a big hairy complex problem because you have no clue about the real world. And you become seriously successful only if you solve a big hairy complex problem. When it comes to entrepreneurship the only experience you need is the experience of having run a business previously. Domain knowledge helps but you can always spend a few months to a year understanding everything you need to run your business.

These are some serious advantages young people have, and its upto you to exploit these and fast!

Entrepreneurs always tell you how hard it is, but I don’t think you ever really fathom what they mean until you go through that yourself. There are just so many days when nothing goes right until one day changes it all. Being persistent while being flexible to modify the business as you access new information is critical. I advise people to be committed to the process of starting up instead of being committed to the idea itself.

But is it all thorns? Absolutely not. Its fulfilling, exciting and fun(in a very weird way though). I especially enjoy working with smart people and executing what I believe is right. And when you hear clients telling you how important you are to their business, its a little like hearing people clap for you after you’ve performed on stage.

1. Plan your countries well and try to include bordering countries which will save you money on rail passes (by far the cheapest way to travel). Italy is inexpensive as are Germany and France. Scandinavia is super expensive, Switzerland is comparable.

2. Book your tickets at least two months in advance to get the cheapest return ticket. If you are planning for multiple countries, pick a central European city to fly to and from. Flying out from the same airport will save you quite a bit of money. I suggest Zurich, which makes France, Germany, Italy and Austria accessible or Brussels, which is close to Netherlands, Germany, France and UK.

3. Stay in youth hostels, which are everywhere and very clean. Buying a youth hostel membership(INR 100 per year) will get you discounts and near guaranteed accommodation during peak seasons. I always couchsurfed and met a lot of interesting people.

4. Eat a monster breakfast and a light lunch and dinner. Healthier way to eat too.

5. And lastly walk or use public transport. Europe is tiny, so use a map to figure out where you got to go and you just might be able to walk instead of even using public transport.

The pressure of occupation and incessant stream of impressions pouring into our consciousness through all the gateways of knowledge make modern existence hazardous in many ways. Most persons are so absorbed in the contemplation of the outside world that they are wholly oblivious of what is passing on within themselves.

Its funny that people even in the early 1900′s suffered from an information deluge, something that definitely plagues the world today. I wonder what Tesla would have thought of Twitter and Facebook.

Every other autobiography I’ve read talks about the powers of introspection but Tesla takes it to a whole new level. He thoroughly understood himself and his brain with its quirks and problems. He suffered from a strong synesthesia (his brain involuntarily visualized words he heard or read and presented itself in his regular vision, which meant he couldn’t always differentiate the reality from the imaginary) which could debilitate normal life functions but he developed and controlled it to use it for his own gain. He writes that every machine or experiment he’s ever performed was first designed, prototyped and tested in his imagination before he actually built a working model in real life. And not once did the results or performance varied from what he imagined.

What an extraordinary man.

What life lessons are unintuitive or go against common sense / wisdom?

My favorite answers from the lot:

1. Better to ask for forgiveness than permission.
2. Money can buy happiness
3. Behavior is controlled more by your environment than your own willpower.
4. Laziness can be a very positive characteristic for a leader.

This is a must read article and video on changing business models by an investor of Chegg/Twitter.

…Mike Maples gave a talk about what he calls “pivots” and “thunder lizards.” Thunder lizards are startups born from atomic eggs that “emerge with attitude” want to disrupt and chew up their competition– both new world and old. They are big, chaotic, relentless and when successful, become huge companies. What helps make a thunder lizard successful is something Maples calls the “pivot.”

This isn’t about product iteration– the pivot has to do with business model. Business model shouldn’t be confused with “business plan,” Maples says. A business plan is a static thing, a business model charts money flowing out to create a product and money flowing back in from that product. A startup’s entire reason to exist is to have  more arrows going back in than arrows going out, and it’s always changing…

Of course this doesn’t mean change willy nily at the slightest hint of failure but there needs to be a balance, which makes this decision is even difficult. And you should throw out the old model completely instead of trying to do more than one thing at the same time.

There’s a parallel in the real world of course: It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change. ~Charles Darwin